7. Philology and Freedom

Ernest Renan’s Struggle with Catholicism

Ernest Renan’s decision to leave the Catholic Church in 1845 struck at the heart of French Catholicism, the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, the most prestigious institution in France for the training of clergy. As Renan walked away from the imposing building in the Faubourg Saint-Germain he was abandoning a promising career for an uncertain future. A brilliant student of impeccable morals, Renan had been singled out for special attention by his clerical mentors as someone whose intellect could defend Catholicism against those who belittled the intellectual resources of the church. Renan’s disenchantment came at a moment when the church showed signs of recovering from the assaults of the revolutionary years of the 1790s and 1830. Lacordaire’s lectures at the cathedral of Notre Dame in 1835 had drawn a large and distinguished audience to hear his defense of orthodox Catholicism, inflected with a Mennaisien conviction that the church could accommodate itself to a modern and liberal regime.¹ From a devotional perspective, Marian piety was flourishing, as evident in the much publicized conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne in 1842. Catholics also had become more active in addressing the social question, most notably in the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, founded by Frédéric Ozanam in 1833.² In 1838 Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the enormously supple Old Regime bishop who had abandoned his ministry to serve the revolutionary regime, the Napoleonic empire, the Bourbon Restoration, and the July Monarchy, made a dramatic deathbed conversion. Although some observers, including Renan, questioned the sincerity of Talleyrand’s return to the church, French Catholics were thrilled with the homecoming of a prodigal son.³ The priest responsible for Talleyrand’s conversion, Félix Dupanloup, who was to preach at the baptism of Alphonse Ratisbonne and play a central role in Renan’s life, was a rising star whose fame allowed him to make the junior seminary of Saint-Nicolas-de-Chardonnet a fashionable secondary school in Paris. In a more polemical mode, Louis Veuillot became a ferocious defender of ultramontane Catholicism through his journal L’Univers. Imprisoned briefly in 1844 for his attacks on the university, Veuillot wrote that “on the other side of the wall there is only liberty, the liberty of dogs without masters, liberty that I regard as a whore.”⁴

Anticlericals were not slow to respond to these signs of Catholic renewal. As we have seen, Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew (1840) accused the Jesuits of swindling families in a cynical campaign to accumulate power, while Jules Michelet’s Le prêtre, la femme, et la famille (1845) presented the clergy as using the confessional box to alienate wives from their husbands and families. Catholic education was an especially divisive issue in the 1840s, with Catholics led by Montalembert pushing for the right to open secondary schools and thus break the monopoly of the French university system.⁵ Renan was generally aware of these debates during his early years in Paris (1838–1845), but he did not engage directly in the hostile exchanges between Catholics and anticlericals.⁶ Unlike Félicité Lamennais and George Sand, who saw their religious choices as intimately connected to controversial political and social issues—church-state relations, social justice, the status of women—Renan’s religious decisions flowed from a more introspective process of reflection and struggle over fundamental philosophical and religious questions: Can the teachings of the Catholic Church be defended on the basis of reason? Is the Bible a work based on divine revelation? Who was Jesus Christ? Does God exist?

Renan was moved by intellectual and spiritual concerns, but like the other converts in this study, these considerations merged with family feeling in an intricate pattern. Renan’s life nonetheless followed a different path than the one we observed with other Catholic renegades. Born in 1823 into a devout family from Brittany, Renan avoided the religious turbulence associated with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era that marked the early years of Lamennais and Sand. But Renan shared with these other and older Catholics who chose to move away from the church a profound commitment to the individual conscience as the basis of religious liberty, an idea that by the 1840s was able to penetrate the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, an inner sanctum of Catholicism. Renan, like Lamennais and Sand, shows us a powerful and independent intellect contending with a Catholic institution committed to orthodox dogma and ecclesiastical authority. But in both the letters and notes he wrote during his crisis, and in the Souvenirs of his maturity, Renan explores with passionate intensity the powerful appeals of both sides of this debate, offering a sharp contrast with the more resentful and politicized Lamennais and the more heterodox Sand. His account illuminates as well a surprising paradox, for Renan’s move away from the church was mediated by Catholic teachers who taught and encouraged him, and in the end respected his conscience-driven decision to leave them.

This chapter explores the question of how a pious young man from Brittany, the most devout region in France, raised in a fervent Catholic family, and treated with generosity and solicitude by his clerical mentors, could abandon a priestly vocation and, over a period of just a few years, reject not only the dogmas of the church but belief in the supernatural. No answer to this question will ever be fully satisfying, a point Renan himself recognized in his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (1883), where he describes a complex and ambiguous religious identity. The Souvenirs must be the starting point for any discussion of the conversion that led him to reject a clerical career and orthodox Catholicism in the 1840s. A brilliant and moving memoir of a spiritual crisis, Renan’s masterpiece tells us a great deal about the religious and social climate inside the Catholic Church in the 1840s, a context that enabled a decision that stands as an important moment in the history of religious liberty. But the Souvenirs can only be a starting point, to be taken “cum grano salis,” as Renan himself wrote in the preface of the work, which appeared almost forty years after he walked away from the seminary in October 1845.⁷ Fortunately, we have as well his correspondence and his notebooks from this period, invaluable complements to the Souvenirs, which have been scrutinized and edited by scholars who devoted their lives to exploring Renan’s inner life and intellectual career.⁸ Taken together Renan’s writings give us an opportunity to observe a poignant decision that illuminates how battles over the borderlands between faith and reason, individual liberty and ecclesiastical authority, were being waged within the conscience of a devout Catholic who was finally unable to reconcile freedom and Catholicism.

Destined for the Priesthood

In his Souvenirs Renan recalls with affection and nostalgia his earliest years in Tréguier, a port town in Brittany, where he was raised by Manon Renan, his widowed mother, and Henriette, an adoring sister.⁹ Renan’s family struggled financially to pay off his father’s debts, with Renan’s mother managing a small shop, while his sister tried her hand at running a school for girls before the need for more income led her to accept a position as a teacher in Paris.¹⁰ We have no reason to doubt Renan’s description of himself as a devout Catholic boy, watched over by a pious mother and educated by the clergy in a town dominated by its fourteenth-century cathedral. In recalling his early years Renan begins with the story of Is, a Breton city swallowed up by the sea, whose church towers can still be glimpsed through the waves on a stormy day and whose bells can be heard when the weather is calm.¹¹ Writing as a preeminent secular intellectual at the height of his power and influence, known especially for his Life of Jesus (La vie de Jésus, 1863), which denied the historicity of Christ’s miracles, Renan looked into himself as well as back in time and found there a call to believe that he could no longer hear: “It seems to me that I have at the bottom of my heart a city of Is whose bells still ring stubbornly, calling to Mass the faithful who no longer hear.”¹² Throughout the Souvenirs Renan repeatedly evokes this sense of a divided self, drawn to a past he has rejected but never entirely left behind.

In the early chapters of the Souvenirs Renan describes himself as torn between the emotional and the rational, between “childish sensibility, candor, innocence, and love” and “bitter scholastic arguments,” with the dividing line his experience at the seminary of St. Sulpice. Renan’s path to religious liberty passed directly through the seminaries where he studied, which in a profound irony led him away from rather than deeper into the Catholic faith within which he was raised. The Catholicism of Renan’s childhood was marked by regular sacramental practice, devotion to saints, the belief in miracles, and the fervor of communal pilgrimages. These practices were watched over by a “serious, disinterested, and honest clergy,” whose lessons he never doubted until the age of fifteen, when he moved to Paris. Even while he draws a contrast between his childhood and his Paris years, Renan insists on the permanent impact these Breton teachers made on him: “These worthy priests were my first spiritual preceptors, and I owe to them whatever is good in me. . . . At the bottom I feel that my life is always governed by a faith that I no longer have. Faith has this particular character, that even when it is gone it still acts on you.”¹³

Renan’s first teachers, the Brothers of Christian Instruction (the order founded by Jean-Marie de Lamennais) identified him as an excellent student, and by 1832, when he entered the minor seminary at Tréguier, he was already destined for a clerical career. In his Souvenirs Renan recalls himself at this stage foreseeing his life as a respected teacher in a local seminary, following in the footsteps of the priests he so admired. But he recalls as well that the thought of becoming a priest was not a freely made decision, “not the result of reflection, of an impulse, of reason. It more or less went without saying. The possibility of a profane career never occurred to me.”¹⁴ These memories of a preordained path into the church are supported by a series of letters Henriette wrote to her mother after she moved to Paris in 1835. But Henriette, in acknowledging the apparent inevitability of ordination that his mother and the local clergy planned for her brother, also expressed reservations about his future, a point she returned to continually over the next ten years. Countering her mother’s ambitions for her son, Henriette begged her to “preserve this cherished creature from the enthusiasm which is so common to young people.”¹⁵

Despite her doubts about Ernest’s clerical future, Henriette’s ambition for her brother was instrumental in bringing him to Paris, where he was awarded a scholarship at the minor seminary of Saint-Nicolas-de-Chardonnet. Directed by the able and ambitious abbé Dupanloup, Saint-Nicolas had been transformed into a prestigious and unique institution. Based on Dupanloup’s vision of a church that would fulfill a social as well as a religious mission, the school recruited both wealthy aristocrats, many of whom did not intend to pursue a clerical career, and priestly aspirants with limited means drawn from throughout France, who were offered scholarships supported by the paying students.¹⁶ It was this policy that brought Renan to Paris, where he studied at Saint-Nicolas for three years before moving on to the seminary of Saint-Sulpice.

