Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864

ERNEST RENAN'S THEORY

Christianity is a fact. We sometimes hear of men who are said to 'deny' 'Christianity.' The expression is nonsense. Men cannot deny the sun. Christianity has been a visible thing, on this planet, for eighteen hundred years. It has done a heavy amount of work, which is very visible too. It is altogether too late in the day to 'deny Christianity.'

That is the first thing to be understood. There is no arguing against the fact. You must take the fact and make the best of it. If your theory requires the annihilation of the fact, it's a bad thing for your theory, for the fact insists on staying. What an amount of fearfully laborious stupidity we would have been saved, if only that plain principle had been remembered!

Christianity has stood face to face with the world, for ages, a hard, stern, uncompromising reality. With a pair of tremendous arms it has worked, fought, endured, conquered, destroyed, builded, all over the earth. It has burned its brand into time. It has stamped its footprints in fire and brightness on earth and sea. It so stands, a great, wonderful, triumphant, flaming fact, blazing through the ages, flaming to the stars, melting, moulding, enlightening humanity.

The first thing to be remembered, then, by Christian and unbeliever alike, when they come to speak of Christianity, is that these things are not the matters in debate. They are the facts to be explained, to be accounted for. In all argument they themselves must first be taken for granted.

That is to say, here is this religion, certainly to any thoughtful man the most wonderful thing, take it all in all, that history has to tell about. It starts in an obscure corner of an obscure province. Its founder dies as a felon among felons. Its teachers are stupid peasants, fettered by a narrow dialect of an almost unknown tongue. Its whole origin is barbarous, ignorant, disgraceful by any worldly judgment. So it begins. As it spreads, imperial Rome takes alarm, and turns to crush the barbarous fanaticism, in the pride of her learning, civilization, and power. She plants her iron heel on the neck of the creeping sect. She presses it down with her gigantic weight. Time passes. The little sect that began in an obscure city of an obscure province, 'the number of the names together being an hundred and twenty,' in less than three centuries masters the world's crowned mistress, and plants its standard in triumph, to remain forever, on the Seven Eternal Hills. Resistless Rome is beaten to her knees, every national reverence, every national divinity trampled on, and spit upon, and the barbarous and disgraceful sect sets its ignominious mark, the cross of the condemned slave, on every monument of Roman reverence, on every trophy of Roman greatness.

There never was such an utter conquest. A pure idea, without a material hand or weapon, domineers over the greatest empire under the sun, in spite of the whole power of that empire armed to crush it.

And, after Rome fell, the huge carcase beaten to the dust, and torn to fragments by the wild creatures that hung upon her borders, this wondrous mystery, this barbarous, obscure faith alone remained, invincible among the powers of Rome. Roman civilization was crushed to the earth, as the Roman legions were. Roman law was trampled out of sight, as Roman art and literature were; but Christianity stood up and faced the Vandal and the Goth, the Frank and Saxon, as it had faced the Cæsars before, and dragged the conquerors of the empire suppliants at the feet of the church. It built a Christian Europe out of the savage hordes of Asia, and made an England, and a Germany, and at last an America out of wild Goth and Ungar, out of bloody Frank and savage Dane.

Now all this is simply matter of fact. My belief in Christianity does not add one jot to these facts. My disbelief does not take one tittle from them. So far as they are concerned, every man is a believer in Christianity. He believes it exists. He believes it has existed, has had such and such a history, has produced such and such results. 'Christian' and 'infidel' alike, to be reasonable, to have any ground for reasonable discussion, go thus far together.

They may differ in their explanations of the facts. That is the only ground of difference. There is the point of separation. It is perfectly logical too. Prima facie, we have no complaint to make that they do differ. And here lies the improvement in the modern type of 'unbeliever.' He does not take the line of his older brethren, and rudely assail Christianity as a mere imposture with Voltaire and Paine. That sort of work has had its day. He, on the other hand, freely admits its beneficent achievements. He has grown reasonable. He accepts Christianity, as the believer does, as a fruitful, beneficent, and conquering fact. He only holds that its existence and its achievements may be accounted for in a far more satisfactory way than we 'believers' have discovered.

