by Will Durant
To understand himself better he studied the philosophers. He loved them despite their vain pretensions to analyze the universe and chart man’s destiny beyond the grave. He quoted Cicero as remarking that “nothing can be said so absurd but that it has been said by one of the philosophers.”60 He praised Socrates for “bringing human wisdom down from heaven, where for a long time it had been lost, to restore it to man again,”61 and he echoed Socrates’ advice to study natural science less and human conduct more. He had no “system” of his own; his ideas were in such restless evolution that no label could pin down his philosophic flight.
In the brave morning of his thought he adopted Stoicism. Since Christianity, splitting into fratricidal sects and bloodying itself with war and massacre, had apparently failed to give man a moral code capable of controlling his instincts, Montaigne turned to philosophy for a natural ethic, a morality not tied to the rise and fall of religious creeds. Stoicism seemed to have approached this ideal; at least it had molded some of the finest men of antiquity. For a time Montaigne made it his ideal. He would train his will to self-mastery; he would shun all passions that might disturb the decency of his conduct or the tranquillity of his mind; he would face all vicissitudes with an even temper and take death itself as a natural and forgivable fulfillment.
Some Stoic strain continued in him to the end, but his effervescent spirit soon found another philosophy to justify itself. He rebelled against a Stoicism that preached the following of “Nature” and yet strove to suppress nature in man. He interpreted Nature through his own nature, and decided to follow his natural desires whenever they did no perceivable harm. He was pleased to find Epicurus no coarse sensualist but a sane defender of sane delights; and he was astonished to discover so much wisdom and grandeur in Lucretius. Now he proclaimed with enthusiasm the legitimacy of pleasure. The only sin that he recognized was excess. “Intemperance is the pestilence which killeth pleasure; temperance is not the flail of pleasure, it is the seasoning thereof.”62
From the oscillation of his views, and the degradation of contemporary Christianity in France, he came to the skepticism that thereafter colored most of his philosophy. His father had been impressed by the Theologia naturalis of the Toulouse theologian Raymond of Sabunde (d. 1437?), who had continued the noble effort of the Scholastics to prove the reasonableness of Christianity. The father asked his son to translate the treatise; Montaigne did, and published his translation (1569). Orthodox France was edified, but some critics objected to Raymond’s reasoning. In 1580 Montaigne inserted into the second “book” of his Essais a two-hundred-page “Apologie de [Defense of] Raimond Sebond,” in which he proposed to answer the objections. But he did so only by abandoning his author’s enterprise, arguing that reason is a limited and untrustworthy instrument, and that it is better to rest religion on faith in the Scriptures and in Holy Mother Church; in effect Montaigne demolished Raymond while purporting to uphold him. Some, like Sainte-Beuve, have judged this “Apology” as a tongue-in-the-cheek argument for unbelief.63 In any case, it is the most destructive of Montaigne’s compositions, perhaps the most thoroughgoing exposition of skepticism in modern literature.