Renan’s Souvenirs offer a mixed review of Dupanloup, and of his education at Saint-Nicolas. Looking back from the 1880s, he judged Dupanloup to be an intellectual lightweight, someone who moved easily in the elite circles of Paris, and whose piety was “worldly, fashionable, free from scholastic barbarisms and mystic jargon, piety as a complement to the ideal of good society, which was, to tell the truth, his principal religion. . . . Religion for him was inseparable from good manners and the good sense derived from studying the classics.”¹⁷ But despite his criticism of the “superficial humanism” that was taught at Saint-Nicolas, Renan acknowledged its transformative character: “From a poor little provincial thoroughly constrained by his past, Dupanloup drew out an active and open mind.” At one point in the Souvenirs Renan describes the changes he experienced at the minor seminary as a conversion: “My coming to Paris marked the passage from one religion to another. . . . My old priests . . . appeared to me like magi, speaking eternal truths; now I saw a religion of candles and ribbons and flowers, a theology for girls.”¹⁸ The Catholicism of Saint-Nicolas may have differed from the more austere devotions of Brittany, and Renan’s letters to his mother from 1838 to 1841 are certainly full of descriptions of elaborate feast days, processions, and ceremonies. But there is nothing in the correspondence from this early period to suggest that as a very young man, only fifteen when he first arrived in Paris, Renan saw himself as entering a new religion. On this point, Renan’s Souvenirs seem to read back into his youth a critical attitude toward the sentimentalized devotions he found at Saint-Nicolas that he did not or perhaps could not articulate at the time.

Renan’s letters sent from his Parisian minor seminary, written from 1838 through 1841, show us a young man intellectually precocious and conventionally pious, deeply attached to his mother, and homesick for his native Brittany. They show at first no sign of his later criticisms of Dupanloup and the education he was receiving at Saint-Nicolas. His loneliness was relieved by regular Thursday visits from his sister Henriette, and by regular conversations with the abbé Tresvaux, a Breton priest serving as a vicar general in the diocese of Paris, who chatted with him in his native language. In letters to his mother Renan combined effusive expressions of love and longing to be with her with reassuring details about his academic successes, excursions to the monuments of Paris, and the sermons of père Ravignan, the popular Jesuit preacher who played a major role in the conversions of Ivan Gagarin and Alphonse Ratisbonne.¹⁹ Although he would later criticize the flowery atmosphere of Catholic devotions from this period, Renan was enthusiastic in describing the chapel at Saint-Nicolas for the opening of the “month of Mary” in May 1839, a setting that was “truly heavenly,” where “one feels and breathes only the sweetest odors, and all the flowers in their silent language seem to join in one voice to praise the purest of Virgins, to celebrate Mary.”²⁰ There is nothing remarkable in this language, nor in the constant references to God’s will and mercy that are laced throughout Renan’s correspondence; they indicate only that as an adolescent, Renan embraced the Catholic culture that surrounded him.

Renan continued to accept as well the clerical path that was so clearly marked out for him. On Pentecost Sunday in May 1839, toward the end of his first year at Saint-Nicolas, Renan donned the cassock, an event marked by his assisting at High Mass at the cathedral of Notre Dame. Proudly reporting to his mother, Renan described his “great joy” at being one of the seminarians chosen for this honor and “the indescribable feeling” evoked in him by the gothic majesty that surrounded him.²¹ He would abandon this external expression of a clerical identity only six years later, when he left Saint-Sulpice in 1845. Another sign of Renan’s determined commitment to a clerical vocation can be seen in his pursuit of his papers of “excorporation,” which placed him in the jurisdiction of Paris, rather than Saint-Brieuc, his home diocese in Brittany. Henriette, although she continued to have reservations about her brother’s vocation, was instrumental in this process, which required some deceptive maneuvering, circumventing the local clergy of Tréguier, who were interested in bringing their young prodigy back home. For Henriette, if Ernest “continues to want to join the clergy, at least let it be in Paris, so much more distinguished in comparison with our good country.”²² By the end of his first year at Saint-Nicolas Renan had established himself as a devout scholar, and so dedicated to his new school that Dupanloup charged him to help recruit other promising candidates from his native Brittany. During his vacation in the summer of 1839 Renan succeeded in attracting two close friends, François Liart and Fiacre Guyomar, to join him at Saint-Nicolas.

In his second year at Saint-Nicolas Renan continued to flourish, joining the school’s elite as a member of the devotional Congregation of the Virgin, and becoming a leader in the “Academy” charged with discussing and evaluating student essays. His personal life was also happier, as he enjoyed the company of Liart and Guyomar, the visits of his sister, and the esteem of his teachers. The first signs of doubt about his vocation came only in Renan’s third year at Saint-Nicolas. Renan’s reservations emerged early in 1841 in the midst of a difficult period in his personal life: Liart had returned to Brittany to continue his seminary training; Guyomar died of tuberculosis in October 1840. An even more serious loss occurred when Henriette left Paris early in 1841, taking a position as the tutor to the daughters of Count André Zamoysi, a Polish nobleman. Over the following years Henriette would continue to play a central role in her brother’s life, providing crucial financial and moral support, but her departure, coupled with the loss of his friends, left him in a somber mood. In this context Renan wrote to Liart and struggled to describe “I don’t know what kind of change of mind that’s come over me.” For the first time we can observe a sharp tone directed at his teachers, as he ridiculed his course in rhetoric, of which nothing could be “more boring, more pedantic, more monotonous, more absurd, more atrocious.” Renan was frustrated by having to employ devices designed to manipulate an audience, rather than state points simply and directly.²³ But his criticism earned him an interview with Dupanloup himself, since the letter was read by a clerical overseer who passed its contents along to the director. This conversation was apparently an open and friendly exchange rather than an admonition, and along with a letter from Liart, defending the art of persuasion, it led Renan to a quick retreat, to what he called a “conversion” in which he now saw rhetoric and philosophy as necessarily linked. This exchange in early 1841 established a pattern that would continue over the next five years, in which critical observations were followed by second thoughts, qualifications that moved Renan away from the radical potential of his ideas but never all the way back to the starting point of a secure and uncritical orthodoxy.

Issy: Liberty and Doubt among the Sulpicians

From 1841 until 1845 Renan was a student at the Sulpician major seminary, spending two years studying philosophy at Issy, just outside of Paris, followed by two years of theology in the heart of Paris. Both of the buildings where Renan studied remain in use; Issy is still the home of a Sulpician seminary, while the Paris site now houses the city hall for the sixth arrondissement. The two schools were linked in the 1840s by the rue de Vaugirard, a long walk that the seminarians in Paris would take each week to enjoy some country air. Today the extension of Vaugirard beyond the Paris city limits that leads to the seminary at Issy has been renamed the rue Ernest Renan, an ironic reminder that the Sulpicians were instrumental in “completely determining the direction of my [Renan’s] life.”²⁴ In his Souvenirs Renan draws a sharp contrast between the humanistic education of Saint-Nicolas and what he considered the more serious training of Saint-Sulpice. From this perspective, the crucial break in Renan’s life was not his arrival in Paris, and his immersion in the devotional and humanistic world of Saint-Nicolas, but the intellectual discipline that he acquired under the direction of his Sulpician mentors. Renan’s letters from his Sulpician years, especially those to Henriette and Liart, confirm the significance of this period, which he recalled as “a terrible battle that completely possessed me, until the point that these words, which I resisted for such a long time as a diabolical obsession: ‘This is not true!’ resounded in my inner self with an unconquerable persistence.”²⁵

Renan fought his battle on two closely related fronts. He was concerned first of all with the truths of the Catholic faith, which he found to be increasingly fragile when examined through the corrosive lens of reason. This intellectual struggle was intricately linked to doubts about his personal destiny, as he considered whether or not he could in conscience become a priest, and thus accountable for defending the Catholic religion and responsible to ecclesiastical authority. Renan’s battle was not fought in the open, through hostile exchanges with his teachers and superiors, but was conducted almost exclusively on an internal plane that he revealed in part to his friend Liart, more fully to Henriette, and most revealingly in a series of personal notes and reflections. Renan’s personal crisis coincided with the heated debate over the right of the Catholic Church to open secondary schools, and not long after the controversy over Lamennais’s efforts to marry liberalism to Catholicism. But Renan, though aware of these public discussions about religious liberty, did not engage with them in any direct manner. Because he kept his distance from the world of political dispute, Renan’s conversion allows us to see with clarity and depth some of the key intellectual, psychological, and moral issues that shaped the experience of religious liberty in post-revolutionary France.

