The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  On one occasion, when Amestris the mother of Xerxes had grown old and wished to appease some god of the Underworld, she caused fourteen young men from the best families in Persia to be buried alive, in accordance with the religious rites of that country. And even today the cement used to make the idols of Themistitan is mixed with the blood of little children, since the only sacrifices they relish are the pure souls of little boys: Justice hungry for innocent blood!

  Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.

  [So great are the evils Religion has encouraged.]220

  [B] The Carthaginians sacrificed their own children to Saturn; those who had none of their own, bought some; their fathers and mothers had to attend the service, looking happy and contented. [A] It is a strange notion to seek to requite divine Goodness with our human affliction; the Spartans did: they courted that Diana of theirs with the suffering of boys who were flogged for her sake – sometimes flogged to death. It was a savage humour which sought to please the Architect by ruining what he had built; to ward off the punishment due to the guilty by punishing the innocent; or to believe that that poor wretched Iphigenia, by her sacrificial death in the port of Aulis, could free the Greek army of the weight of offences they had committed against God.

  [B] Et casta inceste, nubendi tempore in ipso,

  Hostia concideret mactatu moesta parentis.

  [At the very time of her wedding, the pure was impurely slaughtered, a victim sadly murdered by her father.]

  [C] And there were the fair and noble souls of the two Decii, father and son, who threw themselves wildly into the thick of the enemy, as a propitiation to make the gods favour the affairs of Rome: ‘Quae fuit tanta deorum iniquitas, ut placari populo Romano non possent, nisi tales occidissent’ [What great wickedness on the part of the gods to refuse to favour the Roman People unless such men were killed!].221

  [A] We might add that it is not for the criminal to decide how and when he will be whipped: it is for the judge, who can only take account of such chastisements as he himself has ordered and who cannot treat as punishment anything that is pleasing to the sufferer. Both for the sake of its own justice and of our punishment, God’s vengeance must presuppose our complete resistance to it.

  [B] It was an absurd caprice on the part of Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, to cast his most precious jewel into the sea to atone for his continuous run of good fortune by interrupting its course; he thought to placate the turning Wheel of Fortune with a carefully arranged disaster. [C] Fortune, to mock such absurdity, caused the jewel to be returned into his hands through the belly of a fish.

  [A] And then [C] what is the use of all those lacerations and loppings off of limbs practised by the Corybantes and Maenads, or, in our own day, by the Mahometans who slash their faces, their bellies and their limbs, to please their prophet, seeing that [A] the offence lies in the will not [C] in the breast, the eyes, the genitals, a well-rounded belly or in [A] the shoulders or the throat. [C] ‘Tantus est perturbatae mentis et sedibus suis pulsae furor, ut sic Dii placentur, quemadmodum ne homines quidem saeviunt’ [Such is their frenzy, arising from minds disturbed and forcibly unhinged, that it is thought the gods can be placated by surpassing even our human cruelty].

  How we treat the natural fabric of our bodies concerns not only ourselves but the service of God and of other men. It is not right to harm it deliberately, just as it is wrong to kill ourselves on any pretext whatsoever. There is, it seems, both great treachery and great cowardice in whipping and mutilating the servile, senseless functions of our bodies in order to spare our souls the trouble of governing them reasonably: ‘Ubi iratos deos timent, qui sic propitios habere merentur? In regiae libidinis voluptatem castrati sunt quidam; sed nemo sibi, ne vir esset, jubente domino, manus intulit’ [What do they think the gods are angry about, when they believe they can propitiate them thus? Some have been castrated to serve the lust of kings, but no one has ever emasculated himself, even at the command of his master]. [A] In this way they filled their religion with many bad deeds,

  saepius olim

  Relligio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta.

