The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  The hand of God’s governance supports all things with an equal and unchanging sway, with the same order, the same power. Our concerns contribute nothing to this; our human activities and standards are quite irrelevant: ‘Deus ita artifex magnus in magnis, ut minor non sit in parvis’ [In great things God is a great artificer, but in such a way that he is no less great in little things].

  Our arrogance constantly finds fresh ways of blasphemously equating man with God: our jobs are a burden to us men, so Strato endows the gods – and their priests – with complete immunity from work! For Strato it is Nature who produces and maintains all things, Nature who constructs every part of the universe with her weights and her forces. In this way he frees mankind of a burden: the fear of divine judgement: ‘Quod beatum aeternumque sit, id nec habere negotii quicquam, nec exhibere alteri’ [A blessed and eternal Being has no duties and imposes none on others].242

  ‘Nature’s will is that like things should have like correlatives; for example: the fact that mortals are innumerable leads to the conclusion that the immortals are too; the vast number of things which kill or do harm leads to the conclusion that an equivalent number preserve and do good’; so, just as the souls of the gods have no tongue, eyes or ears yet can understand each other and also judge what we are thinking: so too the souls of men, when free from the bonds of the body in sleep or any kind of ecstasy, have powers of divination, can foretell the future and see such things as they could never see when joined to their bodies… [A] ‘Men’, says St Paul, ‘have become fools, professing to be wise, and have changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the image of corruptible man’.243

  [B] Only consider what jugglers’ farces those ‘deifications’ were among the Ancients. After the stately pride and pomp of the funeral procession, just as the fire was taking hold of the apex of the pyre and about to engulf the litter with the dead man on it, they would release an eagle which flew upwards, representing the soul making its way to Paradise. We still possess a thousand medallions (above all, the one of that – oh, so honourable – woman Faustina) where the eagle is portrayed bearing off the deified soul, which is slung over its shoulder just like a dead goat! It is pitiful the way we deceive ourselves with the monkey-tricks that we invent;

  Quod finxere timent

  [They are terrified of their own creations]

  – like children who are scared by the very face of the friend they have just daubed with black. [C] ‘Quasi quicquam infelicius sit homine cui sua figmenta dominantur’ [As though anything were more pitiful than a man overmastered by his own figments].244

  We are far from honouring him who made us when we honour a creature we ourselves have made.

  [B] Augustus had more temples than did Jupiter, in which he was served with just as much devotion and just as much belief in his miracles.

  The Thasians, wishing to repay the benefits they had received from Agesilaus, came to tell him that they had put him on the canonical list of their gods. ‘Are you a people’, he asked, ‘who have the power to make a god of anyone you please? Just to see, first make a god of one of yourselves; and then, [C] when I have learned how he has prospered, [B] I will come and thank you heartily for your offer.’

  [C] Man is indeed out of his mind. He cannot even create a fleshworm, yet creates gods by the dozen. Just listen to Hermes Trismegistus praising our sufficiency: ‘Among all the things which can astonish us, one thing has surpassed astonishment itself: Man’s capacity to discover what the Divine nature is and then proceed to create it.’

  [B] Here are some arguments from the very school in which Philosophy learned her lessons:

  Nosse cui Divos et coeli numina soli,

  Aut soli nescire, datum

  [Philosophy, she to whom alone it is given to know the gods and the numinous powers of heaven, or, alone, to know that they cannot be known!]245

  – If God exists, (she says) he is animate; if he is animate he has senses; if he has senses, he is subject to corruption! If he is incorporeal, he has no soul and consequently is without activity; if he is corporeal, then he is mortal! What a triumph! – [C] We could never make this world; therefore a Nature even more excellent than ours must have taken the task in hand! – It would be stupid arrogance to esteem ourselves the most perfect object in the universe: there must therefore be one thing better: God! – When you see a rich and stately dwelling you may not know who the master of it is, but at least you could say that it was not built for rats: take the divine architecture of the palaces of heaven, which we ourselves can see; does it not oblige us to believe that it is the dwelling-place of a Master greater even than we are? – Is not the higher always more worthy – and we are at the bottom. – Nothing without reason and soul can beget an animate creature capable of reason: the world has begotten us: therefore it has both reason and soul! – Each part of us is less than the whole: we are part of the world: the world is, therefore, provided with wisdom and reason more abundantly than we are. – It is a fair thing to hold great powers of government: the government of the world must, therefore, belong to some happy Nature. – The heavenly bodies do us no harm: they are, therefore, full of goodness. – [B] We need food: so do the gods, who feed on vapours rising up from here below! – [C] Worldly goods are not goods to God: therefore they are not goods to us. – To do harm and to experience harm are equal proofs of weakness: it is therefore mad to be afraid of God! – God is good by nature, man by industry: which makes man superior! – There is no difference between divine wisdom and human wisdom, except that the divine is eternal: but time adds nothing to the quality of wisdom: therefore we and God are on equal footing! [B] We enjoy life, reason, freedom and we esteem goodness, love and justice: therefore these qualities must be in God!

