23

23. On habit: and on never easily changing a traditional law

[Montaigne called this chapter De la coustume… ‘Custom’ for him has essentially the same sense as θος (ěthos) for Aristotle (which is not our word ēthos but means custom, usage, manners, habit). No one English word now covers all these senses. Here any of the above may be used, especially habit and custom. Similarly law for Montaigne embraces not only legislation but religious and moral traditions.

‘On habit’ (or custom) was much expanded in later editions; some of the themes are further developed in II, 12, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’. The fresh discovery of new and old cultures overseas reinforced Montaigne’s sceptical conservatism: habit and custom, however arbitrary, may be the cement of society.]

[A] The power of habit was very well understood, it seems to me, by the man who first forged that tale of a village woman who had grown used to cuddling a calf and carrying it about from the time it was born: she grew so accustomed to doing so that she was able to carry it when a fully grown bull.1 For, in truth, Habit is a violent and treacherous schoolteacher. Gradually and stealthily she slides her authoritative foot into us; then, having by this gentle and humble beginning planted it firmly within us, helped by time she later discloses an angry tyrannous countenance, against which we are no longer allowed even to lift up our eyes.

At every turn we find habit infringing the rules of Nature: [C] ‘Usus efficacissimus rerum omnium magister.’ [Custom, in all things, is a most effectual schoolmaster.]2 I trust here the Cave in Plato’s Republic.3 [A] I trust the doctors who often yield to the authority of habit the reasonings of their Art; I trust that king who, by means of habit, brought his stomach to draw nourishment from poison,4 and that maiden who, as Albertus relates, accustomed herself to live on spiders. [B] Why, in the new world of the Indies great nations were discovered in widely different climates who lived on spiders; they kept them and fed them, as they also did grasshoppers, ants, lizards and bats: when food was short a toad sold for six crowns. They cook them and serve them up in various sauces. Other peoples were found for whom our meats and viands were deadly poisonous.5 [C] ‘Consuetudinis magna vis est. Pemoctant venatores in nive; in montibus uri se patiuntur. Pugiles coestibus contusi ne ingemiscunt quidem.’ [Great is the power of habit: huntsmen spend nights in the snow and endure sunburn in the mountains; boxers, bruised by their studded gloves, do not even groan.]6

These examples are from strange lands, but there is nothing strange about them, if only we consider what we assay by experience every day: how habit stuns our senses. There is no need to go in search of what is said about those who dwell near the cataracts of the Nile; nor what the philosophers deduce about the music of the spheres: that those solid material circles rub and lightly play against each other and so cannot fail to produce a wondrous harmony (by the modulations and mutations of which are conducted the revolutions and variations of the dance of the stars) yet none of the creatures in the whole Universe can hear it, loud though it is, since (as in the case of those Egyptians) our sense of hearing has been dulled by the continuity of the sound.7 Blacksmiths, millers and armourers could not put up with the noise impinging upon their ears if they were stunned by it as we are. My scented waistcoat is at first scented for me: if I wear it for three days, only other people notice the scent.

What is stranger still is that habit can combine and stabilize the effects of its impressions on our senses despite long gaps and intervals: that has been assayed by those who live near belfries. At home I live in a tower where, at daybreak and sundown, a great bell tolls out the Ave Maria every day. My very tower is a-tremble at the din. At first I found it unbearable; a brief time was enough to break me in so that I can now hear it without annoyance and often without even being roused from sleep.

Plato chided a boy for playing knuckle-bones; he replied, ‘You are chiding me for something unimportant.’ ‘Habit,’ said Plato, ‘is not unimportant.’8 I find that our greatest vices do acquire their bent during our most tender infancy, so that our formation is chiefly in the hands of our wet-nurses. Mothers think their boys are playing when they see them wring the neck of a chicken or find sport in wounding a dog or a cat. Some fathers are so stupid as to think that it augurs well for a martial spirit if they see their son outrageously striking a peasant or a lackey who cannot defend himself, or for cleverness when they see him cheat a playmate by some cunning deceit or a trick. Yet those are the true seeds by which cruelty, tyranny and treachery take root; they germinate there and then shoot up and flourish, thriving in the grip of habit. And it is a most dangerous start to education to make excuses for such low tendencies because of the weakness of childhood or the unimportance of the subject. In the first place, it is Nature speaking, whose voice is then all the more loud and clear for being yet unbroken. Secondly, the ugliness of cheating does not depend on the difference between money and counters: it depends on the cheating.