Long before Locke, Montaigne affirms that “all knowledge is addressed to us by the senses,”64 and that reason depends upon the senses; but the senses are deceptive in their reports and severely limited in their range; therefore reason is unreliable. “Both the inward and the outward parts of man are full of weakness and falsehood.”65 (Here, at the very outset of the Age of Reason, a generation before Bacon and Descartes, Montaigne asks the question that they would not stop to ask, that Pascal would ask eighty years later, that the philosophers would not face till Hume and Kant: Why should we trust reason?) Even instinct is a safer guide than reason. See how well the animals get along by instinct—sometimes more wisely than men. “There is a greater difference between many a man and many another man than between many a man and many an animal.”66 Man is no more the center of life than the earth is the center of the universe. It is presumptuous of man to think that God resembles him, or that human affairs are the center of God’s interest, or that the world exists to serve man. And it is ridiculous to suppose that the mind of man can fathom the nature of God. “O senseless man, who cannot make a worm and yet will make gods by the dozen!”67
Montaigne arrives at skepticism by another route—by contemplating the variety and fluctuation of beliefs in laws and morals, in science, philosophy, and religion; which of these truths is truth? He prefers the Copernican to the Ptolemaic astronomy, but: “Who knows whether, a thousand years hence, a third opinion will rise, which haply may overthrow these two,” and “whether it be not more likely that this huge body, which we call the World, is another manner of thing than we judge it?”68 “There is no science,” only the proud hypotheses of immodest minds.69 Of all the philosophies the best is Pyrrho’s—that we know nothing. “The greatest part of what we know is the least part of what we know not.”70 “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known,” and “a persuasion of certainty is a manifest testimony of foolishness.”71 “In few words, there is no constant existence, neither of our being nor of the objects. And we and our judgment, and all mortal things else, do incessantly roll, turn, and pass away. Thus can nothing be certainly established. We have no communication with being.”72 Then, to heal all wounds, Montaigne ends by reaffirming his Christian faith and singing a pantheistic paean to the unknowable God.73
Thereafter he applied his skepticism to everything, always with an obeisance to the Church. “Que sais-je? What do I know?” became his motto, engraved on his seal and inscribed on his library ceiling. Other mottoes adorned the rafters: “The for and against are both possible”; “It may be and it may not be”; “I determine nothing. I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.”74 Something of this attitude he took from Socrates’ Ouden oida, “I know nothing”; something from Pyrrho, something from Cornelius Agrippa, much from Sextus Empiricus. Henceforth, he said, “I fasten myself on that which I see and hold, and go not far from the shore.”75
Now he saw relativity everywhere, and nowhere absolutes. Least of all in standards of beauty; and our lusty philosopher revels in noting the diverse opinions among divers peoples as to what constitutes beauty in a woman’s breasts.76 He believes that many beasts surpass us in beauty and thinks we were wise to clothe ourselves. He perceives that a man’s religion and his moral ideas are usually determined by his environment. “The taste of good or evil greatly depends upon the opinion we have of them,” as Shakespeare was to say; and: “Men are tormented by the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves.”77 The laws of conscience proceed not from God but from custom. Conscience is the discomfort we feel when violating the mores of our tribe.78
Montaigne had better sense than to suppose that because morals are relative they may therefore be ignored. On the contrary, he would be the last to disturb their stability. He talks boldly about sex, and claims much freedom—for men; but when you cross-examine him you find him suddenly orthodox. He recommends chastity to youth, on the ground that energy spent in sex comes from the common store of force in the body; he notes that athletes training for the Olympic games “abstained from all venerean acts and touching of women.”79
It was part of his humor to extend his skepticism to civilization itself, and to anticipate Rousseau and Châteaubriand. The Indians he had seen at Rouen inspired him to read the reports of travelers; from these accounts he composed his essay “Of Cannibals.” Eating dead people, he thought, was less barbarous than torturing live ones. “I find nothing in that nation [Indian America] that is either barbarous or savage, unless men call that barbarism which is not common among themselves.”80 He imagined these natives as rarely sick, as nearly always happy, and as living peaceably without laws.81 He praised Aztec art and Inca roads. He put into the mouth of his Rouen Indians an indictment of European wealth and poverty: “They had perceived there were men amongst us fu
ll gorged with all sorts of commodities, and others that were dying of hunger; and they marveled that the needy ones could endure such an injustice and took not the others by the throat.”82 He compared the morals of the Indians with those of their conquerors, and charged that “the pretended Christians … brought the contagion of vice to innocent souls eager to learn and by nature well disposed.”83 For a moment Montaigne forgot his geniality and burst into noble indignation:
So many goodly cities ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed or made desolate; so infinite millions of harmless people of all sexes, status, and ages, massacred, ravaged, and put to the sword; and the richest, the fairest, the best part of the world topsyturvied, ruined, and defaced for the traffic of pearls and peppers! Oh, mechanical victories, oh, base conquest!84
Was his obeisance to religion sincere? Obviously his classical foraging had long since weaned him from the doctrines of the Church. He retained a vague belief in God conceived sometimes as Nature, sometimes as a cosmic soul, the incomprehensible intelligence of the world. At times he presages Shakespeare’s Lear: “The gods play at handball with us, and toss us up and down”;85 but he ridicules atheism as “unnatural and monstrous”86 and rejects agnosticism as another dogmatism—how do we know that we shall never know?87 He waives aside as pretentious futilities all attempts to define the soul or to explain its relation to the body.88 He is willing to accept the immortality of the soul on faith, but finds no evidence for it in experience or reason;89 and the idea of eternal existence appalls him.90 “Except for faith, I believe not miracles”;91 and he anticipates Hume’s famous argument: “How much more natural and likely do I find it that two men should lie than that one man in twelve hours should be carried by the winds from East to West?”92 (He might seek another example today.) He steals a march on Voltaire by telling of the pilgrim who judged that Christianity must be divine to have maintained itself so long despite the corruption of its administrators.93 He notes that he is a Christian by geographical accident; otherwise “I should rather have taken part with those who worshiped the sun.”94 So far as one reader can recall, he mentions Christ but once.95 The lovely saga of the Mother of Christ made only a moderate appeal to his unsentimental soul; however, he crossed Italy to lay four votive figures before her shrine at Loreto. He lacked those marks of the religious spirit—humility, a sense of sin, remorse and penance, a longing for divine forgiveness and redeeming grace. He was a freethinker with an allergy for martyrdom.
