As edition followed edition Montaigne changed a word here, a phrase there, but above all he added more examples, more quotations and more arguments, as well as thoughts upon the thoughts he had formerly written. These all became more numerous in 1588 and even more so in the edition he was preparing for the press when he died (13 September 1592).
Until modern times there was no easy means of distinguishing the various layers of Montaigne’s text. Pierre Villey pointed the way in his great edition. Now almost every editor uses [A] [B] [C] or similar signs to help the reader through the marquetry-cum-maze that the Essays eventually became. That has been done here. Knowing at least approximately what came when can make Montaigne not only more easy to follow but far more enjoyable.
Few noblemen knew Latin as Montaigne did. It was his native tongue. As soon as he was weaned his loving father had arranged for him to hear nothing but pure Classical Latin. As a child he at first spoke neither Gascon nor French. At an age when others delighted in tales of chivalry and rambling novels of love and adventure translated from the Spanish, he devoured Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When he was eventually sent to school at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux he chattered away in Latin so fluently that he scared the wits out of his schoolmasters, distinguished scholars though they were. One of them was so understanding, though, that he allowed his young pupil to read anything he liked, provided that he first did his prep.
Montaigne never acquired a similar fluency in Greek, so that even Plato and Aristotle (who influenced him deeply) he read in the Latin translations used throughout Europe. (Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, was to do the same.)
Montaigne revelled in the Latin poets. Quotations from them are strewn throughout the Essays, making wry points, opening windows on to beauty, providing authority or contrast or jests. Less obvious now – that is why footnotes are there to point them out – are Montaigne’s numerous quiet, unheralded debts to the Classical moralists, philosophers, biographers, historians and statesmen. Since he read Latin with pleasure and such ease it was to Latin works above all that he turned for moral guidance and for insight into what human nature really is. But he did not turn to them exclusively: all historians delighted him, even naïve ones; not least he studied his near-contemporaries writing not only in Latin but in French, Italian or Spanish. It was in the light of such reading that he judged his own opinions and his own wide experience and sought to find out more about himself, about the ‘human condition’ (that is, about the characteristics which mankind was created with) and about the limits of human nature.
Montaigne was first, it seems as we read him, a Stoic, then a Sceptic, then an Epicurean. In fact he could hold all three philosophies in a kind of taut harmony. He realized that he was so open to influences from the sages of Antiquity that he took on the colour of whichever one he had just read. There is certainly a shift in his thought from a melancholic and stoic concern with dying to a full and joyful acceptance of life; a change of emphasis away from Seneca and towards the happier eclecticism of Cicero who, despite his verbosity, came close to guiding his maturer thought. But for Montaigne no author ever definitively banished or superseded any other; authors are not infallible; they can help us make ‘assays’ but they resolve nothing. Even the sage whom Montaigne most admired, Socrates, is eventually stripped of that saintly authority that Erasmus vested him with.
Gradually Montaigne realized that by studying and questioning the greater and lesser authors in the light of his own opinions and experience he was studying himself. Encouraged by the Classical sayings, which, in Erasmus’ Adages for example, lie clustered around the commandment of the Delphic Oracle, ‘Know Thyself’, Montaigne was led to study his own self, as Socrates did his, coolly, probingly and without self-love. He was acutely aware that when doing so he was not gazing at a solid, stationary object, an evidently unified Ego, but at something ever-changing, ever-flowing. The self he discovered consisted in endless variations set in time, in series upon series of thoughts, feelings, desires, actions and reactions. Plato and Aristotle as then interpreted were excellent guides when he came to face up to that fact. Plato emphasized the primacy of the soul and yet, at least in some of his moods, did not despise the body. Aristotle taught Montaigne that individual persons belong to a genus and a species; so each man and woman individually possesses ‘generic’ and ‘specific’ qualities; and each of them has a specific human soul (or ‘form’); it could vary in quality but not in nature. So any man or woman who remained human could at least partially understand any other, since all possessed a like soul. No virtue or no vice known to any individual human who remains sane should be totally incomprehensible to any other. Even the virtue of Socrates can be momentarily glimpsed, and indeed momentarily shared in, by a lesser member of his species. So too could the cruelties of a Tamberlane be understood by better men. All individual human beings (as the scholastic philosophers put it) bore in themselves the entire ‘form’ of the human race. To study one man is in a sense to study them all. Not that all are identical, but all are inter-related by species. And (more remarkably) Montaigne discovered that to think about women and their sexuality could also tell you much about men and vice versa, since men and women are cast in the same mould: a quite revolutionary idea as Montaigne holds it.
