The best example of what a lay science could and could not do was provided years later by Renan in a lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1878, “On the Services Rendered by Philology to the Historical Sciences.” What is revealing about this text is the way Renan clearly had religion in mind when he spoke about philology—for example, what philology, like religion, teaches us about the origins of humanity, civilization, and language—only to make it evident to his hearers that philology could deliver a far less coherent, less knitted together and positive message than religion.29 Since Renan was irremediably historical and, as he once put it, morphological in his outlook, it stood to reason that the only way in which, as a very young man, he could move out of religion into philological scholarship was to retain in the new lay science the historical world-view he had gained from religion. Hence, “one occupation alone seemed to me to be worthy of filling my life; and that was to pursue my critical research into Christianity [an allusion to Renan’s major scholarly project on the history and origins of Christianity] using those far ampler means offered me by lay science.”30 Renan had assimilated himself to philology according to his own post-Christian fashion.
The difference between the history offered internally by Christianity and the history offered by philology, a relatively new discipline, is precisely what made modern philology possible, and this Renan knew perfectly. For whenever “philology” is spoken of around the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, we are to understand the new philology, whose major successes include comparative grammar, the reclassification of languages into families, and the final rejection of the divine origins of language. It is no exaggeration to say that these accomplishments were a more or less direct consequence of the view that held language to be an entirely human phenomenon. And this view became current once it was discovered empirically that the so-called sacred languages (Hebrew, primarily) were neither of primordial antiquity nor of divine provenance. What Foucault has called the discovery of language was therefore a secular event that displaced a religious conception of how God delivered language to man in Eden.31 Indeed, one of the consequences of this change, by which an etymological, dynastic notion of linguistic filiation was pushed aside by the view of language as a domain all of its own held together with jagged internal structures and coherences, is the dramatic subsidence of interest in the problem of the origins of language. Whereas in the 1770s, which is when Herder’s essay on the origins of language won the 1772 medal from the Berlin Academy, it was all the rage to discuss that problem, by the first decade of the new century it was all but banned as a topic for learned dispute in Europe.
On all sides, and in many different ways, what William Jones stated in his Anniversary Discourses (1785–1792), or what Franz Bopp put forward in his Vergleichende Grammatik (1832), is that the divine dynasty of language was ruptured definitively and discredited as an idea. A new historical conception, in short, was needed, since Christianity seemed unable to survive the empirical evidence that reduced the divine status of its major text. For some, as Chateaubriand put it, faith was unshakable despite new knowledge of how Sanskrit outdated Hebrew: “Hélas! il est arrivé qu’une connaissance plus approfondie de la langue savante de l’Inde a fait rentrer ces siècles innombrables dans le cercle étroit de la Bible. Bien m’en a pris d’être redevenue croyant, avant d’avoir éprouvé cette mortification.”32 (Alas! it has happened that a deeper knowledge of the learned language of India has forced innumerable centuries into the narrow circle of the Bible. How lucky for me that I have become a believer again before having had to experience this mortification.) For others, especially philologists like the pioneering Bopp himself, the study of language entailed its own history, philosophy, and learning, all of which did away with any notion of a primal language given by the Godhead to man in Eden. As the study of Sanskrit and the expansive mood of the later eighteenth century seemed to have moved the earliest beginnings of civilization very far east of the Biblical lands, so too language became less of a continuity between an outside power and the human speaker than an internal field created and accomplished by language users among themselves. There was no first language, just as—except by a method I shall discuss presently—there was no simple language.
The legacy of these first-generation philologists was, to Renan, of the highest importance, higher even than the work done by Sacy. Whenever he discussed language and philology, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of his long career, he repeated the lessons of the new philology, of which the antidynastic, anticontinuous tenets of a technical (as opposed to a divine) linguistic practice are the major pillar. For the linguist, language cannot be pictured as the result of force emanating unilaterally from God. As Coleridge put it, “Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”33 The idea of a first Edenic language gives way to the heuristic notion of a protolanguage (Indo-European, Semitic) whose existence is never a subject of debate, since it is acknowledged that such a language cannot be recaptured but can only be reconstituted in the philological process. To the extent that one language serves, again heuristically, as a touchstone for all the others, it is Sanskrit in its earliest Indo-European form. The terminology has also shifted: there are now families of languages (the analogy with species and anatomical classifications is marked), there is perfect linguistic form, which need not correspond to any “real” language, and there are original languages only as a function of the philological discourse, not because of nature.
But some writers shrewdly commented on how it was that Sanskrit and things Indian in general simply took the place of Hebrew and the Edenic fallacy. As early as 1804 Benjamin Constant noted in his Journal intime that he was not about to discuss India in his De la religion because the English who owned the place and the Germans who studied it indefatigably had made India the fons et origo of everything; and then there were the French who had decided after Napoleon and Champollion that everything originated in Egypt and the new Orient.34 These teleological enthusiasms were fueled after 1808 by Friedrich Schlegel’s celebrated Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, which seemed to confirm his own pronouncement made in 1800 about the Orient being the purest form of Romanticism.
