The Complete Essays (8 page)

Socrates and Plato, are, up to a point, good guides for that Elect: Aristotle is a safer guide for all the rest of us. And so (despite his own moral weakness and his inflated tongue) is Cicero. That Man should welcome his body and that his soul should love it, are ideas which Montaigne found in Cicero, in Erasmus, in Raymond Sebond and even, surprisingly, in Lucretius. From Raymond Sebond directly, no doubt, Montaigne derived the idea that the body and soul should live as in a loving marriage. Marriage he conceives of course as Christians did: as a mutually loving union of two unequals, each with duties to the other, each helping the other until death them do part. For either to neglect its duties, for either to regret or neglect its rightful pleasures or those of its partner, is to fall into the sin of ingratitude. During this life the soul needs the body, and the body needs the soul. As a Christian Montaigne knows that the body itself shares unimaginably in the afterlife. Except for a chosen few, the plain and explicit duty of each human being is to see that the body helps the soul; the soul (even more so), the body.

This civilized and humanizing concept of duty is supported by a long quotation from St Augustine’s
City of God
(XIV, 5). That passage was well chosen, for it is drawn from a section in which Augustine censures the Manichees (who condemned matter, and hence the body, as evil). St Augustine also, as Montaigne does, draws support at this point from Cicero, whose treatises
On the ends of good and evil
and
On duties
, as well as the
Tusculan Disputations
, are alluded to here in Renaissance editions of the
City of God
. Those are specifically the treatises of Cicero on which Montaigne came to draw. Montaigne might not like Cicero’s chatter, but he owed a great deal to his wisdom.

An elect group of Christian mystics are vouchsafed the gift of rapture. That gift of grace segregates them from all the rest of humanity, including philosophers and sages. Montaigne’s conclusion is that all other human beings should acknowledge their humanity; acknowledge that even their greatest thoughts and discoveries are not all that important; acknowledge that there is ample time for the soul to enjoy its pabulum once the body has been fed and its few necessities wisely catered for. After all, even when a man is perched high on a lofty throne, what part of his body is he seated upon? Everything for mankind is
‘selon’
, an expression still current in popular French but strangely technical nowadays in English. Everything is
secundum quid
, ‘according to something’. Montaigne wishes to be judged, he says,
‘selon moy’
, that is
‘secundum me’
, ‘in accordance with myself’, ‘according to my standards’. If a man insists upon living in court he will have to dodge about and use his elbows, living ‘according to this, according
to that and according to something else’. The wiser man will live (in harmony with creation, of which he knows he forms a part)
secundum naturam
, ‘according to nature’. All schools of philosophy tell him to do so, but none now tells him how to do so, having obscured Nature’s footsteps with their artifice. As always art or artifice is the antithesis of nature.

Classical philosophy, not least among the Latins, had taught men how to die. Yet the body and soul will know how to separate well enough when the time comes. Man needs to learn how to live! Meanwhile old age can be indulged and the Muses can bring joy and comfort. But the very last words of the
Essays
convey a warning: old men may go gaga. (Even the wisdom of Socrates, we were told, is at the mercy of the saliva of some slavering rabid cur.) At the end of his quest Montaigne gave, as a philosopher well might, the last word to Latin poetry, to Horace evoking the patron deity of health and the Muses. Montaigne had learned how to come to terms with ill-health and was grateful for pain-free interludes. He had schooled his soul to help its body over its bouts of anguish. He had gratefully discovered in old age that the Muses continued to make life worth living. The Muses, for a sick old man, meant mainly books and such social intercourse as still came his way, now that he had learned detachment and so prepared himself to part from those he loved. But Horace’s words evoke the fear of fears for a man of Montaigne’s turn of mind: senile dementia: and his last word of all encapsulates the dread of old folk throughout the ages: want – not in his case want of food or money or position but of what the Muses bring:
‘nec cythera carentem’
.

ALL SOULS COLLEGE
OXFORD

ALL SOULS DAY, 1989

Note on the Text

There is no such thing as a definitive edition of the
Essays of Michel de Montaigne
. One has to choose. The
Essays
are a prime example of the expanding book.

The text translated here is an eclectic one, deriving mainly from the corpus of editions clustering round the impressive
Edition municipale
of Bordeaux (1906–20) edited by a team led by Fortunat Strowski. This was further edited and adapted by Pierre Villey (1924); V.-L. Saulnier of the Sorbonne again revised, re-edited and adapted the work for the Presses Universitaires de France (1965). Useful editions were also published by J. Plattard (Société ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1947) as well as by A. Thibaudet and M. Rat for the Pléiade (1962). These editions largely supersede all previous ones and have collectively absorbed their scholarship.

I have also used the posthumous editions of 1595, 1598 and 1602 and, since it is good and readily available at All Souls, the
Edition nouvelle
procured in 1617 by Mademoiselle Marie de Gournay, the young admirer and bluestocking to whom Montaigne gave a quasi-legal status as a virtually adopted daughter, a
fille d’alliance
.

