The imagery he used was unusual, but the idea of inscribing such personal statements on medals or jetons was not: it was a fashion of the time, and functioned both as an aide-mémoire and as a token of belonging or identity. Had Montaigne been a young man of the early twenty-first century instead of the sixteenth, he would probably have had it done as a tattoo.
(illustration credit i7.1)
If the medal was indeed designed to remind him of his principles, it worked: Skepticism guided him at work, in his home life, and in his writing. The Essays are suffused with it: he filled his pages with words such as “perhaps,” “to some extent,” “I think,” “It seems to me,” and so on—words which, as Montaigne said himself, “soften and moderate the rashness of our propositions,” and which embody what the critic Hugo Friedrich has called his philosophy of “unassumingness.” They are not extra flourishes; they are Montaigne’s thought, at its purest. He never tired of such thinking, or of boggling his own mind by contemplating the millions of lives that had been lived through history and the impossibility of knowing the truth about them. “Even if all that has come down to us by report from the past should be true and known by someone, it would be less than nothing compared with what is unknown.” How puny is the knowledge of even the most curious person, he reflected, and how astounding the world by comparison. To quote Hugo Friedrich again, Montaigne had a “deep need to be surprised by what is unique, what cannot be categorized, what is mysterious.”
And of all that was mysterious, nothing amazed him more than himself, the most unfathomable phenomenon of all. Countless times, he noticed himself changing an opinion from one extreme to the other, or shifting from emotion to emotion within seconds.
My footing is so unsteady and so insecure, I find it so vacillating and ready to slip, and my sight is so unreliable, that on an empty stomach I feel myself another man than after a meal. If my health smiles upon me, and the brightness of a beautiful day, I am a fine fellow; if I have a corn bothering my toe, I am surly, unpleasant, and unapproachable.
Even his simplest perceptions cannot be relied upon. If he has a fever or has taken medicine, everything tastes different or appears with different colors. A mild cold befuddles the mind; dementia would knock it out entirely. Socrates himself could be rendered a vacant idiot by a stroke or brain damage, and if a rabid dog bit him, he would talk nonsense. The dog’s saliva could make “all philosophy, if it were incarnate, raving mad.” And this is just the point: for Montaigne, philosophy is incarnate. It lives in individual, fallible humans; therefore, it is riddled with uncertainty. “The philosophers, it seems to me, have hardly touched this chord.”
And what of the perceptions of different species? Montaigne correctly guesses (as Sextus did before him) that other animals see colors differently from humans. Perhaps it is we, not they, who see them “wrongly.” We have no way of knowing what the colors really are. Animals have faculties that are weak or lacking in us, and maybe some of these are essential to a full understanding of the world. “We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence.”
This seemingly casual remark proposes a shocking idea: that we may be cut off by our very nature from seeing things as they are. A human being’s perspective may not merely be prone to occasional error, but limited by definition, in exactly the way we normally (and arrogantly) presume a dog’s intelligence to be. Only someone with an exceptional ability to escape his immediate point of view could entertain such an idea, and this was precisely Montaigne’s talent: being able to slip out from behind his eyes so as to gaze back upon himself with Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment. Even the original Skeptics never went so far. They doubted everything around them, but they did not usually consider how implicated their innermost souls were in the general uncertainty. Montaigne did, all the time:
We, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion.
This might seem a dead end, closing off all possibility of knowing anything, since nothing can be measured against anything else, but it can also open up a new way of living. It makes everything more complicated and more interesting: the world becomes a vast multidimensional landscape in which every point of view must be taken into account. All we need to do is to remember this fact, so as to “become wise at our own expense,” as Montaigne put it.
Even for him, the discipline of attention required constant effort: “We must really strain our soul to be aware of our own fallibility.” The Essays helped. By writing them, he set himself up like a lab rat and stood over himself with notebook in hand. Each observed oddity made him rejoice. He even took pleasure in his memory lapses, for they reminded him of his failings and saved him from the error of insisting that he was always right. There was only one exception to his “question everything” rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt. He adhered to the received dogma of the Catholic Church, and that was that.
This can come as a surprise to modern readers. Today, Skepticism and organized religion are usually thought to occupy opposite sides of a divide, with the latter representing faith and authority while the former allies itself with science and reason. In Montaigne’s day, the lines were drawn differently. Science in the modern sense did not yet exist, and human reason was only rarely considered something that could stand alone, unsupported by God. The idea that the human mind could find things out for itself was the very thing Skeptics were likely to be most skeptical about. And the Church currently favored faith over “rational theology,” so it naturally saw Pyrrhonism as an ally. Attacking human arrogance as it did, Pyrrhonian Skepticism was especially useful against the “innovation” of Protestantism, which prioritized private reasoning and conscience rather than dogma.