What Montaigne discovered in himself – as others could do in their own cases too – was a self which was governed by a forme maistresse, a ‘master-mould’ which effectively resisted any attempt to change it by education or indoctrination. Without that mould Montaigne would have found in himself not personality but endless flux and change with no sense of identity.
It was this awareness of flux and change in all things human and sublunary which led him so staunchly to uphold the teaching authority of the Roman Church. Without it he could find nothing but uncertainty anywhere.
If he had been a don or a scholar Montaigne would doubtless have written in Latin. Encouraged though he was to write in French by the example of Bishop Jacques Amyot’s lucid and elegant translation of Plutarch, he believed that by writing in the vulgar tongue which was continuously evolving he was in fact writing for a few readers and for a few years. His book would out-live him and keep him alive in the minds of those who knew him, but would soon become dated and hard to understand. In a sense he was right. His French did become harder to understand. But had he written in Latin few indeed would now take him down from the shelf.
Montaigne was a gentleman not a scholar. He was a man who knew the ways of diplomacy and the realities of the battlefield. He loved books but was no recluse. Among the qualities which he claimed to bring to his writing was a gentleman’s loathing of the villein’s vice of lying, as well as a soldier’s love of bluntness and distaste for claptrap. He was not seeking for verbal subtleties but to portray himself in all truth, to find solid facts about what Man really is, and practical counsel about how he should live and die. That advice he properly and understandably sought not from theology but philosophy. For centuries Christendom had allowed philosophy to go largely its own way. Not that the Classical philosophers had ever been banished from Christian theology. From the very outset the theology of St Paul was indebted to Plato. And from the thirteenth century onwards Aristotle became the Philosopher. St Jerome in antiquity had rejoiced that the Stoics should hold so much in common with Christians. Seneca seemed indeed so close to Christian teachings that it was long believed that he had actually corresponded with St Paul; in Montaigne’s own day Jacques Amyot, the Bishop of Auxerre, held that his much-admired Plutarch was so consonant with Christianity that his books could more profitably be used to instruct Princes in their duties than Holy Writ itself, ‘which seems peremptorily to command rather than graciously to persuade’. He says so quite straightforwardly in his dedication of Plutarch’s Oeuvres morales ‘to the most Christian King Charles the Ninth of that name’. Theologians such as Melanchthon strongly defended the claims of philosophy in its own domain. All agreed that philosophy’s domain i
ncluded large tracts of ethics. Much of the day-to-day ethics of Christendom derive directly from Aristotle and, directly or indirectly, from Plato. Christendom found it right and natural to draw for its ideas about virtue heavily on the School of Athens. Philosophy was a complement to theology. Even a Christian author such as Boethius, who wrote a tractate on the Trinity, also wrote what became a moral classic for medieval Christendom, his Consolation of Philosophy, which at no point betrays any awareness of theology’s teachings. It was, after all, offering the reader the consolation of rational philosophy, not revealed theology. Again in Montaigne’s own day the neo-Stoic Justus Lipsius, whom he much admired, became the darling of the Roman Catholic Church once he had returned from Reformation to the fold, yet his moral writings are a mosaic of Classical Stoicism, with no specific concessions whatsoever to theological verities. When necessary, philosophy had to yield to theology: it did not have constantly to compromise with it. The study of the Classical writers had made immense strides in the generation before Montaigne. The generation of Erasmus had seen Socrates for example as a kind of Christ-figure; Seneca’s suicide was seen as close to Christian martyrdom. Montaigne, partly under the influence of the scholarship of Turnèbe (Adrian Turnebus) and of Denis Lambin, the editor of Lucretius, avoided such anachronisms. For Montaigne the attraction of Classical philosophy lay in its being philosophical. Lacking the authority of Christian revelation it was open to rational examination and discussion. Philosophy worked with its own tools: reason and experience; its domain was natural knowledge; such revelation as it enjoyed – if such revelation there be – was that kind which worked upon inspired poets, doctors, lawgivers, scientists and sages. But especially when philosophy ventured beyond physics into metaphysics it was not teaching but speculating: the ‘essence’ of being, truth and knowledge, is beyond reason and beyond experience. But we can enjoy hunting about for it.