He remained a Catholic long after he had ceased to be a Christian.96 Like some sensible early Christian bowing transiently to a pagan deity, Montaigne, the most pagan of Christians, turned aside now and then from his selected Greeks and Romans to honor the cross of Christ, or even to kiss the foot of a pope. He did not, like Pascal, pass from skepticism to faith, but from skepticism to observance. And not merely through caution. He probably realized that his own philosophy, paralyzed with hesitations, contradictions, and doubt, could safely be the luxury only of a spirit already formed to civilization (by religion?), and that France, even while bathing its creeds in blood, would never exchange them for an intellectual labyrinth in which death would be the only certainty. He thought a wise philosophy would make its peace with religion:
Simple minds, less curious, less well instructed, are made good Christians, and through reverence and obedience hold their simple belief and abide by the laws. In intellects of moderate vigor and capacity is engendered the error of opinions…. The best, most settled, and clearest-seeing spirits make another sort of well-believers, who by long and religious investigation, penetrate to a more profound and abstruse meaning in the Scriptures and discover the mysterious and divine secrets of our ecclesiastical polity…. The simple peasants are honest folk, and so are the philosophers.97
So, after all his barbs at Christianity, and because all faiths alike are cloaks to cover our shivering ignorance, he advises us to accept the religion of our time and place. He himself, true to his geography, returned to the ritual of his fathers. He liked a sensory, fragrant, ceremonial religion, and so he preferred Catholicism to Protestantism. He was repelled by the Calvinist emphasis on predestination;98 being of Erasmian lineage, he liked the genial and worldly cardinals of Rome more than the Loyola of Geneva or the lion of Wittenberg. He regretted particularly that the new creeds were imitating the intolerance of the old. Though he laughed at heretics as fools who raised a fuss over competitive mythologies, he saw no sense in burning such mavericks. “After all, it is setting a high value on our opinions to roast people alive on account of them”99 or to let people roast us.
In politics too he ended as a comfortable conservative. There is no use changing forms of government; the new one will be as bad as the old, because it will be administered by men. Society is so “vast a frame,” so complex a mechanism of instinct, custom, myth, and law, slowly fashioned by the trial-and-error wisdom of time, that no individual intellect, however powerful and brilliant, can take it apart and put it together again without incalculable confusion and suffering.100 Better submit to current rulers, bad as they are, unless they attempt to chain thought itself; then Montaigne might screw his courage up to revolt, for “my reason is not framed to bend or stoop; my knees are.”101 A wise man will avoid public office, while respecting it; “the greatest vocation is to save the commonwealth and be profitable to many”; but “as for me, I depart from it.”102 However, he served his terms.
