How to Live (21 page)

By this time they will probably have been silenced by a punch on the nose, but even that does not bother them, since they are undisturbed by the idea of someone being angry with them, and they are not unduly bothered by physical pain. Who is to say that pain is worse than pleasure? And if a shard of bone penetrates their brain and kills them, so what? Is it better to live than to die?

“Hail, skeptic ease!” wrote the Irish poet Thomas Moore
, long after Montaigne:

So immense was this ease that it could separate Skeptics entirely from ordinary people—even though, unlike the Epicureans in their Garden, they preferred to remain immersed in the real world. Some extraordinary stories were told about Pyrrho himself. He was supposed to be so aloof and so tranquil that he would not react to things at all. When walking somewhere, he would not change his course even for precipices or oncoming carts, so
his friends had to keep intervening to save him. And, as Montaigne recorded, “If he had begun to say something, he never failed to finish it, even though the man he was speaking to had gone away”—because he did not want to be diverted from his inner reality by external changes.

Meanwhile, other stories suggested that even Pyrrho could not maintain perfect indifference all the time. A friend caught him “quarreling very sharply” with his sister, and accused him of betraying his principles. “What, must this silly woman also serve as testimony to my rules?” replied Pyrrho. Another time, having been caught defending himself against a frenzied dog, he admitted, “It is very difficult entirely to strip off the man.”

Montaigne loved both kinds of story: the ones that showed Pyrrho departing radically from normal behavior, as well as the ones that showed him to be merely human. And, like a true Skeptic, he tried to suspend judgment about them all. He felt it more likely, however, that Pyrrho was an ordinary man like himself, striving only to be clear-sighted and to take nothing for granted.

All Pyrrho renounced, according to Montaigne, was the pretension most people fall prey to: that of “regimenting, arranging, and fixing truth.” This was what really interested Montaigne in the Skeptical tradition: not so much the Skeptics’ extreme approach to warding off pains and sorrows (for that, he preferred the Stoics and Epicureans, who seemed more closely attuned to real life), but their desire to take everything provisionally and questioningly. This was just what he always tried to do himself. To keep this goal in the forefront of his mind, he had a series of medals struck in 1576, featuring Sextus’s magic word
epokhe
(here appearing as
epekho)
, together with his own arms and an emblem of weighing scales. The scales are another Pyrrhonian symbol, designed to remind himself both to maintain balance, and to weigh things up rather than merely accepting them.

The imagery he used was unusual, but the idea of inscribing such
personal statements on medals or
jetons
was not: it was a fashion of the time, and functioned both as an
aide-mémoire
and as a token of belonging or identity. Had Montaigne been a young man of the early twenty-first century instead of the sixteenth, he would probably have had it done as a tattoo.

(illustration credit i7.1)

If the medal was indeed designed to remind him of his principles, it worked: Skepticism guided him at work, in his home life, and in his writing. The
Essays
are suffused with it: he filled his pages with words such as “perhaps,” “to some extent,” “I think,” “It seems to me,” and so on—words which, as Montaigne said himself, “soften and moderate the rashness of our propositions,” and which embody what the critic Hugo Friedrich has called his philosophy of “unassumingness.”
They are not extra flourishes; they
are
Montaigne’s thought, at its purest. He never tired of such thinking, or of boggling his own mind by contemplating the millions of lives that had been lived through history and the impossibility of knowing the truth about them. “Even if all that has come down to us by report from the past should be true and known by someone, it would be less than nothing compared with what is unknown.” How puny is the knowledge of even the most curious person, he reflected, and how astounding the world by comparison. To quote Hugo Friedrich again, Montaigne had a “deep need to be surprised by what is unique, what cannot be categorized, what is mysterious.”

And of all that was mysterious, nothing amazed him more than himself, the most unfathomable phenomenon of all. Countless times, he noticed himself changing an opinion from one extreme to the other, or shifting from emotion to emotion within seconds.

Even his simplest perceptions cannot be relied upon. If he has a fever or has taken medicine, everything tastes different or appears with different colors.
A mild cold befuddles the mind; dementia would knock it out entirely. Socrates himself could be rendered a vacant idiot by a stroke or brain damage, and if a rabid dog bit him, he would talk nonsense. The dog’s saliva could make “all philosophy, if it were incarnate, raving mad.” And this is just the point: for Montaigne, philosophy
is
incarnate. It lives in individual, fallible humans; therefore, it is riddled with uncertainty. “The philosophers, it seems to me, have hardly touched this chord.”

And what of the perceptions of different species? Montaigne correctly guesses (as Sextus did before him) that other animals see colors differently from humans.
Perhaps it is we, not they, who see them “wrongly.” We have no way of knowing what the colors really are. Animals have faculties that are weak or lacking in us, and maybe some of these are essential to a full understanding of the world. “We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence.”