The conventions of the time would have allowed Montaigne in the Essays to say nothing at all about his religion. He does indeed say nothing about Christian hopes and fears when writing of death. As a philosopher Montaigne was not concerned with being dead but with bearing with wisdom and fortitude the pain of dying as the soul is, often excruciatingly, released from its body. Not that Montaigne disbelieved in the afterlife, but the splendour of the rewards awaiting redeemed Christian souls and, unimaginably, their bodies, is a matter of theology not of reasoned deduction or induction. The Christian heaven can only be imagined as unimaginable, thought of as unthinkable: to make that point authoritatively Montaigne based his case on the words of St Paul:
Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the hearts of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.3
There are areas where theology and philosophy overlap: so the Essays at times do touch upon religion, but always in the spirit of philosophy. The supreme example of this in the Essays is the longest chapter which Montaigne ever wrote (II, 12), ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’. Even judged by the length of the more developed chapters, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’ is in a class by itself. Its very length shows that it was a very special special chapter indeed. Its topic could have afforded Montaigne, he felt, with matter to write upon for ever. It is an excellent chapter to study as a means of discovering how Montaigne reconciled throughout his Essays a questing, often sceptical, intelligence with a profound political conservatism, an unshakable respect for constitutional legality, a humane morality and an easy submission – in its proper sphere – to the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Those convictions helped Montaigne to remain tolerant, kind and loyal during the long, bitter, appallingly cruel Civil Wars of Religion which devastated the whole of France, not least the lands and villages of Gascony, including the domain of Montaigne itself. It is understandable that Montaigne should have written a considered defence of the Natural Theology of Raymond Sebond, since he himself had translated it into French. In the opening pages of the ‘Apology’ and in the dedication of the work to his father he tells us how he came to do so. Pierre Bunel, a Christian humanist from Toulouse (1499–1546), had once stayed at Montaigne and recommended Sebond’s book as an antidote to the ‘poison’ of Lutheranism – a term often applied to protestantism generally. Bunel’s visit may have occurred between 1538 and 1546; he was then living reasonably near Montaigne, first at Lavour and later in Toulouse. If so, Michel de Montaigne was still a child, perhaps not yet in his teens.
That Bunel should offer such a book to Montaigne’s father makes good sense. Raymond Sebond was a local figure, possibly a Catalan. Montaigne refers to him as a Spaniard professing medicine in Toulouse. In fact he was a Master of Arts who professed both Medicine and Theology. His Natural Theology was written in Toulouse in the 1420s or early 1430s. It seems to have circulated fairly widely in manuscript. By Montaigne’s time it had been printed more than once, as well as being adapted to dialogue form – still in Latin – by Petrus Dorlandus under the titles of Violet of the Soul or of Dialogues concerning the Nature of Man: Exhibiting Knowledge of Christ and of Oneself.
