The Complete Essays (5 page)

There is enough light [Pascal wrote] to lighten the Elect and enough darkness to make them humble. There is enough darkness to blind the Reprobate and enough light to damn them and render them inexcusable.
St Augustine
,
Montaigne, Sebond.
¹⁰

Montaigne follows Sebond in dwelling on the errors and the chaotic jumble of ideas expounded by those unenlightened wise men, vainly seeking certain truth with their human reason from the Book of Creatures: but he does not consider their opinions to be all equally ‘inexcusable’. Nevertheless he asserted that ‘human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially when she concerns herself with matters divine’ (‘Apology’, p. 581). Christian mysteries they never grasped as Christians can. But what about God’s ‘Eternal Wisdom and his Godhead’?

A standard doctrine was, that a grasp of the elements of good morality was possible for all men, Christian or otherwise, though grace was always required for Salvation (even the Mosaic Law would not suffice by itself). That good morality was achieved by pagans is shown by Socrates or by other heroes of Montaigne, such as Epaminondas. (The great moral platitudes are never put in doubt anywhere in the Essays.)

Montaigne specifically finds pagan monotheism at its best not ‘true’ (in the sense of attaining with certainty to the Christian revelations) but nevertheless ‘most excusable’. This is not a correction to St Paul’s teaching in Romans I:20, but a gloss on it.
¹¹

Montaigne touches so lightly on some crucial theological points that readers may miss their import. Yet they can be vital, not least in the ‘Apology’, which is centred on religious knowledge and doubt. In at least one respect, Montaigne’s conception of God was that of St Augustine, of many medieval and Renaissance thinkers, and of Pascal: God is a Hidden God, a
Deus absconditus
who hides himself from Man and therefore can only be known from his self-revelation. Montaigne lightly but specifically attributes that concept to St Paul. When in Athens, Paul saw an altar dedicated to ‘an unknown God’ – Athenian philosophers could get that far. In the ‘Apology’ those words appear as ‘a
hidden
, unknown God’. That enables Paul (in the ‘Apology’) to find the Athenian worshippers to be ‘most excusable’ (‘Apology’, p. 573). The same doctrine appears in the medieval theologian Nicolas of Lyra.
¹²

Such deft and telling use of words should scotch the notion that Montaigne was theologically naïve. (No theologians who had studied his translation of Sebond could make such a gaffe.) And in this case it should help to undermine the curiously coarse interpretation of the ‘Apology’ as a work championing ‘fideism’, one, that is, which denies that there ever can be any rational basis for Christianity since all depends on unfettered faith – faith as trust and faith as credulity. For Montaigne there is a hierarchy of religious opinion among the pagans. (The ‘Apology’ ends with one of the most impressive of them all: Plutarch’s.) Yet Montaigne held with Sebond that even the best of pagans failed to penetrate through to most of the vital truths contained in the Book of Creatures.
¹³

The defence of Raymond Sebond against the second charge – that his arguments are weak – falls into several parts, all marked by varying degrees of scepticism. By turning his sceptical gaze on Man and his cogitations, Montaigne denies that it is possible to find better arguments than Sebond’s anywhere whatsoever. This assertion is governed (as are all the long answers to the second objection) by a declaration of intent which applies to all the many pages which are to follow:

Let us consider for a while Man in isolation – Man with no outside help, armed with no arms but his own and stripped of that grace and knowledge of God in which consist his dignity, his power and the very ground of his being. (‘Apology’, p. 502)

Today the very word scepticism implies for many a mocking or beady-eyed disbelief in the claims of the Church to intellectual validity. It did not do so then. You can be sceptical about the claims of the Church: or you can be sceptical about rational attempts to discredit them…

The unenlightened rivals to Sebond have both their hands tied firmly behind their back. Sebond has grace and illumination: they have not. In this second, longer part of the ‘Apology’, comments are occasionally addressed to this unilluminated ignorance on the basis of revealed wisdom, but the ignorance remains unilluminated and so can only fortuitously, randomly and hesitantly ever arrive at the goal gracefully reached by Sebond’s natural theology. That is what makes the
Essays
as a whole so interesting. Instead of calmly orthodox certainty, we are exhilarated by following all the highways and byways and sidetracks travelled along by Man’s questing spirit in his search for truth about God, Man and the Universe. Montaigne did his job thoroughly: that is why the
Essays
were pillaged for anti-Christian arguments by the
beaux esprits
of later centuries.