Now all this is comprehensible, and it is really, now, the ground of difference between those who believe in Christianity as divine, and those who hold it to be merely human. It is a clear and simple issue. Christianity accounts for itself and its work on a certain plain, straightforward, and consistent theory. It holds that theory to be reasonable, complete, ample, for all the facts. A number of people join issue just here with Christianity. They admit its facts, but they deny its manner of explaining them. They claim to put forward other methods of explanation, which shall be more reasonable, more natural, and, at the same time, just as ample for the facts. We have had a number of these philosophers, with their theories, and they have had various fortunes. On the whole, the Christian world has gone on about as usual, accepting the old explanation, adopting the old theory, a hundred to one, and has dropped the new theories one after another, after more or less investigation, into profound oblivion.

Now we are free to admit the old theory has its difficulties. There are 'things in it hard to be understood.' There are mysteries and wonders which it does not attempt to explain. There are 'hard sayings' which it leaves hard. And the new theories always claim to have no difficulties. They blame the old one bitterly because it tolerates them. They themselves claim to be 'reasonable,' they 'explain' everything.

They therefore challenge the trial. If they fail to be 'reasonable,' or if they can only be reasonable at the expense of some of the facts—that is to say, if they find no place for some of the authentic facts, and so have to explain them away; or if, on the whole, they make too large drafts on our credulity, and demand too great a power of faith—we have the logical right to dismiss them out of our presence with scant courtesy, and are bound to hold by the old explanation still.

The last man who has come forward with his theory of Christanity is Monsieur Ernest Renan, a Frenchman, a member of the Institute, and a Semitic scholar of some considerable pretensions. He broaches his theory in a book, which he calls 'The Life of Jesus.' He offers it to the world, through that book, as an improvement on the accepted one. We propose here to look at M. Renan's theory, and see whether it has any advantages to offer over that usually taught in churches in America, and which the present writer learned, some lustra ago, while catechized at the chancel veil, and which his children are learning now.

It makes the examination easier that M. Renan freely and fully admits the achievements of Christianity. Indeed he glories over them. The beneficence of Christianity, its hallowing and elevating power in the history of the world, its wondrous blessedness among men, the glory it has cast over human life and human aims, the nobleness it has conferred on human character, all these he takes a pride in confessing and appreciating. He will not be a whit behind the stanchest believer in acknowledging the power of these, or in the capacity of prizing these.

But he cannot accept the explanation Christianity gives of itself. He proposes another of his own. We may take his theory as the fruit and flower of all 'liberal' thought. Here, at last, is what unbelieving learning and philosophy have to offer in lieu of the divine origin of Christianity. After a good deal of loud boasting, after a large amount of supercilious sneering, we have here the result of that 'profound criticism' and that 'careful scholarship' which have been laboring for years, in Europe, to destroy the supernatural bases of faith. We are justified, from M. Renan's position and character, in taking it for granted, that his book is the best that modern unbelief has to offer, his theory the most satisfactory that the deniers of the divine origin of Christianity can frame.

In examining that theory, at the first, a suspicious thing strikes a calm observer. It is the reckless way in which M. Renan deals with his authorities. For, be it remarked that, with only one or two outside hints in Josephus and Tacitus, the Four Gospels contain all that we know of the 'Life of Jesus.' They are formally and professedly His biographies. They were expressly written to present the outlines of His life and teaching in connected form. All that we know of Him, His birth, life, and death, is contained in these four narrations. The utmost learning and the utmost simplicity here stand side by side. The most unlearned reader of The Continental is just as well informed, with the Four Gospels in his hand, as any 'member' of any 'Academy' under the sun. Out of these Four Gospels, M. Renan has to construct his 'Life of Jesus.' But he has a theory, and that theory does not seem to be the one set forth in the Four Gospels; so he just rejects whatever goes against his theory, garbles, clips, denies, assents, and colors, with an assurance, amusing for its impudence, if it were not so criminal for its recklessness.

