by Dan Falk
Montaigne was able to project his imagination outside of his own immediate world. He knew that, in a sense, everything is relative: Everything depends on one’s point of view. He saw that what was sacred to members of one culture was blasphemy to members of another. As a young man he had traveled widely, and became acutely conscious of what we would now call “cultural relativism.” Neighboring countries, even neighboring regions, had different customs, laws, and beliefs. “What kind of Good can it be,” he asked, “which was honoured yesterday but not today and which becomes a crime when you cross a river! What kind of truth can be limited by a range of mountains, becoming a lie for the world on the other side.”
To question culture and customs leads one inevitably to question religion and religious practice. Montaigne understood that people come to their religious beliefs through a series of accidents: of birth, of location, by exposure to particular teachers, and so on. We defend our particular brand of faith—but we should not be surprised that our neighbors defend theirs just as vigorously. He quotes approvingly from the Roman poet Juvenal: “The fury of the mob is aroused since everyone hates his neighbours’ gods, convinced that the gods he adores are the only true ones.” Montaigne had witnessed the horrors of religious warfare with his own eyes, as well as the needless suffering brought on by the witch-hunt craze. As he once reflected, “It is taking one’s conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them.” And although Montaigne was fascinated with (perhaps obsessed by) death, he seems to have had little interest in what, if anything, came after it.
Montaigne questioned almost everything. He refused to embrace the godless world described by Lucretius. However much he may have tried, he could not bring himself to doubt the existence of a creator. (He at one point calls atheism a “monstrous thing,” and later speaks of “the dreadful, horrible darkness of irreligion.”) He remained a practicing (and presumably believing) Catholic to his dying day. But he saw no conflict between his faith and his skepticism: He accepted the teachings of his religion not by any process of reasoning, but simply as faith (a perspective known as fideism, from the Latin word for faith, fides). Without such faith, he believed, there was no way to anchor one’s life. Yet he allowed for a separation of private and public life. Whatever inner thoughts one harbored, there was no need to let it interfere with one’s place in the community. “The wise man ought to retire into himself, and allow himself to judge freely of everything,” he wrote, “but outwardly he ought completely to follow the established order.” As a result of this duality, James Jacob notes, Montaigne’s skepticism “had revolutionary intellectual consequences, while scarcely producing so much as a social ripple.” In spite of Montaigne’s avowed devotion to his Catholic faith, many people came to see the Essays as an irreligious, even dangerous work. A century after its publication, the Vatican, which had seen no problems with the book initially, decided not to take any chances, and placed the Essays on its Index of prohibited works.
MONTAIGNE, MAN OF SCIENCE?
Montaigne, like Lucretius, was prepared to question one of the most cherished notions of all—the idea that the universe was made for our benefit. Montaigne’s take on such pompous self-importance—which presages not only Sagan, but Feynman, Weinberg, and a host of late-twentieth-century writers on physics and cosmology—is worth examining (we looked at it briefly in Chapter 2, but here I will quote the relevant passage in its entirety). Who, Montaigne asks,
has convinced [himself] that it is for his convenience, his service, that, for so many centuries, there has been established and maintained the awesome motion of the vault of heaven, the everlasting light of those tapers coursing so proudly overhead or the dread surging of the boundless sea? Is it possible to imagine anything more laughable than that this pitiful, wretched creature—who is not even master of himself, but exposed to shocks on every side—should call himself Master and Emperor of a universe, the smallest particle of which he has no means of knowing, let alone swaying!
There is a stark humility here, and something very much like the assertion of the modern scientist that the universe “isn’t about us.” But was Montaigne a proto-scientist? His biographers tread carefully on this question. M. A. Screech, translator for the massive Penguin edition, says that later Enlightenment thinkers came to see Montaigne as an early proponent of “atheistic naturalism,” while Hugo Friedrich notes Montaigne’s tireless, inquisitive approach to the study of mankind, which he characterizes as “anthropological curiosity.” But Friedrich adds a cautionary note: Montaigne’s way of reasoning “bypasses the mathematical, physical, and technical sciences,” and it would be an “erroneous conclusion” to label Montaigne an early scientist. The problem, I think, is that Montaigne sounds remarkably modern at times, and yet conservative and traditional at others—as one might expect, perhaps, from a figure who lived so close to what we imagine as the temporal divide separating the old from the new. Consider his stance on medicine: He seems to have embraced Galen’s theory of the humors—but he also spoke enthusiastically of the recent work of the physician Paracelsus, who emphasized the role of observation over adherence to ancient texts. At one point Montaigne examined the contents of a goat’s stomach and, on finding stones in it, concluded that goat’s blood was probably useless as a cure for such ailments, as had popularly been imagined. In this early endorsement of experimentation and observation, writes R. A. Sayce, “we can see how his scepticism and empiricism are leading him towards the standards of the scientific age.” His approach “points to the scientific method, and it seems likely that he exercised a direct influence on its development through Descartes and Pascal and perhaps even Bacon.”
