The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  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.

  Montaigne was perhaps first attracted to Lucretius by his arguments against that fear of dying which haunted his youth and young manhood. In the ‘Apology’, however, he chiefly cites him in order to reveal yet another source of darkness and error or, at best, of the kind of partial truths reached by unenlightened sages.

  Particularly effective are his exploitations of precisely those verses in which Lucretius tried to refute those who hold that ‘we can know nothing’. Denis Lambin in his edition praised Lucretius for his solid opposition to the doctrine that ‘nothing can be known’. Montaigne eventually succeeds in exploiting the principal opponent of scepticism for sceptical ends!21

  On many matters, Montaigne and Lambin were in agreement. Especially interesting for the Essays is Lambin’s dedication of Book III of Lucretius’ poem to Germain Valence. It shows that the very failure of even Lucretius and the Epicureans to reach Christian certainties about the nature of the soul can be turned into yet another argument in favour of Christian revelation:

  Not unjustly we despise their unwise wisdom. We should congratulate ourselves that we have been taught by JESUS CHRIST… (without being convinced or coerced by any human reasons or by any arguments, no matter how well demonstrated – not even by the Platonists) and so are persuaded that no opposing reasons, however sharp or compelling, however probable or verisimilitudinous, however firm or strong (let alone those of Lucretius, which are light and weak) could ever dislodge us from this judgement.22

  The Renaissance was a period of new horizons: one was a vast increase in knowledge of the world and its inhabitants, as Europeans sailed the seas and discovered new lands, new peoples and moral and religious systems new to them; another was the rediscovery of Greek literature in its fullness. New horizons make local certainties seem wrong or parochial: they also open up whole treasure-houses of new facts and facets to the sceptic, who with their aid can increase the sense of the relativity of all Man’s beliefs about himself and the universe in which he lives. Montaigne exploited Sextus Empiricus, but he also devoured the writing of the Spanish historians, including those who told of the horrors of the conquest of the New World. There were also compendia such as Johannes Boemus’ Manners of all Peoples (Paris, 1538), as well as standard works such as Ravisius Textor’s Officina (‘Workshop’) which contains chapters with such titles as ‘Various opinions about God’ and ‘Divers morals and various rites of peoples’ (Montaigne would have read in it a full account of Androcles and the Lion). New books gave him and the Essays a dimension and an actuality lacking to Agrippa and Pico. His universe was open to immense variety. He knew of Copernicus. If he wanted noble savages he could draw on the Indies as well as on the Golden Age; or he could try and talk to American Indians for himself (in Rouen) or question sailors.

  But he did not stop there. If he had, he might indeed have been a fideist, claiming that only an arbitrary act of faith could make an irrational leap from a boundless sea of doubt to the rock of certain truth: the Church. Such a theology, never really convincing, was rarely less convincing than in the Renaissance and the nascent scientific world of the following century. If the leap is irrational, why leap to Catholicism and not to a sect or to any other of the teeming religions of the world? Truth must be the same everywhere.

  This infinite variety of the world can be put to the service of Pyrrhonism and its universal doubt: it can also be put to the service of Catholic orthodoxy against sect and schism. If Catholic Christianity is true at all it must be universally true, not merely true for Périgordians, Germans or successive English parliaments. Otherwise it is just one opinion among many. Ever since St Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, Catholic truth was categorized as being Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus (‘What has been held always, everywhere and by all’). In the Renaissance the aspiration to make that a reality lay behind the vast, worldwide evangelism by Rome (which contrasted sharply with the local concerns of the rival Churches seeking to reform one City or one Kingdom). The Roman Catholic faith could indeed claim to be taught universally. Therein lay its strength for minds like Montaigne’s.

  For Montaigne, the strength of Raymond Sebond’s Natural Theology also lay in universality. He believed that Sebond’s illumination of the universal Book of Nature showed that all Nature everywhere was in strict conformity with Catholic truth.

  At the end of Montaigne’s Pyrrhonist pages we are brought to the very brink of uncertainty. Reason has been shaken. So have the senses. If sense-data are unsure, uncertain and often plainly misleading, that does not simply cut us off from any sure and solid knowledge of phenomena: it cuts us off from any sure and certain knowledge of ‘being’. And so ‘we have no communication with Being’ – other than with our own transient one (perhaps).

  To conclude: there is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of judgement and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly; nothing certain can be established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever shifting and changing.23 (‘Apology’, p. 680)

  But this – despite the words ‘to conclude’ (finalement) – is not the end of the ‘Apology’: it is the end of a chain of arguments which can leave man ignorant, or, on the contrary, show him a new way to proceed. If it had been Montaigne’s conclusion, then Sextus Empiricus would literally have had the last word, for the Pyrrhonist basis is evident. But it is precisely here that Pyrrhonism joins Plato and Aristotle in joint hostility to a sophistical trust in individual subjectivity.

  At the end of the long section which immediately precedes Montaigne’s address to his Royal patroness, just as he was about to embark on his Pyrrhonian arguments, Montaigne added an important comment in the margin of the Bordeaux copy of his works he was preparing for the press. It concerns Protagoras, the arch-Sophist who was trounced by Sextus, Plato and Aristotle in very similar terms and for identical reasons:

  And what can anyone understand who cannot understand himself?… Protagoras was really and truly having us on when he made ‘Man the measure of all things’ – Man, who has never known his own measurements.

  Protagoras meant – that is what shocked Plato, Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus – that there is no universal standard of truth: each human being is severally and individually the sole criterion; all is opinion, and all opinions are equally true or false.

  For Montaigne, Protagoras’ ‘measure of Man’ is ‘so favourable’ to human vanity as to be ‘merely laughable. It leads inevitably to the proposition that the measure and the measurer are nothing.’

  Montaigne countered Protagoras, immediately, by citing Thales (the Greek sage to whom he himself had been likened): ‘Wh
en Thales reckons that a knowledge of Man is very hard to acquire, he is telling him that knowledge of anything else is impossible.’ (‘Apology’, p. 628) Hence the growing importance of the study of Man throughout the Essays, especially in Book III and in the hundreds of additions made to the chapters of the two previous Books when the new Book was written and the others were revised.

  In the Theaetetus, Socrates treated Protagoras and his ‘measure’ as a clever man talking nonsense – otherwise how can the same wind be hot to one and cold to another? Nor would anyone maintain that, since a colour appears different to a dog, to other animals and to ourselves, that it differs in its essence.24

  Montaigne made good use of such notions in the ‘Apology’: they can serve to show the fallibility of sense-data and also to place man where his unaided natural reason ought to place him: among the other creatures. But to go from there and make Truth itself the plaything of individual subjectivity, he never did.

  Aristotle similarly mocked Protagoras and his Man-as-measure; his demonstration was adapted by Montaigne.25

  Montaigne knew,26 before he had read a word of Sextus – probably in his days at school in Bordeaux – that in the world of creation nothing ever is; it is only becoming. Plutarch reinforced this. But neither Plutarch nor Plato held that such doctrines cut Man off from a knowledge of God or obliged each person to plunge into pure subjectivism. There were, for Plato, divine revelations; and there was wisdom arising from knowing oneself as Man.

  Within the flux of the created universe, Montaigne strove to follow the Delphic injunction, Know Thyself. He sought to discover the personal, individual, permanent strand in the transient, variegated flux of his experience and sensations, which alone gave continuity to his personality – to his ‘being’ as a Man.27