‘If he cheats over counters, why should he not cheat over money?’ I find it more just to argue that way than the way others do: ‘They are only counters: he would not do that with money.’

We must carefully teach children to detest vices for what they consist in; we must teach them their natural ugliness, so that they flee them not only in their deeds but in their minds: the very thought of them should be hateful, whatever mask they hide behind.

I was trained from boyhood always to stride along the open highway and to find it repugnant to introduce cunning and deceit into my childish games. I am well aware that (since we should note that games are not games for children but are to be judged as the most serious things they do) there is no pastime so trivial that I do not bring to it (from an inner, natural and unstudied propensity) an extreme repugnance against cheating. If I am playing cards I treat pennies like double-doubloons, just as much when playing with my wife and daughter (when winning or losing hardly matters to me) as when I am gambling in earnest. Everywhere and in everything my own eyes suffice to keep me to my duty; no eyes watch me more closely: there are none I regard more highly.

[A] I have recently seen in my home a native of Nantes, a man small and born without arms: he has so fashioned his feet to serve him as hands should do that they have, in truth, half forgotten their natural duties. He calls them his hands moreover; he cuts his food with them, loads a pistol and fires it with them; he threads a needle, sews, writes, doffs his hat, combs his hair, plays cards and plays dice (shaking them as skilfully as anyone else could). I gave him some money (for he earns his living by showing what he can do): he carried it away in his foot, just as we do in our hand. When I was a boy I saw another such who had no hands but wielded a two-handed sword and a halberd by hunching his neck: he tossed them up in the air, caught them again, threw a dagger – and cracked a whip as well as any carter in France.

But we can discover the effects of habit far better from the impressions which she imprints on our souls, in which she encounters less resistance. Where our judgements and beliefs are concerned, what can she not do? Is there any opinion so [C] bizarre [A] – (and9 I am leaving aside that coarse deceit of religions which, as we can see, has intoxicated so many great nations and so many learned men: since that concern lies beyond human reason a man may be excused if he goes astray over that, whenever he is not by divine favour enlightened above the natural order)10 – but in other opinions, are there any so strange that habit has not planted them and established them by laws, anywhere she likes, at her good pleasure? [C] And that ancient exclamation is totally right: ‘Non pudet physicum, id est speculatorem venatoremque naturæ, ab animis consuetudine imbutis quærere testimonium veritatis!’ [Is it not a disgrace that the natural philosopher, that observer and tracker of Nature, should seek evidence of the truth from minds stupefied by habit!]11

[B] I reckon that there is no notion, however mad, which can occur to the imagination of men of which we do not meet an example in some public practice or other and which, as a consequence, is not propped up on its foundations by our discursive reason. There are nations where you greet people by turning your backs on them and where you never look at anyone you wish to honour. There are nations where, when the king spits, the court favourite holds out her hand; in another nation the most eminent of those about him stoop down and gather up his faeces in a linen cloth.12

[C] Let us steal a little room here for a story. A certain French nobleman always used to blow his nose with his fingers, something quite opposed to our customs. Defending his action (and he was famous for his repartee) he asked me why that filthy mucus should be so privileged that we should prepare fine linen to receive it and then, going even further, should wrap it up and carry it carefully about on our persons; that practice ought to excite more loathing and nausea than seeing him simply excrete it (wherever it might be) as we do all our other droppings. I considered that what he said was not totally unreasonable, but habit had prevented me from noticing just that strangeness which we find so hideous in similar customs in another country.