What Renan’s generation—educated from the mid-1830s to the late 1840s—retained from all this enthusiasm about the Orient was the intellectual necessity of the Orient for the Occidental scholar of languages, cultures, and religions. Here the key text was Edgar Quinet’s Le Génie des religions (1832), a work that announced the Oriental Renaissance and placed the Orient and the West in a functional relationship with each other. I have already referred to the vast meaning of this relationship as analyzed comprehensively by Raymond Schwab in La Renaissance orientale; my concern with it here is only to note specific aspects of it that bear upon Renan’s vocation as a philologist and as an Orientalist. Quinet’s association with Michelet, their interest in Herder and Vico, respectively, impressed on them the need for the scholar-historian to confront, almost in the manner of an audience seeing a dramatic event unfold, or a believer witnessing a revelation, the different, the strange, the distant. Quinet’s formulation was that the Orient proposes and the West disposes: Asia has its prophets, Europe its doctors (its learned men, its scientists: the pun is intended). Out of this encounter, a new dogma or god is born, but Quinet’s point is that both East and West fulfill their destinies and confirm their identities in the encounter. As a scholarly attitude the picture of a learned Westerner surveying as if from a peculiarly suited vantage point the passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East, then going on to articulate the East, making the Orient deliver up its secrets under the learned authority of a philologist whose power derives from the ability to unlock secret, esoteric languages—this would persist in Renan. What did not persist in Renan during the 1840s, when he served his apprenticeship as a philologist, was the dramatic attitude: that was replaced by the scientific a
ttitude.
For Quinet and Michelet, history was a drama. Quinet suggestively describes the whole world as a temple and human history as a sort of religious rite. Both Michelet and Quinet saw the world they discussed. The origin of human history was something they could describe in the same splendid and impassioned and dramatic terms used by Vico and Rousseau to portray life on earth in primitive times. For Michelet and Quinet there is no doubt that they belong to the communal European Romantic undertaking “either in epic or some other major genre—in drama, in prose romance, or in the visionary ‘greater Ode’—radically to recast into terms appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances of their own age, the Christian pattern of the fall, the redemption, and the emergence of a new earth which will constitute a restored paradise.”35 I think that for Quinet the idea of a new god being born was tantamount to the filling of the place left by the old god; for Renan, however, being a philologist meant the severance of any and all connections with the old Christian god, so that instead a new doctrine—probably science—would stand free and in a new place, as it were. Renan’s whole career was devoted to the fleshing out of this progress.
He put it very plainly at the end of his undistinguished essay on the origins of language: man is no longer an inventor, and the age of creation is definitely over.36 There was a period, at which we can only guess, when man was literally transported from silence into words. After that there was language, and for the true scientist the task is to examine how language is, not how it came about. Yet if Renan dispels the passionate creation of primitive times (which had excited Herder, Vico, Rousseau, even Quinet and Michelet) he instates a new, and deliberate, type of artificial creation, one that is performed as a result of scientific analysis. In his leçon inaugurale at the Collège de France (February 21, 1862) Renan proclaimed his lectures open to the public so that it might see at first hand “le laboratoire même de la science philologique” (the very laboratory of philological science).37 Any reader of Renan would have understood that such a statement was meant also to carry a typical if rather limp irony, one less intended to shock than passively to delight. For Renan was succeeding to the chair of Hebrew, and his lecture was on the contribution of the Semitic peoples to the history of civilization. What more subtle affront could there be to “sacred” history than the substitution of a philological laboratory for divine intervention in history; and what more telling way was there of declaring the Orient’s contemporary relevance to be simply as material for European investigation?38 Sacy’s comparatively lifeless fragments arranged in tableaux were now being replaced with something new.
The stirring peroration with which Renan concluded his leçon had another function than simply to connect Oriental-Semitic philology with the future and with science. Étienne Quatremère, who immediately preceded Renan in the chair of Hebrew, was a scholar who seemed to exemplify the popular caricature of what a scholar was like. A man of prodigiously industrious and pedantic habits, he went about his work, Renan said in a relatively unfeeling memorial minute for the Journal des débats in October 1857, like a laborious worker who even in rendering immense services nevertheless could not see the whole edifice being constructed. The edifice was nothing less than “la science historique de l’esprit humain,” now in the process of being built stone by stone.39 Just as Quatremère was not of this age, so Renan in his work was determined to be of it. Moreover, if the Orient had been hitherto identified exclusively and indiscriminately with India and China, Renan’s ambition was to carve out a new Oriental province for himself, in this case the Semitic Orient. He had no doubt remarked the casual, and surely current, confusion of Arabic with Sanskrit (as in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, where the fateful talisman’s Arabic script is described as Sanskrit), and he made it his job accordingly to do for the Semitic languages what Bopp had done for the Indo-European: so he said in the 1855 preface to the comparative Semitic treatise.40 Therefore Renan’s plans were to bring the Semitic languages into sharp and glamorous focus à la Bopp, and in addition to elevate the study of these neglected inferior languages to the level of a passionate new science of mind à la Louis Lambert.