Montaigne is so lightly untechnical that it is easy to overlook that, in a fascinatingly personal and idiosyncratic way, he is saying what learned Latin treatises also taught about the opinions of fallen man. Since sixteenth-century Jesuits appreciated Montaigne, one could cite Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., who (with the help of St Augustine’s
City of God
) was struck by the ‘monstrous opinions’ of those unenlightened pagans who ‘even went so far as to make gods of vines and garlick’.
¹⁴
But where Bellarmine finds bleak error Montaigne finds – also – fascinating and inevitable variety.

Montaigne answers the second lot of criticism of Sebond by first crushing human pride: no purely human reasons can show conclusively (as Sebond can) that Man – for all his ‘reason’ – is in any way higher than the other animals. They, too, like us, have reasoning powers. They have instincts, it is true, but so do we. For this crushing of Man’s pride Montaigne first drew mainly on his favourite writer. It seems that Plutarch
so dominated the first outline of the ‘Apology’ that Montaigne could even assert that it owed everything to him, a remark he removed once he realized how far he had moved in indebtedness to Sextus, to Cicero, to Aristotle and to Plato (‘Apology’, p. 629, note 331).

Parts of this praise of the beasts to humble Man’s pride have acquired a certain quaintness: zoology has been revolutionized since the Renaissance. Moreover, Montaigne, by long-established convention, cited the weeping war-horses of the poets or the tale of Androcles and the Lion as though they were zoological and historical fact. His loyal dogs commit suicide or haunt their masters’ tombs. In his own day, however, his animal science was powerfully persuasive. (Well into the next century, his elephant lore is repeated by Salomon de Priezac in his
Histoire des Eléphants
, Paris, 1650.) As codified by his learned clerical disciple Pierre de Charron in his book
On wisdom
, Montaigne’s attitude to the beasts became central to some of the great controversies among the most famous philosophers and theologians of the seventeenth century. In its own way it even had something of the appeal of Darwin. By a very different route it forced people to re-examine in anger or humility what place Man occupied in the Book of Nature among all the other creatures. And Montaigne emphasizes that the common examples of ants, bees and guide-dogs are just as persuasive as exotic rarities.

Pride is the sin of sins: intellectually it leads to Man’s arrogantly taking mere opinion for knowledge. In terms which were common to many Renaissance writers, Montaigne emphasized that ‘there is a plague (a
peste
) on Man: the opinion that he knows something.’
¹⁵

This pride and this trust in opinion are all part of Man’s vanity (of that vain emptiness evoked by Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament book from which were derived several sceptical inscriptions in Montaigne’s library). The ‘Apology’ briefly contrasts such ‘vanity’ with the assurance supplied by ‘Christian Folly’ (which proclaims that God’s true wisdom is to be found in the lowly, the simple, the humble and the meek).
¹⁶

‘Christian folly’ was a major theme in Renaissance thought and had been
long allied to scepticism. Montaigne was not writing the
Essays
in a void. More specifically, the general thrust of his defence of Sebond would have been evident to any reader of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s declamation
On the Weakness and Vanity of all Sciences and on the Excellence of the Word of God
(Cologne, 1530). It was reprinted in Montaigne’s time; he drew on it heavily. It continues a tradition of Christian scepticism to be found in a fifteenth-century scholar such as Valla, who influenced Erasmus, but which is more fully developed in Gian-Francesco Pico della Mirandola’s
Examination of the Vanity of the Doctrines of the Pagans and of the Truth of Christian Teachings
(Mirandola, 1520).
¹⁷

These were major and successful books; Montaigne also drew heavily on a work of 1557, unsuccessful enough to be remaindered (freshened up with a new title page in 1587): the
Dialogues
of Guy de Brués. The magic of Montaigne’s art in the
Essays
and the originality of his thought enabled him to take ideas and matter lying about in Latin tomes or even in unsaleable treatises and then metamorphose them into the very stuff of his most readable pages.
¹⁸

That certainly applies to his scepticism.