Miraculous wonders depend on our ignorance of Nature not on the essence of Nature. Our judgement’s power to see things is lulled to sleep once we grow accustomed to anything. The Barbarians are in no wise more of a wonder to us than we are to them, nor with better reason – as anyone would admit if, after running through examples from the New World, he concentrated on his own and then with good sense compared them. Human reason is a dye spread more or less equally through all the opinions and all the manners of us humans, which are infinite in matter and infinite in diversity.

I now return to the subject. There are peoples [B] where no one but his wife and his children can address the king except through an intermediary: in one and the same country virgins openly display their private parts whilst the married women carefully cover them and hide them; and there is another custom somewhat related to it: in this case chastity is only valued in the service of matrimony: girls can give themselves to whom they wish and, once pregnant, can openly abort themselves with special drugs. Elsewhere, if the bridegroom is, say, a merchant, all the merchants invited to the wedding lie with the bride before he does: the more numerous they are the greater the honour for her and the greater her reputation for staying-power and sexual capacity. The same applies if it is an official who is getting married; the same, too, if it is a nobleman, and so on; but if it is a peasant or anyone of low estate, the duty falls to his lord; and yet they continue to urge strict fidelity during the marriage. There are countries where there are public brothels of men and where men can marry each other; where women accompany their husbands to the wars and play a role not merely in the fighting but in the high command; where not only rings are worn through the nose, lips, cheeks and toes, but heavy golden rods are worn through bosoms and buttocks; where they wipe their fingers when eating on their thighs, on their balls or on the soles of their feet; where children do not inherit, but brothers and nephews do; (elsewhere only nephews do, except for the royal succession;) where, to oversee the community of goods observed there, certain sovereign magistrates have entire control over the cultivation of the land and the distribution of crops, every man according to his need; where they bewail the death of children and rejoice at the death of the elderly; where ten or a dozen men and their wives share the same bed; where wives who lose their husbands by a violent death may remarry but not the others; where womanhood is rated so low that they kill the girls who are born there and buy women from their neighbours when they need them; where husbands can repudiate wives without stating the cause, but wives cannot do so whatever the cause; where husbands can sell their wives if they are barren; where they boil their dead and pound them into a sort of gruel which they then mix with wine and drink down; where the most desirable form of sepulture is to be eaten by dogs or birds; where they believe that the souls of the blessed dwell in pleasant pastures in complete freedom, furnished with all good things (they it is who make the echoes that we hear); where men fight in the water and aim their bows accurately while swimming; where they shrug their shoulders and bow their heads as a sign of subjection, taking off their shoes when they enter the king’s apartments; where the eunuchs who guard the women who are vowed to religion lack noses and lips to make them unlovable and where the priests poke out their eyes to seek the acquaintance of their demons and to consult the oracles; where each makes a god of whatever he likes – the huntsman of a lion or a fox, the fisherman of a particular fish – and make idols of everything that humans do and have done to them (the Sun, Moon and the Earth are their principal gods: their form of oath is to touch the ground whilst looking at the Sun); where they eat fish and flesh raw; [C] where the greatest oath is to swear by the name of a dead man who had a great reputation in that country while touching his tomb;13 where the New Year’s gift sent from the king to his vassal princes is fire: when the ambassador arrives bearing it, the old fires are doused throughout the habitation and the people subject to that vassal must each come and bear away new fire for himself upon pain of lèse-majesté; where whenever a king lays down his charge for reasons of devotion (as he often does), his immediate heir is obliged to do the same, the right to rule in the kingdom passing to the third in line; where they change their form of polity as affairs require: they depose their king whenever it pleases them, appointing elders to govern the state and sometimes leaving it in the hands of the general public; where both men and women receive like baptism and are circumcised; where the warrior who manages to present his king with the heads of seven enemies killed in one or more battles is granted nobility; [B] where they live with that opinion, [C] so rare and so uncouth, [B] that souls14 are mortal; where women give birth without groans and without fear; [C] where the women wear copper shin-guards on both their legs; where it is a sign of high breeding to bite the louse that has bitten them and where girls dare not marry until they have asked the king if he wants to take their maidenhead; [B] where greetings consist in putting one finger on the ground and then raising it heavenwards; where it is the men who carry things on their heads and the women who carry them on their shoulders; where the women stand up to piss and the men squat down; where they send each other their blood as an act of affection and burn incense to the men they would honour as they do to their gods; where the forbidden affinities in marriage extend not merely to the fourth degree but to the most distant relationships; where children are suckled for four years and often for twelve, yet where it is held to be fatal to give a child suck on its very first day; where fathers have the responsibility of punishing male children and the mothers the female, quite apart (the punishment consisting in hanging them by the feet over smoke); where they circumcise females; where they eat herbs of every kind, simply rejecting the ones which seem to them to smell badly; where everything is open and where the houses, however fair and opulent they may be, are without doors, windows or strong-boxes, and where thieves are punished twice as severely as elsewhere; where they kill lice as monkeys do, with their teeth and find it horrible to see them crushed between fingernails; where neither hair nor nails are cut for the whole of one’s life; elsewhere they only cut the nails on their right hand, cultivating those on the left as a proof of gentility; [C] where they let all their hair grow on the left of their body and keep all the other side clean-shaven – and in one of the neighbouring provinces they let the hair grow in front and in another behind, shaving the other side; [B] where, in return for money, fathers let guests have sexual enjoyment of their children, and husbands of their wives; where it is honourable to have children by one’s mother, for fathers to have sexual intercourse with their daughters and with their sons, [C] and where, when they gather for a festival, all can lie with each other’s children.

