THE COMPLETE ESSAYS

‘Dr Screech’s principal achievement has been to render Montaigne into contemporary English without quaintness, but also without sacrifice of that flavour of the sixteenth century which is implicit in Montaigne’s thinking… We want the essence of the man in a form accessible to modern readers, and that is what the translator has so gracefully given us’ – Robertson Davies

‘An absolute treat… [Screech] is the master of Montaigne. He’s already written extremely eloquently about Michel Montaigne as a melancholy man. There’s a kind of liveliness, a vernacular about the translation here that works very well’ – Roy Porter on Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio Four

‘Of its [the translation’s] limpidity and charm there can be no question’ – Simon Raven in the Guardian

‘This thinking tome, edited by a fine scholar, is utterly readable as fine scholars should be. It is more easily picked up than put down, and should be on the bedside table of every homme moyen sensuel, or lady for that matter’ – Anthony Blond in the Evening Standard

‘Most of all, mention should be made of the other greatly original feature of this translation, the commentary… [which] constitutes a fascinating sixteenth-century honnête homme’s library. For this reason the French reader will turn to the translation of M. A. Screech, who takes his place among those who, crossing cultural boundaries, enable each country to rediscover its writers in a new light’ – Jean-Robert Armogathe in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance

‘Anglophones of the next century will be deeply in [Dr Screech’s] debt’ – Gore Vidal in The Times Literary Supplement

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND EDITOR

MICHEL EYQUEM, Seigneur de Montaigne, was born in 1533, the son and heir of Pierre, Seigneur de Montaigne (two previous children dying soon after birth). He was brought up to speak Latin as his mother tongue and always retained a Latin turn of mind; though he knew Greek, he preferred to use translations. After studying law he eventually became counsellor to the Parlement of Bordeaux. He married in 1565. In 1569 he published his French version of the Natural Theology of Raymond Sebond; his Apology is only partly a defence of Sebond and sets sceptical limits to human reasoning about God, man and nature. He retired in 1571 to his lands at Montaigne, devoting himself to reading and reflection and composing his Essays (first version, 1580). He loathed the fanaticism and cruelties of the religious wars of the period, but sided with Catholic orthodoxy and legitimate monarchy. He was twice elected Mayor of Bordeaux (1581 and 1583), a post held for four years. He died at Montaigne in 1592 while preparing the final, and richest, edition of his Essays.

M. A. SCREECH is an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College and an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (Fellow and Chaplain, 2001–3), a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of University College London, and a corresponding member of the Institut de France. He long served on the committee of the Warburg Institute as the Fielden Professor of French Language and Literature in London, until his election to All Souls. He is a Renaissance scholar of international renown. He has edited and translated both the complete edition and a selection of the Essays for Penguin Classics and, in a separate volume, Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond. His other books include Erasmus: Ecstacy and the Praise of Folly (Penguin, 1988), Rabelais, Montaigne and Melancholy (Penguin, 1991) and, most recently, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (Allen Lane, 1998). All are acknowledged to be classics studies in their fields. He worked with Anne Screech on Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament. Michael Screech was promoted Chevalier dans l’Ordre du Mérite in 1982 and Chevalier dans la Légion d’Honneur in 1992. He was ordained, in Oxford, a deacon in 1994 and a priest in 1995.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

The Complete Essays

Translated and edited with anIntroduction and Notes by M. A. SCREECH

PENGUIN BOOKS

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Published by the Penguin GroupPenguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, EnglandPenguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USAPenguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, AustraliaPenguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, IndiaPenguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New ZealandPenguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

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Book II, Chapter 12 previously appeared as An Apology for Raymond Sebond,published in Penguin Books 1987The Complete Essays first published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 1991Reprinted with corrections and a new Chronology 200320

This translation and editorial material copyright © M. A. Screech 1987, 1991, 2003 All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

9780141915937

In Memory of

PHILIP EVELEIGH

Wit, poet, scholar killed during the Allied landings in Italy

Table of Contents

Introduction

Note on the Text

The Annotations

Note on the Translation

Explanation of the Symbols[Summary of the Symbols repeated on p. 1284]