  [Too often in the past, religion has given birth to impious and wicked actions.]222

  Nothing of ours can be compared or associated with the Nature of God, in any way whatsoever, without smudging and staining it with a degree of imperfection. How can infinite Beauty, Power and Goodness ever suffer any juxtaposition or comparison with a thing as abject as we are, without experiencing extreme harm and derogating from divine Greatness? [C] ‘Infirmum dei fortius est hominibus, et stultum Dei sapientius est hominibus’ [The weakness of God is stronger than men and the foolishness of God is wiser than men].223

  Stilpon the philosopher was asked whether the gods took pleasure in our homage and sacrifices: ‘You are most indiscreet,’ he replied; ‘if you want to talk about that, let us draw aside.’224 [A] And yet we prescribe limits in the Infinite and besiege his mighty power with those reasons of ours (I call our ravings and our dreamings ‘reasons’, under the general dispensation of Philosophy who maintains that even the fool and the knave act madly ‘from reason’ – albeit from one special form of reason).225

  We wish to make God subordinate to our human understanding with its vain and feeble probabilities; yet it is he who has made both us and all we know. ‘Since nothing can be made from nothing: God could not construct the world without matter.’ What! Has God placed in our hands the keys to the ultimate principles of his power? Did he bind himself not to venture beyond the limits of human knowledge? Even if we admit, O Man, that you have managed to observe some traces of his acts here in this world, do you think that he has used up all his power by filling that work with every conceivable Form and Idea? You only see – if you see that much – the order and government of this little cave in which you dwell; beyond, his Godhead has an infinite jurisdiction. The tiny bit that we know is nothing compared with ALL:

  omnia cum coelo terraque marique

  Nil sunt ad summam summai totius omnem.

  [The entire heavens, sea and land are nothing compared with the greatest ALL of all.]226

  The laws you cite are by-laws: you have no conception of the Law of the Universe. You are subject to limits: restrict yourself to them, not God. He is not one of your equals; he is not a fellow-citizen or a companion. He has revealed a little of himself to you, but not so as to sink down to your petty level or to make himself accountable for his power to you. The human body cannot fly up to the clouds – that applies to you! The Sun runs his ordered course and never stops still; the boundaries of sea and land can never be confounded; water is yielding and not solid; a material body cannot pass through a solid wall; a man cannot stay alive in a furnace; his body cannot be present in heaven, on earth and in a thousand places at once. It is for you that he made these laws; it is you who are restricted by them. God, if he pleases, can be free from all of them: he has made Christians witnesses to that fact. And in truth, since he is omnipotent, why should he restrict the measure of his power to definite limits? In whose interest ought he to give up being a Law unto himself?

  That Reason of yours never attains more likelihood or better foundations than when it succeeds in persuading you that there are many worlds:

  [B] Terramque, et solem, lunam, mare, caetera quae sunt

  Non esse unica, sed numero magis innumerali.

  [The earth, the sun, the moon and all that exists are not unique, but numerous beyond numbering.]

  [A] That belief was held by the most famous minds of former ages (and still is by some today), on grounds which, to purely human reason, seem compelling, because nothing else within the fabric of the universe stands unique and alone:

  [B] cum in summa res nulla sit una,

  Unica quae gignatur, et unica solaque crescat.

  [Since nothing born of Nature is unique, nor when it grows is anything unique or all alone.]

  [A] There is some element of multiplicity within every species; it seems unlikely, the
refore, that God made only this one universe and no other like it, or that all the matter available for this Form should have been exhausted on this one Particular:

  [B] Quare etiam atque etiam tales fateare necesse est

  Esse alios alibi congressus materiai,

  Qualis hic est avido complexu quem tenet aether.

  [Such things must be said again and again: there are, elsewhere, other material aggregates than the one which the air enfolds in her keen embrace.]

  [A] That is especially the case if the universe has a soul–something which its movements make credible, [C] so credible that Plato was sure of it; many Christians, too, either allow it or dare not disallow it, any more than the ancient opinion that the heavens, all heavenly bodies and other constituent parts of the universe are creatures composed of body and soul, subject to mortality, being composite, but immortal by the decree of their Maker.227

  [A] Now, if there are several worlds, as [C] Democritus, [A] Epicurus and almost the whole of philosophy have opined, how do we know whether the principles and laws which apply to this world apply equally to the others? Other worlds may present different features and be differently governed. [C] Epicurus thought of them as being both similar and dissimilar.228 [A] Even within our own world we can see how mere distance produces infinite differences and variety. Neither wheat nor wine was found in those New Lands discovered by our fathers, nor any of our animals: everything there is different. [C] And only think of those parts of the world which, in times gone by, had no knowledge of Bacchus’ grapes or Ceres’ corn.