On more than one occasion Renan was quite explicit in his assertions that Semites and Semitic were creations of Orientalist philological study.41 Since he was the man who did the study, there was meant to be little ambiguity about the centrality of his role in this new, artificial creation. But how did Renan mean the word creation in these instances? And how was this creation connected with either natural creation, or the creation ascribed by Renan and others to the laboratory and to the classificatory and natural sciences, principally what was called philosophical anatomy? Here we must speculate a little. Throughout his career Renan seemed to imagine the role of science in human life as (and I quote in translation as literally as I can) “telling (speaking or articulating) definitively to man the word [logos?] of things.”42 Science gives speech to things; better yet, science brings out, causes to be pronounced, a potential speech within things. The special value of linguistics (as the new philology was then often called) is not that natural science resembles it, but rather that it treats words as natural, otherwise silent objects, which are made to give up their secrets. Remember that the major breakthrough in the study of inscriptions and hieroglyphs was the discovery by Champollion that the symbols on the Rosetta Stone had a phonetic as well as a semantic component.43 To make objects speak was like making words speak, giving them circumstantial value, and a precise place in a rule-governed order of regularity. In its first sense, creation, as Renan used the word, signified the articulation by which an object like Semitic could be seen as a creature of sorts. Second, creation also signified the setting—in the case of Semitic it meant Oriental history, culture, race, mind—illuminated and brought forward from its reticence by the scientist. Finally, creation was the formulation of a system of classification by which it was possible to see the object in question comparatively with other like objects; and by “comparatively” Renan intended a complex network of paradigmatic relations that obtained between Semitic and Indo-European languages.
If in what I have so far said I have insisted so much on Renan’s comparatively forgotten study of Semitic languages, it has been for several important reasons. Semitic was the scientific study to which Renan turned right after the loss of his Christian faith; I described above how he came to see the study of Semitic as replacing his faith and enabling a critical future relation with it. The study of Semitic was Renan’s first full-length Orientalist and scientific study (finished in 1847, published first in 1855), and was as much a part of his late major works on the origins of Christianity and the history of the Jews as it was a propaedeutic for them. In intention, if not perhaps in achievement—interestingly, few of the standard or contemporary works in either linguistic history or the history of Orientalism cite Renan with anything more than cursory attention44—his Semitic opus was proposed as a philological breakthrough, from which in later years he was always to draw retrospective authority for his positions (almost always bad ones) on religion, race, and nationalism.45 Whenever Renan wished to make a statement about either the Jews or the Muslims, for example, it was always with his remarkably harsh (and unfounded, except according to the science he was practicing) strictures on the Semites in mind. Furthermore, Renan’s Semitic was meant as a contribution both to the development of Indo-European linguistics and to the differentiation of Orientalisms. To the former Semitic was a degraded form, degraded in both the moral and the biological sense, whereas to the latter Semitic was a—if not the—stable form of cultural decadence. Lastly, Semitic was Renan’s first creation, a fiction invented by him in the philological laboratory to satisfy his sense of public place and mission. It should by no means be lost on us that Semitic was for Renan’s ego the symbol of European (and consequently his) dominion over the Orient and over his own era.
Therefore, as a branch of the Orient, Semitic was not fully a natural object—like a species of monke
y, for instance—nor fully an unnatural or a divine object, as it had once been considered. Rather, Semitic occupied a median position, legitimated in its oddities (regularity being defined by Indo-European) by an inverse relation to normal languages, comprehended as an eccentric, quasi-monstrous phenomenon partly because libraries, laboratories, and museums could serve as its place of exhibition and analysis. In his treatise, Renan adopted a tone of voice and a method of exposition that drew the maximum from book-learning and from natural observation as practiced by men like Cuvier and the Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires père et fils. This is an important stylistic achievement, for it allowed Renan consistently to avail himself of the library, rather than either primitivity or divine fiat, as a conceptual framework in which to understand language, together with the museum, which is where the results of laboratory observation are delivered for exhibition, study, and teaching.46 Everywhere Renan treats of normal human facts—language, history, culture, mind, imagination—as transformed into something else, as something peculiarly deviant, because they are Semitic and Oriental, and because they end up for analysis in the laboratory. Thus the Semites are rabid monotheists who produced no mythology, no art, no commerce, no civilization; their consciousness is a narrow and rigid one; all in all they represent “une combinaison inférieure de la nature humaine.”47 At the same time Renan wants it understood that he speaks of a prototype, not a real Semitic type with actual existence (although he violated this too by discussing present-day Jews and Muslims with less than scientific detachment in many places in his writings).48 So on the one hand we have the transformation of the human into the specimen, and on the other the comparative judgment rendered by which the specimen remains a specimen and a subject for philological, scientific study.