Montaigne seized the possibilities of the print form—which did not seem novel to him, after all—to play around with a genre of expression that found a ready audience, one that is digressive, almost improvisatory. He published and republished volumes of short prose pieces—three books totaling 107 individual entries, ranging in length from under a page (“On the frugality of the ancients”) to well over one hundred pages (“Apology for Raymond Sebond”). He called his prose pieces essais, meaning attempts, tests, or perhaps experiments.
“What do I know?” he asks himself. Writing and revising his essays was his way of sifting the world for answers. Although in many ways an exceptional man—born into great wealth, highly literate in an age when less than ten percent of the population could read and write and was essentially all male—and quick to let his readers in on his peculiarities and unusual tastes, Montaigne saw in himself what was universal in the human condition. He believed that a full and honest account of himself would reveal something about ourselves we could not otherwise see, as if by holding a mirror up to himself, we could better see ourselves. This must be true, because Montaigne has never gone out of fashion or out of print. Each age seems to find something in his writings that appears to speak directly to them. For us, living through our own information technology upheaval and the religious and ideological wars waged online and in the flesh, Montaigne can exemplify the struggle we all face to identify what is true and what merely passes for truth because it is what we want to hear. He instructs us on how to filter out the distracting, distressing, irrelevant, or dishonest but self-gratifying. And he shows us that sometimes the best way to understand ourselves is to reveal ourselves to others, a lesson taken to heart today by a new generation of memoirists.
The essays began as a form of engaged reading, a conversation with friends who lived on in the books they wrote. While he was an eager reader as a child, spending time in the company of his favorite authors became a serious preoccupation for Montaigne only after his closest friend, Etienne de la Boétie, died and left him his own book collection. The year was 1563, and Montaigne was thirty years old. He was a jurist at the time, serving in the court of the provincial capital of Bordeaux. Eight years later he retreated from public life to his ancestral home in the wine-producing countryside, thirty miles east of Bordeaux. He declared himself officially retired. Here he spent his time reading, writing, and learning “how to die well and to live well.” Montaigne reached a dead end when he felt he could not go on because his world had failed. A host of beloveds—friend, father, brother, children—were all dead and now his country was coming apart in civil war. He retreated in mourning and prepared to meet death nobly.
He wrote up an announcement in Latin and affixed it to the wall near his library.
In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins [the muses], where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated to it his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.
He spent most of his days at home in his chateau, secure in a corner tower he claimed for himself. His library was on the third floor, and in it he arranged his collection of close to one thousand volumes so that they were within easy reach. “The shape of my library is round, the only flat side being the part needed for my table and chair; and curving round me it presents at a glance all my books, arranged in five rows of shelves on all sides. It offers free and rich views in three directions, and sixteen paces of free space in diameter.”
Montaigne was only five years older than his dear friend Boétie was when he died. But he felt old. Montaigne had suffered one loss after another. Boétie died after a sudden onset of dysentery in 1563. His beloved father died in 1568 from kidney stones after terrible suffering. His younger brother died a year later after a freak accident with a tennis ball. The next year his first child was born and died within three months. And the losses did not stop there: Out of six born, only one of his children lived to adulthood. He himself had a close encounter with death sometime in 1569 or 1570, when his horse was accidentally rammed by another rider. Montaigne was thrown to the ground and lay unconscious for a while. He eventually came to, only to suffer convulsions. He thought he was dying.
But he survived this, just as he had survived the deaths of those closest to him. By his midforties, he experienced his first severely painful attack of kidney stones, the disease that had crippled and eventually killed his father. From then on, the fear of his imminent death never left him. The pain from a kidney stone attack can be so intense that people pass out from it, as Montaigne repeatedly witnessed his father do. Until the stones pass, the patient is at risk of inflammation and infection. Ultimately death can ensue. Today there are safe techniques for breaking up the stones to allow easier passage, and in the event an infection sets in, it can be treated with antibiotics. There was no effective treatment in Montaigne’s time, although he tried every one he heard rumor of.
In the meantime, he would suffer excruciating pain whenever they acted up. Worse, he realized, was that the memory of the attacks played a cruel trick on him. When he was not suffering attacks, he was suffering from the anxiety of anticipating them. He confessed that “the thing I fear the most is fear.” The paralysis of anxiety, familiar to all who suffer anxiety disorders, was in its own way more unbearable to Montaigne than physical suffering. He finally set his mind to conquering that fear and developed what we would call today a cognitive therapy that proved quite effective. He consciously rewrote his memories of the event to focus not on the pain of the attacks, but the intense pleasure felt upon their relief. Creating an aide-mémoire, he writes down on paper (“for lack of a natural memory”) each step of an attack and how it passes. When he feels one come on, he reviews the notes from previous attacks and assures himself that this too will end. Familiarity with past experience gives him hope. Toward the end of his life, when he has faced many such episodes, he comes to the conviction that “nature has lent us pain for the honor and service of pleasure and painlessness.” Thus his experience, tempered by reason, taught him to live.