  [A] Should anyone care to believe Pliny [C] and Herodotus,229 [A] there are species of men, in some places, which have very little resemblance to our own; [B] there are some ambiguous, mongrel forms, between the human and the beast; there are lands where men are born without heads, having eyes and mouths in their chests; there are androgynous creatures and creatures who walk on all fours, have only one eye in the middle of their forehead, or have a head more more like a dog’s than our own; some are fishes below the waist and live in water; some have wives who give birth at five and die at eight; other men have skin on their forehead and on the rest of their cranium so hard that iron spears cannot dent it but simply blunt themselves; there are men without beards, [C] peoples without the use or knowledge of fire and others who ejaculate black semen.

  [B] What about those people who, by natural means, can change into wolves [C] and mares [B] and back again? And [A1] even if you were to accept as true [A] what Plutarch says (that somewhere in the Indies there are men without mouths who sustain themselves by inhaling certain smells) how many of our own descriptions today are certainly wrong!230 If laughter were no longer the property of Man and if Man were no longer a political animal able to reason, our conception of what our inner disposition and causations are would be largely irrelevant…231

  To go further, we have imposed our own commandments on Nature and carved them in stone: yet how many things do we know which defy those fine rules of ours! And yet we try to bind God by them!

  How many things are there which we call miraculous or contrary to Nature? [C] All men and nations do that according to the measure of their ignorance. [A] How many quintessences, how many occult properties have we discovered! For us, following Nature means following our own intelligence as far as it is able to go and as far as we are able to see.232 Everything else is a monster, outside the order of Nature! By that reasoning the cleverest and wisest men would find everything monstrous, since they are convinced that reason has no foundation to stand on, not even to determine [C] whether snow is white (Anaxagoras said it was black), or whether there are such things as knowledge and ignorance (Metrodorus of Chios denied that Man could ever know), [A] or even whether we are alive: Euripides hesitates, ‘Is life this life that we live now? Or is life really what we call death?’ That is:

  233

  [B] There is a degree of probability in that alternative: for why do we give the name existence to that instant which amounts to no more than a flash of lightning against the infinite course of eternal light, or to that tiny break which interrupts the condition which is naturally ours for all eternity, [C] since death fills everything before that moment and everything which comes afterwards as well as a large part of the moment itself?

  [B] Some swear that nothing moves and that there is no such thing at all as motion – [C] as was believed by the followers of Melissus (since, as Plato proves, there is no place for spherical motion within strict Unity, nor even for movement from one place to another) – [B] or that there is, in Nature, no generation and no corruption. [C] Protagoras says that in Nature nothing exists but doubt: that everything is equally open to discussion, including the assertion that everything is equally open to discussion; Nausiphanes holds that among phenomena there is nothing which is rather than is not: that nothing is certain but uncertainty. For Parmenides, within the world of phenomena there is no such thing as genus: there is only Unity. For Zeno, there is not even Unity, only Nothing: for if Unity exists it must exist either within another or within itself; if it exists in another, that makes two; if it exists within itself, that still makes two – the container and the thing contained.

  According to these tenets, Nature is but a shadow, false or vain.234

  [A] It has always seemed to me that certain expressions are too imprudent and irreverent for a Christian: ‘God cannot die’; ‘God cannot change his mind’; ‘God cannot do this or cannot do that’. I find it unacceptable that the power of God should be limited in this way by the rules of human language; these propositions offer an appearance of truth, but it ought to be expressed more reverently and more devoutly. Our speech, like everything else, has its defects and weaknesses. Most of the world’s squabbles are occasioned by grammar! Law-suits are born from disputes over the interpretation of laws; most wars arise from our inability to express clearly the conventions and treaties agreed on by monarchs. How many quarrels, momentous quarrels, have arisen in this world because of doubts about the meaning of that single syllable Hoc.235