[A] Here they live on human flesh;15 there, it is a pious duty to kill one’s father at a particular age; elsewhere the fathers decide, when the children are still in the womb, which will be kept and brought up and which will be killed and abandoned; elsewhere aged husbands lend their wives to younger men to enjoy; elsewhere again there is no sin in having wives in common – indeed in one country the women, as a mark of honour, hem their skirts with a fringe of tassels to show how many men they have lain with.

And did not habit found a state composed only of women? Did it not place weapons in their hands, make them raise armies and fight battles?16

And does not habit teach the roughest of the rough something which the whole of philosophy fails to implant in the heads of the wisest of men? For we know of whole nations [C] where death is not merely despised but rejoiced in; [A] where seven-year-old boys17 let themselves be flogged to death without changing their expression;18 where riches are held in such contempt that the most wretched of their citizens would not deign to stoop and pick up a purse full of crowns. And we know of regions where every kind of food grows in abundance but where both the usual and the most savoury dish is bread and mustard-cress with water.19

[B] And did not custom produce a miracle in Chios where, for seven hundred years, no one ever recalled a woman or girl who lost her honour?

[A] To sum up then, the impression I have is that there is nothing that custom may not do and cannot do; and Pindar rightly calls her (so I have been told) the Queen and Empress of the World.20

[C] The man found beating his father replied that such was traditional in his family; that his father had beaten his grandfather; his grandfather, his great-grandfather: ‘And this boy will beat me once he has reached my age.’ Yet the father whom the son was pulling about and dragging along the road commanded him to stop at a certain doorway, for he had not dragged his own father beyond that point, that being the boundary for the hereditary bashing of fathers customary among the sons of their line.21

It is by custom, says Aristotle, as often as from illness that women tear out their hair, gnaw their nails, eat earth and charcoal: just as it is as much by custom as by Nature that males lie with males.

The laws of conscience which we say are born of Nature are born of custom; since man inwardly venerates the opinions and the manners approved and received about him, he cannot without remorse free himself from them nor apply himself to them without self-approbation.

[B] In the past, when the Cretans wished to curse someone, they prayed the gods to make him catch a bad habit.