At the very least, Montaigne’s way of thinking often has the flavor of science. One of my favorite examples of his hard-nosed skepticism concerns the fate of sailors lost at sea. (Like so many of his stories, it has classical origins; this one he borrowed from a Greek poet named Diagoras of Melos, also known as Diagoras the Atheist, who lived in the fifth century B.C.) Montaigne writes:
[Diagoras] was shown many vows and votive portraits from those who have survived shipwreck and was then asked, “You, there, who think that the gods are indifferent to human affairs, what have you to say about so many men saved by their grace?”—“It is like this,” he replied; “there are no portraits here of those who stayed and drowned—and they are more numerous!”
When I read this passage, I hear something akin to the modern skepticism of Lawrence Krauss or Stephen Hawking. Montaigne is a sober and skeptical debunker, and perfectly able to outthink the philosophers.
Consider his evaluation of the senses: We have our eyes and ears to take in the world around us—but while our senses serve as our window on the world, they also necessarily restrict our view: “We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses,” Montaigne writes, “but perhaps we need the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence.” Moreover, the senses can mislead us; what we see or hear can often lead us astray. One of his examples—again borrowed from one of the ancient writers—involves the theater, and is thus one that Shakespeare could certainly relate to: If colored glass is used to cover the torches that illuminate the stage, the audience can be fooled into thinking that the people and objects in front of them are blue or red or some other hue quite different from their natural color. But even when no tricks are being played on us, we can never be quite sure of what we’re seeing. As Montaigne noted, different people do not necessarily perceive things in exactly the same way: Some people can hear or see better than others; as well, our senses deteriorate as we age. He was also careful not to confuse the sensory impression of an object with the object itself. “So whoever judges from appearances,” he wrote, “judges from something quite different from the object itself.” Snow, he said, may “seem white to us,” but how do we know “that it is truly so in essence?” And once one recognizes this basic problem, “all the knowledge in
the world is inevitably swept away.” He even wondered what the world might seem like to a dog or to other animals, and tried to put himself inside their minds. He famously asked, “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me, rather than I with her?”
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Even if he wasn’t a “scientist,” Montaigne took a deep interest in what scientific thinkers—both ancient and contemporary—had to say about the structure of the world. He read Lucretius’s epic poem, and his own heavily annotated copy of De rerum natura can now be seen in the library of Eton College. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, Montaigne’s Essays contain more than a hundred quotations from Lucretius. And so, whether he found it convincing or not, Montaigne at least had some awareness of the atomic theory outlined at length by Lucretius. He also took an interest in the thinkers of his own century. As mentioned briefly in the Introduction, Montaigne was aware of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. Throughout history, everyone believed that the heavens moved, he states, until certain ancient thinkers proposed the idea that the heavens in fact remain fixed, and that
it was the earth that moved, by the oblique circle of the Zodiake, turning about her axel.… And in our daies Copernicus hath so well grounded this doctrine, that hee doth very orderly fit it to all Astrological consequences. What shall we reape by it, but only that we neede not care, which of the two it be? And who knows whether a thousand years hence a third opinion will rise, which happily shall overthrow these two præcedent?
Note that Montaigne—quoted here in John Florio’s translation of the Essays—is very far from embracing Copernicanism; indeed, what he seems to be questioning is not so much the authority of the ancients, but the authority of philosophers in general.* Even so, as Friedrich notes, Montaigne “was one of the first in France who became aware of Copernicus and took him seriously.” Sayce goes further: In his brief discussion of cosmology, “Montaigne shows … his awareness of the greatest scientific discovery of the sixteenth century and an accurate appreciation of its significance as then understood.” This, together with his reference to ideas about the Earth’s motion, suggest “that he took the theories of Copernicus more seriously than the brief account [in the Essays] might lead us to suppose.” And it’s not just that he mentions Copernicanism and its competitors; it’s what he says about the nature of science. The twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper would have been proud of Montaigne’s assertion that all knowledge is temporary; that a new theory “a thousand years hence” may overthrow our best theories of today. For Montaigne, everything was open to debate; all knowledge could be questioned. He was well aware of the “new” territories that French and Spanish and Dutch and English explorers were discovering, and the surprises they encountered in these far-off lands. Perhaps the cosmos holds some surprises for us too? “Is it not more likely,” he asks, “that this huge body which we call the universe is very different from what we think?” Montaigne’s particular brand of skepticism “threw everything into doubt, even itself,” writes Sarah Bakewell, “and thus raised a huge question mark at the heart of European philosophy.”
