In the past, this essay has mostly baffled me. I didn’t understand why Montaigne was so interested in the virtues of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Roman emperor.
And make no mistake, he was very complimentary of Julian, later getting an earful from Roman censors as a result:
He was, in truth, a very great and rare man, being one whose soul was deeply dyed with the arguments of philosophy, by which he professed to regulate all his actions; and indeed there is no sort of virtue of which he did not leave very notable examples.
Bear in mind that this is someone who came to rule with Christianity fully embedded into Roman rule, and Julian rooted it out. He also took some important steps to improve relationships with Jews, who he had much deeper respect for, and even promised to help rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, if for no other reason than to prove Christian prophesies wrong.
Montaigne liked the fact that he never took advantage of the women in conquered lands and lived a simple, disciplined life:
As for his sobriety, he always lived a soldierly life; and in full peacetime he ate like a man who was preparing and inuring himself to the austerity of war.
But he also became an emperor who believed in religious freedom. As Montaigne describes, he:
Urged that each man should serve his own religion without hindrance and without fear. This solicitation he made very urgently, in the hope that this complete freedom would augment the schisms and factions that divided them and would keep the people from uniting and consequently strengthening themselves against him by their concord and unanimous understanding; for he had learned by experience, from the cruelty of some Christians, that there is no beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man.
In the past, I’ve wondered if this essay were extremely esoteric—aimed at reaching only a few close friends who might understand why this topic is important to him. But now I wonder if Montaigne saw in Julian’s conversion away from Christianity something similar to Etienne de La Boetie on his deathbed, when he returned to Judaism.
I came across this quote from Maurice Merleau-Ponty recently that struck a chord:
What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by the words themselves? By that which it does not ‘say’ as by what it ‘says’? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?
Why would Montaigne occasionally need to communicate like this? I will let Nietzsche have the last word:
At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or keeping over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom.
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