[A] But the principal activity of custom is so to seize us and to grip us in her claws that it is hardly in our power to struggle free and to come back into ourselves, where we can reason and argue about her ordinances. Since we suck them in with our mothers’ milk and since the face of the world is presented thus to our infant gaze, it seems to us that we were really born with the property of continuing to act that way. And as for those ideas which we find to be held in common and in high esteem about us, the seeds of which were planted in our souls by our forefathers, they appear to belong to our genus, to be natural. [C] That is why we think that it is reason which is unhinged whenever custom is – and God knows how often we unreasonably do that! If (as those of us have been led to do who make a study of ourselves) each man, on hearing a wise maxim, immediately looked to see how it properly applied to him, he would find that it was not so much a pithy saying as a whiplash applied to the habitual stupidity of his faculty of judgement. But the counsels of Truth and her precepts are taken to apply to the generality of men, never to oneself: we store them up in our memory not in our manners, which is most stupid and unprofitable.

But let us get back to custom’s imperial sway.

Peoples nurtured on freedom and self-government judge any other form of polity to be deformed and unnatural. Those who are used to monarchy do the same: as soon as they have rid themselves of the exactions of one master, no matter what opportunities for change Fortune may give them they rush to implant an equally difficult one in his place, incapable as they are of resolving to hate the over-mastery as such.22

[A] Darius asked some Greeks what it would take to persuade them to adopt the Indian custom of eating their dead fathers (for that was the ritual among Indians who reckoned that the most auspicious burial they could give their fathers was within themselves): they replied that nothing on earth would make them do it. Then he made an assay at persuading those Indians to abandon their way and adopt that of the Greeks (which was to cremate their fathers’ corpses): he horrified them even more.23

We all do likewise: usage hides the true aspect of things from us:

Nil adeo magnum, nec tam mirabile quicquam Principio, quod non minuant mirarier omnes Paulatim.

[There is nothing which at first seems so great or so wondrous which we do not all gradually wonder at less and less.]24

I once had the duty of justifying one of our practices which, far and wide around us, is accepted as having established authority; I did not wish to maintain it (as is usually done) exclusively by force of law and exempla so I traced it back to its origins: I found its basis to be so weak25 that I all but loathed it – I who was supposed to encourage it in others.

[C] This was the remedy that Plato prescribed to banish the unnatural loves of his age – he considered it a basic, sovereign remedy: public opinion should condemn them; poets and everyone else should give dreadful accounts of them. By this remedy even the fairest daughters would not attract the lust of their fathers, nor would outstandingly handsome brothers that of their sisters, since the myths of Thyestes, of Oedipus and of Macareus would have planted moral beliefs in the tender minds of children by the charm of the poetry.26 Indeed, chastity is a fair virtue; its usefulness is well recognized: yet it is as hard to treat it and to justify it from Nature as it is easy to do so from tradition, law and precept. Basic universal precepts of reason are difficult to investigate thoroughly: dons skim through them quickly or do not even dare to handle them, throwing themselves straightway into the sanctuary of tradition, where they can preen themselves on easy victories.

Those who refuse to be drawn away from the beginnings and sources fail even worse and find themselves bound to savage opinions – as Chrysippus was, who often strewed throughout his writings the little account he took of incestuous unions of any kind.27

[A] A man who wished to loose himself28 from the violent foregone conclusions of custom will find many things accepted as being indubitably settled which have nothing to support them but the hoary whiskers and wrinkles of attendant usage; let him tear off that mask, bring matters back to truth and reason, and he will feel his judgement turned upside-down, yet restored by this to a much surer state.

