Part 8 (1/2)

”Rome the Centre in which Church Authority grew up,” and ”Rome the Capital of Catholicism,” are the t.i.tles of the three lectures in which this thesis is explained and ill.u.s.trated. A lecture on Marcus Aurelius, at the Royal Inst.i.tution, though not one of the series, is obviously connected with it, and concludes M. Renan's work in England.

Except the brilliant bits of writing which, judging from the full abstracts given in translation in the _Times_, appear to have been interspersed, and except the undoubting self-confidence and _aplomb_ with which a historical survey, reversing the common ideas of mankind, was delivered, there was little new to be learned from M. Renan's treatment of his subject. Perhaps it may be described as the Roman Catholic theory of the rise of the Church, put in an infidel point of view. It is Roman Catholic in concentrating all interest, all the sources of influence and power in the Christian religion and Christian Church, from the first moment at Rome. But for Rome the Christian Church would not have existed. The Church is inconceivable without Rome, and Rome as the seat and centre of its spiritual activity.

Everything else is forgotten. There were Christian Churches all over the Empire, in Syria, in Egypt, in Africa, in Asia Minor, in Gaul, in Greece. A great body of Christian literature, embodying the ideas and character of Christians all over the Empire, was growing up, and this was not Roman and had nothing to do with Rome; it was Greek as much as Latin, and local, not metropolitan, in its characteristics.

Christianity was spreading here, there, and everywhere, slowly and imperceptibly as the tide comes in, or as cells multiply in the growing tissues of organised matter; it was spreading under its many distinct guides and teachers, and taking possession of the cities and provinces of the Empire. All this great movement, the real foundation of all that was to be, is overlooked and forgotten in the attention which is fixed on Rome and confined to it. As in the Roman Catholic view, M. Renan brings St. Paul and St. Peter together to Rome, to found that great Imperial Church in which the manifold and varied history of Christendom is merged and swallowed up. Only, of course, M. Renan brings them there as ”fanatics” instead of Apostles and martyrs. We know something about St. Peter and St. Paul. We know them at any rate from their writings.

In M. Renan's representation they stand opposed to one another as leaders of factions, to whose fierce hatreds and jealousies there is nothing comparable. ”All the differences,” he is reported to say, ”which divide orthodox folks, heretics, schismatics, in our own day, are as nothing compared with the dissension between Peter and Paul.” It is, as every one knows, no new story; but there it is in M. Renan in all its crudity, as if it were the most manifest and accredited of truths. M. Renan first brings St. Paul to Rome. ”It was,” he says, ”a great event in the world's history, almost as pregnant with consequences as his conversion.” How it was so M. Renan does not explain; but he brings St. Peter to Rome also, ”following at the heels of St. Paul,” to counteract and neutralise his influence. And who is this St. Peter? He represents the Jewish element; and what that element was at Rome M. Renan takes great pains to put before us. He draws an elaborate picture of the Jews and Jewish quarter of Rome--a ”longsh.o.r.e population” of beggars and pedlars, with a Ghetto resembling the Alsatia of _The Fortunes of Nigel_, seething with dirt and fanaticism.

These were St. Peter's congeners at Rome, whose ideas and claims, ”timid trimmer” though he was, he came to Rome to support against the h.e.l.lenism and Protestantism of St. Paul. And at Rome they, both of them, probably, perished in Nero's persecution, and that is the history of the success of Christianity. ”Only fanatics can found anything.

Judaism lives on because of the intense frenzy of its prophets and annalists, Christianity by means of its martyrs.”

But a certain Clement arose after their deaths, to arrange a reconciliation between the fiercely antagonistic factions of St. Peter and St. Paul. How he harmonised them M. Renan leaves us to imagine; but he did reconcile them; he gathered in his own person the authority of the Roman Church; he lectured the Corinthian Church on its turbulence and insubordination; he antic.i.p.ated, M. Renan remarked, almost in words, the famous saying of the French Archbishop of Rouen, ”My clergy are my regiment, and they are drilled to obey like a regiment.” On this showing, Clement might almost be described as the real founder of Christianity, of which neither St. Peter nor St. Paul, with their violent oppositions, can claim to be the complete representative; at any rate he was the first Pope, complete in all his attributes. And in accordance with this beginning M. Renan sees in the Roman Church, first, the centre in which Church authority grew up, and next, the capital of Catholicism. In Rome the congregation gave up its rights to its elders, and these rights the elders surrendered to the single ruler or Bishop. The creation of the Episcopate was eminently the work of Rome; and this Bishop of Rome caught the full spirit of the Caesar, on whose decay he became great; and troubling himself little about the deep questions which exercised the minds and wrung the hearts of thinkers and mystics, he made himself the foundation of order, authority, and subordination to all parts of the Imperial world.