Appendices

Chronology

To the Reader

BOOK I

1. We reach the same end by discrepant means

2. On sadness

3. Our emotions get carried away beyond us

4. How the soul discharges its emotions against false objects when lacking real ones

5. Whether the governor of a besieged fortress should go out and parley

6. The hour of parleying is dangerous

7. That our deeds are judged by the intention

8. On idleness

9. On liars

10. On a ready or hesitant delivery

11. On prognostications

12. On constancy

13. Ceremonial at the meeting of kings

14. That the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them

15. One is punished for stubbornly defending a fort without a good reason

16. On punishing cowardice

17. The doings of certain ambassadors

18. On fear

19. That we should not be deemed happy till after our death

20. To philosophize is to learn how to die

21. On the power of the imagination

22. One man’s profit is another man’s loss

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

24. Same design: differing outcomes

25. On schoolmasters’ learning

26. On educating children

27. That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities

28. On affectionate relationships

29. Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de La Boëtie

30. On moderation

31. On the Cannibals

32. Judgements on God’s ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence

33. On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of one’s life

34. Fortune is often found in Reason’s train

35. Something lacking in our civil administrations

36. On the custom of wearing clothing

37. On Cato the Younger

38. How we weep and laugh at the same thing

39. On solitude

40. Reflections upon Cicero

41. On not sharing one’s fame

42. On the inequality there is between us

43. On sumptuary laws

44. On sleep

45. On the Battle of Dreux

46. On names

47. On the uncertainty of our judgement

48. On war-horses

49. On ancient customs

50. On Democritus and Heraclitus

51. On the vanity of words

52. On the frugality of the Ancients

53. On one of Caesar’s sayings

54. On vain cunning devices

55. On smells

56. On prayer

57. On the length of life

BOOK II

1. On the inconstancy of our actions

2. On drunkenness

3. A custom of the Isle of Cea

4. ‘Work can wait till tomorrow’

5. On conscience

6. On practice

7. On rewards for honour

8. On the affection of fathers for their children

9. On the armour of the Parthians

10. On books

11. On cruelty

12. An apology for Raymond Sebond

13. On judging someone else’s death

14. How our mind tangles itself up

15. That difficulty increases desire

16. On glory

17. On presumption

18. On giving the lie

19. On freedom of conscience

20. We can savour nothing pure

21. Against indolence

22. On riding ‘in post’

23. On bad means to a good end

24. On the greatness of Rome

25. On not pretending to be ill

26. On thumbs

27. On cowardice, the mother of cruelty

28. There is a season for everything

29. On virtue

30. On a monster-child

31. On anger

32. In defence of Seneca and Plutarch

33. The tale of Spurina

34. Observations on Julius Caesar’s methods of waging war

35. On three good wives

36. On the most excellent of men

37. On the resemblance of children to their fathers

BOOK III

1. On the useful and the honourable

2. On repenting

3. On three kinds of social intercourse

4. On diversion

5. On some lines of Virgil

6. On coaches

7. On high rank as a disadvantage

8. On the art of conversation

9. On vanity

10. On restraining your will

11. On the lame

12. On physiognomy

13. On experience

Index

Introduction

Montaigne is one of the great sages of that modern world which in a sense began with the Renaissance. He is a bridge linking the thought of pagan antiquity and of Christian antiquity with our own. Colourful, practical and direct, and never intentionally obscure, he sets before us his modestly named Essays, his ‘attempts’ at sounding himself and the nature and duties of Man so as to discover a sane and humane manner of living. He enjoys a place apart among French Renaissance authors. Men and women of all sorts are fascinated by what they find in him. Many read him for his wisdom and humanity, for which he may be quoted in a newspaper as readily as in a history of philosophy. He writes about himself, but is no egocentric and is never a bore. He treats the deepest subjects in the least pompous of manners and in a style often marked by dry humour. His writings are vibrant with challenge; they are free from jargon and unnecessary technicalities. In the seventeenth century, Pascal, the great Jansenist author of the Pensées (‘Thoughts’ which owe much to Montaigne), was converted partly by reading him and was soon discussing the Essays at Port-Royal with his director, LeMaistre de Sacy (who had his reservations). Pascal gained, it is said, thirty years by reading Montaigne, thirty years of study and reflection. 1 Others, too, have felt the same. For Montaigne gives his readers the fruits of his own reading and of his own reflections upon it, all measured against his personal experience during a period of intellectual ferment and of religious and political disarray. Montaigne never let himself be limited by his office or station. As husband, father, counsellor, mayor, he kept a critical corner of himself to himself, from which he could judge in freedom and seek to be at peace with himself. He does not crush his reader under the authority of the great philosophers: he tries out their opinions and sees whether they work for him or for others. For he knew that opinions are not certainties, and that most human ‘certainties’ are in fact opinions.