Perhaps the most surprising observation in Renan’s Souvenirs is his insistence on the freedom he enjoyed at the seminary in Issy. His comment that “there is surely not an establishment in the world where the student is freer” was not, however, referring to a spirit of free inquiry that seriously challenged orthodox Catholicism.²⁶ Rather, Renan was describing a Sulpician attitude that left it to students to decide how much or how little time they would devote to their studies, and a relaxed attitude about regulations. As he wrote to Liart soon after his arrival, “We live here in an honest freedom, under a regime generous in its application of the rules, and without the least difficulty or restraint. . . . The youngest student is treated as if he were a reasonable man.”²⁷ Renan enjoyed as well the freedom to wander in the enormous garden, decorated with orange trees and statues, which he compared favorably to the “little courtyard of Saint-Nicolas.”²⁸ From his new situation at Issy Renan looked back scornfully at his minor seminary: “As much as Saint-Nicolas is shrunken, sad, limited, Issy is spacious, agreeable, happy.”²⁹ After only a few months in this bucolic and liberating setting Renan had already begun to entertain serious doubts, generated by a sense that the philosophy he was being taught could not yield the certainty to which he aspired.

Philosophical instruction at Issy was designed to provide the basis for confidence in the theological truths asserted by the church. Through Sunday lectures by the abbé Gosselin, the superior at Issy, and the philosophy course offered by the abbé Manier, the Sulpicians defended as certain the testimony offered by human witnesses and historical tradition, but from the outset Renan was not convinced.³⁰ Already in January 1842, just a few months after his arrival, he wrote to Liart, “Here’s what I’ve learned, that there are objections and difficulties everywhere.” In a passage that suggests how deep these concerns went, Renan admitted that while he used to laugh at the extreme skepticism of Pyrrhonism, unable to believe “that anyone could be so absurd to accept such ideas, now I no longer laugh.” Renan was quick to assure his friend that he was not himself a skeptic, a move typical in its step back from the more radical position he seemed to contemplate.³¹ Renan was able to take a more lighthearted tone with his mother, joking with her in a letter about the questions being posed in his classes: “Is it true I exist? Is it perhaps a dream, an illusion? I can see my dear mother becoming indignant: of course my Ernest exists, and I’d like to see anyone deny it. So you see that philosophers are the funniest people in the world: they doubt everything.” It is telling that Renan went on to assure his mother that if he were ever to become a skeptic, he “most assuredly would never doubt your affection, nor mine.”³² Intended to amuse and reassure, this comment accurately describes a position Renan would come to in just a few years, when he would abandon the church but remain devoted to his Catholic mother.

Renan was troubled but also exhilarated by philosophy, a discipline that he embraced as being the “science of things rather than words” in a letter to Henriette, another shot at what he regarded as the superficial training at Saint-Nicolas. Unlike rhetoric, in philosophy “reason reigns,” and its real task is “less to give us assured notions than to clear away a cloud of prejudices. You are completely surprised to see that until now you have been the plaything of a thousand errors, rooted in opinion, custom, education; it’s the death of a beautiful ideal, you see things as they are, and are surprised to see the most certain judgments placed in the category of problems.” Renan found some relief from the anguish and excitement of philosophy in the study of mathematics, also treated in the first year at Issy, a subject he had always enjoyed, and one that held out the promise of certain knowledge, which he felt obliged to pursue.³³ But Renan found more direct consolation in contemplating the lives and works of Pascal and Malebranche, who provided models of how one could reconcile faith and reason, in Malebranche’s case while pursuing a clerical career. Writing to Liart in May 1842, Renan was close to despair in confronting the problems raised by his philosophical studies. “It is certain that God has used this man [Pascal] in order to conserve my faith: without him I would have lost it six months ago.”³⁴ Renan was equally impressed with Malebranche, the seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian who pursued the rationalist method of Descartes and was “the most impressive logician that ever existed . . . a bold thinker, and yet still a priest.”³⁵ In drawing inspiration from Pascal and Malebranche Renan was moved by their ability to combine an uncompromising commitment to reason, and a willingness to face the doubts that ensued, with a sustained belief and practice of Catholicism. Their personal example held out a model that Renan could hope to follow, while he continued to pursue his quest for a satisfying philosophical basis for his faith.

In the Souvenirs Renan notes that for a time he was able to address his doubts by accepting the reasoning of the Scottish “common sense” school of philosophy, which defended the human capacity to reach religious certainty through an investigation of nature and psychology.³⁶ Renan continued to study the work of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart over the next several years, as well as the philosophy of Victor Cousin, the influential French philosopher who combined Scottish “common sense” with British empiricism and German idealism. Renan valued these thinkers for their approach to religion through observation rather than metaphysical speculation. Renan’s sense that the truth claims of religion needed to pass an empirical and rational test in order to be credible would later be applied to his study of scripture, a connection that suggests the important role played by “common sense” in mediating the spiritual crisis that led Renan away from Catholicism.³⁷

Renan’s philosophical struggles did not go unobserved by his teachers at Issy, a group of men whom he looked back on with heartfelt but patronizing affection in his Souvenirs. Renan expressed the highest regard for the abbé Gosselin, the superior at Issy, who also became his spiritual director, an elderly priest full of “good will, cordiality, and respect for the conscience of a young man.” The freedom Renan found in general at Issy was exemplified in Gosselin, with whom he had frequent and intimate conversations, reading to him for a half-hour each morning: “The freedom which he allowed me was absolute. Observing my honesty, the purity of my morals, my upright nature, the idea never occurred to him that doubts would arise for me in questions where he himself had none.”³⁸ Renan admired Gosselin for his solid religious conviction, his commitment to Catholic dogma, which he saw as rooted firmly in the scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, and the councils. Armed with such belief, Gosselin rejected the fashionable apologetics of Chateaubriand, which emphasized the emotional and aesthetic appeal of Catholicism, and taught confidently that reason accorded perfectly with faith. Renan was personally attracted to Gosselin as a model of virtue and erudition, but these qualities could not hide what he believed was an unwarranted confidence in the ability of reason to sanction religious certitude.

Renan admired other teachers as well. In addition to his philosophy professor the abbé Manier he was struck by the intelligence and piety of the abbé Pinault, formerly a professor of mathematics in the university, before he abandoned a secular career for the Sulpicians. Pinault was physically deformed, a small man twisted by rheumatism, but a powerful personality who served as a kind of pendant to Gosselin, for despite his scientific training he was scornful of the knowledge he imparted. As the leader of the “mystics” at Issy, Pinault mocked Renan for his studious ways. But Renan nonetheless admired him for his insight and integrity, and in the Souvenirs he acknowledged that Pinault had grasped the weaknesses in the attempts of Gosselin and Manier to reconcile their reason with their faith.³⁹ In 1842 Renan was clearly in the camp of Gosselin and the rationalists, drawn to those teachers at Issy who were confident that their Catholicism could not fail to pass any test posed by a rational critique. But during his first year at Issy he began to harbor doubts that he could accept the mental gymnastics needed for such an effort to succeed.

In the summer of 1842, between his first and second year at Issy, too poor to return home to Brittany, Renan spent his two months of vacation at the seminary. With most of the students gone, Renan was left even more on his own, free to wander in the park, “a real desert” where he experienced both a great calm and “an inexpressible sadness.”⁴⁰ In this atmosphere Renan made his first effort at autobiography, drafting a short essay he entitled “Confessions d’Issy” in which he presented himself as taking up the same task of self-examination found in Augustine and Rousseau. In the early paragraphs Renan’s text has a prayer-like quality, as he addresses himself to God, praised for his immutability, a divine contrast with the sorry state of human inconstancy. “You alone, God, are changeless. For us, change is our natural state.” But despite this humiliating condition, Renan admits that he loves to consider all the “different colors of the times of my life, so brief, yet so full of sin and pain.” In the middle of this two-page confession, Renan abandons the references to God to address himself directly: “I am: this word I is unique: when one goes into it deeply, one gets lost. . . . I am me: this poor me is a joke of an individual. It is the being of the world that I know the least, and with whom I am most familiar. . . . It is a fact that when I search my intimate self [mon moi intime], it flees me; sometimes I seem to be with him and then I am living in truth, which consists of being with one self as one self, and not as with a stranger, not to lie to this poor self, but to go with him purely and simply. I am always in dispute with my self. . . . Oh! How difficult it is to destroy the barrier between self and self.” At this point Renan seems to have rejected the Sulpician discipline that calls for a discovery of oneself through the mediation of Christ, found through a combination of prayer and introspection, in favor of a purely subjective method. In the final paragraph he reverts briefly to addressing God (“I exist, thanks to you, my God.”) before concluding that he grasps himself through feeling: “It is this intimate feeling that constitutes everything for us.”⁴¹ The “Confessions d’Issy” are perhaps the earliest example displaying what Jan Goldstein has described as Renan’s “liminal position between a religious and a secular vie intérieure” in which he struggled to decide what role, if any, God might play in his self-understanding. This struggle would continue throughout his seminary years and beyond, and I would argue from the evidence of this period, and from the Souvenirs, that it was never fully resolved.⁴²

