EENAN
KENAN
on his sister (Ma Sceur Henriette, 1862),
tells us that what Barry calls " a good
Maronite priest" was "a sort of fool"
who pestered them for days, and only got
admission to Henriette when both brother
and sister were unconscious from fever.
She never returned to the Church, but
helped Eenan with his Vie de Jesus until a
few days before her death. D. Sep. 24, 1861.
RE NAN, Joseph Ernest, French orientalist. B. Feb. 27, 1823. Ed. Tre- guier Seminary, Saint Nicolas Seminary, Paris, Issy Seminary, and Saint Sulpice. Eenan was only five years old when his father was drowned, and he owed his early education to his sister. He was delicate and precocious, and was destined for the Church. His sister Henriette had him transferred to the seminary at Paris in 1838 ; but the contrast of the ecclesiastical insincerities and culture of Paris with the simple piety and ignorance of Brittany soon began to disturb him. At Issy he studied the German philosophers, and further developed. He took only the minor orders of the Church, and in 1845, encouraged by Henriette, he abandoned it. He then undertook teaching at a night school, spending the day in the study, especially, of Semitic languages. Berthelot was at the same school, and he completed Eenan s Eationalist education. At the time Eenan followed a kind of Hegelian Theism or Pantheism, which he embodied in L avenir de la science (not published until 1890). In the same year, 1848, he won the Volney Prize by an essay on the Semitic languages, and two years later he won a second prize, and was sent by the Academy of Inscriptions to Italy (1849-50). Admitted to the Academy of Inscriptions in 1856, and married in the same year to Ary Scheffer s niece, he began to write with more confidence. His first Eationalist work (Etudes d histoire religieuse, 1857) startled the orthodox by its challenge, but did not hinder his progress. He accepted a Government commission in Phoenicia, and set out with Henriette in 1860. There 651
they wrote, together, the notes for the
Vie de Jesus, until Henriette died, and
Ernest returned (1861). In the following
year he was appointed professor of Hebrew,
Syriac, and Chaldaic at the College de
France, the highest teaching institution in
France. His Life of Jesus appeared in
the following year, and the fierce contro
versy excited by its brilliant success it
has sold 300,000 copies in France alone,
and has been translated into nearly every
European language led the authorities to-
depose him. The work is fine literature,
but not critical history. Eenan, however,
made it the starting-point of a real history
of early Christianity, and developed hi&
programme in his successive Les apdtres
(1866), Saint Paul (1869), L antichrist
(1873), Les evangiles ct la seconde generation
chretienne (1877), L eglise chretienne (1879),
and Marc-Aurele (1881). In 1864-65 he
was again in the East in search of colour
and material. He recovered his chair at
the College de France in 1871 ; but the
events of that year and the subsequent
recovery of reaction for some years tinge
his subsequent work with melancholy.
The most important later work is his
Histoire du peuple d Israel (1888-94), and
he wrote a number of ethical-philosophical
dramas which are collected in his Drames-
philosophiques (1888). Eenan s expressions,
vary much on the philosophical side. He
constantly speaks of " God," and see&
" something divine " in Christ. But in a
note which he left behind, to prevent any
talk about a death-bed conversion, there is-
merely a faint allusion to "the Eternal."
He was really an Agnostic, and he never
believed in personal immortality. In 1862
he expressed this in closing the little work
on his sister ; and his son-in-law, Professor
J. Psichari, tells us, in a beautiful account
of Eenan s last days in his Sceur Anselmine,
that when he lay dying he said : " I know
that when I am dead nothing of me will
remain." His fine character sustained
him tranquilly to the end. " My work is
done, and I die happy," he said. D, Oct. 2,
1892.
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