Traces of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Cicero, St Augustine or his own contemporaries can be found in every page he wrote, but they are skilfully interwoven into his own discourse, being renewed and humanized in the process. And he hardly ever names them when making such borrowings. That was because he was delighted to know that critics would be condemning an idea of Plato, Aristotle or Seneca, say, when they thought they were attacking merely an opinion of his own unimportant self.

After his beloved father died (18 June 1568), he succeeded to the title and the estates at Montaigne, in south-west France. (Provisions were made for his mother.) He was thirty-five, and three years married. Soon (1570) he was able to sell his charge as counsellor in the Parlement of Bordeaux (a legal office). His plan was, like cultured gentlemen in Ancient Roman times, to devote himself to learned leisure. He marked the event with a Latin inscription in his château – he had a taste for inscriptions, covering the beams and walls of his library with some sixty sayings in Greek and Latin, many of which figure in the Essays. His rejoicing at leaving negotium (business) for otium (leisure) was tempered by grief at the death of his friend, Etienne de la Boëtie (1563). (His children all died young, too, except a daughter, Léonor, who was deeply loved but could not, for a nobleman, replace a son and heir.)

Montaigne’s project of calm study soon went wrong. He fell into an unbalanced melancholy; his spirit galloped off like a runaway horse; his mind, left fallow, produced weeds not grass. The terms he uses are clear: his complexion was unbalanced by an increase of melancholy ‘humour’. His natural ‘complexion’ – the mix of his ‘humours’ – was a stable blend of the melancholic and the sanguine. So that sudden access of melancholy humour (brought on by grief and isolation) was a serious matter, for such an increase in that humour was indeed inimical to his complexion, tipping it towards chagrin, a depression touched by madness. Such chagrin induced rêveries, a term which then, and long afterwards, meant not amiable poetic musings but ravings. (The Rêveries of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, are his ‘ravings’, not his ‘day-dreams’.) So at the outset otium brought Montaigne not happy leisure and wisdom but instability. Writing the Essays was, at one period, a successful attempt to exorcize that demon. To shame himself, he tells us, he decided to write down his thoughts and his rhapsodies. That was the beginning of his Essays. 2 But he was not a professional scholar: he had no ‘subject’ to write about. He was not a statesman or a general. He soon decided to write about himself, the only subject he might know better than anyone else. This was a revolutionary decision, made easier, no doubt, by his bout of melancholy, for that humour encouraged an increased self-awareness. No one in Classical Antiquity had done anything like it. In the history of the known world only a handful of authors had ever broken the taboo against writing primarily about oneself, as an ordinary man. St Augustine had written about himself, but as a penitent in the Confessions; during the Renaissance, Girolamo Cardano wrote On his Life and On his Books, and Joachim Du Bellay lamented his Roman ‘exile’ in his poetic Regrets. But those works bear no resemblance to what the Essays were to become for Montaigne – ‘tentative attempts’ to ‘assay’ the value of himself, his nature, his habits and of his own opinions and those of others – a hunt for truth, personality and a knowledge of humanity through an exploration of his own reactions to his reading, his travels, his public and his private experience in peace and in Civil War, in health and in sickness. The Essays are not a diary but are of ‘one substance’ with their author: ‘I am myself the matter of my book.’ In the case of a questioning and questing mind like his this study became not a book on a ‘subject’ but Assays of Michel de Montaigne – ‘assays’ of himself by himself.

These essays were first divided into two books (a third followed later). Each book contains many chapters and each chapter contains many ‘assays’. He himself never referred to his chapters as essays; his chapters were convenient groupings of several assays – primarily ‘assays’ of a man called Michel de Montaigne. He soon discovered that very short chapters did not allow him enough scope for all the assays he wanted to make. He let his chapters grow longer. In the process he discovered the joys of digression and freedom from an imposed order. And he found he could tackle deeper subjects more exhaustively.

Montaigne’s method of writing makes it sometimes puzzling for the reader to follow the linkings of his thought. His chapters are not arranged in order of their composition. Within each chapter sentences and phrases written at widely different times were printed without any hint of dating. Moreover each chapter, no matter how long, was presented as one continuous slab of text. That was quite usual then, but for us it leads to a kind of intellectual indigestion. Modern editors introduce paragraphs as well as quotation marks, italics and a now more usual punctuation. That has been done here too. It makes it easier to pick up Montaigne and to put him down. That is a great advantage for what is one of Europe’s great bedside books. But Montaigne warned us that we should be prepared to give him an hour or so at a stretch when necessary. Even that is easier when there are paragraphs, as well as some indication of what was written when.

