Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

And what of the perceptions of different species? Montaigne correctly guesses (as Sextus did before him) that other animals see colors differently from humans. Perhaps it is we, not they, who see them “wrongly.” We have no way of knowing what the colors really are. Animals have faculties that are weak or lacking in us, and maybe some of these are essential to a full understanding of the world. “We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence.”

This seemingly casual remark proposes a shocking idea: that we may be cut off by our very nature from seeing things as they are. A human being’s perspective may not merely be prone to occasional error, but limited by definition, in exactly the way we normally (and arrogantly) presume a dog’s intelligence to be. Only someone with an exceptional ability to escape his immediate point of view could entertain such an idea, and this was precisely Montaigne’s talent: being able to slip out from behind his eyes so as to gaze back upon himself with Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment. Even the original Skeptics never went so far. They doubted everything around them, but they did not usually consider how implicated their innermost souls were in the general uncertainty. Montaigne did, all the time:

We, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion.

This might seem a dead end, closing off all possibility of knowing anything, since nothing can be measured against anything else, but it can also open up a new way of living. It makes everything more complicated and more interesting: the world becomes a vast multidimensional landscape in which every point of view must be taken into account. All we need to do is to remember this fact, so as to “become wise at our own expense,” as Montaigne put it.

Even for him, the discipline of attention required constant effort: “We must really strain our soul to be aware of our own fallibility.” The Essays helped. By writing them, he set himself up like a lab rat and stood over himself with notebook in hand. Each observed oddity made him rejoice. He even took pleasure in his memory lapses, for they reminded him of his failings and saved him from the error of insisting that he was always right. There was only one exception to his “question everything” rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt. He adhered to the received dogma of the Catholic Church, and that was that.

This can come as a surprise to modern readers. Today, Skepticism and organized religion are usually thought to occupy opposite sides of a divide, with the latter representing faith and authority while the former allies itself with science and reason. In Montaigne’s day, the lines were drawn differently. Science in the modern sense did not yet exist, and human reason was only rarely considered something that could stand alone, unsupported by God. The idea that the human mind could find things out for itself was the very thing Skeptics were likely to be most skeptical about. And the Church currently favored faith over “rational theology,” so it naturally saw Pyrrhonism as an ally. Attacking human arrogance as it did, Pyrrhonian Skepticism was especially useful against the “innovation” of Protestantism, which prioritized private reasoning and conscience rather than dogma.

Thus, for several decades, Catholicism embraced Pyrrhonism, and held up books such as Henri Estienne’s Sextus translation and Montaigne’s Essays as valuable antidotes to heresy. Montaigne helped them with his attack on rational hubris, as well as with the many overt statements of Fideism scattered through his work. Religion, he wrote, must come to us from God by means of “an extraordinary infusion,” not by our own efforts. God provides the tea bag; we provide the water and cup. And if we do not receive the infusion directly, it is enough to trust in the Church, which is a sort of authorized mass samovar, filled with pre-brewed faith. Montaigne made it clear that he recognized the Church’s right to govern him in religious matters, even to the extent of policing his thoughts. At a time when people were rushing to novelty, he wrote, the principle of unquestioning obedience had saved him many a time:

Otherwise I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I have, by the grace of God, kept myself intact, without agitation or disturbance of conscience, in the ancient beliefs of our religion, in the midst of so many sects and divisions that our century has produced.

It is hard to tell whether the disturbance he had in mind was a spiritual one, or whether he was thinking more of the inconvenience of being called a heretic and having his books burned. Fideism could be a handy pretext for secret unbelievers. Having paid God His due and immunized oneself against accusations of irreligion, one could in theory go on to be as secular as one wished. What possible accusation could you bring against someone who advocated submission to God and to Church doctrine in every detail? Indeed, the Church eventually noticed this danger, and by the following century had cast Fideism into disrepute. For the moment, however, anyone who wanted to take this path could do so with impunity. Did Montaigne fall into this category?

It is true that he showed little sign of real interest in religion. The Essays has nothing to say about most Christian ideas: he seems unmoved by themes of sacrifice, repentance, and salvation, and shows neither fear of Hell nor desire for Heaven. The idea that witches and demons are active in the world gets shorter shrift than does the idea of cats hypnotizing birds out of trees. When Montaigne broods on death, he apparently forgets that he is supposed to believe in an afterlife. He says things like, “I plunge head down, stupidly, into death … as into a silent and dark abyss which swallows me up at one leap and overwhelms me in an instant with a heavy sleep free from feeling and pain.” Theologians of the following century were horrified by this godless description. Another topic Montaigne shows no interest in is Jesus Christ. He writes about the noble deaths of Socrates and Cato, but does not think to mention the crucifixion alongside them. The sacred mystery of redemption leaves him cold. He cares much more about secular morality — about questions of mercy and cruelty. As the modern critic David Quint has summed it up, Montaigne would probably interpret the message for humanity in Christ’s crucifixion as being “Don’t crucify people.”

On the other hand, it is unlikely that Montaigne was an out-and-out atheist; in the sixteenth century almost no one was. And it would be no surprise to find him genuinely drawn to Fideism. It accorded well both with his Skeptical philosophy and his personal temperament — for, despite his love of independence, he often preferred giving up control, especially of things that did not interest him much. Besides, whatever he really thought about Fideism’s high-altitude God, the attraction of what remains down here exerted a much stronger pull on him.

The result, in any case, was that he lived his life without ever encountering serious problems with the Church: quite an achievement for a man who wrote so freely, who lived on a border between Catholic and Protestant lands, and who occupied public office in a time of religious war. When he was traveling in Italy in the 1580s, Inquisition officials did inspect the Essays and produced a list of mild objections. One was that he used the word Fortune instead of the officially approved Providence . (Providence comes from God and allows room for free will; Fortune is just the way the cookie crumbles.) Others were that he quoted heretical poets, that he made excuses for the apostate emperor Julian, that he thought anything beyond simple execution cruel, and that he recommended bringing children up naturally and freely. But the Inquisition did not mind his views on death, his reservations about witchcraft trials, or — least of all — his Skepticism.