On the very threshold he asserts, in the teeth of his sole authorities, that Jesus was born in Nazareth! He refers his startled reader to a footnote. That footnote informs him that the 'assessment under Quirinus, by which He is sought to be connected with Bethlehem,' took place ten years after. We are to take this on M. Renan's sole authority. We are to fling the Gospels over on the strength of a footnote! Now it is simply impossible that M. Renan can be ignorant that there are very satisfactory ways of explaining this difficulty, otherwise than by charging a forgery. Josephus, whom he cites to prove the assessment to be ten years after, would have informed him that the preliminary enrolment took place at the time mentioned, and that it did extend over Herod's dominions. Moreover, the authorities for this last fact are not Christian only, as he says. They are Josephus, a Jew, and Suetonius, a pagan.

This is only an instance, on the threshold, of what occurs, a hundred times, in the book. Any statement which stands in the way of the writer's hypothesis, is swept out of existence at one pen-stroke. Calm historical relations, evidently most essential portions of the writings, are treated as forgeries, or deceptions, without a condescending why or wherefore, if they embarrass the writer.

That large portion of the Gospels, the miracles, is scarcely worth a thought from M. Renan. He dismisses the whole question of miracles with a bon mot. 'Many people followed Jesus into the desert. Thanks to their extreme frugality, they lived there. They naturally believed they saw in that a miracle.' Now is not that wonderful! The circumstantial relation of the miraculous feeding is supposed to be satisfactorily explained by people 'naturally believing' that frugality was 'a miracle'! But the great miracle of all, the miracle which seals the story, which gives ground of hope and faith to all Christian men, that miracle, without which they have always felt the Gospel would be preached in vain, that grand consummating and awful miracle, which flashed brightness into the sepulchre, which shot the light of immortality athwart the darkness of Death, and gave mortal man a sure grasp on immortality, that great crowning miracle, the resurrection of our Lord, on which so much depended, which so many jealous eyes were watching, which was so early asserted on the very spot where it claims to have occurred—this M. Renan treats as unworthy serious refutation. It is not even necessary to try to disprove it. It is simply sufficient for him to mention 'the strong imagination of Mary Magdalene,' and to exclaim so beautifully!—'Divine power of love, sacred moments in which the passion of a hallucinated woman gives to the world a resurrected God!'

There it is! The doctrine of the resurrection, and all that clings around it for humanity, the doctrine preached always as one of the foundations of the faith ('because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection'), and the fact of the resurrection, the fact always put forth as the clinching argument, the justification of the whole story, thrown into the face of Jew and Greek as a perpetual challenge—this doctrine and this fact are disposed of by a bit of sickly sentiment!

Now, this sort of thing may be very rhetorical, and very beautiful, when done up in approved, sentimental French, but it is certainly neither logical nor philosophical. We have a right to insist that M. Renan shall come with no theory which compels him to reject half the facts unexamined, and to garble and misuse half the rest. Those facts stand on the same ground as all the others. The same authority which tells us that Christ lived at Nazareth, tells us also that He fed five thousand with five loaves and two small fishes. M. Renan accepts the first statement, without examination, and denies the second, without examination. He does this because he has made up his mind beforehand that prima facie a miracle is impossible. But that carries us out of the line of historical investigation altogether. That is a question of metaphysics. M. Renan's decision of the question is not admitted by an means universally, not even frequently. The truer decision as well as the more philosophical is that, prima facie, all things are possible, except contradictions.

At all events, we hold that the Four Evangelists stand on their own merits. They are not to be declared impostors, either in whole or in part, beforehand, in order to save a metaphysical theory.

The same logical viciousness shows itself in M. Renan's treatment of the Prophets. Daniel never could have written the book attributed to him, he says, because that book contains statements of fact which occurred long after Daniel! That is to say, M. Renan does not believe in such a thing as prophecy, and, by consequence, Daniel never wrote the book of Daniel! This is taking things for granted with a witness.

