The Complete Essays (7 page)

Of course Pyrrhonian scepticism shocked many. It always does. But when Montaigne’s
Essays
were examined by a courteous censor in Rome, such little fuss there was at the time came from factions among the French. The Maestro del Sacro Palazzo, Sisto Fabri, told him to take no notice and do what he thought fit.
³²

In the following century Montaigne’s respect for the beasts and his distrust of unaided human reason brought him many enemies among dogmatic philosophers and theologians; they brought him many friends as well, ranging from Francis Bacon to Daniel Huët, Bishop of Avranches. In his
Philosophical Treatise on the Weakness of the Human Spirit
(1723) Huët reminded his readers that when Pyrrhonism was rejected in Ancient times, it was nothing to do with Christians fearful for the Faith but of pagans fearful for their Science. What is dangerous to Christianity, he added, is not Pyrrhonism but Pride.
³³

But Montaigne had done his job well – well enough for many free-thinkers including those of the Enlightenment to see him as a forerunner of their sceptical Deism or atheistic naturalism. This was in part inevitable: truth is one and unchanging while men are ever-changing. Truth cannot be set finally in words. It was a sound theologian, Bishop Wescott, who said, ‘No formula which expresses clearly the thought of one generation can convey the same meaning to the generation which follows.’ In a different climate of opinion, Montaigne’s protestations of loyalty to his Church in
several of his chapters were taken to be moonshine. Allusions to ‘Christian folly’ were interpreted as smirking and knowing ackowledgements that Christianity was silly or stupid, fit for fools. Read in this way, selectively, the
Essays
could, did and do provide weapons and delight to a variety of readers. This became more easily possible after Hellenistic philosophy lost its hold on many in the eighteenth century. Hellenistic Christianity (like Hellenistic Philosophy) accepts that the true nature of things lies behind their visible appearances, and beyond time and space. It holds with Plotinus that nothing that is can ever perish.
³⁴
Such a conviction dominated the thought of Renaissance Christians including Ficino, Erasmus, Rabelais and Montaigne. Without such a conviction and a respect for its roots in Platonism, the end of the ‘Apology’ (and much else in the
Essays
) may seem purely arbitrary – arbitrary and ironic, or a meaningless tactical bow to authority.

But we know from Montaigne’s
Journal
(discovered in 1772 and never intended for publication) that he was a practising Christian whose devotion was as superstitious as Newman’s. He could attach great importance to the pious family ex-voto which he paid to be displayed in the Church of Santa Maria de Loreto (in the shrine of the Holy House of the Virgin, transported by angels to Loretto, was it not, on 2 December 1295) and to the miraculous cure there of Michel Marteau.
³⁵

This was a great shock to those
philosophes
and wits who had grown used to exploiting the
Essays
as an anti-Christian weapon-house. They had done so all the more mockingly after the
Essays
had been put on the Index in 1697. But that act of absurdity can be better attributed not to the
Essays
as such as to Jansenist zeal and to horror at the use made of them by the free-thinking libertins.
³⁶

In Montaigne’s own day Rome knew better – and presumably does so now. The Vatican Manuscript No. 9693 records the granting of Roman citizenship to Montaigne. It states that it was granted to ‘the French Socrates’.

And that Christian Socrates died in the bosom of his Church. (But, even then, André Gide persuaded himself that he only pretended to do so because of moral blackmail from his wife…)

Citing Plutarch at the end of the ‘Apology’ does more than vindicate Raymond Sebond: it vindicates St Paul. In retrospect it can be seen that Romans I:20 gave authority not only to Montaigne’s defence of natural theology in his reply to the first charge against the book he had translated: it governs the long reply to the second charge. St Paul declared that what can be grasped by natural theology (‘from the things that are made’) are God’s ‘eternal power’ and his ‘divinity’. Plutarch shows that that is true: Plutarch did so. But Plutarch is nevertheless only one pagan voice among many, one ray of light in confused darkness.

Montaigne is exemplifying a tradition codified at least as early as Nicolas of Lyra, the thirteenth-century scriptural commentator who suggested that by the words ‘from the creation of the world’ (in the Vulgate Latin,
‘a creatura mundi’
) Paul meant from Man (who is the ‘creature of the world’
par excellence
). Montaigne does not say this explicitly, but his whole enterprise in the
Essays
is driven forward by a desire to know Man and his place in the Universe (not simply one example of Mankind, himself, though that is his means to the greater end). The seeking of God ‘from the things that are made’ is explained by Nicolas of Lyra to mean
‘per creaturas’
(‘through the creatures’ – through all that God created). And what Man can discover concerns ‘the divine Essence’: ‘from the creatures a man can learn that that eternal Essence is “One, Uncompounded and Infinite”.’
³⁷

Of course, none of this ‘natural theology’ brings fallen Man effectively to the Triune God: that needs grace.
³⁸

An appreciation of the balance between religious certainty and rational doubt and inquiry which Montaigne struck in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’ is a great help in following his whole intellectual venture as he takes us through an astonishingly varied series of topics which lead us into the mind of a man who, though he lived four hundred years ago, yet remains fresh and stimulating and well able to speak for himself.