I will ask him, for example, what could be stranger than seeing a people obliged to obey laws which they have never understood;29 in all their household concerns, marriages, gifts, wills, buying and selling, they are bound by laws which they cannot know, being neither written nor published in their own language: they needs must pay to have them interpreted and applied [C] – not following in this the ingenious notion of Isocrates30 (who advised his king to make all trade and business free, unfettered and profitable but all quarrels and disputes onerous, loading them with heavy taxes); they prefer the monstrous notion of making a trade of reason itself and treating laws like merchandise. [A] I am pleased that it was (as our historians state) a Gascon gentleman from my part of the country whom Fortune led to be the first to object when Charlemagne wished to impose Imperial Roman Law on us.31

What is more uncouth than a nation32 where, by legal custom, the office of judge is openly venal and where verdicts are simply bought for cash? where, quite legally, justice is denied to anyone who cannot pay for it, yet where this trade is held in such high esteem that there is formed a fourth estate in the commonwealth, composed of men who deal in lawsuits, thus joining the three ancient estates, the Church, the Nobility and the People? where this fourth estate, having charge of the laws and sovereign authority over lives and chattels, should be quite distinct from the nobility, with the result that there are two sets of laws, the law of honour and the law of justice which are strongly opposed in many matters (the first condemns an unavenged accusation of lying: the other condemns the revenge; a gentleman who puts up with an insult is, by the laws of arms, stripped of his rank and nobility: one who avenges it incurs capital punishment; if he goes to law to redress an offence against his honour, he is dishonoured; if he acts independently he is chastised and punished by the Law); where these two estates, so different from each other, both derive from a single Head, yet one is responsible for peace, the other for war; the first acquires profit, the second, honour; the first, learning, the second, virtue; the first, words, the second, deeds; the first, justice, the second valour; the first reason, the second, fortitude; the first the long gown, the second, the short?

Take things indifferent, such as clothing: if anyone cared to refer clothing back to its true purpose (which is its usefulness and convenience for the body – its original grace and comeliness depends on that), I would concede to him that the most monstrous clothes imaginable include, to my taste, our doctoral bonnets, that long tail of pleated velvet hanging down from the heads of our womenfolk with its motley fringes, and that silly codpiece uselessly modelling a member which we cannot even decently call by its name yet which we make a parade of, showing it off in public.

Nevertheless such considerations do not deter a man of intelligence from following the common fashion;33 it seems to me on the contrary that all idiosyncratic and outlandish modes derive less from reason than from madness and ambitious affectation; it is his soul that a wise man should withdraw from the crowd, maintaining its power and freedom freely to make judgements, whilst externally accepting all received forms and fashions.

The government of a community has no right to our thoughts, but everything else such as our actions, efforts, wealth and life itself should be lent to it for its service or even given up when the community’s opinions so require, [A1] just as that great and good man Socrates refused to save his life by disobeying [B] the magistrate, [A1] a most unjust and iniquitous magistrate. For the Rule of rules, the general Law of laws, is that each should observe those of the place wherein he lives.34

[It is right to obey one’s country’s laws.]

And here is one drawn from a different barrel: it is greatly to be doubted whether any obvious good can come from changing any traditional law, whatever it may be, compared with the evil of changing it; for a polity is like a building made of diverse pieces interlocked together, joined in such a way that it is impossible to move one without the whole structure feeling it. He who gave the Thurians their laws35 ordained that if any man wished to abolish an ancient one or establish a new one he should appear before the people with a rope round his neck, so that he could be hanged at once if anyone failed to approve of his novelty. And the lawgiver to the Spartans spent his life in persuading the citizens to make a solemn promise not to break any of his ordinances. The Spartan Magistrate36 who roughly cut the two extra strings which Phrynis added to his lyre was not worried about whether the music was improved or whether the chords were more ample: it sufficed him to condemn them because it was a departure from the traditional style. (That was the meaning of that rusty sword of justice hanging in Massilia.)37

[B] I abhor novelty, no matter what visage it presents, and am right to do so, for I have seen some of its disastrous effects. That novelty which has [C] for so many years [B] beset us is not solely responsible,38 but one can say with every likelihood that it has incidentally caused and given birth to them all. Even for the evils and destruction which have subsequently happened without it and despite it it must accept responsibility.

