What’s it like to read this really long essay from Montaigne? I think Phillipe Desan in his recent biography of Montaigne describes it well:
He also takes care to display a flawless faith, but follows Sebond in lines of reasoning that go around in circles and are sometimes completely contradictory. Montaigne notes that “God owes his extraordinary help to faith and religion, not to our passions,” but immediately passes on to considerations more sociological than theological in nature. For example, he states—in accord with the views he was to develop later—that “All this is a very evident sign that we receive our religion only in our own way and with our own hands, and not otherwise than as other religions are received.” This relativist vision of religious belief considerably weakens the argument of the preceding pages, and the author of the Essais is venturing onto a slippery slope. The reader loses his way, because this long apology for Sebond looks like a labyrinth from which one cannot emerge.
That is no doubt the case. Reading An Apology for Raymond Sebond feels like being lost in a maze. First of all, for English readers, there’s no available translation of Sebond’s work, so you can’t cross reference the work, you’re completely dependent on Montaigne or second hand accounts (like Desan somewhat provides.) Second, and I’ll get to more details on this in a moment, Montaigne is being extremely political in this essay, so you’re left wondering what Sebond has to do with much of what he’s writing. And third, Montaigne’s religion is an extremely confusing matter, because there’s a constant tension between his politics, his conservatism, his free thinking nature, and his obscurity. At times you know he’s not writing what he really believes, but at the same time, you cannot be sure what those true beliefs are.
My reaction to this through the years has been to throw up my hands. I’ve picked out pieces of the essay and created my own read on it, no doubt fitting Montaigne to whatever points I was trying to make (which is very Montaigne in spirit, but not at all helpful in understanding this essay.) And I’m tempted to leave it at that, except for the fact that my essay about Sebond is the single most searched page on my site and I have this nagging fear that I’m giving people the wrong impression of Montaigne’s work. And then there’s the matter of Shakespeare stealing passages from this essay. If it was good enough for the Bard, I must be missing something.
So there are lots of angles to approach in this essay, and in this part, I’m going to focus on the political, relying on Desan’s analysis. The central thesis of Desan’s book is that everything Montaigne writes needs to be filtered through the politics of his age and the fact that, as much as Montaigne liked to express support for walking away from the governing world and contemplating yourself from a safe distance, he was always deeply engaged in political life and kept looking for strategies to advance in it.
The first matter to consider is why Montaigne felt obliged to write this piece at all. The reason is that Montaigne’s translation of Sebond was starting to become controversial as the religious wars of the era flared. The Vatican initially put Sebond’s book on the list of banned texts, but later narrowed that to just the introduction. There was a sense that Sebond’s theological approach might create intellectual cover for protestants. Montaigne, who put this essay in the second volume of his essays, was getting his first taste of literary fame and didn’t want to risk being associated with a controversial text. So, Desan explained, he covered his ass:
The revised 1581 edition could provide an opportunity to explain the circumstances under which he did the translation. Why not accompany it by a prologue, an apology for Raymond Sebond that could at the same time serve as a self-justification? Better yet, why not propose an apology outside Sebond’s text, thus creating an additional distance between this youthful exercise and the theologian’s book? It was pointless to make too much of it or to deny the translator’s interest in some of Sebond’s ideas and the way they are defended. So these ideas had to be situated in their historical context in order to show that they could now serve the Catholic cause against the atheists or the heretics. Sebond might even have been a visionary: “In this he was very well advised, rightly foreseeing by rational inference that this incipient malady would easily degenerate into an execrable atheism.”
This wasn’t entirely cynical on Montaigne’s part. Remember, Montaigne dislikes novelty and new laws. He believes culture and custom should determine how people behave. So it’s only natural for him to defend the dominant religion of his place and time:
According to [Montaigne,] the turmoil engendered by the theological debates injured the principle of civil peace necessary for any society. The authority of the laws was seriously compromised by the new ideas. Montaigne defends the Catholic religion unreservedly, less on the basis of a theological analysis than simply in the name of the proper functioning of political institutions.