Apart from these Latin books Raymond Sebond had fallen into oblivion. When inquiries about him and his Natural Theology were addressed to Adrian Turnebus (Montaigne’s scholarly friend ‘who knew everything’), he could only say that the Natural Theology was a ‘kind of quintessence drawn from Thomas Aquinas’. That may imply that Turnebus rightly considered it to have been influenced by another medieval Catalan theologian, Raymond Lull, the great Doctor Illuminatus who was himself held to be the Quintessence of Aquinas. Since Turnebus died in 1565, the Natural Theology of Sebond must have been in Montaigne’s mind for several years before he published his translation.
In the ‘Apology’ Montaigne tells us that he translated Sebond at the request of his father in the ‘last days’ of his life. In the epistle in which he dedicated the translation to his father, Montaigne lets it be understood he had been working on the task at least some months before that. Since the Theologia Naturalis runs into nearly a thousand pages, a year or more is certainly likely. The finished translation was Montaigne’s tribute to his beloved parent. The dedicatory epistle is addressed from Paris ‘To My Lord, the Lord of Montaigne’; in it, he wishes his father long life: yet it is dated from the very day of his father’s death – hardly a coincidence but rather a fitting tribute to a son’s feelings of piety at the death of the ‘best father that ever was’. It may well imply that he wished he had translated and published the work more speedily, to give his father joy in his lifetime.
The works of Sebond had been appreciated by high-born ladies in France long before Montaigne wrote his ‘Apology’ at the request of an unnamed patroness who may well have been Princess Margaret of France, the future wife of Henry of Navarre.4 In 1551 Jean Martin had translated Dorlandus’ version of Sebond’s Violet of the Soul into highly latinate French for Queen Eleonora of Austria, the widow of King Francis I. In her absence from France the version was dedicated to the Cardinal de Lenincourt; there we read that the Viola animae is a book which could ‘bring back atheists, if any there be, to the true light, while maintaining the faithful in the good way’. Clearly Pierre Bunel had every reason to give the original and full version of such a book to an intelligent but not formally educated nobleman such as Montaigne’s father, who wanted to find an ‘antidote’ to Lutheranism.
The Catholic credentials of the Natural Theology of Raymond Sebond may appear to need no defence or apology. In the fifteenth century the scholarly and saintly Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa had possessed a copy: it may have contributed to his doctrine of ‘learned ignorance’ – that Socratic, Evangelical docta ignorantia of the Christian who is content to own that all human knowledge is as nothing, compared to that infinity who is God; learned ignorance never claims to know, or to aspire to know, anything beyond the saving law of Christ. In the sixteenth century the French Platonizing humanist Charles de Bouelles also had a copy: he was a Christian apologist of real depth and power. But Montaig
ne was not mistaken in believing that the Natural Theology did need an apologist against criticisms arising within his own Church. In 1559 a work called the Violetta del anima appeared on a list of prohibited books drawn up by the Spanish Inquisitor Ferdinando de Valdés, Archbishop of Seville. It may refer to a Spanish version of the Violet of the Soul. More important, in 1558–9, the entry Raymundus de Sabunde: Theologia Naturalis appeared on the Index of Forbidden Books of Pope Paul IV.
So the Catholic Montaigne had translated a prohibited book! Or had he? His own translation was never condemned. On the contrary, it enjoyed a certain popularity well into the next century. After Montaigne’s first and second editions in 1569 and 1581 (both in Paris) it was reprinted in Rouen in 1603, in Tournon in 1611, in Paris again, also in 1611 and finally in Rouen in 1641.
That fact can be easily explained. It was not to the Natural Theology that the censors took exception but to the short Prologue which accompanied it, as is shown by the definitive judgement of the Council of Trent; the Tridentine Index of Forbidden Books (1564) condemned the Prologue and nothing else. Shorn of the page and a half of Prologue, the Latin original of Sebond’s Natural Theology circulated freely and was fully reprinted in Venice in 1581, in Frankfurt-on-the-Main in 1631 – with the Prologue – and finally in Lyons in 1648, by which time it was becoming dated. And even the Prologue was eventually removed from the Index in the nineteenth century.