Ernest Renan Quotes on God
Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Semitic philologist, historian, and philosopher of religion and one of the most influential and controversial public intellectuals of nineteenth-century France. This page collects quotes attributed to Ernest Renan on the topic of god, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ernest Renan:
“Religion is born of the soul before it is articulated as doctrine.”
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“All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient.”
Des Religions de l’antiquité et leurs derniers historiens”, Mondes , vol. 23, no. 2 (1853) p. 835, quoted in Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009). -
“Des Religions de l’antiquité et leurs derniers historiens”, Mondes , vol. 23, no. 2 (1853) p. 835, quoted in Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009).”
All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient. -
“The Semites did not understand the variety, the plurality, the genders in God: the word goddess in Hebrew is the most horrible barbarism.”
pp. 5–6. | As translated in Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science , trans. Sonia Wichmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 95.