it’s always a perilous endeavor to examine Montaigne’s faith. This is where we see him at most slippery. In one respect, Montaigne clearly is a Roman Catholic. He believes in sticking with the whatever authority exists in any country at any particular time, that holds for both political authority and religious. He was horrified by the religious wars in France and held the protestants responsible for setting them off (although he disliked the radical Catholics as well.)
But the religious story gets more complicated through the years, and it’s not easy to tell. Fortunately, I came across a book called “How to Read Montaigne” by Oxford Professor Terence Cave that does a wonderful job of encapsulating it.
When Montaigne brought concepts like skepticism into discussions of religion, he used them in a way to attack individual reason in faith, which at the time he wrote was a common tactic in defense of the status quo. As Cave explains:
To us, it may seem strange that radical scepticism is deployed as a weapon to defend religion. But sixteenth-century scholars saw such arguments as parallel with the vein of Christian pessimism which is usually associated with Augustinian thought, that is to say with a distrust of human reason as a means to salvation.
But as Cave points out, it’s easy to draw different conclusions from what Montaigne writes about faith, especially in the sprawling Sebond essay. Skepticism has taken on a different meaning over time:
Modern readers for whom ‘scepticism’ is likely to mean above all unbelief often assume that Montaigne has a hidden anti-Christian or agnostic agenda in the ‘Apology’; indeed, from the nineteenth century onwards, especially in France, his name has widely been associated with that of Voltaire as an enemy of traditional beliefs and institutions.
But this must be historically contexualized. As Cave notes:
No reader of that period seems in fact to have regarded the Essais as in any sense a dangerous book.
But that did not last. Roughly a century later, Montaigne had become controversial among religious authority:
It was not until the mid-seventeenth century, when unbelief had become a serious threat to the Church and Montaigne was credited with spreading sceptical arguments which had by then come to be used against belief itself, that the Essais were placed on the Church’s Indexes of Prohibited Books and the Jansenist apologist Blaise Pascal famously attacked Montaigne for his ‘indifference about salvation’.
And so this is the perfect opportunity to introduce mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, a man who started off his masterpiece Pensees determined to slay Montaigne, but eventually ends up becoming someone very similar to him.
When thinking critically about Montaigne, boy did Pascal let him have it:
His foolish project of describing himself! And this not casually and against his maxims, since every one makes mistakes, but by his maxims themselves, and by first and chief design. For to say silly things by chance and weakness is a common misfortune; but to say them intentionally is intolerable …. What good there is in Montaigne can only have been acquired with difficulty. The evil that is in him, I mean apart from his morality, could have been corrected in a moment, if he had been informed that he made too much of trifles and spoke too much of himself.
I cannot dismiss Pascal’s criticisms out of hand because he has a point and Montaigne in many places says the same of himself. But it’s the insouciance of Montaigne’s project that makes it so charming, something that T.S. Eliot pointed out in his introduction to a translation of the Pensees:
Of all authors Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences; or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.
Montaigne charmed Eliot, and Eliot was in awe:
What makes Montaigne a very great figure is that he succeeded, God knows how—for Montaigne very likely did not know that he had done it—it is not the sort of thing that men can observe about themselves, for it is essentially bigger than the individual’s consciousness—he succeeded in giving expression to the skepticism of every human being. For every man who thinks and lives by thought must have his own skepticism, that which stops at the question, that which ends in denial, or that which leads to faith and which is somehow integrated into the faith which transcends it.
That final clause is an interesting description of Montaigne’s faith. I’ve reached the point that I’ve given up trying to determine precisely what Montaigne believed about matters of faith, he worked too hard to confuse us and succeeded.
As mentioned previously, I think “The Hollow Men” is Eliot’s bridge poem to that same type of transcendence, and so it makes perfect sense he finds Montaigne, even if he just projected upon him, to be his ideal guide. This brings me, finally, to today’s Montaigne essay—a macabre little piece about conjoined twins.
Montaigne describes the twins in gruesome detail, but refuses to surrender to the popular notion that the children are monsters:
What we call monsters are not so for God who sees the infinite number of forms which he has included in the immensity of his creation: it is to be believed that the figure which astonishes us relates to, and derives from, some other figure of the same genus unknown to Man. God is all-wise; nothing comes from him which is not good, general and regular: but we cannot see the disposition and relationship: What a man frequently sees never produces wonder in him, even though he does not know how it happens. But if something occurs which he has never seen before, he takes it as a portent.
Those portents are the actual subject of this essay. Given the ongoing civil war in France, Montaigne suggests one could easily see in the conjoined twins a metaphor for France and how it can survive and perhaps even thrive with two religious faiths under one king. But Montaigne doesn’t fall for this … instead, he suggests we should look at the conjoined twins as a poetic description of France’s current condition:
This double body and these sundry limbs all depending on one single head could well provide us with a favorable omen that our king will maintain the sundry parties and factions of our State in unity under his laws; but for fear lest the outcome should belie it we should let that happen first, for there is no divining like divining about the past! … Once things have happened we can find some interpretation of them which turns them into prophecies. As was said of Epimenides: he always prophesied backwards.
To prophesize backwards is to be a poet, to reorder the universe and place it into a unique juxtaposition that alters our understanding of it. Perhaps the reason Pascal had such a difficult time with Montaigne at first—and I’ll discuss in later essays how he eventually found (unacknowledged) peace with him — is that Montaigne wrote prose with a poetic mindset. His gift was finding poetic juxtapositions that make us think about the way we act and think a bit differently. That he had the courage to introduce skepticism into religious thought (what Cave describes as introducing the “first mutuation of a gene before it begins a new evolutionary branch) is upsetting to some. But to me at least, I find his questioning faith-affirming, not rejecting.
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