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Montaigne’s Essays were first translated into English in 1603 by John Florio (whom we met in Chapter 7), and they sold well. What was it about Montaigne’s writing that appealed to the English mind? It wasn’t necessarily his philosophy. Rather, as Bakewell explains, it was his style, and his utter lack of pretension:
Montaigne’s preference for details over abstractions appealed to them; so did his distrust of scholars, his preference for moderation and comfort, and his desire for privacy.… On the other hand, the English also had a taste for travel and exoticism, as did Montaigne. He could show unexpected bursts of radicalism in the very midst of quiet conservatism: so could they. Much of the time he was happier watching his cat play by the fireside—and so were the English.
Florio, as Bakewell puts it, brought out the “hidden Englishman” in Montaigne. Born in London of an Italian father and an English mother, he traveled widely as a young man, and seems to have had a knack for languages. Shakespeare, as we have seen, may have known Florio, and was perhaps one of the first English readers of the Essays—and they had a profound impact on his work. (Because Montaigne’s influence turns up as early as Hamlet, which predates Florio’s published version of the Essays by a few years, it is thought that the playwright had access to earlier copies of Florio’s translation, which had likely been circulating in manuscript.)
SHAKESPEARE AND MONTAIGNE
Scholars have long remarked on the similarities between numerous passages from Shakespeare’s plays and the Essays of Montaigne. Dozens of examples have been found over the years; one will suffice to give the flavor of Shakespeare’s debt to the French writer. Consider Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Montaigne’s essay “On the Cannibals.” Montaigne was fascinated by reports from the New World, and devoured the various accounts from explorers who had returned from the Americas. Some of them, like the French explorer Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, brought native captives back to France. Montaigne met some of these unfortunate men and women on a visit to Rouen—in this case, a group of Tupinambá people, from what is now Brazil. Here is Montaigne’s description of the South American natives (as translated by Florio):
It’s a nation … that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of poverty; no contracts, no dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common, no apparell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them.
And here, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is Gonzalo’s explanation of how he would turn Prospero’s island into an earthly paradise, if only he had the chance to rule it as governor:
I’th’ commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things, for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard—none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine or oil;
No occupation, all men idle, all …
(2.1.148–55)
The parallel between these two passages was first noted in the nineteenth century, and since then scholars have found a multitude of such borrowings.
Of course, we can’t, in a technical sense, prove that Shakespeare read Montaigne; after all, as Greenblatt said during our interview, “no one was around with a video camera” to catch him in the act—“but Montaigne’s fingerprints are in many, many Shakespeare plays, after a certain point in his career.” And it’s not just the words themselves; in the case of the cannibals essay, as Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan note in the Arden edition of the play, Shakespeare employs a “rhetorical strategy of exploring different, often opposite, perspectives, never settling on a definitive view”—an approach that echoes that of Montaigne. Incidentally, the British Museum has a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays that contains a signature, on its inside front cover, that may, perhaps, be that of William Shakespeare.* Knowing that Shakespeare read Montaigne, we are now in a position to restate a point made briefly in the Introduction: Shakespeare must at least have known of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, thanks to Montaigne’s Essays, even if he had not come across it by another route.
Why was Shakespeare so enamored with Montaigne? The two men, in spite of living on opposite sides of the English Channel and swearing loyalty to different kings and practicing different religions, are something like kindred spirits. Both men, as Bakewell puts it, have been “held up as modern writers, capturing that distinctive sense of being unsure where you belong, who you are, and what you are expected to do.” Both men devoted their lives
to investigating the human condition; both were insatiably curious; and neither was afraid to doubt.
In King Lear, too, we find Shakespeare borrowing extensively from Montaigne. As Jay Halio notes, it is in the Essays that Shakespeare finds unrighteous judges (4.5.146–48), blind men who can see (4.5.144–45), and dogs that could be “obeyed in office” (4.5.151); more generally, Shakespeare “seems indebted to the French essayist not only for phrases and ideas but for the skeptical attitudes that pervade the play.” Scholars have found at least twenty-three passages in Lear that borrow directly from the Essays, and, as Millicent Bell notes, the play contains more than a hundred words that Shakespeare had not previously used, but that occur in Florio’s translation of the Essays.
SHAKESPEARE’S SKEPTICAL VILLAINS
Let’s take a closer look at the questioning and uncertainty that haunts King Lear. We have seen that Edmond is a skeptic—Bell describes him as a “skeptic philosopher”—but he can also be seen, perhaps, as something of a scientist. He is analytical and doggedly single-minded in pursuit of his goals, and is rational through and through. Let us look for a moment at Edmond’s character, as sketched by the noted twentieth-century Shakespeare scholar A. C. Bradley:
Edmond is an adventurer pure and simple … he regards men and women, with their virtues and vices, together with the bonds of kinship, friendship, or allegiance, merely as hindrances or helps to his end. They are for him divested of all quality except their relation to this end; as indifferent as mathematical quantities or mere physical agents.
A credulous father and a brother noble,
… I see the business,
he says, as if he were talking of x and y.
This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
That which my father loses; no less than all:
The younger rises when the old doth fall:
he meditates, as if he were considering a problem in mechanics.