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 everchanging, 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 outlive 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 included 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 Montaigne 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.

This has not stopped Sebond’s method of teaching the Catholic faith from being thought of as somehow dangerous. Even the New Catholic Encyclopedia (which ought to know better) calls it heretical. It is not. But it was clearly a disturbing book – a good defence against heresy yet, for many, a work somehow not to be trusted. There were contemporaries of Montaigne who shared that opinion: hence his apology for it.

When Montaigne published his translation in 1569, he included with it a translation of the Prologue which proved quite acceptable to the Roman Catholic Church. No censor has ever said a word against it. He had clearly taken theological advice and had adapted the Prologue to meet the needs of the Faith. A comparison of his version and the original shows why the Latin Prologue appeared among the prohibited books, while the French version never did.

Sebond’s original Prologue is dense and interesting. It is emphatic, trenchant and absolute. Its claims are such as were bound to appeal to intelligent Catholic ladies deprived of formal education and to laymen such as Montaigne’s father. It claimed to ‘illuminate’ Christians with a knowledge of God and themselves. It required no previous knowledge of Grammar, Logic, nor any other deliberative art or science, nor of Physics nor of Metaphysics – no Aristotle, therefore. It offered a method applicable to both clergy and laity. It promised certain results, ‘in less than a month, without toil and without learning anything off by heart. And once learned it is never forgotten.’ The Natural Theology was said to lead not only to knowledge but to morality, making whoever studied it ‘happy, humble, kind, obedient, loathing all vice and sin, loving all virtues, yet without puffing up with pride’.

Montaigne did not essentially lessen this appeal but introduced changes in the Prologue (and, indeed, in the work itself) which show a sensitivity to theological distinctions. Where the Prologue was concerned, his changes were few but vital enough to restore it to undoubted orthodoxy. For example, where Raymond Sebond had written of his art as ‘necessary to every man’, Montaigne made it merely useful. When Sebond claimed that his method taught ‘every duty’ required for the student Montaigne changed that to ‘nearly everything’. Sebond wrote:

In addition this science teaches everyone really to know, without difficulty or toil, every truth necessary to Man concerning both Man and God; and all things which are necessary to Man for his salvation, for making him perfect and for bringing him through to life eternal. And by this science a man learns, without difficulty and in reality, whatever is contained in Holy Scripture.

*

Montaigne tones that down:

In addition this science teaches everyone to see clearly, without difficulty or toil, truth insofar as it is possible for natural reason, concerning knowledge of God and of himself and of what he has need for his salvation and to reach life eternal; it affords him access to understanding what is prescribed and commanded in Holy Scripture.

The words in italics are vital. In Montaigne’s hands the work of Sebond is presented as a means of access to truths and duties prescribed in Scripture. Sebond’s original Prologue could be taken to mean that his method stood alongside Scripture, independently. That of course would have been heretical if Sebond had been arguing from fallen natural reason. But he was not.

Today we are so used to commercialized religious charlatanism that the claims of Sebond risk sounding like some slick, patent road to an illusory salvation. That is far from the truth. The Natural Theology is a cogently written work in scholastic Latin seeking to anchor the reader firmly within the Roman Catholic Faith, free from all wavering and doubt. The Prologue (in both the original and in Montaigne’s translation) ends with an uncompromising act of submission to the ‘Most Holy Church of Rome, the Mother of all faithful Christians, the Mistress of grace and faith, the Rule of Truth’.

The method of Raymond Sebond is sufficiently complex to be misunderstood, not least by the many who were long deprived of his Prologue by the folly of censorship. Obviously even quite a few moderns writing on Montaigne have never been able to study it. 5

Sebond firmly bases his method on ‘illumination’. He does not claim that human reason by itself can discover Christian truths. Quite the reverse. Without ‘illumination’ reason can understand nothing fundamental about the universe. But, duly illuminated, Man can come to know himself and his Creator as well as his religious and moral duties, which he will then love to fulfil. It is a method of freeing Man from doubts; it reveals the errors of pagan antiquity and its unenlightened philosophers; it teaches Catholic truth and shows up sects as errors and lies. It does all these things by teaching the Christian the ‘alphabet’ which must be acquired if one is to read Nature aright. The science ‘teaches Man to know himself, to know why he was created and by Whom; to know his good, his evil and his duty; by what and to Whom he is bound. What good are the other sciences to a man who is ignorant of such things?’