And, by the way, we may as well ease our minds just here concerning another trick of the school to which M. Renan belongs, and of which he furnishes many marked examples. We mean the trick of arbitrarily deciding by what they are pleased to call 'philological criticism,' all about all the books and nearly all the chapters in the Bible. 'Learned men are agreed that such and such chapters were not written by Isaiah.' 'It is clear, from internal evidence of style, that this book was made up of earlier scattered memoranda.' 'These chapters, it is evident, were not written till such and such a time.' 'The best critics are agreed that this narration was added long after the writing of the book.' This is the way they write, to the astonishment of the simple.

When we were younger, this sort of talk seemed to our simplicity to be exceedingly imposing. We actually believed that there were a set of people, in Germany, at least, who could look at a Hebrew chapter and tell you who wrote it, when he wrote it, how he wrote it, and why; and the who, when, how, and why, should be each different from those mentioned by the author of the book himself. As years removed the credulous simplicity of childhood, we found out that this was only a trick of the trade. We discovered that no two of these doctors agreed among themselves, that the line of argument they followed would disprove the authorship of any page ever written, that decisions from difference of style, wise as they might be, philologically, were, rationally and logically, nonsensical; for Burns, no doubt, wrote his letters as well as his poems, and Shakspeare's 'Sonnets' were written by the hand that wrote 'King Lear,' although, according to these wise doctors, it is assumed to be utterly impossible that the same man can use two styles, or that a man at seventy will write otherwise than he did at thirty. In short, we discovered that there is nothing more arbitrary, more opinionated, and more unphilosophical than this 'philological criticism.' Applied, as these wonderful German doctors apply it, to any book ever penned, and it can be shown, 'as the result of high critical ability,' that no author ever wrote his own book. It is the easiest thing in the world to prove that Shakspeare never wrote 'Shakspeare,' that Milton never wrote 'Paradise Lost,' that 'Johnson's Dictionary' just 'growed' like Topsey, and was never made at all, and, to name small things with great, that M. Renan never wrote the 'Life of Jesus.'

When we read, then, that 'it is certain that Isaiah never wrote this chapter,' that 'St. John could not possibly have written the fourth Gospel,' that 'this book is composed, undoubtedly, of fragments of earlier writings,' or that 'this' other 'is the growth of a certain school,' we advise simple Christians to take it easy. They are to understand that the world goes on much as usual, and that their family Bibles still contain the old Table of Contents. There has been no wonderful discovery made, no ancient book catalogues have come to light, no files of ancient documents have been dug up. There are still just the old facts and the old evidence on which Christians made up their minds sixteen or seventeen hundred years ago. The amount of all this talk is only that 'the great Doctor Teufelsdroeck' or 'the learned Professor Von Baum' has hazarded a guess, and made an assertion, which every other 'great doctor' and 'learned professor' will contradict, and displace with another guess just as probable, in three months' time. There are men just as learned and just as honest who have examined their guesses, and find them poor inventions indeed. And we have a right to deny point blank the assertions so flippantly made by men like M. Renan. 'It is universally acknowledged that this book was never written by Daniel or Isaiah or Jeremiah,' 'It is certain this chapter is an addition of such and such a date,' etc. It is not universally acknowledged. It is not certain. The whole thing is pure guesswork. There is only one way to prove the authorship of a book, and that is by testimony. There is nothing under the sun more absurd, philologically, than that a common and very poor stock-actor should have written 'Hamlet.' We know he did write it, however, not by 'internal evidence,' or from 'philological criticism,' but by plain human testimony to the fact. We cite that, and leave the 'internal' critics to their profound babble on vowels and consonants, on long and short syllables, and let them do with the fact the best they can.

In other words, there is no way by which I can determine whether St. John wrote his Gospel except by testimony. I do not know beforehand how St. John would write. I can therefore judge nothing by 'style.' All I can do is to ask of competent witnesses. I do ask. I am told by such witnesses, straight up to his own day, that he did write this Gospel, that this is the very one which we now have, for they cite it and mention its peculiarities. I accept the fact, as I do in the case of Shakspeare, and let the wise 'critics' settle it among them.

