The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  My first taste for books arose from enjoying Ovid’s Metamorphoses; when I was about seven or eight I used to sneak away from all other joys to read it, especially since Latin was my mother-tongue and the Metamorphoses was the easiest book I knew and the one most suitable by its subject to my tender age. (As for Lancelot du lac, [B] Amadis, [A] Huon de Bordeaux and so on, trashy books which children spend time on, I did not even know their titles – and still do not know their insides – so exact was the way I was taught.)

  This rendered me a bit slacker about studying my set-books. I was particularly lucky at this stage to have to deal with an understanding tutor who adroitly connived at this and other similar passions: for I read in succession Virgil (the Aeneid), Terence, Plautus and the Italian comedies, ever seduced by the attractiveness of their subjects. Had he been mad enough to break this succession I reckon that I would have left school hating books, as most French aristocrats do. He acted most ingeniously. Pretending not to notice anything, he sharpened my appetite by making me devour such books in secret, while gently requiring me to do my duty by the other, prescribed, books. For the chief qualities which my father looked for in those who had charge of me were affability and an easy-going complexion: and my own complexion had no vices other than sluggishness and laziness. The risk was not that I should do wrong but do nothing. Nobody forecast that I would turn out bad, only useless. What they foretold was idleness not wickedness.

  [C] I am aware that that is the way things have turned out. The complaints which ring in my ears confirm it: ‘Lazy! No warmth in his duties as friend, relation or public official! Too much on his own!’ Even the most insulting accusers never say, ‘Why did he go and take that?’ or ‘Why has he never paid up?’ What they say is, ‘Why will he not write it off?’ or ‘Why will he not give it away?’

  I would consider it flattering if people found me wanting only in such works of supererogation. Where they are unjust is in requiring that I exceed my obligations – more rigorously, indeed, than they require of themselves their mere fulfilment. By so requiring they destroy the gratuitous nature of the deed and therefore the gratitude which would be my due; whereas any active generosity on my part should be more highly appreciated, seeing that I have never been the recipient of any. I am all the more free to dispose of my fortune in that it is thoroughly mine. Yet if I were a great burnisher-up of my actions I might well beat off such reproaches. I would teach some of these people that they are not annoyed because I do not do a lot for them but because I could do a lot more.

  [A] For all that, my soul was not wanting in powerful emotions of her own, [C] nor in sure and open judgements about subjects which she knew, [A] digesting them alone, without telling anyone else. Among other things, I truly believe that she was incapable of surrendering to force and violence.

  [B] Should I include another of my characteristics as a child? I had an assured countenance and a suppleness of voice and gesture when I undertook to act in plays; for, in advance of my age,

  Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus,

  [The following year had scarcely plucked me from my eleventh,]104

  I played the chief characters in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente and Muret, which were put on in our Collège de Guyenne with dignity.105 In such matters Andreas Gouveanus, our principal, was incomparably the best principal in France, as he was in all other aspects of his duties; and I was held to be a past master. Acting is an activity which is not unpraiseworthy in the children of good families; I have subsequently seen our Princes actively involved in it (following the example of the ancients) and winning honour and praise. [C] In Greece it was open even to gentlemen to make acting their profession: ‘Aristoni tragico actori rem aperit: huic et genus et fortuna honesta erant; nec ars, quia nihil tale apud Græcos pudori est, ea deformabat.’ [He disclosed his project to Ariston, the tragic actor, a gentleman respected for his birth and his fortune; his profession in no ways impaired this respect, since nothing like that is a source of shame among the Greeks.]106

  [B] Those who condemn such entertainments I have even accused of lack of perspicacity; and of injustice, those who deny entry into our goodly towns to worthwhile troops of actors, begrudging the people such public festivities. Good governments take the trouble to bring their citizens together and to assemble them for sports and games just as they do for serious acts of worship: a sense of community and good-will is increased by this. And you could not allow citizens any amusements better regulated than those which take place in the presence of all and in full view of the magistrate. I would find it reasonable that the magistrate or the monarch should occasionally offer such amusements to the people for nothing, with a kind of fatherly goodness and affection, [C] and that in the bigger towns there should be places set aside and duly appointed for such spectacles, which would be a diversion from worse and secret goings-on.

  [A] Now, to get back to my subject, there is nothing like tempting the boy to want to study and to love it: otherwise you simply produce donkeys laden with books. They are flogged into retaining a pannierful of learning; but if it is to do any good, Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.

  27. That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities

  [Curiosity when applied to strange or miraculous events is both vain and arrogant. Since men are lulled by habit, they cease to wonder at the glory of the heavens yet they claim to know the limits of the whole order of Nature – and so to judge from their own parochial experience what is miraculous and what is not. Only the authority of the Church and of God’s saints can recognize miracles for what they are and vouch for them. Once the Church has decided any issue of fact or doctrine, Roman Catholics must never deviate from her teachings. A man may reject her authority altogether, but he is not free to pick and choose among doctrines, especially during discussions with heretics.]