‘The other sciences’, when this basis is lacking, are but vanity. They lead to error, men not knowing ‘whither they are going, whence they came’ nor what Man is. Sebond shows Man how far he has fallen and how he can be reformed.

Raymond Sebond believes that God has given Man two Books, a metaphorical one and a real one. The first is the ‘Book of all Creatures’ or the ‘Book of Nature’. The second is Holy Scripture. The first Book to be given Man – at the Creation – was the Book of Nature. In it all created things are like letters of the alphabet; they can be combined into words and sentences, teaching Man truths about God and himself. But with the Fall, Man was blinded to the sense of the Book of Nature. He could no longer read it aright. Nevertheless, that book remains common to all.

The Second Book, Holy Writ, is not common to all – ‘to read the second book one must be a clerk’. Yet (unlike Scripture) the Book of Nature cannot be falsified; it cannot lead to heresy. Yet in fact both Books teach the same lesson (since the same God created all things in due order and revealed the Scriptures). They cannot contradict each other, even though the first is natural – of one nature with us Men – while the other is above all Nature, supernatural.

Now, Man was created in the beginning as a reasonable creature, capable of learning. But at his creation, Man – Sebond means Adam – knew nothing whatever. ‘Since no doctrine can be acquired without books’, it was most appropriate that Divine Wisdom should create this Book of Creatures in which Man, on his own, without a teacher, could study the doctrines requisite for him. It was the visible ‘letters’ of this Book – the ‘creatures’ placed in God’s good order, not our own – that Man was intended to read, using the pre-lapsarian judgement which God had bestowed on him when he was newly created.

But since the Fall all that has changed. Man can no longer find God’s truths in Nature, ‘unless he is enlightened by God and cleansed of original sin. 6 And therefore not one of the pagan philosophers of Antiquity could read this science, because they were blinded concerning the sovereign good, even though they did read some sort of science in this Book and derived whatever they did have from it.’ But the solid, true science which leads to life eternal – even though it was written there – they were unable to read.

In Montaigne’s hands Raymond Sebond’s method shows enlightened Christians that the revealed truths about God and man are consonant with the Book of Nature properly read. It reconciles observed nature with revealed truth and so can lead men to accept it without doubt or hesitation.

Montaigne’s ‘Apology’ is a defence of this doctrine, and corresponds to the two assertions of Sebond: i: Man, when enlightened, can once again read the Book of Nature aright; ii: Man when not enlightened by God’s grace can never be sure he has read it aright: Mankind has read ‘some sort of science’ in this Book of Nature but is ‘unable to read’ that ‘true science which leads to life eternal’. This means that unenlightened Man, Man left to his own devices, can no longer ‘read’ God’s creatures – and creatures covers not only plants and animals but the Universe and everything in it – the letters of that alphabet appear all jumbled up. No longer can Man be sure he has any knowledge of himself or of any created thing or being, from the highest heavens to the tiniest ant.

The two main sections of the ‘Apology’ are of widely different lengths. Montaigne dismisses fairly curtly, though courteously, the first of the two criticisms made of Sebond.

The first charge is… that Christians do themselves wrong in wishing to support their belief with human reason: belief is grasped only by faith and by private inspiration from God’s grace.

Montaigne’s reply is to accept ‘that purely human means’ are not enough; had they been so, ‘many choice and excellent souls in ancient times’ would have succeeded in reaching truth. But despite their integrity and their excellent natural faculties, the Ancients all failed in their ultimate quest: ‘Only faith can embrace, with a lively certainty, the high mysteries of our religion’ (‘Apology’, p. 492).

That is quite orthodox. At least from the time of Thomas Aquinas it was held that natural reason ought to bring Man to the preambles of the Faith – that there is one God, that he is good, that he can be known from revelation – but that specifically Christian mysteries are hidden until revealed. 7 Montaigne may seem to put even those preambles in doubt, only to vindicate them triumphantly at the end of the ‘Apology’ with the aid of Plutarch.