  In short, both constructively and destructively, we forge for ourselves the attributes of God, taking ourselves as the correlative. What a model, what a pattern! Take human qualities and stretch them, raise them, magnify them as much as you please! Wretched little Man, puff yourself up as much as you like! More. More. More still: ‘Non si te ruperis, inquit’… [‘Not even’, he said, ‘if you burst.’]. [C] ‘Profecto non Deum, quem cogitare non possunt, sed semet ipsos pro illo cogitantes, non illum sed se ipsos non illi sed sibi comparant’ [Indeed, Men cannot conceive of God, so they base their conceptions on themselves instead; they do not compare themselves to him, but him to themselves].246

  [B] Even within Nature, effects barely suggest half their causes. But what of this Cause? God is a Cause completely above the order of Nature. His mode of being is too high, too distant, too magisterial to allow our logical conclusions to judge or to bind him. We shall never get that far by our own efforts: our path is too lowly. We are no nearer the heavens on the top of Mount Cenis than we are at the bottom of the sea. Your astrolabe will tell you that.

  Yet men even reduce God to having sexual intercourse with women, noting how often he did it and for how many births.

  Paulina, the wife of Saturninus, was a Roman matron of great reputation; she thought she was lying with a god, Serapis, but through the pimping of the temple-priests she found herself in the arms of a lover.247 [C] In his treatises on theology, Varro, the most subtle and learned of Latin authors, wrote of a sexton in the temple of Hercules who cast dice with both hands, one for himself, the other for Hercules. The stakes were a supper and a woman: if he won, he paid for them out of the collection; if he lost, he paid for them himself. He lost; so the cost of the woman and dinner fell to himself. Now the woman was called Laurentina; lying that night with this ‘god’ in her arms, she heard him volunteer the remark that the first man she met when she left in the morning would see that she received from heaven the money she had just earned. She did in fact meet a rich young man called Taruntius who took her back home and eventually left her all his money. She in her turn, hoping to do an action pleasing to this god, left her inheritance to the Roman People, who then bestowed divine honours upon her.248

  As though it were simply not en
ough that Plato should be descended, on both sides, from the gods, with Neptune as the common ancestor, it was believed as a fact in Athens that, when Ariston had wished to consummate his love for the fair Perictione, he could not bring it off; he was warned in a dream by the god Apollo not to deflower her but to leave her a virgin until she had given birth… And they were Plato’s father and mother!249

  How many other accounts are there of similar cuckoldries procured by the gods against wretched human beings, or of husbands unjustly defamed to honour their children! In the religion of Mahomet the people believe that there are ‘Merlins’ in plenty – children, that is, begot without fathers, spiritual children divinely conceived in virgins’ wombs. (They are given a special name which, in their language, means just that.)250

  [B] We should note that no creature holds anything dearer than the kind of being that it is [C] (lions, eagles, dolphins value nothing above their own species) [B] and that every species reduces the qualities of everything else to analogies with its own. We can extend our characteristics or reduce them, but that is all we can do, since our intellect can do nothing and guess nothing except on the principle of such analogies; it is impossible for it to go beyond that point. [C] That explains Ancient philosophical conclusions such as these: Man is the most beautiful of all forms, so God must also have that form! – No one can be happy without virtue; virtue cannot be without reason: no reason can dwell elsewhere but in the human shape: therefore God is clad in a human shape! ‘Ita est informatum, anticipatum mentibus nostris ut homini, cum de Deo cogitet, forma occurrat humana’ [The mould and prejudice of our minds are such that when we think of God it is the human form which occurs to them].251

  [B] That is why Xenophanes said with a smile that if the beasts invent gods for themselves, as they probably do, they certainly make them like themselves, glorifying themselves – as we do.252 For why should a gosling not argue thus: ‘All the parts of the universe are there for me: the earth serves me to waddle upon, the sun to give me light; the heavenly bodies exist to breathe their influences upon me; the winds help me this way, the waters, that way: there is nothing which the vault of Heaven treats with greater favour than me. I am Nature’s darling: does not Man care for me, house me, serve me? It is for me that Man sows and grinds his corn; it is true that he eats me, but he also eats his fellow-men, and I eat the worms which kill him and eat him.’

  A crane could say the same – even more majestically on account of the freedom of its flight and its secure enjoyment of those fair and higher regions: [C] ‘Tam blanda conciliatrix et tam sui est lena ipsa natura’ [So flattering a procuress is Nature, such a seductress of herself].253

  [B] Well, if that is how it goes, the Universe and the Fates are all for us! The lightning flashes for us; the thunder crashes for us; the Creator and all his creatures exist just for us. We are the end which the entire Universe is aiming towards. Just examine the records of celestial affairs which Philosophy has kept for two thousand years and more: the gods have acted and spoken only for Man. Philosophy attributes no other concern to them, no other employment: they go to war against us,

  domitosque Herculea manu

  Telluris juvenes, unde periculum

  Fulgens contremuit domus

  Saturni veteris.