Heu patior telis vulnera facta meis. [Alas, I suffer wounds made by my own arrows.]39

[C] Those [B] who shake40 the State are easily the first to be engulfed in its destruction. [C] The fruits of dissension are not gathered by the one who began it: he stirs and troubles the waters for other men to fish in. [B] Once the great structure of the monarchy is shaken by novelty and its interwoven bonds torn asunder – especially in its old age – the gates are opened as wide as you wish to similar attacks. [C] It is harder for Regal Majesty, said an ancient, to decline from the summit to a middling place than to plunge from there to the very bottom.41

But if innovators do most harm, those who copy them are more at fault for rushing to follow examples after they have experienced the horror of them and punished them. And if there are degrees of honour even in the doing of evil, then they must concede to the others the glory of innovation and the courage to make the first attempt.

[B] From this first and abundant source all kinds of new depravity go [C] happily [B] drawing ideas and models for disturbing our system of government. In the very laws which were made to remedy the original evil we can find introductions to all sorts of wicked actions and excuses for them: what is happening to us is what Thucydides said of the civil wars of his own time: that to flatter public vices and to justify them, gentler names were given to them, rejecting true indictments of them as spurious or else mitigating them.42 Yet the intention is to reform our consciences and our beliefs! ‘Honesta oratio est!’ [The plea is fine enough!]43 But even the best of [C] pretexts [B] for novelty are exceedingly dangerous: [C] ‘adeo nihil motum ex antiquo probabile est’ [so true is it that no change from ancient ways can be approved].44

[B] To speak frankly, it seems to me that there is a great deal of self-love and arrogance in judging so highly of your opinions that you are obliged to disturb the public peace in order to establish them, thereby introducing those many unavoidable evils and that horrifying moral corruption which, in matters of great importance, civil wars and political upheavals bring in their wake – introducing them moreover into your own country. [C] Is it not bad husbandry to encourage so many definite and acknowledged vices in order to combat alleged and disputable error? Is there any kind of vice more wicked than those which trouble the naturally recognized sense of community?

When the Roman Senate had differences with the people about the service of their religion it dared to palm them off with this evasion: ‘Ad deos id magis quam ad se pertinere, ipsos visuros ne sacra sua polluantur.’ [That this was less a matter for them than for the gods, who would see that their rites were not profaned.]45 That concurs with what the oracle replied to the men of Delphi in their war against the Medes: fearing a Persian invasion they asked the god what they should do with the holy treasures in his temple, hide them or bear them away. He told them to move nothing; they should look after themselves: he was able to provide for his own.46

[B] The Christian religion bears all the signs of the highest justice and utility, but none is more obvious than the specific injunction to obey the powers that be and to uphold the civil polity.47 What a wondrous example was bequeathed to us by the Wisdom of God48 when, in order to establish the salvation of the human race and forward his glorious victory over death and sin, he willed to do so only within the context of our political order. He submitted the course and conduct of so sublime an enterprise, so rich in salvation, to the blind injustice of our human usages and custom, permitting the innocent blood of so many of the Elect, his favoured ones, to flow; he suffered many long years to be lost in order to bring that inestimable fruit to ripeness.

There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.

In excuse the former can cite simplicity, obedience and example: whatever he may do, it cannot be from ill-will, only (at worse) from misfortune; [C] ‘Quis est enim quem non moveat clarissimis monumentis testata consignataque antiquitas?’ [Who would not be moved by the most illustrious records witnessed and sealed by antiquity?] – apart from what Isocrates said, that imperfection has a greater interest in moderation than excess does.49