  [A] It is not perhaps without good reason that we attribute to simple-mindedness a readiness to believe anything and to ignorance the readiness to be convinced, for I think I was once taught that a belief is like an impression stamped on our soul: the softer and less resisting the soul, the easier it is to print anything on it: [C] ‘Ut necesse est lancem in libra ponderibus impositis deprimi, sic animum perspicuis cedere.’ [‘For just as a weight placed on a balance must weigh it down, so the mind must yield to clear evidence.’]1 The more empty a soul is and the less furnished with counterweights, the more easily its balance will be swayed under the force of its first convictions. [A] That is why children, the common people, women and the sick are more readily led by the nose.

  On the other hand there is a silly arrogance in continuing to disdain something and to condemn it as false just because it seems unlikely to us. That is a common vice among those who think their capacities are above the ordinary.

  I used to do that once: if I heard tell of ghosts walking or of prophecies, enchantments, sorcery, or some other tale which I could not get my teeth into –

  Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,

  Nocturnos lemures portentaque Thessala

  [Dreams, magic terrors, miracles, witches, nocturnal visits from the dead or spells from Thessaly]2

  – I used to feel sorry for the wretched folk who were taken in by such madness. Now I find that I was at least as much to be pitied as they were. It is not that experience has subsequently shown me anything going beyond my original beliefs (nor is it from any lack of curiosity on my part), but reason has taught me that, if you condemn in this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the frontiers and bounds of the will of God and the power of Nature our Mother; it taught me also that there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities.

  How many of the things which constantly come into our purview must be deemed monstrous or miraculous if we apply such terms to anything which outstrips our reason! If we consider that we have to gr
ope through a fog even to understand the very things we hold in our hands, then we will certainly find that it is not knowledge but habit which takes away their strangeness;

  [B] jam nemo, fessus satiate videndi,

  Suspicere in cæli dignatur lucida templa;

  [Already now, tired and satiated with seeing, nobody bothers to gaze up at the shining temples of the heavens:]

  [A] such things, if they were newly presented to us, would seem as unbelievable as any others;

  si nunc primum mortalibus adsint

  Ex improviso, ceu sint objecta repente,

  Nil magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici,

  Aut minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes.

  [supposing that now, for the first time, they were suddenly shown to mortal men: nothing could be called more miraculous; such things the nations would not have dared to believe.]3

  He who had never actually seen a river, the first time he did so took it for the ocean, since we think that the biggest things that we know represent the limits of what Nature can produce in that species.

  [B] Scilicet et fluvius, qui non est maximus, eii est

  Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit, et ingens

  Arbor homoque videtur; [A] et omnia de genere omni

  Maxima quæ vidit quisque, hæc ingentia fingit.

  [B] Just as a river may not be all that big, but seems huge to a man who has never seen a bigger one, so, too, for the biggest tree or biggest man; [A] and the biggest thing of any kind which we know is considered huge by us.]

  [C] ‘Consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur, neque requirunt rationes earum rerum quas semper vident.’ [When we grow used to seeing anything it accustoms our minds to it and we cease to be astonished by it; we never seek the causes of things like that.]4 What makes us seek the cause of anything is not size but novelty.

  [A] We ought to judge the infinite power of [C] Nature [A] with more reverence5 and a greater recognition of our own ignorance and weakness. How many improbable things there are which have been testified to by people worthy of our trust: if we cannot be convinced we should at least remain in suspense. To condemn them as impossible is to be rashly presumptuous, boasting that we know the limits of the possible. [C] If we understood the difference between what is impossible and what is unusual, or between what is against the order of the course of Nature6 and what is against the common opinion of mankind, then the way to observe that rule laid down by Chilo, Nothing to excess, would be, Not to believe too rashly: not to disbelieve too easily.

  [A] When we read in Froissart that the Comte de Foix knew the following morning in Béarn of the defeat of King John of Castille at Juberoth, and when we read of the means he is alleged to have used, we can laugh at that;7 we can laugh too when our annals tell how Pope Honorius, on the very same day that King Philip-Augustus died at Mante, celebrated a public requiem for him and ordered the same to be done throughout Italy;8 for the authority of such witnesses is not high enough to rein us back.