Montaigne’s contemporaries were impressed by his reflections on his experience as a soldier and statesman. Both his Italian translator, G. Naselli, and his English one, John Florio, stress on their title pages that these
Essays
include moral, political and military discourses. For them they were
primarily that. On matters of war and politics Montaigne was listened to throughout Europe as a gentleman who knew from experience, and not from book-learning alone, what he was talking about.
³⁹
Up to our own time Montaigne has spoken directly to many who have had experience of war and of military life. Many who have been spared such experiences have at times undervalued the part played by the experience of battle, of parleys and of political negotiations in the formation of Montaigne’s way of thinking.
⁴⁰
That is a pity, for to undervalue this aspect of his life is to some extent to falsify the
Essays
which, where such matters are concerned, are not simply based upon hearsay. It is because Montaigne knew directly of barbaric cruelty that he could write so movingly of ‘cannibals’ and of the crimes of the Conquistadores. It is because he had seen and talked to ‘savages’ and, say, to women languishing in prisons under the accusation of witchcraft that he could write of them with such a sense of humanity. It is because he was privileged to experience a very special friendship with Estienne de La Boëtie that he could write on affectionate relationships more evocatively than even Cicero could. Only a man who loved poetry and had experienced the love of a wife and, especially in youth, of other women could have written so probingly on sexuality and its limitations, as well as on matrimony and the running of a household with their calmer joys and risks of daily irritations. And it is as a seasoned traveller that Montaigne wrote of his experience in Germany and Italy.

Nowadays a collection of essays can be read in any order, with each essay taken as a unit. Montaigne’s
Essays
are not presented like that. His
Essays
form three Books, each Book divided not into self-contained units but into chapters. Book III, written unexpectedly after his first two, ends with a discourse ‘On experience’, which is not an ‘essay’ which happens to come last but the final chapter of the final book. It marks the end of Montaigne’s quest. He was not, he tells us, a man over-given to bookish interests, but what he did seek from books and from experience he sought with passion and tenacity. ‘On experience’ (III, 13) gives us the distillation of his mature thought, showing us how to live our lives with gratitude.

The
Essays
had begun with thoughts of ambiguity, sadness and of emotions which make men beside themselves: Montaigne, after a thousand or so pages of thought and after reflecting on a lifetime of experience, starts his final chapter with a ringing challenge. He alludes to the opening words of Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
, words which every serious reader knew: ‘All men naturally desire knowledge.’ Why, even schoolboys knew them! Those words of Aristotle had for centuries evoked theological certainties, since they formed part of a standard chain of argument claiming to prove on Platonico-Christian grounds that the soul is immortal:

All men naturally desire knowledge;
But no man’s desire for knowledge is satisfied in this life;
Yet Nature does nothing in vain;
Therefore there must be an afterlife in which that desire will be satisfied.

Aristotle wrote that first sentence of his
Metaphysics
to introduce the notion that experience, when collated, weighed and pondered over, can produce an ‘art’ (a
techné
). Such an art, he asserts, can help man towards knowledge in areas where pure reason proves inadequate. The two ‘arts’ most evidently based on such weighed experience are law and, above all, medicine, which was usually known in Montaigne’s day as
‘the
Art’, or, by a corruption of the Greek, simply as
‘Tegne’
.
⁴¹
But Montaigne, having throughout the
Essays
shown how fallible reason is, rejects any notion that certain knowledge can be based on fallible experience either; experience is finite: circumstances are infinitely varied. Hence the importance of judgement, of temperance and moderation, by the help of which the wise know how to think and to live in the midst of unresolvable uncertainties.

Montaigne was an excellent pupil of the School of Athens and of its Latin disciples. He realized that wisdom did not consist in simply studying Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the schools of philosophy which the Ancient Greek and Latin world derived from them: wisdom consists in following precepts, not in knowing them off by heart. Aristotle may well point the way, but Montaigne was not content to know the words of his
Metaphysics
and his
Physics
(and even less merely to pick his way through a maze of commentaries upon them): more than any other object he studied his own ‘self’: that study was his metaphysics; that study was his physics; with their
aid he could judge whether or not Aristotle or anyone else was probably talking sense or nonsense.

His ‘self’, he found, was more than his soul. His ‘being’, like that of any person, consisted in a soul (‘form’) linked to a body (‘matter’). (That was another scholastic axiom: ‘Form gives being to matter.’) But as his body aged it was racked with pain. (The colic paroxysms produced by his stone were recognized as being suicidal.
⁴²
) Once he had grasped how ‘wonderously corporeal’ human beings are he saw that wisdom lies in keeping body and soul together in loving harmony, not in segregating the soul from the body to keep it pure and purely intellectual. Those Socratic injunctions to seek to ‘practise dying’ – to strive, that is, to enable the soul to leave the body for a while and ‘go outside’ – those ecstatic activities which send the soul soaring aloft from the body, are by most men to be rejected. As for those baser ecstasies which lead the body to wallow in the mire of lust and drunkenness, bereft of its soul, they are not ‘bestial’ (beasts do not act like that): they are sub-human.

Christian rapture is a great thing. Yet only a tiny handful of the Elect – only privileged ascetic contemplatives touched by grace – can safely neglect their bodies’ transitory necessities while their souls feed by anticipation on lasting heavenly food. For ordinary folk to strive to ape them leads to madness: for madness, too, consists in the pulling apart of soul and body. Since Platonic times there was thought to be a hierarchy of souls within creation. Above the human souls were classed the souls of angels; below the human souls were classed the souls of beasts. But, concludes Montaigne, attempt, without a special gift of grace, to soar aloft and rank with the angels and you will end up a maniac: not an angel but below a beast; not supernally moral but subterrestrially immoral.