  [The Sons of Earth, those Titans at whose assault the shining house of ancient Saturn shook with fear, are defeated by the hand of Hercules.]

  The gods side with us in our civil disturbances, [C] to return our services, since we have so often taken sides in theirs:

  [B] Neptunus muros magnoque emota tridenti

  Fundamenta quatit, totamque a sedibus urbem

  Eruit. Hic Juno Scaeas saevissima portas

  Prima tenet.

  [With his mighty trident Neptune shakes the walls of Troy to their foundations and dashes the whole city to the ground; here, implacable Juno holds the Scaean gates.]

  [C] On their feast-days, the Caunians, jealous for the hegemony of their own gods, load weapons on their shoulders and charge around the outskirts of their city stabbing their swords into the air, fighting the foreign gods to the finish and driving them out of their lands.254

  [B] The powers of the gods are tailored to meet our human needs: this one cures horses, another, men; [C] this one, the plague, [B] that one, the ring-worm, that one, the cough; [C] this one cures one sort of mange; that one, another: ‘adeo minimis etiam rebus prava religio inserit deos’ [Thus does religion, when depraved, bring the gods even into the most trivial affairs]; [B] this god makes grapes to grow, another, garlic; this god is responsible for lechery, that one, for trade, [C] (each tribe of craftsmen has its god!); [B] this god’s sway and reputation lie in the East; that god’s lie in the West.

  hic illius arma,

  Hic currus fuit;

  [Here were her arms, here stood her chariot;]

  [C] O Sancte Apollo, qui umbilicum certum terrarum obtines;

  [O holy Apollo, thou that holdest sway in the Navel of the world;]

  Pallada Cecropidae, Minoia Creta Dianam,

  Vulcanum tellus Hipsipilea colit,

  Junonem Sparte Pelopeiadesque Mycenae;

  Pinigerum Fauni Maenalis ora caput;

  Mars Latio venerandus.

  [The descendants of Cecrops worship Pallas in Athens; Minoan Crete worships Diana; Lemnos, Vulcan; Sparta and Peloponnesian Mycenae, Juno. Pan, crowned with pine leaves, is venerated in Maenalus; and Mars in Latium.]

  [B] This god has only a single town or family under his sway, [C] that one lives alone, but the other one, willingly or from necessity, lives with his peers:

  Junctaque sunt magno templa nepotis avo.

  [The grandson’s temple is amalgamated with the temple of his grandsire.]255

  [B] Some of these gods are so mean and so lowly (for their number amounts to thirty-six thousand) that you need a pile of five or six of them to make a grain of corn – their various names are taken from this – [C] you need three for a door (one for the wood, one for the hinge, one for the doorstep); then you need four for an infant (protecting its cradle, its drink, its food and its sucking). The functions of some are uncertain and doubtful; others are not allowed into Paradise yet:

  Quos quoniam coeli nondum dignamur honore,

  Quas dedimus certe terras habitare sinamus.

  [Since some are not yet worthy to be honoured with paradise, we at least allow them to dwell in the lands we have given them.]

  There are nature-gods, poetic gods, civic gods; there are intermediary beings, half-way between the divine nature and the human, who are mediators, doing business between us and God and worshipped with an inferior, second-grade worship; they have innumerable titles and duties. Some are good: some are bad. [B] There are gods who are old and decrepit; there are gods who are mortal; for Chrysippus considered that all gods died in the last great conflagration of the world, except Jupiter.

  [C] Man invents a thousand amusing links of fellowship between himself and God. Is God not a fellow-Countryman! ‘Jovis incunabula Creten’ [Crete, cradle of Jupiter].256

  Here is the justification given after reflection by Scaevola, a great Pontifex, and by Varro, a great theologian (both ‘great’ in their time): it is necessary (they said) that people should not know many things which are true and should believe many things which are false, ‘cum veritatem qua liberetur, inquirat, credatur ei expedire, quod fallitur’ [since man only wants to find such truth as sets him free, it can be thought expedient for him to be deceived].257

  [B] Human eyes can only perceive things in accordance with such Forms as they know. [C] We forget what a tumble the wretched Phaëton took when, with a mortal hand, he tried to manage the reins of his father’s horses: our rashness causes our minds to take a similar plunge and to be bruised and broken as he was.258 [B] Ask Philosophy what the Sky and the Sun are composed of; what will she answer, if not iron, or, [C] with Anaxagoras, [B] stone, or some such everyday material? If you ask Zeno what Nature is, he replies Fire – an artif
icer having as its properties generative powers and regularity; if you ask Archimedes (the master of geometry, that science which grants itself precedence over all others in matters of truth and certainty) he replies that the Sun is a god of burning iron. What a fine idea to come out of geometrical demonstrations, with their beauty and compelling necessities! Not so compelling [C] and useful, though, [B] but that [C] Socrates thought you only need to know enough geometry to survey any land given or acquired; [B] the illustrious Polyaenus (formerly a famous teacher of geometry) came to despise its demonstrations as false and manifestly vain; that was after tasting the sweet fruits of the idle gardens of Epicurus.259