Ernest Renan

(1823 - 1892)

In 1838, at the age of fifteen, the French philosopher Ernest Renan was awarded a scholarship to study at the seminary of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet in Paris. “At each step toward the altar,” he later wrote of this time, “doubt followed me; it was science, and child that I was, I called it the devil.” After leaving the priesthood in 1845, Renan devoted himself to the philological and historical study of the biblical world. He completed his seven-volume History of the Origins of Christianity in 1881, and gave an influential lecture on nationhood and nationalism a year later, stating, “The essence of a nation is that all of its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.” He died of a cold in 1892. “Four hours before death,” one of his obituaries stated, he “turned to his wife and said: ‘Why are you sad!’ ‘Because I see you suffer,’ she replied. ‘Be calm and resigned,’ he responded. ‘We undergo the laws of that nature whereof we are a manifestation. We perish; we disappear; but heaven and earth remain, and the march of time goes on forever.’ ”