The Complete Essays (117 page)

19. On freedom of conscience

[Freedom of conscience – freedom of worship and association granted to a rival sect of Christians claiming to be the one true Church – was a new idea, only reluctantly accepted by the Kings of France (or, indeed, of England). Montaigne regards it as a
pis-aller,
forced on the government by the condition of France, exhausted by the Wars of Religion. Montaigne’s concern to present fairly the anti-Christian Emperor Julian the Apostate (which raised some eyebrows in the Vatican) shows how we can be just even to enemies of our religion. In fact Montaigne’s judgement is that of the Christian poet Prudentius, whose childhood was spent under Julian. This chapter continues the reflections of the previous one on the great Ancients’ indifference to invective. It ends with a quip borrowed from Montaigne’s favourite writer of Latin comedies, Terence. It had long been going the rounds in a Pasquinade; here it applies to the stalemate which led to the proclamation of Henry III and of Catherine de’ Medici in 1576, tolerating the Huguenots, except in Paris – since they could not be crushed.]

[A] It is quite normal to see good intentions, when not carried out with moderation, urging men to actions which are truly vicious. In the present quarrel which is driving France to distraction with its civil wars, the better and more wholesome party is certainly the one upholding the religion and constitution of our country. Now among the men of honour who support it (for I am not talking about people who use it as a pretext for settling private scores, satisfying their greed or courting the favour of princes but about those who support it out of true zeal for their religion and a sacred desire to defend the peace and good estate of their homeland) even among such men as these you can find many who, once passion drives them beyond the bounds of reason, take decisions which are unjust, violent and rash.

It is certain that, in those early days when our religion began to be backed by the authority of law, zeal provided many with weapons to use against all sorts of pagan books, causing the learned public to suffer staggering losses. I reckon that this inordinate zeal caused more harm to literature than all the fires started by the Barbarians.

Cornelius Tacitus can bear witness to this. His kinsman the Emperor Tacitus expressly commanded all the libraries of the world to be furnished with copies of his
Histories
, yet not a single one of them wholly escaped the
meticulous search of those who sought to destroy them simply because they contain five or six wretched sentences hostile to our religion.
¹

They went further, heaping false praise upon all the Emperors who favoured us and completely condemning all the actions of our adversaries. That can readily be seen from the case of the Emperor Julian, dubbed the Apostate. He was a truly great and outstanding person, appropriate enough for a man whose mind was steeped in philosophical argument by which he claimed to order all his activities. And indeed he left behind examples of model behaviour in every single field of virtue.

As for his chastity, his whole life affords clear testimony of it. A similar characteristic is ascribed to him as to Alexander and Scipio: he did not even want to look at any of the many beautiful women he captured. And that was in the flower of his manhood, as when the Parthians killed him he was only thirty-one.
²

As for justice, he took care to hear the contending parties himself. He was curious about what religion was professed by those who appeared before him and asked them about it; yet the hatred he bore against our own never turned the scales of his justice. He personally enacted several good laws and severely pruned the taxes and imposts raised by his predecessors.

We have two good historians who were eye-witnesses of his actions. One of them, Ammianus Marcellinus, bitterly reproaches him several times in his
History
for barring Christian rhetoricians and grammarians from the institutes of learning and forbidding them to teach. Marcellinus said that he could wish that deed were buried in silence. It is probable that if Julian had done anything harsher against us Marcellinus would not have overlooked it, since he was well disposed towards our side.

Julian was an enemy harsh towards us, it is true, but not cruel. Even our own side tell the following tale about him: when he was walking one day near the town of Chalcedon the local bishop, Maris, dared to rail at him as a traitor to Christ. He simply replied, ‘Go away, you wretched man, and lament the loss of your eyesight!’ The bishop retorted: ‘I thank Jesus Christ for having taken away my sight; it stops me seeing your insolent face!’

Julian, so they say, was simply acting the patient philosopher.

In any case what he did then cannot be squared with the cruelties he is said to have used against us. According to Eutropius, my other witness, he was an enemy of Christianity but without shedding blood.

To return to his justice: the only reproach to be made against it is the severe treatment he meted out at the beginning of his reign to those who supported the party of Constantius, his predecessor.

As for sobriety, he always lived a soldierly life. Even in times of total peace he dined as though he were in training and accustoming himself to the austerities of war. He was so watchful that he divided the night into three or four parts, giving only the smallest of them over to sleep. The remainder he devoted either to checking up in person on his army and his Imperial guard, or else to study. Among his other rare qualities he greatly excelled in all branches of literature.

It is said of Alexander the Great that when he lay down for a rest he kept sleep from debauching his thinking and studies by having a basin placed beside him; he then held one of his hands outside the couch clasping a little copper ball. If he fell asleep his fingers let go of the ball which clanged into the basin and woke him up.
³
Julian’s mind was so intent on what he was about and (thanks to his exceptional abstemiousness) so unclouded, that he could do without such tricks.