The attempt, therefore, on the part of M. Renan, to get rid of those large portions of the Gospels which embarrass him in his theory, by attempting to discredit their authorship, while, at the same time, he accepts other parts, that stand on the same authority, and the supercilious way in which he ignores that large part which the miracles fill, turning them off with a small witticism, or a smaller bit of sentiment, suggest, at the start, decided suspicions of the honesty of his intentions and the sufficiency of his theory.

We only hint at these things here. They occur all through his book. They are not evidence of learning or critical skill. There are no secrets for deciding such matters. The whole data have been public for ages. All the 'members of the Institute' together do not possess one grain of evidence that any ordinary scholar in America does not possess as well. M. Renan rejects, or discredits, or garbles, or slips over silently, because he finds it necessary for his theory. That is all. He pettifogs with his witnesses to establish his theory.

That theory is, that He, whom all Christians have called Our Lord, was a mere man, of what race is uncertain, born in Galilee of a man named Joseph and of a woman named Mary; who taught in Galilee and a little in Judea, and who was at last killed and buried, and so an end of Him. This theory M. Renan has to find in the Gospels, and there is, as we have hinted, very little of the Gospels left when he gets through. It is so palpably against them that he has to get rid of the most of them to make it stand.

Now this theory, like all others, must be put to the test. Will it explain the facts? We have seen how it is compelled to get rid of the Gospels. But we put that aside. Will it explain the history of Christianity? Will it explain its place to-day? Will it account for its effects?

The Jesus of M. Renan is a strange character. He is more difficult of comprehension than any mystery of orthodoxy. We ask where He gets His wondrous wisdom, this young carpenter, how He learned to speak 'as man never spoke?' and M. Renan sentimentalizes. We ask how He got this wondrous power over men, to lead them and control them, so that they followed Him and 'heard Him gladly,' and M. Renan goes off into ecstasies over the 'delicious climate' and 'the lovely villages,' and the Arcadian simplicity of Galilee, as he fancies they once were, and expects us to be answered. His influence over women is accounted for more readily. M. Renan tells us, in his peculiar way, that 'this beautiful young man' had great power over the 'nervous' susceptibilities of Mary Magdalene; and Pilate's wife, having once seen him, 'dreamed about him' the next night, and sent to her husband to save him in consequence!

However, He begins His teaching. Where He learned it, how He learned it, why it took the form it did, how He came to give moral law to the world, where He found the words of wisdom and consolation—the divine words of power—for all generations, there is positively not one sentence of explanation. Of all the young Jews of His day, how came He by these powers and this omnipotent wisdom? Now the Christian theory does attempt an explanation. It gives an ample answer to the question. M. Renan gives no answer whatever. He flies to sentiment. We have all sorts of adjectives—'delicious,' 'enchanting, 'beautiful,' 'sweet,' 'charming'—he beats a whole female seminary at the business, in attempting to describe how, like full-grown babes, everybody in Galilee lived, so innocent, so simple, so Arcadian were they all—and that is all! What shall a man do, whom this fine style of novel writing doesn't answer—to whom, in fact, it seems just a bit of disgusting nonsense? Is this wonderful power, this omnipotent wisdom, a production of the 'delicious' climate? Is this all 'philosophical criticism' has to offer, and is he to accept that as more reasonable than the Gospel theory that they were supernatural and divine?

In this wonderful romantic dialect, M. Renan describes the beginning of our Lord's ministry. He is embarrassed, however, by the fact that, as Jesus goes on, He Himself makes claims, and sets up pretensions, and exercises powers, which are totally at variance with the proposed explanation. M. Renan cannot deny that He claimed to be the Son of God, the Messiah, the Son of David, that He claimed to work 'miracles,' to possess supernatural powers, to be somewhat altogether different from the amiable, sentimental, young carpenter of his modern biographer.