Such is M. Renan's explanation of the great march and triumph of the Christian Church. The Roman Empire, which we had supposed was the natural enemy of the Church, was really the founder of all that made the Church strong, and bequeathed to the Church its prerogatives and its spirit, and partly its machinery. We should hardly gather from this picture that there was, besides, a widespread Catholic Church, with its numerous centres of life and thought and teaching, and with very slight connection, in the early times, with the Church of the capital. And, in the next place, we should gather from it that there was little more in the Church than a powerful and strongly built system of centralised organisation and control; we should hardly suspect the existence of the real questions which interested or disturbed it; we should hardly suspect the existence of a living and all-engrossing theology, or the growth and energy in it of moral forces, or that the minds of Christians about the world were much more busy with the discipline of life, the teaching and meaning of the inspired words of Scripture, and the ever-recurring conflict with perverseness and error, than with their dependent connection on the Imperial Primacy of Rome, and the lessons they were to learn from it.

Disguised as it may be, M. Renan's lectures represent not history, but scepticism as to all possibility of history. Pictures of a Jewish Ghetto, with its ragged mendicants smelling of garlic, in places where Christians have been wont to think of the Saints; ingenious explanations as to the way in which the ”club” of the Christian Church surrendered its rights to a _bureau_ of its officers; exhortations to liberty and tolerance; side-glances at the contrasts of national gifts and destinies and futures in the first century and in the nineteenth; felicitous parallels and cunning epigrams, subtle combinations of the pathetic, the egotistical, and the cynical, all presented with calm self-reliance and in the most finished and distinguished of styles, may veil for the moment from the audience which such things amuse, and even interest, the hollowness which lies beneath. But the only meaning of the lectures is to point out more forcibly than ever that besides the obvious riddles of man's life there is one stranger and more appalling still--that a religion which M. Renan can never speak of without admiration and enthusiasm is based on a self-contradiction and deluding falsehood, more dreadful in its moral inconsistencies than the grave.

We cannot help feeling that M. Renan himself is a true representative of that highly cultivated society of the Empire which would have crushed Christianity, and which Christianity, vanquished. He still owes something, and owns it, to what he has abandoned--”I am often tempted to say, as Job said, in our Latin version, _Etiam si occident me, in ipso sperabo_. But the next moment all is gone--all is but a symbol and a dream.” There is no possibility of solving the religious problem. He relapses into profound disbelief of the worth and success of moral efforts after truth. His last word is an exhortation to tolerance for ”fanatics,” as the best mode of extinguis.h.i.+ng them. ”If, instead of leading _Polyeucte_ to punishment, the magistrate, with a smile and shake of the hand, had sent him home again, _Polyeucte_ would not have been caught offending again; perhaps, in his old age, he would even have laughed at his escapade, and would have become a sensible man.” It is as obvious and natural in our days to dispose of such difficulties in this way with a smile and a sneer as it was in the first century with a shout--_”Christiani ad leones.”_ But Corneille was as good a judge of the human heart as M. Renan. He had gauged the powers of faith and conviction; he certainly would have expected to find his _Polyeucte_ more obstinate.

XIV

RENAN'S ”SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE”[17]

[17]

_Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse_. Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_, 18th July 1883.

The sketches which M. Renan gives us of his early life are what we should have looked for from the writer of the _Vie de Jesus_. The story of the disintegration of a faith is supposed commonly to have something tragic about it. We expect it to be a story of heart-breaking disenchantments, of painful struggles, of fierce recoils against ancient beliefs and the teachers who bolstered them up; of indignation at having been so long deceived; of lamentation over years wasted in the service of falsehood. The confessions of St. Augustine, the biography of Blanco White, the letters of Lamennais, at least agree in the witness which they bear to the bitter pangs and anxieties amid which, in their case, the eventful change came about. Even Cardinal Newman's _Apologia_, self-restrained and severely controlled as it is, shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M.

Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid, contented. He calls his life the ”_charmante promenade_” which the ”cause of all good,” whatever that may be, has granted him through the realities of existence. There are in it no storms of pa.s.sion, no cruelties of circ.u.mstances, no deplorable mistakes, no complaints, no recriminations. His life flows on smoothly, peacefully, happily, with little of rapids and broken waters, gradually and in the most natural and inevitable way enlarging itself, moving in new and wider channels and with increased volume and force, but never detaching itself and breaking off from its beginnings. It is a spectacle which M. Renan, who has lived this life, takes a gentle pleasure in contemplating. He looks back on it with thankfulness, and also with amus.e.m.e.nt It makes a charming and complete picture. No part could be wanting without injuring the effect of the whole. It is the very ideal of the education of the Rousseau school--a child of nature, developing, amid the simplest and humblest circ.u.mstances of life, the finest gifts and most delicate graces of faith and reverence and purity--brought up by sages whose wisdom he could not in time help outrunning, but whose piety, sweetness, disinterestedness, and devoted labour left on his mind impressions which nothing could wear out; and at length, when the time came, pa.s.sing naturally, and without pa.s.sion or bitterness, from out of their faithful but too narrow discipline into a wider and ampler air, and becoming, as was fit, master and guide to himself, with light which they could not bear, and views of truth greater and deeper than they could conceive. But every stage of the progress, through the virtues of the teachers, and the felicitous disposition of the pupil, exhibits both in exactly the due relations in which each ought to be with the other, with none of the friction of rebellious and refractory temper on one side, or of unintelligent harshness on the other. He has nothing to regret in the schools through which he pa.s.sed, in the preparations which he made there for the future, in the way in which they shaped his life. He lays down the maxim, ”On ne doit jamais ecrire que de ce qu'on aime.” There is a serene satisfaction diffused through the book, which scarcely anything intervenes to break or disturb; he sees so much poetry in his life, so much content, so much signal and unlooked-for success, that he has little to tell except what is delightful and admirable. And then he is so certain that he is right: he can look down with so much good-humoured superiority on past and present, alike on what he calls ”l'effroyable aventure du moyen age,” and on the march of modern society to the dead level of ”Americanism.” It need not be said that the story is told with all M. Renan's consummate charm of storytelling. All that it wants is depth of real feeling and seriousness--some sense of the greatness of what he has had to give up, not merely of its poetic beauty and tender a.s.sociations. It hardly seems to occur to him that something more than his easy cheerfulness and his vivid historical imagination is wanted to solve for him the problems of the world, and that his gradual transition from the Catholicism of the seminary to the absolute rejection of the supernatural in religion does not, as he describes it, throw much light on the question of the hopes and destiny of mankind.

The outline of his story is soon told. It is in general like that of many more who in France have broken away from religion. A clever studious boy, a true son of old Brittany--the most melancholy, the most tender, the most ardent, the most devout, not only of all French provinces, but of all regions in Europe--is pa.s.sed on from the teaching of good, simple, hard-working country priests to the central seminaries, where the leaders of the French clergy are educated. He comes up a raw, eager, ignorant provincial, full of zeal for knowledge, full of reverence and faith, and first goes through the distinguished literary school of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, of which Dupanloup was the founder and the inspiring soul. Thence he pa.s.sed under the more strictly professional discipline of St. Sulpice: first at the preparatory philosophical school at Issy, then to study scientific theology in the house of St. Sulpice itself at Paris. At St. Sulpice he showed special apt.i.tudes for the study of Hebrew, in which he was a.s.sisted and encouraged by M. le Hir, ”the most remarkable person,” in his opinion, ”whom the French clergy has produced in our days,” a ”savant and a saint,” who had mastered the results of German criticism as they were found in the works of Gesenius and Ewald. On his faith all this knowledge had not made the faintest impression; but it was this knowledge which broke down M. Renan's, and finally led to his retiring from St. Sulpice. On the one side was the Bible and Catholic theology, carefully, scientifically, and consistently taught at St. Sulpice; on the other were the exegesis and the historical criticism of the German school. He came at length to the conclusion that the two are incompatible; that there was but a choice of alternatives; and purely on the ground of historical criticism, he says, not on any abstract objections to the supernatural, or to miracles, or to Catholic dogma, he gave up revealed religion. He gave it up not without regrets at the distress caused to friends, and at parting with much that was endeared to him by old a.s.sociations, and by intrinsic beauty and value; but, as far as can be judged, without any serious sense of loss. He spent some time in obscurity, teaching, and studying laboriously, and at length beginning to write. Michel Levy, the publisher, found him out, and opened to him a literary career, and in due time he became famous. He has had the ambiguous honour of making the Bible an object of such interest to French readers as it never was before, at the cost of teaching them to find in it a reflection of their own characteristic ways of looking at life and the world. It is not an easy thing to do with such a book as the Bible; but he has done it.

As a mere history of a change of convictions, the _Souvenirs_ are interesting, but hardly of much importance. They are written with a kind of Epicurean serenity and dignity, avoiding all exaggeration and violence, profuse in every page in the delicacies and also in the reticences of respect, not too serious to exclude the perpetual suggestion of a well-behaved amused irony, not too much alive to the ridiculous and the self-contradictory to forget the att.i.tude of composure due to the theme of the book. He warns his readers at the outset that they must not look for a stupid literalness in his account.

”Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours poesie”--the reflection of states of mind and varying humours, not the exact details of fact. ”Tout est vrai dans ce pet.i.t volume, mais non de ce genre de verite qui est requis pour une _Biographie universelle_. Bien des choses ont ete mises, afin qu'on sourie; si l'usage l'eut permis, j'aurais du ecrire plus d'une fois a la marge--_c.u.m grano salis_”. It is candid to warn us thus to read a little between the lines; but it is a curious and unconscious disclosure of his characteristic love of a mixture of the misty and the clear. The really pleasant part of it is his account, which takes up half the volume, of Breton ways and feelings half a century ago, an account which exactly tallies with the pictures of them in Souvestre's writings; and the kindliness and justice with which he speaks of his old Catholic and priestly teachers, not only in his boyish days at Treguier, but in his seminary life in Paris. His account of this seminary life is unique in its picturesque vividness. He describes how, at St. Nicolas, under the fiery and irresistible Dupanloup, whom he speaks of with the reserved courtesy due to a distinguished person whom he much dislikes, his eager eyes were opened to the realities of literature, and to the subtle powers of form and style in writing, which have stood him in such stead, and have been the real secret of his own success.

Le monde s'ouvrit pour moi. Malgre sa pretention d'etre un asile ferme aux bruits du dehors, Saint-Nicolas etait a cette epoque la maison la plus brillante et la plus mondaine. Paris y entrait a pleins bords par les portes et les fenetres, Paris tout entier, moins la corruption, je me hate de le dire, Paris avec ses pet.i.tesses et ses grandeurs, ses hardiesses et ses chiffons, sa force revolutionnaire et ses mollesses flasques. Mes vieux pretres de Bretagne savaient bien mieux les mathematiques et le latin que mes nouveaux maitres; mais ils vivaient dans des catacombes sans lumiere et sans air. Ici, l'atmosphere du siecle circulait librement.... Au bout de quelque temps une chose tout a fait inconnue m'etait revelee. Les mots, talent, eclat, reputation eurent un sens pour moi. J'etais perdu pour l'ideal modeste que mes anciens maitres m'avaient inculque.

And he describes how Dupanloup brought his pupils perpetually into direct relations with himself and communicated to them something of his own enthusiasm. He gained the power over their hearts which a great general gains over his soldiers. His approval, his interest in a man, were the all-absorbing object, the all-sufficient reward; the one punishment feared was dismissal, always inflicted with courtesy and tact, from the honour and the joy of serving under him:--

Adore de ses eleves, M. Dupanloup n'etait pas toujours agreable a ces collaborateurs. On m'a dit que, plus tard, dans son diocese, les choses se pa.s.serent de la meme maniere, qu'il fut toujours plus aime de ses laques que de ses pretres. Il est certain qu'il ecrasait tout autour de lui. Mais sa violence meme nous attachait; car nous sentions que nous etions son but unique. Ce qu'il etait, c'etait un eveilleur incomparable; pour tirer de chacun de ses eleves la somme de ce qu'il pouvait donner, personne ne l'egalait.

Chacun de ses deux cents eleves existait distinct dans sa pensee; il etait pour chacun d'eux l'excitateur toujours present, le motif de vivre et de travailler. Il croyait au talent et en faisait la base de la foi. Il repetait souvent que l'homme vaut en proportion de sa faculte d'admirer. Son admiration n'etait pas toujours a.s.sez eclairee par la science; mais elle venait d'une grande chaleur d'ame et d'un coeur vraiment possede de l'amour du beau.... Les defauts de l'education qu'il donnait etaient les defauts meme de son esprit. Il etait trop peu rationnel, trop peu scientifique. On eut dit que ses deux cents eleves etaient destines a etre tous poetes, ecrivains, orateurs.

St. Nicolas was literary. Issy and St. Sulpice were severely philosophic and scientific, places of ”_fortes etudes_”; and the writer thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant literary education given under Dupanloup. In one sense it may be so.

They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable knowledge. He pa.s.sed, he says, from words to things. But he is a writer who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup, than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display, and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant. But his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm. Of course he thinks them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting of priests:--

Beaucoup de mes jugements etonnent les gens du monde parcequ'ils n'out pas vu ce que j'ai vu. J'ai vu a Saint-Sulpice, a.s.socies a des idees etroites, je l'avoue, les miracles que nos races peuvent produire en fait de bonte, de modestie, d'abnegation personelle.

Ce qu'il y a de vertu a Saint-Sulpice suffirait pour gouverner un monde, et cela m'a rendu difficile pour ce que j'ai trouve ailleurs.

M. Renan, as we have said, is very just to his education, and to the men who gave it. He never speaks of them except with respect and grat.i.tude. It is seldom, indeed, that he permits himself anything like open disparagement of the men and the cause which he forsook. The shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the radical violences of M. Clemenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation of Auguste Comte, ”who has been set up as a man of the highest order of genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself.” He attributes to his ecclesiastical training those excellences in his own temper and principles on which he dwells with much satisfaction and thankfulness.

They are, he considers, the result of his Christian and ”Sulpician”