136 F ORIENT ALISM 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 For some, as Chateaubriand put it, faith was unshakable despite new knowl edge of how Sanskrit outdated Hebrew: “Heélas! i) est arrivé qu’une connaissance plus approfondie de la langue savante de I'Inde a fait rentrer ces siécles innombrables dans le cercle étroit de la Bible. Bien m’en a pris d’étre redevenue croyant, avant d’avoir éprouvé cette mortification.”*? (Alas! it has happened that a deeper knowl edge 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 themseives. 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.”** 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

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 137 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 Ja religion because the Engtish 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.* These teleological enthusiasms were fueled after 1808 by Friedrich Schlegel’s celebrated Ober 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 18 40s—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 alearned West