Thus, for several decades, Catholicism embraced Pyrrhonism, and held up books such as Henri Estienne’s Sextus translation and Montaigne’s Essays as valuable antidotes to heresy. Montaigne helped them with his attack on rational hubris, as well as with the many overt statements of Fideism scattered through his work. Religion, he wrote, must come to us from God by means of “an extraordinary infusion,” not by our own efforts. God provides the tea bag; we provide the water and cup. And if we do not receive the infusion directly, it is enough to trust in the Church, which is a sort of authorized mass samovar, filled with pre-brewed faith. Montaigne made it clear that he recognized the Church’s right to govern him in religious matters, even to the extent of policing his thoughts. At a time when people were rushing to novelty, he wrote, the principle of unquestioning obedience had saved him many a time:
Otherwise I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I have, by the grace of God, kept myself intact, without agitation or disturbance of conscience, in the ancient beliefs of our religion, in the midst of so many sects and divisions that our century has produced.
It is hard to tell whether the disturbance he had in mind was a spiritual one, or whether he was thinking more of the inconvenience of being called a heretic and having his books burned. Fideism could be a handy pretext for secret unbelievers. Having paid God His due and immunized oneself against accusations of irreligion, one could in theory go on to be as secular as one wished. What possible accusation could you bring against someone who advocated submission to God and to Church doctrine in every detail? Indeed, the Church eventually noticed this danger, and by the following century had cast Fideism into disrepute. For the moment, however, anyone who wanted to take this path could do so with impunity. Did Montaigne fall into this category?
It is true that he showed little sign of real interest in religion. The Essays has nothing to say about most Christian ideas: he seems unmoved by themes of sacrifice, repentance, and salvation, and shows neither fear of Hell
nor desire for Heaven. The idea that witches and demons are active in the world gets shorter shrift than does the idea of cats hypnotizing birds out of trees. When Montaigne broods on death, he apparently forgets that he is supposed to believe in an afterlife. He says things like, “I plunge head down, stupidly, into death … as into a silent and dark abyss which swallows me up at one leap and overwhelms me in an instant with a heavy sleep free from feeling and pain.” Theologians of the following century were horrified by this godless description. Another topic Montaigne shows no interest in is Jesus Christ. He writes about the noble deaths of Socrates and Cato, but does not think to mention the crucifixion alongside them. The sacred mystery of redemption leaves him cold. He cares much more about secular morality—about questions of mercy and cruelty. As the modern critic David Quint has summed it up, Montaigne would probably interpret the message for humanity in Christ’s crucifixion as being “Don’t crucify people.”
On the other hand, it is unlikely that Montaigne was an out-and-out atheist; in the sixteenth century almost no one was. And it would be no surprise to find him genuinely drawn to Fideism. It accorded well both with his Skeptical philosophy and his personal temperament—for, despite his love of independence, he often preferred giving up control, especially of things that did not interest him much. Besides, whatever he really thought about Fideism’s high-altitude God, the attraction of what remains down here exerted a much stronger pull on him.
The result, in any case, was that he lived his life without ever encountering serious problems with the Church: quite an achievement for a man who wrote so freely, who lived on a border between Catholic and Protestant lands, and who occupied public office in a time of religious war. When he was traveling in Italy in the 1580s, Inquisition officials did inspect the Essays and produced a list of mild objections. One was that he used the word Fortune instead of the officially approved Providence. (Providence comes from God and allows room for free will; Fortune is just the way the cookie crumbles.) Others were that he quoted heretical poets, that he made excuses for the apostate emperor Julian, that he thought anything beyond simple execution cruel, and that he recommended bringing children up naturally and freely. But the Inquisition did not mind his views on death, his reservations about witchcraft trials, or—least of all—his Skepticism.
It was, in fact, the Essays’ Skepticism that made it such a success on first publication, alongside its Stoicism and Epicureanism. It managed to appeal to thoughtful, independent-minded readers, but also to the most orthodox of churchmen. It pleased people like Montaigne’s Bordeaux colleague Florimond de Raemond, a zealous Catholic whose favorite subject, in his own writings, was the imminent arrival of the Antichrist and the coming Apocalypse. Raemond advised people to read Montaigne to fortify themselves against heresy, and particularly praised the “beautiful Apology” because of its abundance of stories demonstrating how little we know about the world. He borrowed several such stories for a chapter of his own work L’Antichrist, entitled “Strange things of which we do not know the reason.” Why does an angry elephant become calm on seeing a sheep? he asked. Why does a wild bull become docile if he is tethered to a fig tree? And how exactly does the remora fish apply its little hooks to a ship’s hull to hold it back at sea? Raemond sounds so amiable and shows such a bright amazement about natural wonders that one has to pinch oneself to remember that he believed the end of the world was nigh. Fideism produced odd bedfellows indeed; extremists and secular moderates were brought together by a shared desire to marvel at their own ignorance.
Thus, the early Montaigne was embraced by the orthodox as a pious Skeptical sage, a new Pyrrho as well as a new Seneca: the author of a book at once consoling and morally improving. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to discover that by the end of the following century he was shunned with horror and that the Essays was consigned to the Index of Prohibited Books, there to stay for almost a hundred and eighty years.