  [B] Take the proposition which Logic asserts to be the clearest of all. If you say ‘The weather is fine’ and you say it truly, then the weather is fine. That seems to be clear enough; and yet such a formula can lead us astray. You can see that from the following example: if you say, ‘I lie’, and you say it truly, then you lie! In both cases, the art, reason and force of the conclusion are the same: yet the second leaves you stogged in the mud!236

  [A] Pyrrhonist philosophers, I see, cannot express their general concepts in any known kind of speech; they would need a new language: ours is made up of affirmative propositions totally inimical to them – so much so that when they say ‘I doubt’, you can jump down their throats and make them admit that they at least know one thing for certain, namely that they doubt. To save themselves they are constrained to draw an analogy from medicine: without it their sceptical humour would never get purged! When they say I know not or I doubt that affirmation purges itself (they maintain) along with all the others, exactly like a dose of rhubarb, which evacuates all our evil humours, itself included.237

  [B] (Scepticism can best be conceived through the form of a question: ‘What do I know?’ – Que sçay-je, words inscribed on my emblem of a Balance.)238

  [A] See how people avail themselves of such forms of speech as are full of irreverence. In our present religious strife, if you press your adversaries too hard they will bluntly reply that it exceeds God’s power to make his body be in paradise and in several places on earth all at the same time. How that scoffer239 among the Ancients exploited similar assertions! ‘At least’, he said, ‘it is no light comfort for Man to know that God cannot do everything! God cannot kill himself when he wants to (which is the greatest prerogative attached to the human condition); he cannot bring the dead back to life; he cannot make someone not to have lived who has lived, or not to have received honour who has received honour; he has no jurisdiction over the past other than to make it merge into oblivio
n; finally (so that this equality of status in God and Man can be further strengthened with amusing examples), God cannot even stop ten and ten from making twenty!’ That is what he says – and what should never pass a Christian’s lips. Whereas, on the contrary, men seem to me to go looking for such insane and arrogant terms in order to cut God down to their own size:

  cras vel atra

  Nube polum pater occupato,

  Vel sole puro; non tamen irritum

  Quodcumque retro est, efficiet, neque

  Diffinget infectumque reddet

  Quod fugiens semel hora vexit.

  [Tomorrow the Father can cover the pole with black clouds or with pure sunlight, but he cannot change the past, he cannot undo or annul anything that fleeting time has borne away.]

  When we say that countless ages – ages past and ages yet to come – are but a moment to God and that God’s essence consists in goodness, wisdom, power, we utter words, but our intelligence cannot grasp the sense. Despite that, we, in our arrogance, want to force God through human filters. All the raving errors that this world possesses are bred from trying to squeeze on to human scales weights far beyond their capacity: [C] ‘Mirum quo procedat improbitas cordis humani, parvulo aliquo invitata successu’ [It is astonishing how far the impudence of the human heart can go, once encouraged by the least success].

  How insolently the Stoics taunt Epicurus for holding that essential goodness and happiness belong to God alone, so that the Sage can only possess some shadowy likeness of them. [A] How rashly they subject God to Destiny (would that some who bear the name of Christians did not do so still);240 Thales, Plato and Pythagoras even make God the slave of Necessity. This fierce desire to scan the Divine through human eyes even brought one of our own great Christian figures to endow God with a corporeal shape;241 [B] it also explains why we daily assign to God a peculiar responsibility for any event, the outcome of which seems important to us. We attach particular weight to such events, so God must do so too, paying more attention to them than to others which seem unimportant to us or simply part of the regular order: [C] ‘magna dii curant, parva negligunt!’ [The gods take care of great matters and neglect the small!] Listen to the example given and you will see more clearly what is meant: ‘nec in regnis quidem reges omnia minima curant’ [Even kings in their kingdoms do not concern themselves with every tiny detail]. As though it were more difficult for God to shake an empire than to shake a leaf, or as though his Providence were exercised differently when influencing the outcome of a battle and the jump of a flea.