In his Souvenirs Renan focuses on a particular moment during his second year at Issy, in the spring of 1843, which crystallized the beginnings of his spiritual crisis, and which illuminates how the teaching methods at Issy as well as the generally liberal atmosphere unintentionally encouraged him to doubt. Philosophical instruction at Issy allowed for lively discussion of controversial ideas in weekly meetings, conférences, which were led by the best and more advanced students.⁴³ During his second year Renan was chosen as a “maître de conférence” and was in the middle of conversations that testified to the intellectual freedom at Issy, albeit framed within orthodox Catholicism. Following the scholastic convention of solvuntur objecta (solutions to objections), students debated and responded to the ideas of fashionable philosophers such as Victor Cousin; of the Catholic liberals Lamennais, Montalembert, and Lacordaire; and of the socialist Pierre Leroux, who was exercising enormous influence over George Sand at precisely the same moment. Recalling these sessions in the Souvenirs, Renan concludes that “under the cover of weak refutations, all of modern ideas came to us.”⁴⁴ During one discussion Renan insisted so convincingly on the strength of the objections that some in the group began to smile, leading the abbé Gottofrey, the clerical observer, to bring the class to an end. Gottofrey was, like Pinault, a religious zealot suspicious of reason. After the class he heatedly admonished Renan for what he considered his anti-Christian confidence in reason and concluded with a devastating judgment: “You are not a Christian!”⁴⁵

Renan was shaken by Gottofrey’s accusation, which resonated with doubts he had entertained for over a year, and which he brought to his adviser Gosselin the following day. At this point his philosophical and spiritual crisis intersected in troubling ways with his professional ambitions and family feelings. Gosselin reassured his protégé that his doubts arose from the normal anxieties of seminary students, and would disappear once Renan was ordained. But this conversation followed closely after an agonizing period in which Gosselin and Renan had finally decided that he should receive the tonsure at end of the academic year, an issue that he never raises in the Souvenirs. This ritual cutting of the hair marked an important step in a clerical career, though it did not involve an irrevocable vow. Renan nevertheless had serious reservations about the tonsure, which he poured out in letters to his mother, and to Henriette and Liart, and which he thought had been resolved by surrendering himself to Gosselin, and to his mother’s pious wishes that her son become a priest. Faced with Ernest’s reservations, Manon Renan responded with the kind of advice that recalls the emotionally charged exchanges between Lamennais and his friends and family prior to his ordination. In both cases clerical aspirants confused about their future were asked to weigh their personal doubts against familial pressure and God’s will, powerful arguments that pushed them forward toward the priesthood. Renan’s mother insisted that she had never spoken to him about his vocation, which came from “God alone,” who had guided him throughout his life, starting with his cure as a child from a dangerous illness following her pilgrimage to a shrine to Our Lady of Good Help. But she could not hold back an expression of her maternal pride and aspirations for her son: “A most worthy position awaits you; to serve the good God in his sanctuary. . . . That is my entire ambition.”⁴⁶ Manon Renan’s attitude placed her son in a double bind, as she insisted that he feel free to do as he wanted, but also to do as she wished, a complex sentiment compounded by the presumably determinative role that God played in this drama. Faced with such pressure, Renan responded to his mother in May 1843 that “everything is finally decided.” He would be tonsured after all, accepting the decision of Gosselin, whose will he accepted as “the voice of God himself.” God had given him an adviser and a mother whose authority he embraced, but in a curious passage Renan brought himself and his conscience back into the equation: “How can I thank you, my good mother, for the way in which you have led me in all this, to have left me so entirely free for an act which depends only on God and the conscience?”⁴⁷

Gottofrey’s accusation, coming just after this anxious and ambiguous surrender of his freedom, raised again Renan’s doubts about his worthiness to be tonsured.⁴⁸ Gosselin, always sensitive to his advisee, reversed himself and withdrew his recommendation that he take this step, but with the understanding that putting off tonsure involved only a delay, and in no sense suggested that Renan no longer had a vocation to the priesthood. The entire episode of the tonsure was nonetheless crucial in Renan’s development, for it provided him the occasion for reflecting deeply on his clerical future. As in the past, he used Henriette and Liart as sounding boards, but in the early months of 1843 he began to articulate with greater clarity the reasons that drew him to the priesthood, and those that drove him away.

Renan’s correspondence with his sister during his time in Issy shows him hesitant about his vocation, which he feared would lead to a life surrounded by mediocre men whose authority he would have to accept. He wrote, in September 1842, that he would prefer a life of isolation to one with colleagues marked by “frivolity, duplicity, and a sycophantic character,” and that he feared submitting to ecclesiastical authority, “which will never bend me to its will if it involves performing a base act.”⁴⁹ But despite such reservations, a constant theme in his correspondence, Renan would always balance his doubts about the priesthood with the advantages, for a clerical career offered him the best possibility of reaching his goal of a quiet, studious life of research and reflection. Even after the decision to put off tonsure, Renan insisted that his ultimate goal remained the priesthood, but in taking this position he also emphasized his reliance on the opinion of the Sulpician community rather than his own. “I’ve never believed so intimately, my superiors have never assured me with such certainty, that God wills that I be a priest.”⁵⁰ Despite an impulse to leave, Renan continued to feel himself bound by past commitments made to his family, his friends, and his religious teachers.

Henriette’s letters to Ernest in 1842 and 1843 were both reassuring and troubling, for she constantly affirmed her love and support for Ernest, regardless of what he chose, but she made clear as well her own position, which she knew would reinforce his doubts. In tone, though not in content, Henriette’s letters resemble those of her mother to the much-admired brother and son. Like Manon Renan, Henriette insisted that any final decision had to come from Ernest himself, but also like Manon, she could not resist sharing her own views. “You can be certain that as much as I desire that your decisions come from yourself, I am also resolved always to tell you without restriction my opinion and my fears.”⁵¹ Henriette addressed the issue of freedom within a career by noting that her own position as a woman and a teacher had taught her a lot about the constraints that apply in some sense to everyone. “I can assure you, based on my own experience, that you have to fight hard to attain this inner freedom, protected from any outside interference, and to make our paymasters understand that on some matters we are accountable only to God and our conscience.”⁵² In any career he might choose, she admitted, he would be constrained by some authority, but clerical vows added an additional and troublesome dimension: “Is a priest a free agent? Isn’t he obligated to follow the orders of his superiors? . . . I am only posing some questions here; may your reason and your conscience help you to resolve them.”⁵³ Ernest did not dispute Henriette’s claims, admitting that as a priest he would not be able to speak out freely and openly, but he insisted that even as a clergyman he could retain an inner freedom, “never adopting nor rejecting an opinion only on human authority.” He would at times have to be silent, but this was an obligation that all men who wished to live in peace must honor, and one that his adviser Gosselin told him was especially important for a priest: “My dear son, he said to me, if I knew that you didn’t have the strength to be quiet, I would beg you not to enter the ecclesiastical estate.”⁵⁴ As he prepared to leave Issy for advanced theological training in Paris Renan was still determined to pursue his vocation, but reflecting (with a push from his sister) on its philosophical and professional challenges led him into a difficult corner, where his freedom of conscience could be preserved only by retreating into silence.

Philosophical doubt and professional anxiety produced a religious crisis for Renan, but in the Souvenirs he insists that after his two years at Issy his faith was not diminished. “My faith was destroyed by historical criticism, not by scholasticism nor by philosophy.” He also suggests in his memoir that the Christianity he espoused was somehow inauthentic: “I imagined that in being polite like M. Gosselin and moderate like M. Manier I was Christian.”⁵⁵ Like the other converts in this study, Renan looked back on his past to find evidence that even before his open and definitive move across a religious border he had, without realizing it consciously, already made this choice. Although we need to be careful about accepting too easily such judgments, Renan’s perspective here has the virtue of seeing conversion as a continuous and complex psychological process. Like the other converts Renan lived for an extended period of time in a borderland, a gray area of religious doubt and ambiguity. Eventually, he would make a conscious move, exercising his freedom of conscience and religion, and thereby manifesting to himself and to his friends and family the new person he had become. But during his visit home for the summer vacation of 1843, Renan’s friends and family in Brittany would have had no doubt about his Christianity and his Catholicism. They would have observed a young man, robed in a cassock, accompanied by a proud mother on long walks in the countryside and on family visits, assisting at Mass, taking the Eucharist, a brilliant seminarian on the verge of theological study that would lead to ordination and an outstanding career.