But Montaigne contrasts the routine practising Christian, merely accepting the local religion of Germany or Périgord in casual devotion, with what illuminated Christians are really like when ‘God’s light touches us even slightly’. Such Christians emanate brightness (‘Apology’, p. 493). The apprentice Christian may not rise so high but, once his heart is governed by Faith, it is reasonable for Faith to draw on his other capacities to support him. Sebond’s doctrine of illumination helps us to do so effectively and to draw religious strength from a knowledge of God’s creation:

[God] has left within these lofty works the impress of his Godhead: only our weakness stops us from discovering it. He tells us himself that he makes manifest his unseen workings through those things which are seen. (‘Apology’, p. 498)

Montaigne turns to a key text of Scripture which he suitably cites. Sebond could toil to show that, to the enlightened Christian, ‘no piece within this world belies its Maker’ precisely because Scripture gives Man that assurance:

All things, Heaven, Earth, the elements, our bodies and our souls are in one accord: we simply have to find how to use them. If we have the capacity to understand, they will teach us. ‘The invisible things of God,’ says St Paul, ‘are clearly seen from the creation of the world, his Eternal Wisdom and his Godhead being perceived from the things he has made.’ (‘Apology’, p. 499)

That quotation, adapted from the Vulgate Latin text of Romans I:20, is the foundation of all natural theology in the Renaissance. That can be seen from author after author, since Montaigne had chosen his scriptural authority well. He had selected the obvious text. In 1606, for example, George Pacard published his own Théologie Naturelle and placed Romans I:20 firmly on his title page, lending its tone to his whole book. A generation later Edward Chaloner could defend the general thesis of Montaigne here, with precisely this verse, in a sermon preached at All Souls College in Oxford. 8

To make this point clear, Montaigne uses an analogy taken from Aristotelian physics, in which any object is composed of inert matter and a form which gives it its being.

Our human reasonings and concepts are like matter, heavy and barren: God’s grace is their form, giving them shape and worth. (‘Apology’, p. 499)

Since men such as Socrates and Cato lacked God’s grace, even their most virtuous actions are without shape or ultimate value; in the context of salvation they ‘remain vain and useless’. So too with the themes of Sebond. By themselves they are heavy and barren. When Faith illuminates them, they become finger-posts setting man on the road which leads to his becoming ‘capable’ of God’s grace. 9 In the light of the closing words of the ‘Apology’ that is a vital consideration.

The Renaissance thinker, like his forebears from the earliest Christian times, had to decide what to do about the great pious men of Ancient days. Were they saved by their loyalty to the Word (the Logos) before he was incarnate in Christ? One of the earliest theologians, Justin Martyr, thought they were. Or were they inevitably destined to eternal reprobation, since even their good actions were not directed to the right End? Were some, such as Socrates or Plato, vouchsafed special saving grace? Erasmus would like to think that God would make the same kind of understanding, graded concessions that he himself made to those Ancients who were pious, moral and sensitive to metaphysical realities.

Montaigne’s admiration for the virtuous heroes of Antiquity was boundless: the moral system he was teasing out for Christian laymen like himself to supplement the Church’s teaching owed nearly everything to them. He insisted nevertheless that they were great with human greatness only and in no wise proto-Christians. Yet the ‘Apology’ also shows by the careful use of theological language that Montaigne did not look on all the Ancients as an undifferentiate ‘mass of damnation’. This is brought out by the way he cited Romans I:20, without the final clause, ‘so that they [the pagans] are inexcusable’.

Many did attach this clause to St Paul’s assertion that the invisible things of God are accessible through the visible: George Pacard did precisely that in the title page of his Théologie Naturelle. But many did not; to cite only one example: Allessandro della Torre, Bishop of Sittià, cited this text of Romans three times in his Italian work, The Triumph of Revealed Theology (Venice, 1611): each time he omits that damning clause. By doing the same Montaigne and others could stress the human limitations of Socrates or Plato, while avoiding the Jansenist rigour which Pascal read back into the ‘Apology’:

There is enough light [Pascal wrote] to lighten the Elect and enough darkness to make them humble. There is enough darkness to blind the Reprobate and enough light to damn them and render them inexcusable. St Augustine, Montaigne, Sebond. 10

Montaigne follows Sebond in dwelling on the errors and the chaotic jumble of ideas expounded by those unenlightened wise men, vainly seeking certain truth with their human reason from the Book of Creatures: but he does not consider their opinions to be all equally ‘inexcusable’. Nevertheless he asserted that ‘human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially when she concerns herself with matters divine’ (‘Apology’, p. 581). Christian mysteries they never grasped as Christians can. But what about God’s ‘Eternal Wisdom and his Godhead’?

A standard doctrine was, that a grasp of the elements of good morality was possible for all men, Christian or otherwise, though grace was always required for Salvation (even the Mosaic Law would not suffice by itself). That good morality was achieved by pagans is shown by Socrates or by other heroes of Montaigne, such as Epaminondas. (The great moral platitudes are never put in doubt anywhere in the Essays.)