MONTAIGNE ASKS HIS FRIENDS FOR HELP
Montaigne was intimately familiar with the information overload produced by printed books. But as a print native, he had already devised a way to impose a filter between himself and information inundation. Like many of us today facing too much information, he turned to his friends for advice about what to heed and what to ignore. As a reader, he had developed an extended network of similarly bookish friends ever since he labored over his Latin lessons as a young boy. By the time he reached maturity, though, those he loved most dearly were no longer among the living. This was a sad regret, perhaps, but no cause for despair. He still had a library full of trusted friends who showed him by example how to die well and to live well, such friends as Lucretius, Cicero, and Socrates. When he lost Boétie to an early death, Montaigne turned instead to his library, the land of memory where dead people talk.
His initial essays are wonderfully death obsessed, with such cheery titles as “Of sadness,” “Of fear,” and “That to philosophize is to learn to die” (the latter a quote from Cicero). Each was rich with long citations from Stoic and Epicurean philosophers who had confronted death without the consolation of the Christian revelation. Reading and writing, which for Montaigne were almost inseparable, were themselves acts of memory, sustaining a conversation he had begun with Boétie and that he was simply forced to continue in a different mode after his friend died.
When he decided to publish the essays, he claimed to be writing for his own posterity. In the foreword to his first volume, published when he was forty-seven, Montaigne says that he has written his essays for “my relatives and friends, so that when
they have lost me (as soon they must), they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament, and by this means keep the knowledge that they have had of me more complete and alive.” It was a bold enterprise, making oneself the entire subject of a book. It seems quite modern to us—thoroughly uncontroversial, even tiresome in its concerted egocentricity. But that is because we are his descendants.
Montaigne may not have been the first writer to preface his book with disingenuous disclaimers about his humble intentions, and he was certainly not the last. But over the course of decades of publishing, editing, and republishing his essays, he continues to explain to the reader what he intends to do and how we, as readers, should understand what he is doing. Montaigne struggles to reframe his enterprise and reinterpret himself as he matures and records changes in himself. Though his early essays are a bit self-conscious, timid, even awkward by his own standards, we get a sense of how difficult it is to work in a genre that you invent as you go along. The processes of reading, thinking, writing were all forced through the crucible of this new, ungainly form he labored in—and his writing can seem quite labored, even accounting for the stilted style of the antique language.
WHEN THE WORLD FAILS
He tested his experience and reason for soundness by setting them alongside those of classical philosophers. This testing of self against history’s exemplars is another way to understand what Montaigne meant by the word “essai,” derived from the same root as “assay,” or examine by trial or experiment. Paradoxically, even though his idols of wisdom were pagan, Montaigne felt safer citing them as experts than his contemporaries. The Renaissance had not only recovered what remained of classical literature, it resurrected these texts and gave them legitimacy as a body of historical knowledge—and just in time. Classical authors remained marvelously agnostic during the religious wars. Exemplars of pre-Christian mentalities, they were immune to the contagion of ideological warfare, standing outside, if not actually above, the battles waged among competing Christian confessions. Montaigne lived and wrote in exceedingly dangerous times, the early decades of the Reformation, when Europe was tearing itself apart, country by country, region by region, family by family over life-and-death-and-afterlife issues—the nature of grace, free will, the sacraments, even the divinity of Jesus. Civil war between the Catholic loyalists and rebellious Protestants convulsed France in the 1550s and continued on and off for decades. (The wars did not stop until a few years after Montaigne died.)
The fact that his family embraced both Catholics and Protestants and he was a committed moderate in his Catholic confession made him a target of special vitriolic attention from both sides. The middle ground was the loneliest ground to defend. He remained a loyal Catholic and kept peace with siblings who were Protestant. But as time wore on, the sectarian conflict acquired its own involuted logic of blood and vengeance, sweeping up all charity and compassion into a vortex of violence. Several times he was forced to evacuate his home and take his family on the road when his own neighborhood was overrun by warring factions, accompanied, as always, by the dark shadow of the plague.
There was an all-out crisis of authority throughout Western Christendom as one institution after another began to fail. In England, Henry VIII declared his independence from papal authority, confiscated church property, and shut down monasteries. In France, the crown passed among contentious factions professing opposing religious allegiances with alarming frequency. Assassination became a way of settling political differences. At one point Montaigne himself was thrown into the Bastille by the enemies of his friends.
No institution failed more spectacularly than the papacy, in its day the sole global power of the Western world, basing its authority on direct descent from the apostle Peter. It had never recovered politically from a crisis in the fourteenth century, when seven legitimately anointed popes reigned in succession from Avignon in France, not Rome, and several other individuals laid claim to the Holy See in Rome. But the papacy’s religious authority and reputation remained fast among the faithful until they encountered detailed (often printed) reports of moral corruption in the papal court, frequently accompanied by salacious drawings that grabbed the eyeballs of literate and illiterate alike and that, like porn throughout the ages, traveled faster than the speed of light and farther than well-sourced and reliable reporting. People became disillusioned with the clergy at all levels. But they did not become less religious. On the contrary, it was an inflammation of religious passion that led to the reformation, rather than the dying off, of Christian faith.
