How can vicious passions, such as inconstancy and sudden dismay, produce in our souls anything right?
While my current version of the Apology for Raymond Sebond essay seems rather popular among whatever combination of humans and bots currently visit this site, I have a nagging feeling that I’ve never done the piece justice. After all, this is a work that inspired Hamlet, perhaps the greatest artifact of dramatic arts Western civilization has created. And all I can take from that inspiration is a dismissal of its religiosity and a gloss about romantic relationships? I must be missing key elements here.
So I’ve decided to re-read the essay, little bits at a time, taking it apart outside of the mad schedule that I’ve previously latched myself onto. Even my attempts to revisit past essays have taken my quick takes as reasonable starting points. This time, I’m throwing everything out, reading and writing it as if it’s brand new. And, yes, I will almost certainly end up repeating myself and forgetting things that I’ve already written on this subject or elsewhere. So be it. That’s the core of my method, you should expect nothing less.
Montaigne makes a curious start of this essay, stating upfront something that he will return to often (probably most extensively in On Physiognomy) that learning is not the pathway to virtue:
I do not believe – nor what others have said: that learning is the Mother of virtue and that all vice is born of Ignorance.
He goes on to say that he’s been surrounded by well educated people his whole life—his father would routinely invite men of great erudition into their estate for discussions. Montaigne says that he likes learned men, but does not worship them.
So one man who came to the estate gave Raymond Sebond’s book “Theologia Naturalis” to his father. Montaigne describes it as being “composed in a kind of pidgin — Spanish with Latin endings. Not knowing Latin, Montaigne’s father tossed it to his son and asked him to translate.
From here, Montaigne quickly transitions to an attack on Protestantism, noting how “this new disease would soon degenerate into loathsome atheism.” The reason why Montaigne found Protestantism dangerous sounds an awful lot like what it’s like when the news media was torn asunder by the Internet, leaving everyone to find their own information and evaluate it all personally, without any authority curating:
The mass of ordinary people lack the faculty of judging things as they are, letting themselves be carried away by chance appearances. Once you have put into their hands the foolhardiness of despising and criticizing opinions which they used to hold in the highest awe (such as those which concern their salvation), and once you have thrown into the balance of doubt and uncertainty any articles of their religion, they soon cast all the rest of their beliefs into similar uncertainty. They had no more authority for them, no more foundation, than for those you have just undermined; and so, as though it were the yoke of a tyrant, they shake off all those other concepts which had been impressed upon them by the authority of Law and the awesomeness of ancient custom.
And he concludes the thought:
They then take it upon themselves to accept nothing on which they have not pronounced their own approval, subjecting it to their individual assent.
This sets up a fascinating parallel between the religious wars taking place in Montaigne’s time and the political divide in the United States today. He praises parts of the Sebond book, but very quickly moves on to his own complementary positions. Montaigne starts off with a fascinating argument for embodied consciousness, even though he couches it in spiritual terms:
We are not content merely to serve God with our spirits and our souls: we owe him more than that, doing him reverence with our bodies; we honour him with our very members, our actions and with things external. In the same way we must accompany our faith with all the reason that lies within us – but always with the reservation that we never reckon that faith depends upon ourselves or that our efforts and our conjectures can ever themselves attain to a knowledge so supernatural, so divine.
Montaigne is making an argument against a purely rational explanation of faith. In doing so, he embraces the stranger aspect of religion, the mysterious elements, as ones worth emulating, if only to highlight the awesome power of faith that is beyond reason:
If a ray of God’s light touched us even slightly, it would be everywhere apparent: not only our words but our deeds would bear its lustre and its brightness. Everything emanating from us would be seen shining with that noble light. We ought to be ashamed: among the schools of human philosophy there never was an initiate who did not make his conduct and his life conform, at least in some respect, to their teachings, however difficult or strange: and yet so holy and heavenly an ordinance as ours only marks Christians on their tongues.
He then moves on to address the religious conflict as it existed in France at the time—and set off an endless series of civil religious wars. Montaigne had no patience for these conflicts, he thought they were destructive and ultimately pointless, and he especially disliked the fact that religion was bringing out the worst in everyone:
It is evident to me that we only willingly carry out those religious duties which flatter our passions. Christians excel at hating enemies. Our zeal works wonders when it strengthens our tendency towards hatred, enmity, ambition, avarice, evil-speaking… and rebellion. On the other hand, zeal never makes anyone go flying towards goodness, kindness or temperance, unless he is miraculously pre-disposed to them by some rare complexion. Our religion was made to root out vices: now it cloaks them, nurses them, stimulates them.
Montaigne then brings in his favorite subject, custom, arguing that we only attach ourselves to whatever religion is most strongly tied to whatever culture we occupy, so the battles we fight are more about protecting our folkways than the actual religion:
All this is a clear sign that we accept our religion only as we would fashion it, only from our own hands – no differently from the way other religions gain acceptance. We happen to be born in a country where it is practised, or else we have regard for its age or for the authority of the men who have upheld it; perhaps we fear the threats which it attaches to the wicked or go along with its promises. Such considerations as these must be deployed in defence of our beliefs, but only as support-troops. Their bonds are human. Another region, other witnesses, similar promises or similar menaces, would, in the same way, stamp a contrary belief on us. We are Christians by the same title that we are Périgordians or Germans.
Next, Montaigne criticizes atheism and paganism, which isn’t terribly original or illuminating. But he closes it with some concept that he will carry throughout the rest of the essay—that since there is a Creator, the shape of the world naturally follows God’s form:
All things, Heaven, Earth, the elements, our bodies and our souls are in one accord: we simply have to find how to use them. If we have the capacity to understand, they will teach us. For this world is a most holy Temple into which Man has been brought in order to contemplate the Sun, the heavenly bodies, the waters and the dry land – objects not sculpted by mortal hands but made manifest to our senses by the Divine Mind in order to represent intelligibles. “The invisible things of God’, says St Paul, ‘are clearly seen from the creation of the world, his Eternal Wisdom and his Godhead being perceived from the things he has made.’
He takes from this an argument that all human thought—and therefore philosophy—is unsatisfactory because it does not venerate God’s hand:
Our human reasonings and concepts are like matter, heavy and barren: God’s grace is their form, giving them shape and worth. The virtuous actions of Socrates and of Cato remain vain and useless, since they did not have, as their end or their aim, love of the true Creator of all things nor obedience to him: they did not know God; the same applies to our concepts and thoughts: they have a body of sorts, but it is a formless mass, unenlightened and without shape, unless accompanied by faith in God and by grace.
Montaigne has set up his thoughts and will now turn to Sebond, making this a good place to end part one.
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