Montaigne specifically finds pagan monotheism at its best not ‘true’ (in the sense of attaining with certainty to the Christian revelations) but nevertheless ‘most excusable’. This is not a correction to St Paul’s teaching in Romans I:20, but a gloss on it. 11

Montaigne touches so lightly on some crucial theological points that readers may miss their import. Yet they can be vital, not least in the ‘Apology’, which is centred on religious knowledge and doubt. In at least one respect, Montaigne’s conception of God was that of St Augustine, of many medieval and Renaissance thinkers, and of Pascal: God is a Hidden God, a Deus absconditus who hides himself from Man and therefore can only be known from his self-revelation. Montaigne lightly but specifically attributes that concept to St Paul. When in Athens, Paul saw an altar dedicated to ‘an unknown God’ – Athenian philosophers could get that far. In the ‘Apology’ those words appear as ‘a hidden, unknown God’. That enables Paul (in the ‘Apology’) to find the Athenian worshippers to be ‘most excusable’ (‘Apology’, p. 573). The same doctrine appears in the medieval theologian Nicolas of Lyra. 12

Such deft and telling use of words should scotch the notion that Montaigne was theologically naïve. (No theologians who had studied his translation of Sebond could make such a gaffe.) And in this case it should help to undermine the curiously coarse interpretation of the ‘Apology’ as a work championing ‘fideism’, one, that is, which denies that there ever can be any rational basis for Christianity since all depends on unfettered faith – faith as trust and faith as credulity. For Montaigne there is a hierarchy of religious opinion among the pagans. (The ‘Apology’ ends with one of the most impressive of them all: Plutarch’s.) Yet Montaigne held with Sebond that even the best of pagans failed to penetrate through to most of the vital truths contained in the Book of Creatures. 13

The defence of Raymond Sebond against the second charge – that his arguments are weak – falls into several parts, all marked by varying degrees of scepticism. By turning his sceptical gaze on Man and his cogitations, Montaigne denies that it is possible to find better arguments than Sebond’s anywhere whatsoever. This assertion is governed (as are all the long answers to the second objection) by a declaration of intent which applies to all the many pages which are to follow:

Let us consider for a while Man in isolation – Man with no outside help, armed with no arms but his own and stripped of that grace and knowledge of God in which consist his dignity, his power and the very ground of his being. (‘Apology’, p. 502)

Today the very word scepticism implies for many a mocking or beady-eyed disbelief in the claims of the Church to intellectual validity. It did not do so then. You can be sceptical about the claims of the Church: or you can be sceptical about rational attempts to discredit them…

The unenlightened rivals to Sebond have both their hands tied firmly behind their back. Sebond has grace and illumination: they have not. In this second, longer part of the ‘Apology’, comments are occasionally addressed to this unilluminated ignorance on the basis of revealed wisdom, but the ignorance remains unilluminated and so can only fortuitously, randomly and hesitantly ever arrive at the goal gracefully reached by Sebond’s natural theology. That is what makes the Essays as a whole so interesting. Instead of calmly orthodox certainty, we are exhilarated by following all the highways and byways and sidetracks travelled along by Man’s questing spirit in his search for truth about God, Man and the Universe. Montaigne did his job thoroughly: that is why the Essays were pillaged for anti-Christian arguments by the beaux esprits of later centuries.

Montaigne is so lightly untechnical that it is easy to overlook that, in a fascinatingly personal and idiosyncratic way, he is saying what learned Latin treatises also taught about the opinions of fallen man. Since sixteenth-century Jesuits appreciated Montaigne, one could cite Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., who (with the help of St Augustine’s City of God) was struck by the ‘monstrous opinions’ of those unenlightened pagans who ‘even went so far as to make gods of vines and garlick’. 14 But where Bellarmine finds bleak error Montaigne finds – also – fascinating and inevitable variety.

Montaigne answers the second lot of criticism of Sebond by first crushing human pride: no purely human reasons can show conclusively (as Sebond can) that Man – for all his ‘reason’ – is in any way higher than the other animals. They, too, like us, have reasoning powers. They have instincts, it is true, but so do we. For this crushing of Man’s pride Montaigne first drew mainly on his favourite writer. It seems that Plutarch so dominated the first outline of the ‘Apology’ that Montaigne could even assert that it owed everything to him, a remark he removed once he realized how far he had moved in indebtedness to Sextus, to Cicero, to Aristotle and to Plato (‘Apology’, p. 629, note 331).