This seemingly casual remark proposes a shocking idea: that we may be cut off by our very nature from seeing things as they are. A human being’s perspective may not merely be prone to occasional error, but limited by definition, in exactly the way we normally (and arrogantly) presume a dog’s intelligence to be. Only someone with an exceptional ability to escape his immediate point of view could entertain such an idea, and this was precisely Montaigne’s talent: being able to slip out from behind his eyes so as to gaze back upon himself with Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment. Even the original Skeptics never went so far. They doubted everything around them, but they did not usually consider how implicated their innermost souls were in the general uncertainty. Montaigne did, all the time:

This might seem a dead end, closing off all possibility of knowing anything, since nothing can be measured against anything else, but it can also open up a new way of living. It makes everything more complicated and more interesting: the world becomes a vast multidimensional landscape in which every point of view must be taken into account. All we need to do is to remember this fact, so as to “become wise at our own expense,” as Montaigne put it.

Even for him, the discipline of attention required constant effort: “We must really strain our soul to be aware of our own fallibility.”
The
Essays
helped. By writing them, he set himself up like a lab rat and stood over himself with notebook in hand. Each observed oddity made him rejoice. He even took pleasure in his memory lapses, for they reminded him of his failings and saved him from the error of insisting that he was always right. There was only one exception to his “question everything” rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt. He adhered to the received dogma of the Catholic Church, and that was that.

This can come as a surprise to modern readers. Today, Skepticism and organized religion are usually thought to occupy opposite sides of a divide, with the latter representing faith and authority while the former allies itself with science and reason. In Montaigne’s day, the lines were drawn differently. Science in the modern sense did not yet exist, and human reason was only rarely considered something that could stand alone, unsupported by God. The idea that the human mind could find things out for itself was the very thing Skeptics were likely to be most skeptical about. And the Church currently favored faith over “rational theology,” so it naturally saw Pyrrhonism as an ally. Attacking human arrogance as it did, Pyrrhonian Skepticism was especially useful against the “innovation” of Protestantism, which prioritized private reasoning and conscience rather than dogma.

Thus, for several decades, Catholicism embraced Pyrrhonism, and held up books such as Henri Estienne’s Sextus translation and Montaigne’s
Essays
as valuable antidotes to heresy. Montaigne helped them with his attack on rational hubris, as well as with the many overt statements of Fideism scattered through his work. Religion, he wrote, must come to us from God by means of “an extraordinary infusion,” not by our own efforts.
God provides the tea bag; we provide the water and cup. And if we do not receive the infusion directly, it is enough to trust in the Church, which is a sort of authorized mass samovar, filled with pre-brewed faith. Montaigne made it clear that he recognized the Church’s right to govern him in religious matters, even to the extent of policing his thoughts. At a time when people were rushing to novelty, he wrote, the principle of unquestioning obedience had saved him many a time:

It is hard to tell whether the disturbance he had in mind was a spiritual one, or whether he was thinking more of the inconvenience of being called a heretic and having his books burned. Fideism could be a handy pretext for secret unbelievers. Having paid God His due and immunized oneself against accusations of irreligion, one could in theory go on to be as secular as one wished. What possible accusation could you bring against someone who advocated submission to God and to Church doctrine in every detail? Indeed, the Church eventually noticed this danger, and by the following century had cast Fideism into disrepute. For the moment, however, anyone who wanted to take this path could do so with impunity. Did Montaigne fall into this category?

It is true that he showed little sign of real interest in religion. The
Essays
has nothing to say about most Christian ideas: he seems unmoved by themes of sacrifice, repentance, and salvation, and shows neither fear of Hell nor desire for Heaven. The idea that witches and demons are active in the world gets shorter shrift than does the idea of cats hypnotizing birds out of trees.
When Montaigne broods on death, he apparently forgets that he is
supposed to believe in an afterlife. He says things like, “I plunge head down, stupidly, into death … as into a silent and dark abyss which swallows me up at one leap and overwhelms me in an instant with a heavy sleep free from feeling and pain.” Theologians of the following century were horrified by this godless description. Another topic Montaigne shows no interest in is Jesus Christ. He writes about the noble deaths of Socrates and Cato, but does not think to mention the crucifixion alongside them. The sacred mystery of redemption leaves him cold. He cares much more about secular morality—about questions of mercy and cruelty. As the modern critic David Quint has summed it up, Montaigne would probably interpret the message for humanity in Christ’s crucifixion as being “Don’t crucify people.”

On the other hand, it is unlikely that Montaigne was an out-and-out atheist; in the sixteenth century almost no one was. And it would be no surprise to find him genuinely drawn to Fideism. It accorded well both with his Skeptical philosophy and his personal temperament—for, despite his love of independence, he often preferred giving up control, especially of things that did not interest him much. Besides, whatever he really thought about Fideism’s high-altitude God, the attraction of what remains down
here
exerted a much stronger pull on him.