The Complete Essays (6 page)

Montaigne was perhaps first attracted to Lucretius by his arguments against that fear of dying which haunted his youth and young manhood. In the ‘Apology’, however, he chiefly cites him in order to reveal yet another source of darkness and error or, at best, of the kind of partial truths reached by unenlightened sages.

Particularly effective are his exploitations of precisely those verses in which Lucretius tried to refute those who hold that ‘we can know nothing’. Denis Lambin in his edition praised Lucretius for his solid opposition to the doctrine that ‘nothing can be known’. Montaigne eventually succeeds in exploiting the principal opponent of scepticism for sceptical ends!
²¹

On many matters, Montaigne and Lambin were in agreement. Especially interesting for the
Essays
is Lambin’s dedication of Book III of Lucretius’ poem to Germain Valence. It shows that the very failure of even Lucretius and the Epicureans to reach Christian certainties about the nature of the soul can be turned into yet another argument in favour of Christian revelation:

Not unjustly we despise their unwise wisdom. We should congratulate ourselves that we have been taught by
JESUS CHRIST
… (without being convinced or coerced by any human reasons or by any arguments, no matter how well demonstrated – not even by the Platonists) and so are persuaded that no opposing reasons, however sharp or compelling, however probable or verisimilitudinous, however firm or strong (let alone those of Lucretius, which are light and weak) could ever dislodge us from this judgement.
²²

The Renaissance was a period of new horizons: one was a vast increase in knowledge of the world and its inhabitants, as Europeans sailed the seas and discovered new lands, new peoples and moral and religious systems new to them; another was the rediscovery of Greek literature in its fullness. New horizons make local certainties seem wrong or parochial: they also open up whole treasure-houses of new facts and facets to the sceptic, who with their aid can increase the sense of the relativity of all Man’s beliefs about himself and the universe in which he lives. Montaigne exploited Sextus Empiricus, but he also devoured the writing of the Spanish historians, including those who told of the horrors of the conquest of the New World. There were also compendia such as Johannes Boemus’
Manners of all Peoples
(Paris, 1538), as well as standard works such as Ravisius Textor’s
Officina
(‘Workshop’) which contains chapters with such titles as ‘Various opinions about God’ and ‘Divers morals and various rites of peoples’ (Montaigne would have read in it a full account of Androcles and the Lion). New books gave him and the
Essays
a dimension and an actuality lacking to Agrippa and Pico. His universe was open to immense variety. He knew of Copernicus. If he wanted noble savages he could draw on the Indies as well as on the Golden Age; or he could try and talk to American Indians for himself (in Rouen) or question sailors.

But he did not stop there. If he had, he might indeed have been a fideist, claiming that only an arbitrary act of faith could make an irrational leap from a boundless sea of doubt to the rock of certain truth: the Church. Such a theology, never really convincing, was rarely less convincing than in the Renaissance and the nascent scientific world of the following century. If the leap is irrational, why leap to Catholicism and not to a sect or to any other of the teeming religions of the world? Truth must be the same everywhere.

This infinite variety of the world can be put to the service of Pyrrhonism and its universal doubt: it can also be put to the service of Catholic orthodoxy against sect and schism. If Catholic Christianity is true at all it
must be universally true, not merely true for Périgordians, Germans or successive English parliaments. Otherwise it is just one opinion among many. Ever since St Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, Catholic truth was categorized as being
Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus
(‘What has been held always, everywhere and by all’). In the Renaissance the aspiration to make that a reality lay behind the vast, worldwide evangelism by Rome (which contrasted sharply with the local concerns of the rival Churches seeking to reform one City or one Kingdom). The Roman Catholic faith could indeed claim to be taught universally. Therein lay its strength for minds like Montaigne’s.

For Montaigne, the strength of Raymond Sebond’s
Natural Theology
also lay in universality. He believed that Sebond’s illumination of the universal Book of Nature showed that all Nature everywhere was in strict conformity with Catholic truth.

At the end of Montaigne’s Pyrrhonist pages we are brought to the very brink of uncertainty. Reason has been shaken. So have the senses. If sense-data are unsure, uncertain and often plainly misleading, that does not simply cut us off from any sure and solid knowledge of phenomena: it cuts us off from any sure and certain knowledge of ‘being’. And so ‘we have no communication with Being’ – other than with our own transient one (perhaps).

To conclude: there is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of judgement and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly; nothing certain can be established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever shifting and changing.
²³
(‘Apology’, p. 680)

But this – despite the words ‘to conclude’ (
finalement
) – is not the end of the ‘Apology’: it is the end of a chain of arguments which can leave man ignorant, or, on the contrary, show him a new way to proceed. If it had been Montaigne’s conclusion, then Sextus Empiricus would literally have had the last word, for the Pyrrhonist basis is evident. But it is precisely here that Pyrrhonism joins Plato and Aristotle in joint hostility to a sophistical trust in individual subjectivity.

At the end of the long section which immediately precedes Montaigne’s address to his Royal patroness, just as he was about to embark on his
Pyrrhonian arguments, Montaigne added an important comment in the margin of the Bordeaux copy of his works he was preparing for the press. It concerns Protagoras, the arch-Sophist who was trounced by Sextus, Plato and Aristotle in very similar terms and for identical reasons:

And what can anyone understand who cannot understand himself?… Protagoras was really and truly having us on when he made ‘Man the measure of all things’ – Man, who has never known his own measurements.

Protagoras meant – that is what shocked Plato, Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus – that there is no universal standard of truth: each human being is severally and individually the sole criterion; all is opinion, and all opinions are equally true or false.