As for his competence in military matters, he was astonishingly endowed with all the requisites of a great general. He spent most of his time engaged in fighting, mostly together with us here in France against the Germans and the Franks.

There is hardly a man on record who experienced more danger or who risked his own life more often. His death was something like that of Epaminondas, since he was struck by a dart and tried to pull it out.
⁴
He would have done so, only the edge was sharp, cutting his hand and weakening his grasp. He kept insisting that he be carried as he was into the thick of the fray to encourage his soldiers. Even without him they fought that battle most courageously until nightfall parted the armies.

To philosophy he owed his remarkable contempt for his own life and for all things human. He firmly believed in the immortality of the soul.

In matters of religion he was altogether vicious.
⁵
He was named the Apostate for having abandoned ours, but the most likely opinion seems
to me to be that he never took it to his heart, merely pretending to do so and obeying the law until he had the Empire under his thumb. In his own religion he was so superstitious that even his contemporaries laughed at him: they said that if he had managed to gain victory over the Parthians his sacrifices would have exhausted the world’s entire stock of bulls!

He was besotted with the art of divination, lending his authority to every sort of augury. As he lay dying he said, among other things, that he was grateful to the gods for not wanting death to take him by surprise (having long since warned him of the place and time of his end) and for not giving him a soft relaxed death more suitable for idle delicate people, nor yet a death which was long, languishing and painful; he thanked them for having found him worthy of dying in that noble fashion, in the flush of his victories and the flower of his glory. He had a vision such as that of Marcus Brutus: it first came to threaten him in Gaul and appeared to him again in Persia when he was on the point of dying.

[C] These words have been attributed to him as he was struck down: ‘Thou hast conquered, Nazarean!’ or sometimes, ‘Be satisfied, Nazarean!’
⁶
But if my authorities had believed that, they would not have overlooked them: they were present in his army and noted the slightest of his final words and gestures. Nor would they have overlooked certain miracles now associated with his death.

[A] To get back to the theme of my subject: Marcellinus says that Julian had long nursed paganism in his heart but dared not disclose this fact, since his army was made up of Christians. When at last he found himself strong enough to dare to proclaim his intentions, he ordered the temples of the gods to be reopened and he assayed every means of restoring the worship of idols.

Finding the laity of Constantinople torn apart and the bishops of the Christian Church divided, to achieve his purposes he made them appear before him in his palace, warned them to damp down the civil strife at once and commanded that every person, without let or fear, should follow his own religion.
⁷

He urged his case strongly, hoping that the licence he gave them would increase their divisions and schismatic plottings, so preventing the people
from uniting together and strengthening their resistance to him by their harmony and unanimity. He had assayed from his experience with some of the Christians that no beast in the world is more to be feared by Man than Man.
⁸

Those are approximately his very words.

It is worth considering that, in order to stir up the flames of civil strife, the Emperor Julian exploited the self-same remedy of freedom of conscience which our kings now employ to stifle them.

On the one side you could say that to slacken the reins and allow the parties to hold on to their opinions is the way to sow dissension broadcast: it is all but equivalent to lending a hand to increase it, since there is no obstacle to bar its course and no legal constraint to rein it back.

For the other side you could say that to slacken the reins and allow the parties to hold on to their opinions is to soften and weaken them by ease and laxity; it blunts the goad, whereas rareness, novelty and difficulty sharpen it.

Yet for the honour and piety of our kings I prefer to believe that, since they could not do what they wished, they pretended to wish to do what they could.
⁹

20. We can savour nothing pure

[A chapter particularly interesting for the light it throws on melancholy. Some of Montaigne’s quotations derive directly from Justus Lipsius.]

[A] The feebleness of our condition means that we can make habitual use of nothing in its natural unsophisticated purity. The very elements which we enjoy are corrupt: so too are the metals – even gold must be alloyed with some other substance to make it serviceable to us. [C] Nor could the simple virtue which Ariston and Pyrrho, and the Stoics too, taught as the aim of our life serve that end without some admixture, any more than the hedonism of Aristippus and the Cyrenaics. [A] Of the pleasures and goods which we enjoy, not one is exempt from being compounded with some evil and injury.

[B]
medio de fonte leporum
Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat
.

