Summary
Edgar Quinet, whose Le Génie des religions (dated 1832 in the text, as printed) Said calls the key text for Ernest Renan’s generation — the generation educated from the mid-1830s to the late 1840s — announcing the Oriental Renaissance and placing the Orient and the West in a functional relationship with each other (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.146-147 / printed p.137-138). The 1832 date is as printed, checked against the original, and is held under Open questions on the source page.
Details
- The Oriental renaissance of which Quinet spoke expanded, in Said’s account, the fairly narrow limits in which Islam was the catchall Oriental example (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.84-85 / printed p.75-76).
- Even Quinet, writing more metaphysically, was dimly aware, Said says, of the therapeutic relationship between the early Orientalists and the modern Orient: L’Asie a les prophètes; L’Europe a les docteurs, from Le Génie des religions (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.88-89 / printed p.79-80).
- Bouvard’s vision in Flaubert’s sketches — Europe regenerated by Asia, the two forms of humanity soldered together — is, in Said’s account, an obvious echo of Quinet (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.122 / printed p.113).
- What Renan’s generation retained from the period’s enthusiasm about the Orient was the intellectual necessity of the Orient for the Occidental scholar of languages, cultures and religions, and its key text was Quinet’s Le Génie des religions; Quinet’s association with Michelet, and their interest in Herder and Vico respectively, impressed on them the need for the scholar-historian to confront the different, the strange and the distant almost as an audience seeing a dramatic event unfold, or a believer witnessing a revelation (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.146 / printed p.137).
- Quinet’s formulation was that the Orient proposes and the West disposes: Asia has its prophets, Europe its doctors (its learned men, its scientists); out of the encounter a new dogma or god is born, and both East and West fulfill their destinies and confirm their identities in it (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.146 / printed p.137).
- The picture of a learned Westerner surveying the passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East and then articulating it under the learned authority of a philologist persisted in Renan; what did not persist in Renan during his 1840s apprenticeship was Quinet and Michelet’s dramatic attitude, replaced by the scientific attitude — for Quinet and Michelet history was a drama, Quinet describing the whole world as a temple and human history as a sort of religious rite, and Said places both in a communal European Romantic undertaking described in a quotation that is unattributed on the page (its note marker is garbled in the copy), to be confirmed against the Notes in a later part (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.146-147 / printed p.137-138).
- 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, by contrast, being a philologist meant severing all connections with the old Christian god so that a new doctrine, probably science, would stand free in a new place (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.147 / printed p.138).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Ernest Renan, Philology, Friedrich Schlegel, Gustave Flaubert