Paris: Beginning and Abandoning a Priestly Career

Just as Issy offered a stark contrast with Saint-Nicolas-de-Chardonnet, so did the Paris seminary of the Sulpicians differ markedly from the bucolic setting of Issy where Renan had studied philosophy. Saint-Sulpice in Paris was a larger institution, situated on a busy square on the Left Bank, dominated by the monumental church of Saint-Sulpice. The seminary was home to 220 students, who were polite to each other but not inclined to pursue close friendships, knowing that they were there only briefly, for two years of study, before returning to their home dioceses for ordination and careers. Renan was distraught at first after his arrival, once again suffering the pangs of an intense homesickness, which he poured out in sentimental letters to his mother, to Liart, and to Henriette.⁵⁶ His anxiety was in large part due to the return of the issue that had so troubled him in his last year at Issy: receiving the tonsure. In Paris the director of the seminary, the abbé Carbon, along with his spiritual adviser the abbé Baudier, called on him to take this step at the ordination ceremonies held at Christmas, a prospect that raised again all his anxieties about his vocation. In a letter to Liart, who had similar concerns about entering a clerical career, Renan laid out more clearly than ever before how he saw his dilemma, focusing on his concern that he might be compelled to accept as true something he no longer believed: “What I fear above all is ecclesiastical authority, the engagements that one takes, especially intellectual, the irrevocable obligation to uphold a cause that one believes true, while a young man, but that one would also be obliged to uphold still, when mature reason would lead to another conclusion.” Typically, Renan went on to assure his friend, and himself, that he had no doubts at the moment, but then foresaw the possibility of a change of mind in a series of complicated phrases that testify to his confusion: “It is not that I now doubt, thank God, but who can swear about the future? Without a doubt, it appears indeed that this will not happen; but this could happen, that things would not appear to me in the same way; I assure you that this has led me to cruel reflections, and I thank God not to have allowed me to proceed.”⁵⁷ These thoughts led Renan, in a similar letter to his sister, to admit that he was willing to surrender his freedom and let others decide for him. “I never before understood how powerful Providence is in the destiny of every man, until seeing how the most influential act in shaping this destiny is so little in his power. Because finally, I can’t hide from myself that all my reflections give me very little direction. . . . Yes, without a doubt, we are led. . . . Happily the Christian can add: we are well led. There, to tell the truth, is the only logical and truly solid consolation.”⁵⁸ In his first months in Paris Renan seemingly made a decision to give up his freedom, but he continued also to equivocate and qualify, a posture that endured for two years, but that became more difficult to uphold as he pursued his study of scripture and pondered the reality of a clerical career.

In the end, Renan did accept the tonsure at a ceremony on December 23, 1843, in the Paris chapel, where Archbishop Affre ordained 105 priests, deacons, and subdeacons and oversaw the tonsure of 56 seminarians. Always eager to gratify his mother, Renan wrote to her that “while painful uncertainty and battles preceded the great act of my first consecration to God, now I have found again calm and joy in taking his share finally for myself and consecrating myself to him without looking back.”⁵⁹ These reassuring words, however, provide only a partial view of Renan’s inner life at this moment, which he revealed inadvertently in describing the scene after the ordination ceremony. When the abbé Baudier repeatedly called Renan mon tonsuré Renan agreed with him but emphasized his adviser’s decisive role: “c’est votre ouvrage” (it’s your doing). As he advanced in his clerical career, Renan continued to establish a certain distance from the identity he was publicly embracing.

Renan expressed his inner turmoil as well in an intense set of reflections written in the days surrounding the ceremony. In these “principles of conduct,” begun as part of a retreat in preparation for the tonsure, Renan asserts that he had begun to “master my troubles,” but taken as a whole they show him still caught in an ongoing struggle that pitted the good student, loyal son, and devout Catholic against the independent-minded seeker of truth.⁶⁰ Reflecting perhaps on his own recent decision to accept the tonsure, Renan criticizes himself for being too willing to please those around him and resolved “not to alter himself [altérer son unité] in order to please someone or other.” But he acknowledges as well that this commitment would have to be balanced against a priestly career where he might be confronted with positions he did not share. In such situations, he planned to retreat into a tactical silence, and instead of sharing his own ideas he “would be quiet and keep myself from either agreeing or arguing.” Such a posture is difficult to accommodate to the unequivocal defense of the pursuit of truth that comes toward the end of his reflections. After quoting the passage from Psalm 16 used at the tonsure ritual (“The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup”), Renan goes on to substitute truth for the Lord as the object of his ultimate devotion: “Dominus pars [The Lord is my portion]. . . . Truth is my portion; I embrace it, I take it for my companion, I abandon everything for it; I renounce everything to follow it and attach myself to it.” In a passage that has a certain shock value, Renan then imagines that “if Christianity were not true, this ceremony would still be delightful [délicieuse], and I would not repent having done it. It would be an initiation to the search for truth, the separation from men, the renunciation of the superficial.” After having gone so far, Renan once again reverses field and affirms that he has embraced Christianity as true, only to shift his ground once more, coming back to his doubts: “If (which is as far as possible from my thoughts, and which I would say is impossible, if man was not an inexplicable mystery) the future shows me the truth lay elsewhere, well then! it is to the truth that I am consecrated, I would follow the truth where I saw it and still be truly tonsured.” Even as he committed himself to the priesthood, Renan was conflicted about his religious beliefs and muddled in his thinking about how his situation might be resolved. He would become a coherent, integrated person but would keep silent rather than cause trouble; he would move toward ordination as a Catholic priest, while imagining a future in which he would choose the truth over the orthodox Christianity that the clergy were charged to defend.

Renan did not confine his doubts about Christianity and the priesthood only to his notebooks, and in the months following his tonsure pursued them in letters to Henriette and Liart. To his sister he emphasized that he was able to accept the tonsure because it did not bind him “irrevocably before God and man,” and because he still felt that the priesthood offered him the best opportunity for pursuing a life of study and reflection. But in this same letter he asked Henriette to take up a plan she had proposed to him, to look for a position as a teacher in Germany that would allow him a year away from the seminary and delay the definitive decision, to be ordained as a subdeacon.⁶¹ Here Renan continued the dance he was constantly engaged in, matching a step away from the priesthood with a half-step back, seeking a position outside the seminary, but seeing it as a move that would allow him time to make a decision, rather than being a decision in and of itself. To Liart, who had recently been ordained as a subdeacon, Renan recalled that before his tonsure his doubts had reached well beyond the immediate decision, to touch his faith itself, “these beliefs with which I was imbued, which filled my childhood, which were the perpetual object of my thoughts, the foundation of my life and my happiness.” While he claimed that after “the most agitated days of my life came the happiest and most tranquil days I’ve known for a long time,” he acknowledged as well that he was still fighting his doubts. In reflecting on this struggle he concluded that it was impossible to reconcile faith and doubt. “I don’t believe that there could be two men in the world more incapable of understanding each other than a believer and a doubter, when they find themselves face to face, whatever their good faith and intelligence.”⁶² This comment can be read as a description of Renan’s spiritual crisis but also as a premonition of an emerging intellectual agenda in which he would struggle to span what he feared was an unbridgeable gap.

His “principles of conduct,” along with his letters to Henriette and Liart, can be read as indications that Renan was well on his way out of the seminary and the church, even while he worked hard to deny this outcome. While this is a reasonable judgment, it is valuable as well to stay with Renan in the midst of his anxiety, and to recall what his counselors told him, and which he for a time believed, that doubts about a vocation were common and would dissipate as he pursued his clerical career. While the abbés Gosselin and Carbon eventually proved mistaken, Renan’s continued success in the seminary, in both pastoral and intellectual work, suggested to them, and to Renan as well, that despite his hesitancy he could still anticipate a successful and even prominent future inside the church.

The poignancy of Renan’s spiritual confusion is especially clear when we consider his work as a preacher and teacher in the church of Saint-Sulpice, just next to the seminary, which he began just as he was racked by doubt about his tonsure. Saint-Sulpice, then as now, was an imposing baroque church that drew parishioners from its fashionable neighborhood of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Mounting the pulpit at Saint-Sulpice was both a reward and a responsibility, which Renan understood and took seriously. He proudly announced to his mother that he had been one of the five seminarians chosen to lead the Catechism of Perseverance, designed for two hundred young people between the ages of twelve and twenty, who met each Sunday “to hear religious instruction on the foundations of the faith and Christian morality.”⁶³ Now robed with a surplice, the accomplished and promising cleric delivered his first sermon to his young audience, and many of their parents as well, during the Advent season on December 10. Renan followed Bossuet closely in his sermon on the life and work of John the Baptist, the precursor of Christ. But it is hard not to hear a veiled reference to his own plight when he contrasted the voice of John, “severe and hard,” with the sweetness of Jesus. From this Renan drew the lesson that “God uses our pain to cure us” and that “after this salutary bitterness will come ineffable sweetness.”⁶⁴ In preaching on the infancy of Christ three weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, Renan focused especially on Jesus’s silence in the cradle. Repeating a theme from his “principles of conduct,” Renan embraced as an ideal a “Christian silence, which is at the same time patience, humility, resignation.”⁶⁵