The Annotations

Marie de Gournay first contributed to the annotation of Montaigne by tracing the sources of his verse and other quotations, providing translations of them, and getting a friend to supply headings in the margins.

From that day to this, scholars have added to them. The major source has long been the fourth volume of the Strowski edition, the work of Pierre Villey. It is a masterpiece of patient scholarship and makes recourse to earlier editions largely unnecessary. Most notes of most subsequent editions derive from it rather than from even the fuller nineteenth-century editions subsumed into it. This translation is no exception, though I have made quite a few changes and added my own. Montaigne knew some of his authors very well indeed, but many of his
exempla
and philosophical sayings were widely known from compendia such as Erasmus’
Adages
and
Apophthegmata
. His judgements on women and marriage are sometimes paralleled in a widely read legal work on the subject, the
De legibus connubialibus
of Rabelais’ friend Andreas Tiraquellus. Similarly some of his classical and scriptural quotations and philosophical arguments in religious contexts are to be found in such treatises as the
De Anima
of Melanchthon or in the theological books of clergymen of his own Church writing in his own day. I have taken care to point out some of these possible sources, since Montaigne’s ideas are better understood when placed in such contexts.

References to Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca are given more fully than usual. Although Montaigne read Plato in Latin, references are given to the Greek text (except in ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’) since most readers will not have access to Ficino’s Latin translation. References to Aristotle too are always given to the Greek: that will enable them to be more easily traced in such bilingual editions as the Loeb Classics. For Plutarch’s
Moralia
detailed references are given to the first edition of Amyot’s translation (
Les Oeuvres morales et meslées
, Paris, 1572); for Plutarch’s
Lives
however only general references are given under their English titles (many may like to read them in North’s
Plutarch
).

For historical writers of Montaigne’s own time only brief references are given. All of them derive from Pierre Villey’s studies in which the reader will find much relevant detail:
Les Livres d’histoire modernes utilisés par
Montaigne
, Paris, 1908, and
Les sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne
, Paris, 1908 (second edition 1933). Those books are monuments of scholarship and have not been superseded.

The classical quotations (which from the outset vary slightly from edition to edition of the
Essays
) are normally given as they appear in the Villey/Saulnier edition: most readers discover that the quickest way to find a passage in another edition or translation is to hunt quickly through the chapter looking for the nearest quotation. Once found in the Villey/Saulnier edition a passage can be followed up in the Leake
Concordance
and traced to other standard editions.

My studies of Montaigne have been greatly helped by the kindness of the Librarian of University College London, the Reverend Frederick Friend, who has authorized several volumes to be made available to me on a very long loan. I am most grateful to him and to University College London.

I am most grateful to those readers who have suggested corrections or improvements, many of which have been included in this 1994 reprinting. A special word of thanks is due to Mr Jan Stolpe, the distinguished translator of Montaigne into Swedish, and to Donald Upton Esq., Dr Jon Haarberg, Dr Andrew Calder, M. Gilbert de Botton, Dr Bernard Curchod, Professor David Wiggins, Mrs Thalia Martin and Dr Jean Birrell.

*

Postscript:

Since my ordination by the Bishop of Oxford in 1993 I am often asked if I find Montaigne Montaigne’s arguments for his Church still convincing. Clearly not: I was not ordained in his Church, but I do think that Montaigne can still succeed in getting many to take Christianity – and religion in general – seriously.

M.A.S. All Souls College, Oxford.

June 2003.

Note on the Translation

I have tried to convey Montaigne’s sense and something of his style, without archaisms but without forcing him into an unsuitable, demotic English. I have not found that his meaning is more loyally conveyed by clinging in English to the grammar and constructions of his French: French and English achieve their literary effect by different means. On the other hand I have tried to translate his puns: they clearly mattered to him, and it was fun doing so. Montaigne’s sentences are often very long; where the sense does not suffer I have left many of them as they are. It helps to retain something of his savour.

It is seldom possible to translate one word in one language by one only in another. I have striven to do so in two cases vital for the understanding of Montaigne. The first is
essai, essayer
and the like: I have rendered these by
essay
or
assay
or the equivalent verbs even if that meant straining English a little. The second is
opinion
. In Montaigne’s French, as often in English,
opinion
does not imply that the idea is true: rather the contrary, as in Plato.

Montaigne’s numerous quotations are seldom integrated grammatically into his sentences. However long they may be we are meant to read them as asides – mentally holding our breath. I have respected that. To do otherwise would be to rewrite him.

When in doubt, I have given priority to what I take to be the meaning, though never, I hope, losing sight of readability.

Of versions of the Classics Jowett remarked that, ‘the slight personification arising out of Greek genders is the greatest difficulty in translation.’ In Montaigne’s French this difficulty is even greater since his sense of gender enables him to flit in and out of various degrees of personification in ways not open to writers of English. Where the personification is certain or a vital though implied element of the meaning I have sometimes used a capital letter and personal pronouns, etc., to produce a similar effect.