[B] The other is in a much tougher position,50 [C] since anyone who undertakes to chop and change usurps the right to judge and must pride himself on seeing the defect in what he would get rid of and the good in what he would bring in. The following principles are banal enough but they did strengthen me in my position and even put a bridle on my rasher youth: never to load my shoulders with the heavy burden of claiming knowledge of so important a science;51 Never to venture to do in such a matter what I would never dare to do in the easiest of those disciplines in which I had been instructed and where facile decisions do no harm, seeming to me as it does to be most iniquitous to wish to submit immovable public regulations and observances to the instability of private ideas (private reasoning having jurisdiction only in private matters) and to undertake against divine ordinances something that no State would tolerate against civil ones (even though human reason is far more involved in civil law, the Law is the sovereign judge of its judges; judicial discretion is limited to explaining and extending accepted usage: it cannot deflect it or make innovations). Though divine Providence has sometimes passed beyond the rules to which we are bound by necessity, it was not dispensing us from them. Such cases are blows from God’s hand which we are not to imitate but to greet with amazement; they are inordinate examples, expressly marked by signs of special approval, the same in kind as the miracles which Providence gives us in witness of his omnipotence, miracles far above our order-of-being and our capacities which it is madness and impiety to assay to imitate. We are required not to follow them but to contemplate them in ecstasy. They are acts of his Person, not ours.52

Cotta’s testimony is relevant here: ‘Quum de religione agitur T. Coruncanium, P. Scipionem, P. Scævolam, pontifices maximos, non Zenonem aut Cleanthem aut Chrysippum sequor.’ [In matters of religion I do not follow Zeno, Cleanthes or Chrysippus but Titus Coruncanius, Publius Scipio, Publius Scaevola and the Supreme Pontiffs.]53

[B] God does know, in our present quarrel, when a hundred articles of religion are to be removed or restored – great and profound ones – how many men are there who can proudly claim to have mastered in detail the reasons and fundamental positions of both sides. They amount to a number (if you could call them a number!) who would not have much power to disturb us. But all the rest of the crowd, where are they heading for? They rush to take sides, but under what banner? Their remedy is like other remedies when weak and badly prescribed: those humours in us which it was meant to purge have been inflamed, irritated and aggravated by the conflict: yet the potion remains in the body. It could not purge us: it was too weak; but it has weakened us. So we cannot evacuate it, yet all we get out of its workings on our inwards is prolonged pain.

[A] Nevertheless Fortune ever reserves her authority far above our arguments; she sometimes presents us with a need so pressing that the laws simply must find room for it. [B] If you are resisting the growth of an innovation which has recently been introduced by violence, it is a dangerous and unfair obligation to be restrained by rules everywhere and all the time in your struggle against those who run loose, for whom anything is licit which advances their cause, and for whom law and order means seeking their own advantage: [C] ‘Aditum nocendi perfido praestat fides.’ [To trust an untrustworthy man is to give him power to harm.]54 [B] The normal restraints in a healthy State do not provide for such abnormal occurrences: they presuppose a body where the main links and functions cohere together, as well as a common consent to acknowledge and obey it. [C] The way of the law is weighty, cold and constrained; it is no good for resisting ways which are lawless and wild.

[A] We all know that two great figures in two civil wars – Octavius against Sylla and Cato against Caesar – are still reproached for having preferred to let their country suffer any extremity rather than to come to its aid by changing anything whatever at the expense of the law. For truly in dire extremities, when it is impossible to hold on, it would perhaps be wiser to bow your head a little and to let the blow fall, rather than to cling impossibly on, refusing to concede anything whatsoever and so giving violence the occasion to trample everything underfoot; it would be better, since the Laws cannot do what they wish, to force them to wish what they can do.55 That was the solution of the man who ordered them to go to sleep for four-and-twenty hours,56 and of that other man who made a second May out of the month of June.57 The Spartans religiously observed the ordinances of their country, but, when they were caught between a law forbidding them to elect the same admiral twice and a pressing emergency requiring Lysander to reassume that office, even they elected someone called Aracus as Admiral and Lysander as ‘Superintendent of the Navy’!58 And similar acuteness was shown by a Spartan ambassador who was dispatched to the Athenians to negotiate a change in one of their laws, only to find Pericles testifying that it was forbidden to remove a tablet once a law had been inscribed on it: he counselled him – since that was not forbidden – simply to turn the tablet round.

Plutarch praises Philopoemen for being born to command, knowing how to issue commands by the laws and, when public necessity required it, to the laws.59