[from the very fount of our delights there surges something bitter which gives us distress even among the flowers.]
¹

The greatest of our pleasures has an air of groaning and lamentation. Could you not say that it was languishing from affliction? Indeed when we forge images of it at its highest reach we paint its face with sickly epithets and dolorous qualities: languor, faintness, weakness, debility,
morbidezza
,
²
which greatly witnesses to their common blood and consubstantiality. [C] Deep joy has more gravity than gaiety; the highest and fullest happiness, more calm than playfulness.
‘Ipsa fælicitas, se nisi temperat, premit.’
[Even joy overwhelms us, unless it be tempered.]
³
Ease crushes us. [A] That is what is meant by that line of ancient Greek poetry: ‘The gods sell us all the
pleasures which they give us’; that is to say, none that they give us is pure and perfect: we can only buy them at the price of some suffering. [C] Pleasure and travail, so unlike in their natures, are yet fellows by some inexplicable natural relationship. Socrates said that some god or other made an assay at fusing pain and pleasure into one mass: when he could not achieve this he decided at least to couple them by their tails.
⁴

[B] Metrodorus said that sadness was not unalloyed with a certain pleasure. I do not know whether he meant something else: personally I can readily think that there is an element of purpose, consent and complacency in feeding oneself on melancholy – I mean, quite apart from ambition, which can also be mixed up with it. There is some hint as of delicate sweetmeats which smiles at us and flatters us in the very bosom of melancholy. Are there not some complexions which make it their only food?

Est quædam flere voluptas
.
[There is a certain pleasure in our tears.]

[C] And Attalus says in Seneca that the memory of those loved ones we have lost tastes pleasant, like the bitterness of very old wine:

Minister vetuli, puer, falerni,
Ingere mi calices amariores!    

[Butler serving Falernian wine! Pour me out your bitterest cups!]

– like those apples which are both sharp and sweet.
⁵

[B] Nature reveals this alloy to us; painters hold that the same wrinkling movements of our faces which serve to show weeping also show laughter. Indeed. Watch the picture in progress before either emotion has been finally delineated: you are in doubt towards which it is tending. And the extremes of laughter are mixed with tears.

[C]
‘Nullum sine auctoramento malum est.’
[There is no evil without its compensations.]
⁶
When I picture a man besieged by all the enjoyments which he could desire – say that all his members were forever seized of a
pleasure equal to that of sexual intercourse at its climax – I see him collapsing under the weight of his joy; and I can perceive him quite incapable of bearing pleasure so pure, so constant and so total: truly, once there, he runs away and naturally hastens to escape from it as from some narrow passage where he cannot find solid ground and fears to be engulfed.

[B] When I scrupulously make my confession to myself I find that the best of the goodness in me has some vicious stain. And I am afraid that Plato, even in his most flourishing virtue – (and I say this who am the most genuine and loyal admirer of it, as of all virtues of similar stamp) if he had put his ear close to it [C] (and he did put his ear close to it) [B] – he would have heard in it some sinister sound of a human alloy, even though it were a muffled sound which only he could detect. Man, totally and throughout, is but patches and many-coloured oddments.

[A] The very laws of justice cannot subsist without some admixture of injustice; and Plato says that those who claim to remove all the improprieties and inconsistencies from the laws are undertaking to cut off the Hydra’s head.
⁷
Tacitus says:
‘Omne magnum exemplum habet aliquid ex iniquo, quod contra singulos utilitate publica rependitur.’
[Every case of exemplary punishment is unfair to individuals: that is counterbalanced by the public good.]

[B] It is likewise true that for the usages of the life and service of the common weal there can be an excess of purity and discernment in our wits; such penetrating clarity has too much subtleness and inquisitiveness. We must weigh down our wits and blunt their edge to render them more obedient to precedent and practice; we must coarsen them and darken them to give them the proportions of this earthy darksome life. That is why the more commonplace and less tense of wits are more appropriate to the conduct of affairs and more successful. The high inquisitive opinions of philosophy prove unsuited in practice. Such sharp vigour of soul and such supple restless whirring motions trouble our negotiations. We must manage the affairs of men more rough-and-readily, more superficially, leaving a good and better share to the rights of Fortune. There is no need to cast light so deeply and keenly on to our affairs. You lose yourself in them by contemplating so much varied brilliance and such diverse forms: [C]
‘Voluntantibus res inter se pugnantes obtorpuerant animi.’
[Minds wallowing in mutual contradictions are benumbed.]
⁸

That is what the Ancients said of Simonides. When King Hiero posed him a question to answer which he had several days to meditate upon, his powers of thought presented him with so many keen and subtle considerations that, doubting which was the most likely, he totally despaired of the truth.
⁹

[B] He who seeks out all the circumstances and grasps their consequences impedes his choice. A modest talent suffices and can equally well carry into execution matters of great and little weight. Note how those who best manage their estates are the least able to explain how they do so, while the most skilful talkers are as often as not useless at it. I know one man who is excellent at talking about all kinds of estate-management and at describing it but who has let a hundred thousand pounds of income slip through his fingers. I know another who speaks and deliberates better than any man in his council-chamber; never in the world was there a more beautiful display of intelligence and of competence: yet when it comes to practice his servants find he is quite other than that – I mean, even leaving aside bad luck.