Sometimes it’s difficult to tell when Montaigne is examining an issue straight up or if he’s doing it with a wink and a nod. This essay is a very clear example of the latter. I don’t even need to consult Montaigne scholars on this one, it’s obvious what he’s up to. Just take a look at the first paragraph:
Philosophy believes she has not made a bad use of her resources when she has bestowed on Reason sovereign mastery over our soul and authority to bridle our appetites. Those who judge that there are no appetites more violent than the ones engendered by love have on their side the facts that they partake of both body and soul and that every man is swayed by them in such a way that his very health depends on them, so that even medicine is sometimes constrained to serve them as a procurer.
When people are considering whether to have sex, they consider many things, but I cannot imagine even the stodgiest academic giving a first or second thought to philosophy. And Montaigne knows this. He’s really taking aim at religion, he just can’t say that directly. So he shifts onto Plato and Aristotle a complaint he actually holds of the Catholic Church.
He then makes a couple gruesome/humorous examples of the extreme things men will do to punish their bodies, so as to avoid sexual desire. But then Montaigne makes this statement that, perhaps, reveals more than he intended:
Yet when the passions are all in the soul, as in ambition, covetousness and the rest, they are much more troublesome to reason, for reason cannot be succoured save by her own means: and those passions are not susceptible to satiety – indeed they are sharpened and increased by our enjoyment of them.
I’ve had to turn this thought over a few times to fully understand what Montaigne is saying. He’s setting up an examination of Caesar by noting that it is easier to deny sexual pleasure than his own soul sickness, which he defines as Caesar’s ambition. Fair enough. But reading it, something else came to my mind.
While these “passions of the soul” can be negative traits like ambition and covetousness, so too could it be amorous passion. In fact, I would argue that the desire for someone loved body, mind and soul exceeds all human passions. And to demonstrate, I offer as evidence the true story of Abelard and Heloise (as recounted on abelardandheloise.com.)
In twelfth century Paris, the intellectually gifted young Heloise, the niece of Notre Dame’s Canon Fulbert, strives for knowledge, truth and the answer to the question of human existence. It soon becomes apparent that only one teacher in Paris can provide the education that she seeks. Though twenty years her senior, Abelard quickly becomes intrigued by Heloise’s uncommon wit and intelligence, for Heloise is on par intellectually with Abelard.
They soon find themselves so entwined that neither can resist the spiritual and physical desires of their bodies, yet they both know that the laws of the time forbid such a relationship. But their physical love and the strength of their passion proved to be a power impossible to resist.
When Heloise becomes pregnant, they realize it is not safe for her to remain in Paris. They flee for Brittany, Abelard’s place of birth. In a scheme to protect the dignity of his fallen niece, and return Heloise to his home, Canon Fulbert arranges a secret marriage between Heloise and Abelard. But shortly after the two lovers are wed, they discover Fulbert’s true plot is to ruin Abelard and keep Heloise for himself. For her safety, Heloise escapes to the convent at Argenteuil, but it is too late for Abelard and he is brutally attacked (and castrated) in Paris.
As a result of his humiliating punishment, Abelard no longer considers himself capable of continuing as a teacher at Notre Dame, and he and Heloise understand what they must do. Canon Bedell pleads with Abelard to not force such a fate upon Heloise, but both Heloise and Abelard agree that they must take Holy Orders as Monk and Nun. In a heartbreaking moment, Heloise must give up her child, knowing that she will never see him again.
Through their famous correspondence of twenty years, their love continues to flourish, in spite of their separation. After many years pass, in a chance meeting, Heloise and Abelard are briefly reunited at a ceremony in Paris. Though they have been physically apart all these years, at last in the sight of the other, the former lovers realize that the love they share is the reason for human existence. As the glorious ceremony begins, they triumphantly promise to remain “Forever One”.
They never met again, yet through their famous letters, their love endures.
This description doesn’t do justice to those “famous letters.” They are some of the most achingly beautiful documents ever created, and it seems not credible to me that Montaigne didn’t read them. Alas, he did not raise their story, and seems much more interested here in both praising and damning Julius Caesar. Oh well, we must accept the Montaigne we have …
Montaigne argues that Julius Caesar, a man of titanic sexual appetites, never lets them impede his personal ambitions:
Caesar’s pursuit of pleasure never made him steal one single minute, never deflected him one inch, from any opportunity which was offered him to aggrandize himself. His passionate ambition ruled so sovereignly over all other passions and possessed his soul with such total authority, that, wherever it wanted to go, it carried him there.
Other than these two vices, Montaigne notes, Caesar was an otherwise exemplary human being, one of the greatest men who ever lived:
He was uniquely lacking in self-indulgence and so undemanding about food that Oppius tells how, one day, when he was served with some oil-of-physic in mistake for salad oil, he used it copiously so as not to embarrass his host …. Examples of his kindness and clemency towards those who had harmed him are numberless – I mean not counting those he provided during the period when the Civil Wars were still in progress: he himself makes us realize clearly in his writings that he exploited those cases to woo his opponents and make them less fearful of his victory and of his future dominance. Yet even if we must say that those particular examples do not suffice to prove to us his native clemency, they do at least show us in that great man a marvelous self-assurance and grandeur.
But these great personal traits were overshadowed by his horrendous ambition:
Never was there man who showed more moderation in victory nor more resolution in adversity. Yet all these beautiful dispositions were stifled and corrupted by that frenzied passion of ambition by which he permitted himself to be so totally carried away that it is easy to show that it was the rudder which steered all his actions…. That one vice alone, in my judgement, undid the most beautiful and the most richly endowed nature there ever was, making his name abominable to all good men for having willed to seek his own glory from the destruction and overthrow of his country, the most powerful and flourishing commonwealth that the world will ever see.
And now comes the punchline of Montaigne’s discussion—a digression to the question of marriage that is a roundabout way of saying that Caesar should have put his sexual cravings first rather than sublimate them to his ambition to rule:
It is perhaps easier to do without women altogether than duly and scrupulously to restrict yourself to the company of your wife: a man has more means of living an unworried life in poverty than in duly controlled abundance; behavior duly governed by reason is more thorny than abstinence. Moderation is a virtue which makes more demands on you than suffering does.
In Caesar, Montaigne offers an example of a man who did moderate his sexual behavior, not by following marriage vows, but by finding an even greater passionate craving. In a strange way, Caesar follows the Buddhist Four Noble Truths by eliminating some of his desire and, therefore, alleviates suffering. But he merely substitutes a different form of desire, one harder to sublimate, taking suffering to a new level.
This forces Caesar to pursue ever greater conquests to satisfy his ambition. And I think Montaigne is saying that, Caesar being Caesar, he would have been a far greater person if he had turned it around and used his sexual conquests to moderate his desire for totalitarian rule.
That’s the obvious interpretation, anyway. I am suspicious of what Montaigne continues to hide, why he’s so unwilling to ever admit falling into a deep, passionate love that overruled his reason. There are hints throughout the essays that he wasn’t immune to this kind of passion. But for whatever reason, he’s much more comfortable discussing Caesar’s sex life than people like Abelard and Heloise.
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