And, of course, being an advocate for the status quo was a good strategy for someone interested in furthering his own ambitions. So Montaigne took up the subject and arguably made a complete muddle of it. Desan believes this was done on purpose:
Sebond’s thesis surely did not displease Montaigne; otherwise, how could we explain the reprinting and the major place given this author in the second book of the Essais? In any case, Montaigne had to explain this translation done in his youth. That is the primary function of the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” which is so long that one has the feeling that Montaigne is trying to cloud the issue.
Desan makes the interesting argument that Montaigne might have been drawn to Sebond not for any of his ideas, but for his style, so distorting his thoughts wasn’t at all problematic to him:
Montaigne seems not to have understood Sebond all that well. But is that really a bad thing? Pretending to be naive in matters of religion was a political strategy that made sense at that time. Moreover, Montaigne has told us many times that he is not a theologian and took an interest in Sebond’s text only for his free style and way of arguing. To hear him tell it, Sebond might even have been the first essayist!
And he distorts the text freely, Desan writes. He believes that, in addition to not really understanding Sebond’s theology, he turns it into an excuse to make political statements:
He praises Sebond’s enterprise while politicizing his theses. For him, the more the existence of God is proven, the better, especially in times of heresy and atheism. Montaigne transforms the author of the Theologia naturalis into a prophet of the ills that were soon to divide France. Thus it is with the help of the text of the “Apology” that we must understand the reprinting of Montaigne’s translation in 1581. Montaigne transforms Sebond’s book into a political discourse on his own time.
Editorial note: Desan’s biography of Montaigne is often maddening to read because, as he accused Montaigne of being contradictory often, Desan does the same thing. So please contrast the last two pull out quotes from his book, with the following:
Didn’t Montaigne misunderstand, or at least misread, Sebond’s work? Perhaps not. On the contrary, we see in these contradictions the a posteriori necessity of transforming Sebond’s text into a currently relevant document that could be used politically. Montaigne pretends to be a skeptic the better to assert the necessity of a rational, durable foundation for any power, either political or religious. As we have seen, his political conservatism has to be situated in the practices of his time. Montaigne often defends the status quo, even though he constantly makes—frequently in a contradictory way—skeptical judgments regarding any form of authority acquired through tradition or custom. To those who reproached the theologian for the weakness of his demonstrations, Montaigne replies that it is impossible to acquire and prove universal truths.
This section makes me wonder if Desan is actually the one using Montaigne for his own political purpose, which is to demonstrate that all texts must be analyzed within the political conditions of the time they were written. But in any event, what seems clear is that Montaigne found some useful purpose for Sebond’s text and found a way to pull heavy inspiration from it, to an extent that he did not any other text that inspired his essays. For all of Montaigne’s admiration of Seneca, for example, he did not write an 80 page treatise about his work.
Desan, however, concludes that Montaigne mostly pulled off a masterful political act—he took a potential weakness in his political profile and transformed it into a strength:
The best way to get rid of a skeleton in one’s closet is to bring it out into the daylight where everyone can see it. Montaigne does not conceal his “youthful mistake” (a lack of judgment with regard to the request made by an “unlettered” father), but he explains that it was a choice for which he takes responsibility. In the reprinting of the Théologie naturelle in 1581 we have to see a desire to limit the damage that might be done to a political career by a potentially dangerous book. If Montaigne succeeded in getting past the Roman censors on this point, then the battle would be won and his future in the service of the king assured. The author of the Essais acted as an amateur theologian in giving a political dimension to his apology. This famous chapter 12 of the second book of the Essais of 1580 must be considered an exercise in diplomacy. If it reassures Montaigne’s reader (here he was in no way thinking of a common reader, but rather of the political and religious authorities), he also reaffirms his own religious convictions and confirms his talent as a negotiator. Unlike in theology, in diplomacy nothing is ever achieved by being dogmatic.
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