Scepticism is a classical Greek philosophy. Its full force was rediscovered towards the end of the sixteenth century. As such it plays a vital role in Renaissance thought; but the essential doctrines of scepticism (including some of the basic arguments and examples which appear in the
Essays
) were known much earlier, from Cicero’s
Academics
and from critical assessments of scepticism (sometimes associated with judgements on the proto-Sceptic Protagoras) in both Plato and Aristotle. Cicero’s
Academics
is the easiest to read for lovers of Montaigne (who find that whole passages have been integrated into the
Essays)
. So are major borrowings from other works of Cicero, including
On the Nature of the Gods
and the
Tusculan Disputations
. But the influence of Plato and Aristotle goes far deeper.

Up to a point Cicero was a good guide, but less exciting than Sextus
Empiricus and the intellectual stimulus of Plato and Aristotle.
¹⁹
Clearly, Sextus’
Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes
dominates parts of the ‘Apology’, yet appears in no other chapter of the
Essays
. (This has helped support the contention that, when writing the ‘Apology’, Montaigne went through an acute crisis of scepticism, symbolized by his device of the poised scales with
Que sçay-je?
; What do I know?) By any standards the publication in 1562 by Henri Estienne of the first edition of the original Greek text of Sextus’ account of Pyrrho’s scepticism was a major event. (Montaigne probably relied chiefly on his Latin translation – also found in the second edition of 1567, but quotations from the original Greek enlivened his library.) Gentian Hervet in his introduction to Sextus’ other work,
Against the Mathematicians
(or
Against the Professors
) (1569) helps us to read Montaigne in context. For Hervet, too, the works of Sextus are an excellent weapon against heretics: Pyrrho’s scepticism, by reducing all Man’s knowledge to opinion, deprives heretics of any criterion of truth. Montaigne did the same in the pages of the ‘Apology’ which follow upon his address to his patroness (p. 628).

However thorough-going the Pyrrhonism in these final pages, scepticism remained for Montaigne – as for many others – a weapon of last resort: a way of demolishing the arguments of would-be infallible adversaries. There was a price to pay, though. The Pyrrhonian method leaves you with no purely human certainties either! But only much later did that worry many Roman Catholics. Among writers variously attracted to Pyrrhonism were St Francis of Sales (who admired Montaigne’s uprightness) and Maldonat (Montaigne’s Jesuit friend).

Opinion is not knowledge. Pyrrhonist sceptics revelled in that fact. Sextus Empiricus systematized that contention into a powerful engine of doubt which helped a wise man to suspend his judgement and so to attain tranquillity of mind.

The rediscovery of the works of Sextus gave a fresh impetus to Renaissance scepticism, but it did not create it; Sextus fell on welcome ears: already in 1546 Rabelais has his wise old evangelical King delighted to find that all the best Philosophers are Pyrrhonists nowadays.

It is deliberately paradoxical that the poet who dominates the Pyrrhonist
pages of the ‘Apology’ should be Lucretius. That Latin poet of the first century
BC
was a follower of Epicurus and remains our principal source for Epicurean doctrine in the realm of physical nature. But Epicureanism is flatly opposed to Pyrrhonist scepticism. Far from asserting that all man’s boasted knowledge is mere opinion, it holds that the senses give Man access to infallible certainty. The point is made clearly and sharply in Denis Lambin’s edition of Lucretius, which Montaigne read with marked attention. (What seems to be Montaigne’s own copy, annotated in his hand, was recently recognized as such by Paul Quarrie when he bought a Lambin
Lucretius
for Eton College library, where that book now is.) For Lucretius, truth about things must be accessible to our minds from sense-impressions: if they are not, all claims to know truth collapse. So even the Sun can be only a trifle larger than appears to our sight. If we cannot explain why, we must nevertheless make no concessions to those who deny this. Such a view flew in the face of traditional and solid scientific knowledge. Montaigne delights in citing Lucretius’ own words to undermine Epicurean assertions.
²⁰
But Lucretius also serves to undermine other ideas widely supposed to be true – and to warn against superstition.