The problem began with discussion of a topic which one might think of little importance: animals.
ANIMALS AND DEMONS
Montaigne’s favorite trick for undermining human vanity was the telling of animal stories like those that so intrigued Florimond de Raemond—many of them liberated from Plutarch. He liked them because they were entertaining, yet had a serious purpose. Tales of animal cleverness and sensitivity demonstrated that human abilities were far from exceptional, and indeed that animals do many things better than we do.
Animals can be good, for example, at working cooperatively. Oxen, hogs, and other creatures will gather in groups for self-defense. If a parrotfish is hooked by a fisherman, his fellow parrotfish rush to chew through the line and free him. Or, if one is netted, others thrust their tails through the net so he can grab one with his teeth, and be pulled out. Even different species can work together in this way, as with the pilot fish that guides the whale, or the bird that picks the crocodile’s teeth.
Tuna fish demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of astronomy: when the winter solstice arrives, the whole school stops precisely where it is in the water, and stays there until the following spring equinox. They know geometry and arithmetic too, for they have been observed to form themselves into a perfect cube of which all six sides are equal.
Morally, animals prove themselves at least as noble as humans. For repentance, who can surpass the elephant who was so grief-stricken about having killed his keeper in a fit of temper that he deliberately starved himself to death? And what of the female halcyon, or kingfisher, who loyally carries a wounded mate around on her shoulders, for the rest of her life if need be? These loving kingfishers also show a flair for technology: they use fishbones to build a structure that acts as both nest and boat, cleverly testing it for leaks near a shore first before launching it into open sea.
(illustration credit i7.2)
Animals surpass us in miscellaneous abilities of all kinds. Humans change color, but in an uncontrolled way: we blush when we are embarrassed, and go pale when we are frightened. This places us on the same level as chameleons, who also change at the mercy of chance conditions, but far below the octopus, who can blend his colors however and whenever he pleases. We and the chameleons can only gaze up in admiration at the mighty octopus—a shock for human vanity.
Yet still we humans persist in thinking of ourselves as separate from all other creatures, closer to gods than to chameleons or parrotfish. It never occurs to us to rank ourselves among animals, or to put ourselves in their minds. We barely stop to wonder whether they have minds at all. Yet, for Montaigne, it is enough to watch a dog dreaming to see that it must have an inner world just like ours. A person who dreams about Rome or Paris conjures up an insubstantial Rome or Paris within. Likewise, a dog dreaming about a hare surely sees a disembodied hare running through his dream. We sense this from the twitching of his paws as he runs after it: a hare is there for him somewhere, albeit “a hare without fur or bones.” Animals populate their internal world with ghosts of their own invention, just as we do.
Montaigne’s animal stories seemed both delightful and innocuous to his first readers. If anything, they were morally useful, pointing out that humans are modest beings who cannot expect to master or understand much on God’s earth. But as the sixteenth century receded into history and the seventeenth rolled on, people became increasingly disturbed by this picture of themselves as less refined or capable than an octopus. It seemed degrading rather than merely humbling. By the 1660s, the “Apology,” where most of the animal stories are found, no longer looked like a treasure chest of uplifting wisdom. It looked like a case study in everything that had gone wrong with the morals of the previous century. Montaigne’s easy acceptance of human fallibility and of our animalistic side was now something to be fought against—almost a trick of the Devil himself.
Typical of the new attitude was a denunciation from the pulpit by the bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in 1668. Montaigne, he said,
prefers animals to men, their instinct to our reaso
n, their simple, innocent, and plain nature … to our refinements and malices. But tell me, subtle philosopher, who laughs so cleverly at man for imagining himself to be something [more than an animal], do you reckon it as nothing to know God?
The challenging tone was new, and so was the feeling that human dignity needed defending against a “subtle” enemy. The seventeenth century would cease to accept Montaigne as a sage; it would begin to see him as a trickster and a subversive. Montaigne’s animal stories and his debunking of human pretensions would prove particularly irksome to two of the greatest writers of the new era: René Descartes and Blaise Pascal. They had no sympathy for each other; this makes it all the more noteworthy that they came together in disapproval of Montaigne.
René Descartes, the greatest philosopher of the early modern era, was interested in animals mainly as a contrast to human beings. Humans have a conscious, immaterial mind; they can reflect on their own experience, and say “I think.” Animals cannot. For Descartes, they therefore lack souls and are no more than machines. They are programmed to walk, run, sleep, yawn, sneeze, hunt, roar, scratch themselves, build nests, raise young, eat, and defecate, but they do this in the same way as a clockwork automaton might whirr its gears and trundle across the floor. A dog, for Descartes, has no perspective, no true experience. It does not create a hare in its inner world and chase it across the fields. It can snuffle and twitch its paws all it likes; Descartes will never see anything but contracting muscles and firing nerves, triggered by equally mechanical operations in the brain.
How to Live Page 15