He mourned that half his life had been lived during the ruination of France,103 “in an age so corrupt and times so ignorant.” “Read all ancient stories, be they never so tragical, you shall find none to equal those we daily see practiced.”104 He was not neutral in the duel for France, but “my interest has not made me forget either the commendable qualities of our adversaries or the reproachful qualities of those whom I have supported.”105 He would not shoulder a gun, but his pen was with the Politiques, those peace-preferring Catholics who advocated some compromise with the Huguenots. He lauded Michel de L’Hôpital for farsighted humanitarian moderation, and he rejoiced when his friend Henry of Navarre moved to victory on the policies of L’Hôpital. Montaigne was the most civilized of Frenchmen in that savage age.
5. The Rolling Stone
The stones in his bladder bothered him more than the wars of France. In June 1580, shortly after the first publication of the Essays, he set out on an extended tour of Western Europe, partly to see the world, partly to visit medicinal springs in the hope of alleviating the “colic” (as he called it) that repeatedly incapacitated him with pain. He left his wife behind to take care of the estate; but he took with him a younger brother, a brother-in-law, the Baron of Estissac, and a secretary to whom he dictated part of his travel diary; add a retinue of servants and muleteers, and we no longer wonder that these memoirs are intellectually thin. They were meant rather for remembrance than for publication; Montaigne, returning, hid them in a chest, where they were discovered 178 years after his death.
The party went first to Paris, where the proud author presented a copy of the Essays to Henry III; then by easy stages to Plombières, where Montaigne for nine days drank two quarts of medicinal waters daily and succeeded in passing some small stones with great pain.106 Then through Lorraine to Switzerland. “He had infinite pleasure,” says the third-person diary, “in observing the freedom and good government of this nation.”107 He took the waters at Baden-Baden and advanced into Germany. He attended Calvinist and Lutheran as well as Catholic services, and discussed theology with Protestant clergymen. He tells of one Lutheran minister who vowed that he would rather hear a thousand Masses than partake of one Calvinist Communion108—for the Calvinists denied the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Moving into the Tirol, he felt the grandeur of the Alps long before Rousseau. From Innsbruck the party mounted to the Brenner Pass, Montaigne passing on the way “a stone of middling size.” Then through Trent to Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Venice, where he contributed “two big stones” to the Grand Canal. He th
ought the city not so wonderful as he had expected, nor the prostitutes as beautiful. On to Ferrara, where (according to the Essays, not the diary) he visited the insane Tasso; to Bologna and Florence, where the Arno received “two stones and a quantity of gravel,”109 and through Siena to Rome, where he “passed a stone as big as a pine kernel.”110 All in all, these recorded accretion-excretions would have built a pretty pyramid.
In Rome he visited a Jewish synagogue, witnessed a circumcision, and discussed with the rabbis their religious rites. He exchanged philosophies with the Roman courtesans. He was not (as Stendhal thought) insensitive to the art in Rome.111 He wandered day after day among the classic remains, never ceasing to marvel at their grandeur. But the great event was a visit to Gregory XIII. Like any son of the Church, Montaigne knelt to kiss the papal shoe, which the Pope kindly raised to ease the operation.112 Meanwhile the customs officials had found a copy of the Essays, which they turned over to the Inquisition. Montaigne was summoned to the Holy Office and was gently admonished that some passages smelled of heresy; would he not change or delete them in future editions? He promised. “I thought I left them very well satisfied with me”; indeed, they invited him to come and live in Rome. (He kept his promise indifferently, and in 1676 his book was placed on the Index.) Perhaps to reassure them and himself, he journeyed across Italy to the shrine of the Virgin at Loreto and dedicated a votive tablet to her. Then he recrossed the Apennines to take the waters at Lucca.
There (September 7, 1581) a message came, saying that he had been chosen mayor of Bordeaux. He asked to be excused, but Henry III bade him accept, and the tradition of public service left him by his father could not be ignored. He took his time getting back to France; he did not sight his château till November 30, seventeen months after beginning the tour. The duties of the mayoralty were light; the emoluments were honors without pay. He functioned sufficiently well, for he was re-elected (August 1583) for another two years. In December 1584 Henry of Navarre, with a mistress and forty followers, visited him, and the future king of France slept in the philosopher’s bed. Toward the end of the second term plague struck Bordeaux, and Montaigne, like nearly all public officials, left the city for rural retreats. On July 30, 1585, he turned over the insignia of his office to a successor and retired to his home.