  But wait. When Plutarch (leaving aside the many examples which he alleges from Antiquity) says that he himself knows quite definitely that, at the time of Domitian, news of the battle lost by Antony several days’ journey away in Germany was publicly announced in Rome and spread through all the world on the very day that it was lost; and when Caesar maintains that it was often the case that news of an event actually anticipated the event itself: are we supposed to say that they were simple people who merely followed the mob and who let themselves be deceived because they saw things less clearly than we do!9

  Can there be anything more delicate, clear-cut and lively than the judgement of Pliny when he pleases to exercise it? Is there anything further from triviality? (I am not discussing his outstanding erudition; I put less store by that: but in which of those two qualities are we supposed to surpass him?) And yet every little schoolboy convicts him of lying and lectures him about the march of Nature’s handiwork.10

  When we read in Bouchet about miracles associated with the relics of Saint Hilary we can shrug it off:11 his right to be believed is not great enough to take away our freedom to challenge him. But to go on from there and condemn all similar accounts seems to me to be impudent in the extreme. Such a great saint as Augustine swears that he saw:12 a blind child restored to sight by the relics of Saint Gervaise and Saint Protasius at Milan; a woman in Carthage cured of a cancer by the sign of the cross made by a woman who had just been baptised; his close friend Hesperius driving off devils (who were infesting his house) by using a little soil taken from the sepulchre of our Lord, and that same soil, borne into the Church, suddenly curing a paralytic; a woman who, having touched the reliquary of Saint Stephen with a posy of flowers during a procession, rubbed her eyes with them afterwards and recovered her sight which she had recently lost – as well as several other miracles which occurred in his presence. What are we to accuse him of – him and the two holy bishops, Aurelius and Maximinus, whom he calls on as witnesses? Is it of ignorance, simplemindedness, credulity, deliberate deception or imposture? Is there any man in our century so impudent as to think he can be compared with them for virtue, piety, scholarship, judgement and ability? [C] ‘Qui, ut rationem nullam afferent, ipsa authoritate me frangerent.’ [Why, even if they gave no reasons, they would convince me by their very authority.]13

  [A] Apart from the absurd rashness which it entails, there is a dangerous boldness of great consequence in despising whatever we cannot understand. For as soon as you have established the frontiers of truth and error with that fine brain of yours and then discover that you must of necessity believe some things even stranger than the ones which you reject, you are already forced to abandon these frontiers.

  Now it seems to me that what brings as much disorder as anything into our consciences during our current religious strife is the way Catholics are prepared to treat some of their beliefs as expendable. They believe they are being moderate and well-informed when they surrender to their enemies some of the articles of faith which are in dispute. But, apart from the fact that they cannot see what an advantage you give to an adversary when you begin to yield ground and beat a retreat, or how much that excites him to follow up his attack, the very articles which they select as being less weighty are sometimes extremely important ones.

  We must either totally submit to the authority of our ecclesiastical polity or else totally release ourselves from it. It is not for us to decide what degree of obedience we owe to it.

  Moreover I can say that for having assayed it; in the past I made use of that freedom of personal choice and private selection in order to neglect certain details in the observances of our Church because they seemed to be rather odd or rather empty; then, when I came to tell some learned men about it, I discovered that those very practices were based on massive and absolutely solid foundations, and that it is only our ignorance and animal-stupidity which make us treat them with less reverence than all the rest.

  Why cannot we remember all the contradictions which we feel within our own judgement, and how many things which were articles of belief for us yesterday are fables for us today?

  Vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.

  28. On affectionate relationships

  [This chapter, ‘De l’amitié’, is traditionally called ‘On friendship’. But in Renaissance French amitié includes many affectionate relationships, ranging from a father’s love for his child (or for his brain-child) to the friendly services of a doctor or lawyer, to that conjugal love felt by Montaigne for his wife, and to that rarest of lasting friendships which David shared with Jonathan, Roland with Oliver or Montaigne with La Boëtie. Several terms are needed in English to render these different senses; they include friendship, loving-friendship, benevolence, affection, affectionate relationships and love. The basic meaning of amitié is rooted in aimer (to love); but it often excluded amour,
love between the sexes, and always folle amour (‘mad love’) which was sexual and extramarital. The first syllable of amitié was fully nasalized in Renaissance French: it therefore sounds like âme (soul). Since ancient times philosophy had classified love between the sexes as at least primarily an affair of the other, lower, part of Man: the body; some Renaissance Platonists were concerned to modify this stark dichotomy between soul-love and body-love. Much was written on parfaite amitié, a ‘perfect’ loving relationship which could arise between a man and a woman in which physical love was relegated to a vital but second place. Montaigne does not underplay the role of sexual love (cf. III, 5, ‘On some lines of Virgil’, and III, 3, ‘On three kinds of social intercourse’); but despite Classical precedent he does wonder whether a fully sexual love plus a fully soul-centred amitié could not bind an exceptional man to an exceptional woman. If it could, then it would engage the whole individual person, body and soul. That would indeed be ‘perfect love’, parfaite amitié. Male homosexual love, which did from Socratic times claim to do just that, does not disturb nor preoccupy Montaigne: he dismisses it as ‘justly abhorrent to our manners’ and as a parody of heterosexual love. But philosophical homosexuality shows, mutatis mutandis, what the love of man and woman could ideally be: a marriage of bodies and souls.