In the Souvenirs Renan insists that his struggles with Catholicism became acute not because of philosophical objections but because his study of scripture in Paris led him to see the fallacies of Catholic teaching.⁶⁶ From what we have seen, this claim would seem exaggerated, but Renan’s letters and notebooks confirm the central role of philology in pushing him away from orthodox Catholicism. Saint-Sulpice in Paris was in fact the only Catholic institution of higher learning in France where it was possible to pursue a serious study of the scriptures through a direct contact with the Hebrew Bible. Antoine Garnier (1762–1845), the superior general of the congregation, was an old man when Renan entered the seminary, but his manual was the basis for his first course in scripture, which dealt with the Pauline epistles and the book of the Apocalypse. Jean Pommier’s detailed study of Garnier’s manual, and Renan’s notes on his courses in 1843–1844, reveal an approach that was both erudite and scrupulously orthodox.⁶⁷ Garnier and his successor as professor of Hebrew, the abbé Le Hir, considered questions of divine inspiration, historical accuracy, and doctrine with reference to an exhaustive list of previous commentators, up to and including recent German critics, such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and Wilhelm Gesenius, innovators who used philological research to distinguish what they viewed as myth from historical fact.⁶⁸ Renan was thus introduced to writers who approached the scriptures in a critical spirit, but in a context “which left nothing to fear from the corrosive force of German thought . . . whose criticisms were dispersed, half-hidden by refutations, drowned in the middle of considerations favorable to the good cause.”⁶⁹

The philological tradition at Saint-Sulpice established by Garnier continued with Le Hir, an accomplished linguist remembered fondly by Renan in the Souvenirs: “M. Le Hir made me what I am; I was a philologist by instinct. I found in him the man most capable of developing this aptitude. Everything that I am as a savant I am because of M. Le Hir.”⁷⁰ Under Le Hir’s tutelage, Renan made rapid progress in Hebrew, and his prodigious talent led his professor to send him to the Collège de France to study Syriac with Etienne Quatremère. Le Hir was thus crucial in creating a bridge between Renan and the world of secular scholarship, which would eventually reward him by making him the administrator of the collège in 1883. But Le Hir, like Garnier, was thoroughly committed to orthodox notions about the Bible that Renan found increasingly difficult to accept. He found ridiculous, for example, the convoluted efforts made to explain how the New Testament could be defended as infallible even when it mistakenly cited passages from the Old.⁷¹ A critical approach to sacred scripture cast doubt on fundamental teachings, that Moses was the sole author of the Pentateuch, that the Psalms included prophecies fulfilled by Jesus, that the four Gospels were eyewitness accounts written by the disciples, and that the stories of the miracles of Jesus could be taken at face value.⁷² Renan’s doubts were expressed in an Essai psychologique sur Jésus Christ written during a retreat in May 1845 and in the notebooks he began writing in June 1845. As Robert Priest has written, in the Essai Renan “grappled with the question of Jesus’ divinity and historicity.”⁷³ Renan rejected out of hand rationalist arguments that Jesus was a fraud, which could not account for the success of Christianity. But he rejected as well any easy assumption of divinity. Instead, Renan sought to interpret Jesus as emerging from a Jewish culture at a moment when “extraordinary psychological laws” were operating. At such times new religions might be generated through a historical process that involved the mediation of individuals, but without recourse to supernatural explanations. Renan’s Essai might be read as a very rough first draft of The Life of Jesus, a “disorderly blend of modern philosophy and orthodox theology.”⁷⁴ In the notebooks that he began just after writing the Essai he shows for the first time signs that he was also becoming an embittered and angry dissident. In one comment from early in the notebooks Renan divided the orthodox into two camps, the first including bishops and noncritics (such as Dupanloup) who set the boundaries within which the second group, the scholars, must work. As a result of this divide Catholic biblical scholars were forced to adopt a posture of “bad faith,” because from his perspective “it is scientifically evident that the orthodox explanation of Scripture is unsustainable.”⁷⁵ Renan’s critique of Catholic scholarship led him in turn to a broader condemnation of the institutional church, which he saw as characterized by “religious pride” and “scornful intolerance,” exemplified even in the teacher he so admired, the abbé Le Hir.⁷⁶

Renan’s faith was shaken by his study of scripture, mediated by his increasing respect for the “higher criticism” emanating from Germany. But it was not only German biblical scholarship that drew Renan during his training at Saint-Sulpice. He was influenced as well by Kant, also a guide to his sister Henriette, who invoked the German philosopher to encourage her brother to pursue his career outside of the church: “Duty, sublime word! You offer nothing agreeable to man, you speak to him only of sacrifices, and yet you alone reveal to him his dignity, his freedom! Do you recognize Kant in this maxim?”⁷⁷ Throughout his religious crisis Renan described repeatedly an inner conflict between his desire to please his teachers and his mother and his sense of duty, understood as the pursuit of a self-determined and rational goal, grasped apart from any self-interest or emotional desire, in short, a version of Kant’s categorical imperative. Herder along with Kant figured largely in Renan’s pantheon of German scholars, both of them representatives of a world he idealized for its ability to combine a serious commitment to Christianity with unfettered philosophical, philological, and theological research. In the summer of 1845, with his knowledge of German now well advanced, Renan read deeply in Herder, and other German writers, translating and annotating them with increasing appreciation.⁷⁸ By the end of the summer, as he was approaching his return to Paris and an uncertain future, he wrote to a clerical friend that in studying German scholars he felt that he had entered into a temple. “Everything I have found there is pure, elevated, moral, beautiful, touching,” a list of traits that contrasted sharply with “dry orthodoxy, rejection of the critical spirit, stiff, sterile, small: type Saint-Sulpice.”⁷⁹ In his Souvenirs Renan regrets that he had not been born in Germany, where he imagined himself like Herder, combining a clerical vocation with rigorous scholarship, a possibility open to Protestants but not Catholics, in his view.⁸⁰ Earlier in his seminary years Renan had consoled himself by thinking of Malebranche, a French Catholic priest as well as a distinguished philosopher, but by the end of his time at Saint-Sulpice his model was Herder, a Lutheran bishop, philosopher, and theologian.

Throughout his years in the seminaries of Issy and Paris Renan had confided constantly in his sister Henriette and in Liart, who provided sympathetic ears and encouraged him to take possession of his own future. But it was only in the spring of 1845 that Renan acknowledged to Henriette that his doubts about a clerical career were based on a fundamental break with orthodoxy, and not simply on a distaste for ecclesiastical authority. In a letter to her in April 1845, Renan confessed that “I don’t recall ever telling you the motives that have soured me on a clerical career; I want to do it today with the clarity of a frank and upright soul, speaking to an intelligence capable of understanding. And so! Here it is in a single word: I don’t believe enough.” Despite his best efforts to persuade himself of the truths of Christianity on rational grounds, he could not. But even at this decisive moment of declaring his doubts to the person he loved and trusted most Renan managed to pull back into a more ambiguous posture: “God preserve me from saying that Christianity is false; this word would describe very little the bearing of my thought: a lie doesn’t produce such beautiful fruit. But it is one thing to say that Christianity is not false, and another that it is the absolute truth, as understood in the manner of those who present themselves as its interpreters.”⁸¹ Renan agonized over the situation he found himself in, being forced to choose between a Catholicism that had exercised its authority over him since his youth, mediated by clerical mentors and a mother he revered, and the doubts generated by the reason that the church had trained him to use. This ordeal of freedom was expressed most clearly in a letter Renan wrote to Liart in March 1845, just before his friend died:

Oh my friend, man is so little free in determining his destiny! Here you have a poor child, who acts only by impulse and imitation. And it is at this age that one makes him choose his life: a superior power wraps him in indissoluble bonds; it pursues its work in silence, before he begins to know himself, he is tied without knowing how. At a certain age, he wakes up, he wants to act, impossible! . . . It is God himself who binds him, and cruel opinion makes of the vague desires of childhood an irrevocable edict, and will laugh at him if he wants to leave behind the toy that amused him as a child. . . . How many times have I desired that man be born totally free or totally unfree. . . . With this unhappy sliver of freedom he is strong enough to resist, not strong enough to act, exactly what it takes to be miserable. Oh my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?⁸²

In this passage Renan moves from the third to the first person, suggesting that he saw his particular predicament as exemplifying a broader conflict between the individual conscience and religious authority. He closes with a quote from the opening words of Psalm 22, repeated as Christ’s dying words in the New Testament (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34), a telling reference that illuminates how he could not conceive of his doubts about Christianity apart from his identification with the person of Christ, a tension that continued to define his intellectual and religious life.

