埃内斯特·勒南

约瑟夫·欧内斯特·勒南（法语：Joseph Ernest Renan，法语发音：[ʒozɛf ɛʁnɛst ʁənɑ̃]；1823年2月28日—1892年10月2日），法国研究中东古代语言文明的专家、哲学家、作家。他以有关早期基督教及其政治理论的历史著作而著名。勒南曾与奥古斯特·孔德相识。

Joseph Ernest Renan ( ruh-NAHN; French: [ʒozɛf ɛʁnɛst ʁənɑ̃]; 27 February 1823 – 2 October 1892) was a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, writing on Semitic languages and civilizations, historian of religion, philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and critic. He wrote works on the origins of early Christianity, and espoused popular political theories especially concerning nationalism, national identity, and the supposed superiority of white people over other human races.

Renan is among the first scholars to advance the Khazar theory, which held that Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of the Khazars, Turkic peoples who had adopted the Jewish religion and allegedly migrated to central and eastern Europe following the collapse of their khanate. On this basis he alleged that the Jews were "an incomplete race."

He led an archaeological expedition "Mission to Phoenicia. 1864-1874" to Lebanon, Syria and Palestine trying to track the ancient Phoenicians.

Life

Birth and family

He was born at Tréguier in Brittany, in northwestern France, to a family of fishermen. His grandfather, having made a small fortune with his fishing smack, bought a house at Tréguier and settled there, and his father, captain of a small cutter and an ardent republican, married the daughter of a Royalist tradesman from the neighbouring town of Lannion. All his life, Renan was aware of the conflict between his father's and his mother's political beliefs. He was five years old when his father died, and his sister, Henriette, twelve years his senior, became the moral head of the household. Having in vain attempted to keep a school for girls at Tréguier, she departed and went to Paris as a teacher in a young ladies' boarding-school.

Education

Ernest was educated in the ecclesiastical seminary of his native town. His school reports describe him as "docile, patient, diligent, painstaking, thorough". While the Catholic priests taught him mathematics and Latin, his mother completed his education. Renan's mother was half Breton. Her paternal ancestors came from Bordeaux, and Renan used to say that in his own nature, the Gascon and the Breton were constantly at odds.

During the summer of 1838, Renan won all the prizes at the college of Tréguier. His sister told the doctor of the school in Paris where she taught about her brother, and he informed Félix Dupanloup, who was involved in organizing the ecclesiastical college of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, a school in which the young Catholic nobility and the most talented pupils of the Catholic seminaries were to be educated together, with the idea of creating friendships between the aristocracy and the priesthood. Dupanloup sent for Renan, who was then fifteen years old and had never been outside Brittany. "I learned with stupor that knowledge was not a privilege of the Church ... I awoke to the meaning of the words talent, fame, celebrity." Religion seemed to him wholly different in Tréguier and in Paris. He came to view Abbé Dupanloup as a father figure.

Study at Issy-les-Moulineaux

In 1840, Renan left Saint Nicholas to study philosophy at the Saint-Sulpice Seminary near Paris. He entered with a passion for Catholic scholasticism. Among the philosophers, Thomas Reid and Nicolas Malebranche first attracted him, and, then he turned to Hegel, Immanuel Kant and J. G. Herder. Renan began to see a contradiction between the metaphysics which he studied and the faith he professed, but an appetite for verifiable truths restrained his scepticism. "Philosophy excites and only half satisfies the appetite for truth; I am eager for mathematics", he wrote to Henriette. Henriette had accepted in the family of Count Zamoyski an engagement more lucrative than her former job. She exercised the strongest influence over her brother.