As he reaches the end of his first volume of essays, Montaigne is taking stock of the project and wondering if the things he’s cobbled together have any value. And so he compares himself to poets who create elaborate puzzles within the text or people who’ve cultivated stupid party tricks and wonders if there’s a point to any of it.
He then transitions to thoughts about extremes — being brave or cowardly often elicits the same physiological symptoms. Being too attracted to or not attracted enough to a woman could hamper a man’s sexual performance (it’s kind of amazing how often Montaigne returns to this subject.) And then he moves on to a fairly standard stoic thought:
Animal-stupidity and wisdom converge in the way they feel and resist the misfortunes men must endure: wise men bully misfortune and master it: the others ignore it; the latter are on this side of misfortune so to speak: the former are beyond it; they first weigh and consider what misfortunes are and then judge them for what they are; they leap above them by the force of a vigorous mind; they despise them and trample them underfoot; they have souls so strong and so solid that when the arrows of Fortune strike against them they can only bounce back and be blunted, having met an obstacle which they cannot dent.
Here I have to interrupt with a “yes, but …” One problem I have with the fully rational approach to building resilience, whether it comes from Eastern mindfulness, stoicism or Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, is how it discounts the power of the unconscious. Some practitioners of CBT deny the existence of an unconscious altogether.
My unconscious at the moment wants me to make a diversion, so I’m going to follow its orders. Yesterday I came across a very interesting passage from Nietzsche about Montaigne. In my first run through the essays, I related many of the issues Montaigne was raising to Nietzsche, in part because I was just a lot more familiar with his writing, but also because I saw some similarities. I didn’t know at the time that Nietzsche was a massive Montaigne fanboy—in fact; he counts him as one of his primary influences.
In researching this a bit, I came across two interesting quotes. The first was from Blaise Pascal, who wrote, “it is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.” That line is so powerful and right on the mark. Montaigne has this incredible ability to help us see and reveal. It ultimately does not matter what weird personal habits he writes about or ancient heroes he holds up as exempla, the method of his examination sets off in any thoughtful person a stream of reflections. In this respect, reading and reacting to Montaigne is psychotherapy.
The other quote comes from Nietzsche, who wrote that Montaigne’s essays contain “ideas of the kind that produce ideas.” This goes back to the rational side of the examination. To Pascal, Montaigne is a mirror of his psyche. To Nietzsche, he’s like having a really smart friend who incites you to think about things in a new way. And what’s really remarkable about this to me is the fact that Montaigne started down this path precisely because he lost that kind of friend in his life and was desperately trying to deal with the grief.
I find it touching that Montaigne could respond to that loss by creating these pieces—these trifles as he somehow considers them—that would find intellectual friendship with the likes of not only Pascal and Nietzsche but also Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig, centuries later and inspire some of their best writing.
Discovering thoughts like this makes me feel better about my project. Is it a vain, cunning device to keep repeating this same activity of writing about Montaigne and using him as a mirror to my soul? Well, if it was good enough for Pascal and Nietzsche, who am I to deny this power?
I’ll close by returning to the essay. Montaigne transitions to a thought about what makes a good Christian. But these thoughts could equally apply to the question of who makes a good Montaigne acolyte. Whether I can ever graduate from middling capacity to the level of great minds is something I’ll leave for a later pass down this road:
Good Christians are made from simple minds, incurious and unlearned, which out of reverence and obedience have simple faith and remain within prescribed doctrine. It is in minds of middling vigour and middling capacity that are born erroneous opinions, for they follow the apparent truth of their first impressions and do have a case for interpreting as simplicity and animal-stupidity the sight of people like us who stick to the old ways, fixing on us who are not instructed in such matters by study. Great minds are more settled and see things more clearly: they form another category of good believers; by long and reverent research they penetrate through to a deeper, darker light of Scripture and know the sacred and mysterious secret of our ecclesiastical polity
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