During the summer of 1845 Renan confronted his dilemma and made his choice to pursue a career outside of the church. From this point on Renan and his sister discussed at length the practical problems raised by his decision to pursue another career. She wrote in August 1845 that it was absolutely necessary for Renan to be “entirely free” (a phrase used twice in the same paragraph) for a year, so that he could prepare for the baccalaureate, and then the licence and agrégation.⁸³ And she applauded and reinforced the decision he had so painfully reached: “I finally see [in your letter] a sense of resolution, I find there some signs of that energy, of that force of will that I have so much desired for you and without which we are all our lives only big children.”⁸⁴ With Henriette’s support Renan had broken decisively with orthodox Catholicism and no longer envisaged a clerical career. As for the future, they decided that Renan would return to Paris in October, consult with his spiritual advisers, and seek a position, perhaps even within the seminary itself, that would allow him to study for the baccalaureate, the first of the state exams he would need to take to pursue a career as a secular scholar.

All these plans were negotiated by correspondence during the summer vacation of 1845, while Renan was home with his mother, wearing a cassock that, as far as Manon Renan knew, indicated that her son was still on track to be ordained. In order to avoid distressing her he suggested that he might take a year off to pursue independent study but led her to believe that this would be an interruption, not a definitive break from the career path that she had envisioned for him. To his friend père Cognat Renan bemoaned the false position he was in: “[My mother’s] caresses desolate me; her beautiful dreams, which she never stops discussing and which I don’t have the courage to contradict, break my heart. . . . I would sacrifice everything for her, except my duty and my conscience.”⁸⁵ Although he managed to keep his decision a secret from his mother, Renan declared himself openly to the abbé Baudier, his spiritual adviser, as the summer came to an end: “One thing that I now seem to know certainly, is that I will not return to orthodoxy while following the line I’ve adopted, I mean to say rational and critical examination. Until now I hoped that after I traveled the circle of doubt, I would return to my point of departure; I’ve totally lost this hope; the return to Catholicism no longer seems possible except by a move backward, breaking clearly the line which I’ve engaged, dishonoring my reason, declaring it once and for all null and void, condemning it to a respectful silence.”⁸⁶ With his letters to Cognat and Baudier, Renan shared with his clerical friends and advisers his loss of faith that he had already announced to Henriette, but what would come next? It is one thing to say that you no longer believe, and can no longer pursue a clerical career, and another to decide what to do when your entire life had been directed toward that single goal.

Breaking Free: From One Religion to Another?

Renan returned to Paris in early October, determined to map a new future for himself, without having a clear idea of what that might be. He was forced into a difficult position immediately after his arrival, when he learned that Archbishop Affre, well aware of his talent, had chosen him to be a professor at a new faculty of theology that he was planning. Convinced that his lack of faith made such a position impossible, Renan refused the offer, spoke at length with his clerical advisers, and was gratified to find them sympathetic and helpful. “I’ve been delighted by the esteem and affection they have shown me. I never would have believed in such generosity in the center of strict orthodoxy.” But in the letter to Henriette describing the warm reception he found in the seminary he added that “they’re all persuaded that I’ll come back,” an attitude that pleased him, and that he typically managed to entertain momentarily himself.⁸⁷ Renan spent the first few days outside of the seminary in a rooming house nearby, still wearing his cassock, and visiting the church of Saint-Sulpice at night, hoping to recover his faith. During this period the abbés Carbon and Le Hir, as well as Monsignor Dupanloup, were instrumental in finding Renan a position at the College of Saint Stanislaus, where he would be a tutor and have sufficient time to study for the baccalaureate. Although anxious and alone, Renan seemed about to enter into a smooth transition out of the seminary, and of the church.⁸⁸

This hope was immediately quashed when Renan was told by the abbé Gratry, the head of Saint Stanislaus, that against his expectations he would be required to wear the cassock while fulfilling his duties at the collège. After his first few days outside of the Paris seminary Renan had abandoned his clerical exterior for the first time since 1839; the idea of putting the cassock on again just two weeks later appalled him.⁸⁹ He argued politely but firmly with Gratry, who brushed off his objections and insisted that the position absolutely required the clerical habit. For Renan this was too much, and he realized that there could be no “middle way between leaving the school and keeping up a clerical appearance.”⁹⁰

Renan’s abandonment of the cassock can be seen as a crucial step in his journey out of the church, for he now had left behind the external sign that identified him with the clerical profession and brought his public self into line with his internal convictions. Although he experienced moments of anxiety about his future, especially in the days immediately after his departure from Saint Stanislaus, within a few weeks his mood had changed dramatically. He soon found a reasonably priced boarding house in the Latin Quarter, and a more suitable position as a private tutor, which provided a small stipend to supplement Henriette’s investment in her brother. At his pension on the rue des Deux Eglises Renan met Marcellin Berthelot, who was to become one of the most prominent chemists of the nineteenth century and remained a close friend of Renan’s for the rest of his life. Berthelot, like Renan, had recently abandoned Catholic practice, and the two of them found reinforcement and consolation in long conversations together. All in all, Renan’s letters and notebooks of late 1845 and 1846 show us an energetic and optimistic young man, breezing through his state exams for the baccalaureate and licence in 1846, and the agrégation in 1847, impressing secular intellectuals just as he had his clerical teachers with his brilliance, spread across philosophy, theology, and literature. Within just a few months of leaving Saint-Sulpice Renan was engaged in deep conversations with Adolphe Garnier and Jean-Philbert Damiron, professors of philosophy at the Sorbonne, and had impressed as well Frédéric Ozanam, professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne (and a devout Catholic), and Eugène Burnouf, the leading scholar of Sanskrit and a professor at the Collège de France. At Burnouf’s urging, by the end of 1846 he had begun work on a manuscript that ran to fifteen hundred pages over four volumes, Essai historique et théorique sur les langues sémitiques en général et sur la langue hébraïque en particulier. By March it was finished and was awarded the Prix Volney by the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. Renan proudly described to his mother the details of the award ceremony at the Institut de France, with members of all five French academies present and Alexis de Tocqueville presiding.⁹¹

After years of struggle, doubt, and hesitation Renan had left behind Catholicism both as a set of beliefs and as a vocation and was well on his way to a career that would establish him as one of the most significant secular intellectuals of the nineteenth century. But where on the religious landscape had Renan’s conversion left him? David Drach, Théodore Ratisbonne, Sister Philomène, and Ivan Gagarin also went through extended periods of doubt and uncertainty about their religious identity before settling inside the Roman Catholic Church. It is harder to characterize the religious territory that Lamennais and Sand finally occupied, but Christian socialism might be a reasonable description. Laudyce Rétat, Renan’s most sensitive interpreter, borrowed a phrase from the Souvenirs to describe the period between 1842 and 1849 as one in which he moved “from one religion to another” but purposefully (and wisely) did not specify Renan’s religious destination.⁹² Renan’s notebooks, letters, and unpublished manuscripts from the late 1840s show him freed from orthodox Catholicism, yet still preoccupied with the questions that led him away from the church, and still bound by the intellectual frameworks he had absorbed in his youth, and at Saint-Sulpice.

At the most obvious level, Renan’s conversion can be explained as a rejection of a traditional understanding of the supernatural, a point he made clearly in the spring of 1845 when he wrote in his “cahiers” that “we need to banish from the world the God of fantasy that our fathers dreamed of. . . . God, since he has created beings and their laws, has not once revoked the course of these laws, has not once put his hand to his own work.”⁹³ But this bald statement, which might seem to associate him with a Voltairean-like deism, is only one dimension of Renan’s religious identity. In his notebooks, and in L’avenir de la science, the long, complex, and confusing text that Renan wrote in 1848–1849 but did not publish until 1890, he struggled to define a new “religion entirely as sweet, entirely as wonderful as the most venerable cults.”⁹⁴ Renan was aware of his failure to present this new faith in a coherent manner, and toward the end of L’avenir asks the reader’s indulgence for his exaggerations and inconsistencies, but concludes that “above all what I have wanted to inculcate in this book is faith in reason and in human nature . . . faith in science and the human spirit.”⁹⁵ The science that Renan evoked and idealized referred primarily to the humanities, what the French term the “human sciences,” and was rooted first of all in philology, the historically informed study of ancient languages and ancient texts, and not the natural sciences.⁹⁶ Although the precise end point of the critical study of religion was unclear, in Renan’s view it might well end up rejecting “a personal God, providence, prayer, anthropomorphism, personal immortality, etc.”⁹⁷ But this future religion, which could not be clearly specified, would nonetheless be a superior and purer form of belief, because it would be based exclusively on the human capacity to pursue and obtain the truth. At one point Renan describes this process as one in which humanity would “make God perfect.” Reason, after organizing human society, “WILL ORGANIZE GOD.”⁹⁸