The world of unified Christendom failed for many reasons, but technology played its part. The presses both facilitated the spread of antipapal propaganda and spread the word of the Gospels far and wide through multiple vernacular translations. On the one hand, printing helped the pope sell more indulgences (which awarded the purchaser a quicker passage to heaven after death). On the other hand, the presses produced a big run of Martin Luther’s “Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” excoriating indulgences and all manner of papal venality. The presses had destroyed the possibility of monopolizing channels of communication. It took a few generations before people and parties became adept at controlling the presses so they could control the message. In the meantime, there was a scramble among publishing entrepreneurs to gain market share for their books, not unlike the jostling we see today for control of search, social media, and apps for mobile devices. Printers pioneered consumer-friendly features such as the small-format volumes (octavo size, the equivalent of today’s paperback books), newfangled fonts designed for easier reading, and the liberal use of commas and semicolons to ease the speed of comprehension.
In reaction to the challenges to papal authority from Luther and the constellations of religious dissidents spun off from the implosion of doctrinal orthodoxy, the church convened the Council of Trent over the course of several years (1545–47, 1551–52, 1559–63) to plot a counterattack. Cornered and feeling vulnerable, the councilors began deciding matters religious and otherwise that had been left open, ambiguous, and adaptable. Now, wherever a good Catholic looked, there was orthodoxy. The church even compiled a list of tainted titles, the Index of Prohibited Books, forbidden to the faithful. In 1676, Montaigne’s essays were added to the dishonor roll, no doubt ensuring a steady readership over the centuries to come. The world of the all-merciful God, colored in subtle shades of gray, was becoming starkly black and white. While introspection for the sake of taking account of one’s soul was encouraged by the church, trying to understand oneself as a person, a singular and unique individual with a worth and dignity distinct from one’s soul—that was frankly outlandish, certainly in bad taste for a man of Montaigne’s rank, and strictly speaking, quite impious. He had a natural caution about discussing his religious views. He could be extravagant in certain kinds of self-revelations. He wrote about the size of his sex organ, the frequency and complexion of his bowel movements, and the state of his kidney stones with relish. But in matters most intimate—his relationship with God—he kept his counsel.
THE MIRROR OF THE PAST
Montaigne’s essays found a delighted audience of readers, though it is more accurate to say that he created his audience by giving them something new, something they did not even know they wanted. Through his writings, contemporaries could discover a different past, filtered through his consciousness, a past that—even if full of unredeemable pagans—was a place of greater safety for exploring the human condition than contemporary Christendom. The mirror Montaigne held up for self-examination was fashioned from the classical past, but what readers could see in it was a clear picture of the present. The massive resurrection of Greek and Roman literature—literature that was utterly orthogonal to the sacred texts of Christianity—gave Europeans an alternative past to claim as their own. Montaigne’s innovation was to present this universe to his readers not through pedantic commentaries turgid with learning, but in this experimental form that followed the m
ental meanderings of a man like themselves—full of faults, complaints, humor, and pity.
What matters for us here is not what the pagans said in particular, but that Montaigne turned more often to the ancients than to the church fathers. He does not ask what Jesus would do. His reference points are more likely to be Plato, Pindar, and Plutarch. He knew his readers would be familiar with the whole tribe of vivid and quotable characters from the ancient Mediterranean who offered many different models from which to learn the art of self-fashioning—or if not familiar, would want to appear so. They could read Montaigne as we read book reviews to gain familiarity with titles we may or may not read. The past became a real time, populated by real people living in places that can be found on maps. Reflected in Montaigne’s mirror from the past, readers were given an alternative vision of how life could be lived because it revealed to them how life was lived. By tapping into the collective memory of humanity, Europeans were in essence resurrecting and revivifying the heritage of an extinct culture, adapting it for their own purposes. Like farmers looking to strengthen their weakening vineyards and orchards, the Europeans grafted an ancient strain of cultural memory onto their own cultural rootstock, diversifying the monoculture of Christendom to fortify it against internal forces of corruption, decay, and sectarian dissension.
Montaigne died in 1592 from complications brought on by his kidney stones. In the following centuries, the classical past loomed larger and more influential with every decade. Through the diffuse vectors of cultural osmosis, it became a prestigious model for artists, writers, and composers. It also provided political paradigms, good and bad, of democracy, republicanism, empire, and of course how quickly all of the above degenerate into tyranny and armed conflict. The publishing industry—and it did begin to look like an industry as printers pushed to secure income streams through new laws granting copyright privileges—accelerated the pace and reach of ideas.
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