For Montaigne, Protagoras’ ‘measure of Man’ is ‘so favourable’ to human vanity as to be ‘merely laughable. It leads inevitably to the proposition that the measure and the measurer are nothing.’

Montaigne countered Protagoras, immediately, by citing Thales (the Greek sage to whom he himself had been likened): ‘When Thales reckons that a knowledge of Man is very hard to acquire, he is telling him that knowledge of anything else is impossible.’ (‘Apology’, p. 628) Hence the growing importance of the study of Man throughout the
Essays
, especially in Book III and in the hundreds of additions made to the chapters of the two previous Books when the new Book was written and the others were revised.

In the
Theaetetus
, Socrates treated Protagoras and his ‘measure’ as a clever man talking nonsense – otherwise how can the same wind be hot to one and cold to another? Nor would anyone maintain that, since a colour appears different to a dog, to other animals and to ourselves, that it differs in its essence.
²⁴

Montaigne made good use of such notions in the ‘Apology’: they can serve to show the fallibility of sense-data and also to place man where his unaided natural reason ought to place him: among the other creatures. But to go from there and make Truth itself the plaything of individual subjectivity, he never did.

Aristotle similarly mocked Protagoras and his Man-as-measure; his demonstration was adapted by Montaigne.
²⁵

Montaigne knew,
²⁶
before he had read a word of Sextus – probably in his days at school in Bordeaux – that in the world of creation nothing ever is; it is only becoming. Plutarch reinforced this. But neither Plutarch nor Plato held that such doctrines cut Man off from a knowledge of God or obliged each person to plunge into pure subjectivism. There were, for Plato, divine revelations; and there was wisdom arising from knowing oneself as Man.

Within the flux of the created universe, Montaigne strove to follow the Delphic injunction, Know Thyself. He sought to discover the personal, individual, permanent strand in the transient, variegated flux of his experience and sensations, which alone gave continuity to his personality – to his ‘being’ as a Man.
²⁷

But this was not a merely subjective indulgence. By studying his own form (his soul within his body) he aspired to know Man – not just one odd individual example of humankind.
²⁸

The
Essays
as a whole do not end with the last words of the ‘Apology’; much exploration of self and of Man remained to be done, but Montaigne had clearly seen that the characteristic property of the creature is impermanence. No creature ever
is
: a creature is always shifting, changing, becoming.

The Platonic background to such a conclusion – unlike the purely Pyrrhonian one – enabled Montaigne to pass from the impermanence of the everchanging creature to what he presents as a ‘most pious’ concept of the Godhead, accessible to purely human reason: the Creator must have those qualities which Man as creature lacks: he must have unity, not diversity; absolute Being, not mere ‘becoming’. And since he created Time he must be outside it and beyond it.

It is strikingly right that this natural leap to the Eternal Being of God should be given not in Montaigne’s own words – he is not a pagan – but in a long and unheralded transcription from Plutarch. Montaigne took it from the dense mystic treatise
On the E’i at Delphi
.

In this powerful work Plutarch grappled with the religious import of the word
E’i
inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. In Greek it can mean ‘Five’; it can mean ‘If’: but above all it means ‘Thou Art’. As such it declares that God has eternal Being. He is the eternal
THOU
to our transient
I
. Each individual human being is relative, contingent, impermanent. But
each ‘I’ can know itself; it can know Man through itself; and it can stretch out to Reality and say
THOU ART.

In doing so, it recognizes God.
²⁹

The
Natural Theology
of Sebond taught each man to know himself and God. It is, in a sense, the key to that Delphic utterance: Know Thyself. Montaigne’s translation of the
Natural Theology
is all of a piece with the self-exploration of the
Essays
. For both Plutarch and Raymond Sebond ‘knowing oneself’ is, properly understood, a complement to knowing God. Sebond says so on his title pages: Plutarch does so in the closing words of
On the E’i at Delphi
:

Meanwhile it seems that the word
E’i
[THOU ART]
is in one way an antithesis to that precept
KNOW THYSELF
, yet in another it is in agreement and accord with it. For one saying is a saying of awe and of adoration towards God as Eternal, ever in Being; the other is a reminder to mortal man of the weakness and debility of his nature.

Plutarch could reach that pious height: a Roman Stoic could also assert that if a man is to aspire towards God he must ‘rise above himself’. So far so good.

We are doubtless stirred by such eloquent aspirations. But the final words of the chapter tip over the house of cards. If any human being is to rise up towards that Eternal Being glimpsed by Plutarch, it will not be through Greek philosophy or proud Stoic Virtue: it will be ‘by grace’ or, more widely, ‘by purely heavenly means’. That will be an event ‘extraordinary’ – outside the natural
order
of the universe. In the process, the individual human being will not raise himself but
be
raised to a higher form. He will (in the last word of the chapter) be ‘metamorphosed’: transformed and transfigured.
³⁰

That leaves Montaigne free as always to continue to explore his ‘master-mould’; to examine his relative ‘being’ – his body-and-soul conjoined.

Nowhere else in the
Essays
does Pyrrhonian scepticism make the running – it does not make all of it even in the ‘Apology’. But to the solid
bastion of his faith Montaigne added a shield of last resort, ever ready in reserve to use against those who sought to oppose his Church’s infallibility by a rival one. As Edward Stillingfleet, Dean of St Paul’s, perceived in the following century, Pyrrhonism comes into play only when men are not content to ‘take in the assistance of Reason, which, though not Infallible, might give such Evidence, as afforded Certainty, where it fell short of Demonstration’. But as soon as ‘Epicurus thought there could be no Certainty in Sense, unless it were made Infallible’, he could only defend his hypothesis with absurdity: ‘the Sun must be no bigger than a bonfire’.
³¹