Renan’s hazy vision of a new religion, shaped by human reason and rejecting any orthodox understanding of the supernatural, looks very different at first glance from the Catholicism that he left behind. But Renan’s insistence that he carried much with him from his earlier religion is worth taking seriously. This continuity is most evident in his enduring devotion to the person of Jesus, not understood as a mythological figure linking the divine and the human, as Renan understood the German biblical critics to argue, but as a historical figure who both lived within and transcended the Jewish culture of his time. The language Renan used to express his understanding of the historical Christ drew heavily on his Catholic training: “[Jesus] is really the son of God and the son Man, God in man.”⁹⁹ Even more telling than such linguistic continuity, however, is Renan’s profound psychological attachment to Jesus, expressed with astounding force in a dream he recorded at length in his notebooks at some point in 1846. In the dream Renan was a witness to the trial of Jesus, whose appearance before the magistrates provoked in him a feeling of profound love. Renan pushed forward to defend the accused, praising his purity and sweetness, but then stopped abruptly when he realized that “no one will believe me.” At this moment the dream became confused, with Jesus merging with his late friend Guyomar and an anonymous young man condemned for breaking a law he didn’t know. A priest appeared, at whose feet both the accused and Renan knelt and prayed, with Renan whispering to the victim to ask God to give him back his lost faith. After recounting this dream Renan adopted a prayer-like style, addressing Jesus directly, insisting that he could never deny him, but that in order to love him he needed to imagine him “as my fellow man, having like me a heart of flesh. . . . My God! Poor friend, where are you? Do you hear me, do you still love me? Do you forgive me? . . . My God! I don’t know what I’m looking for, I’m looking for something.”¹⁰⁰

Renan’s continuing inclination to pray took a less troubled form during a trip to Italy he undertook in 1849–1850, a state-subsidized excursion to explore the collections of several libraries. While in Rome Renan was moved by the piety of the laity, described in detail in letters to his sister and to Berthelot, which led him to a new appreciation of popular forms of Christianity, and to question his exclusive devotion to critical reason.¹⁰¹ In a notebook he kept during his time in Rome he described what happened during a visit to the cemetery of Santo Spirito: “Today I prayed. How did I return to prayer. In the cemetery, the tomb of a young girl. My thought, perhaps I would have loved her. Pray for her. And yes! I will pray, pray for her sweet soul; I fell on my knees and I said for her the prayer of Christians. Since this time, I’ve completely changed; I believe that I again became a Christian.”¹⁰² However we interpret this passage, which adds an erotic element to Renan’s religious sensibility, it illuminates his sympathy for religious forms whose content continued to draw him, without the power to persuade him of their truth when judged by his critical reason. This attitude is expressed even more clearly in Renan’s sketch of a novel, “Patrice,” also written during his time in Italy, in which his protagonist admires the simple piety of the young woman Cécile, without being able to embrace it. Patrice, like Renan, writes from Rome to describe his experience, wondering if “it would be possible to be a Catholic without believing in Catholicism. Because on the one hand I want to be able to call myself Catholic, but on the other hand it is absolutely impossible for me to believe all that Catholicism teaches.”¹⁰³

In his notebooks and letters from the late 1840s Renan openly acknowledged the complexity of his new religion, as he struggled to reconcile the sentimental attachment he felt for Catholicism with the demands of reason. The spiritual battle that he seemed to have resolved in October 1845 was in fact continuing, conducted now without the complicating factor of having to decide about his professional future. Laudyce Rétat suggests that this conflict should not be taken as an inability or unwillingness to decide, but as the essential element in Renan’s new religion, a free choice on Renan’s part to embrace inconsistency and doubt.¹⁰⁴ From this perspective, Renan’s unsatisfied yearning for his lost faith was not nostalgia, but a religious principle. In exercising his religious liberty, Renan chose to occupy an ambiguous position that left him outside of the church, but also outside of any alternative that would endorse once and for all any particular doctrine or associate him with any particular institution. He acknowledged that this position would not produce “a perfectly harmonized intellectual system” but accepted the consequences, affirming that “we are happy as a result of this inconsistency, and a certain attitude that accepts patiently what might otherwise be understood as torture.”¹⁰⁵ This posture achieved an epigrammatic expression in Renan’s notebooks from 1846, where he wrote that “doubt is so beautiful that I have just prayed to God never to deliver me from it.”¹⁰⁶

In both his writings from the late 1840s and the Souvenirs of 1883 Renan self-consciously expresses a complex religious identity that looked at Catholicism with a combination of sympathy and critical distance. Renan seems less aware of some other dimensions of his new religion that recall his Catholic and clerical past, and that suggest a less flattering but fuller understanding of how much he carried over from Catholicism into his new life. In L’avenir de la science Renan draws a sharp distinction between an intellectual elite able to attain an elevated cultural state and the masses who are unable to reason and are thus relegated to a cruder and simpler existence, framed by a Christianity appropriate for them, but not for him and his colleagues. In Renan’s cultural elitism we can hear a clear echo of clericalism, a sense that a privileged few, possessed of a special and sacred knowledge, were obliged to direct a fickle and ignorant majority. “The good of humanity being the supreme goal, the minority must not be scrupulous in leading against its will, if it be necessary, the selfish and stupid majority.”¹⁰⁷ Renan flirted briefly with socialism in the wake of the February revolution and was generally sympathetic with the need to improve the material circumstances of the lower classes, a position that led to one of the few quarrels he had with his sister Henriette. But his sense of superiority, and of the incapacity of the masses, made him skeptical as well of placing an absolute value on freedom. Some of the language used in L’avenir de la science recalls Gregory XVI’s criticism of liberty as less valuable than truth, expressed in Mirari vos, his encyclical condemning Lamennais in 1832. “Without a doubt we must carefully maintain the liberties we have conquered with so much effort; but what matters even more is to realize that this is an advantage if we have ideas, a disaster if we don’t. What good is it to have the freedom to assemble, if we don’t have something worthwhile to communicate? What good is it to be free to speak and to write if one doesn’t have something true and new to say?”¹⁰⁸ Renan’s new friends counseled him against publishing L’avenir de la science when he showed it to them in 1849, before his trip to Italy, concerned that the public was not prepared for some of his advanced positions on religion and society. Renan accepted their advice and admitted in his preface to the 1890 edition that his attempt to summarize “the new faith that had replaced my ruined Catholicism” was at times overstated and crude, and that in refusing to publish it he was making a sacrifice “to what one calls in France good taste.”¹⁰⁹ During his spiritual struggles at Saint-Sulpice Renan had at one point accepted the advice of his superiors to keep silent as a way to preserve his relationship with his clerical colleagues and to honor, at least in an external sense, ecclesiastical authority. In the end he found such discretion too difficult a policy to maintain, but his act of self-censorship in addressing the public suggests that here too Renan’s new religion incorporated elements of the Catholicism that he had tried to leave behind.

Renan’s decision to leave the church can stand as a clear affirmation of the freedom of conscience, and an example of how difficult and painful it was for a devout Catholic to accept and in the end act on the basis of a personal judgment that went against the culture within which he was born and raised. But the language Renan used to describe his decision also suggests that he was compelled by the faculty of critical reason, which mirrored the competing power of ecclesiastical authority reinforced by family feeling. This sense of obligation to accept reason shows up first of all in the “principles of conduct” from Renan’s retreat before his tonsure, when he vowed “to preserve himself from any constraint against the natural progression of my mind,” and runs as a theme through his correspondence during his crisis, and in particular in the letters he exchanged with his friend the abbé Cognat. Despite his desire to remain in the church, he could not because “Catholicism suffices for all of my faculties, except my critical reason.”¹¹⁰ This faculty “eliminates, discusses, purifies, is impossible to silence. Ah! If I had been able to do so I would have.”¹¹¹ For years Renan had struggled with his doubt and had let his conscience be formed by his superiors, even as he was unable to convince himself that what they taught was true. In the end Renan gave in to the pressure of disbelief, expressed in “Patrice” in a litany-like form interspersed with his inevitable qualifications: “This book [the Bible], you say, is the authentic history of primitive times. This is not true; this book is admirable, precious, divine; I adore it but is not what you say it is. This bread is substantially the body of Jesus. This is not true. This bread, I respect, I adore it; if I dared I would receive it on my lips, and I hope to God that someday, converted and again blind, I would be able to participate in the feast of the simple, and receive communion anew, with the woman and the child. But this bread is not what you say it is. This confessional box is a place of supernatural operations, where, at a given moment, sins are forgiven: this is not true.”¹¹² By 1850, five years after he had left Saint-Sulpice, Renan was certain about what he did not believe, but unable to detach himself fully from the Catholicism that had shaped him. He spent much of the rest of his life working within this tension, most notably in The Life of Jesus, which appeared in 1863, a work that presents an idealized Christ, a supremely important moral teacher, but not the miracle worker of orthodoxy.¹¹³ Just three years before he died Renan wrote for the Revue des Deux Mondes a final testament, an “examination of philosophical conscience,” which began with a more elaborate version of his understanding of the constraints imposed by reason that he first expressed in the 1840s: “The first duty of a sincere man is not to influence his own opinions . . . [but] to assist as a spectator the internal battles that are undertaken in the depths of his conscience.”¹¹⁴ Even as he left the church, Renan sought to place himself under an authority that could not be questioned, and even as he exercised his freedom of religion, he paradoxically surrendered it to a rational faculty whose coercive power over him he both accepted and regretted.