Parts of this praise of the beasts to humble Man’s pride have acquired a certain quaintness: zoology has been revolutionized since the Renaissance. Moreover, Montaigne, by long-established convention, cited the weeping war-horses of the poets or the tale of Androcles and the Lion as though they were zoological and historical fact. His loyal dogs commit suicide or haunt their masters’ tombs. In his own day, however, his animal science was powerfully persuasive. (Well into the next century, his elephant lore is repeated by Salomon de Priezac in his Histoire des Eléphants, Paris, 1650.) As codified by his learned clerical disciple Pierre de Charron in his book On wisdom, Montaigne’s attitude to the beasts became central to some of the great controversies among the most famous philosophers and theologians of the seventeenth century. In its own way it even had something of the appeal of Darwin. By a very different route it forced people to re-examine in anger or humility what place Man occupied in the Book of Nature among all the other creatures. And Montaigne emphasizes that the common examples of ants, bees and guide-dogs are just as persuasive as exotic rarities.

Pride is the sin of sins: intellectually it leads to Man’s arrogantly taking mere opinion for knowledge. In terms which were common to many Renaissance writers, Montaigne emphasized that ‘there is a plague (a peste) on Man: the opinion that he knows something.’ 15

This pride and this trust in opinion are all part of Man’s vanity (of that vain emptiness evoked by Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament book from which were derived several sceptical inscriptions in Montaigne’s library). The ‘Apology’ briefly contrasts such ‘vanity’ with the assurance supplied by ‘Christian Folly’ (which proclaims that God’s true wisdom is to be found in the lowly, the simple, the humble and the meek). 16

‘Christian folly’ was a major theme in Renaissance thought and had been long allied to scepticism. Montaigne was not writing the Essays in a void. More specifically, the general thrust of his defence of Sebond would have been evident to any reader of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s declamation On the Weakness and Vanity of all Sciences and on the Excellence of the Word of God (Cologne, 1530). It was reprinted in Montaigne’s time; he drew on it heavily. It continues a tradition of Christian scepticism to be found in a fifteenth-century scholar such as Valla, who influenced Erasmus, but which is more fully developed in Gian-Francesco Pico della Mirandola’s Examination of the Vanity of the Doctrines of the Pagans and of the Truth of Christian Teachings (Mirandola, 1520). 17

These were major and successful books; Montaigne also drew heavily on a work of 1557, unsuccessful enough to be remaindered (freshened up with a new title page in 1587): the Dialogues of Guy de Brués. The magic of Montaigne’s art in the Essays and the originality of his thought enabled him to take ideas and matter lying about in Latin tomes or even in unsaleable treatises and then metamorphose them into the very stuff of his most readable pages. 18

That certainly applies to his scepticism.

Scepticism is a classical Greek philosophy. Its full force was rediscovered towards the end of the sixteenth century. As such it plays a vital role in Renaissance thought; but the essential doctrines of scepticism (including some of the basic arguments and examples which appear in the Essays) were known much earlier, from Cicero’s Academics and from critical assessments of scepticism (sometimes associated with judgements on the proto-Sceptic Protagoras) in both Plato and Aristotle. Cicero’s Academics is the easiest to read for lovers of Montaigne (who find that whole passages have been integrated into the Essays). So are major borrowings from other works of Cicero, including On the Nature of the Gods and the Tusculan Disputations. But the influence of Plato and Aristotle goes far deeper.

Up to a point Cicero was a good guide, but less exciting than Sextus Empiricus and the intellectual stimulus of Plato and Aristotle. 19 Clearly, Sextus’ Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes dominates parts of the ‘Apology’, yet appears in no other chapter of the Essays. (This has helped support the contention that, when writing the ‘Apology’, Montaigne went through an acute crisis of scepticism, symbolized by his device of the poised scales with Que sçay-je?; What do I know?) By any standards the publication in 1562 by Henri Estienne of the first edition of the original Greek text of Sextus’ account of Pyrrho’s scepticism was a major event. (Montaigne probably relied chiefly on his Latin translation – also found in the second edition of 1567, but quotations from the original Greek enlivened his library.) Gentian Hervet in his introduction to Sextus’ other work, Against the Mathematicians (or Against the Professors) (1569) helps us to read Montaigne in context. For Hervet, too, the works of Sextus are an excellent weapon against heretics: Pyrrho’s scepticism, by reducing all Man’s knowledge to opinion, deprives heretics of any criterion of truth. Montaigne did the same in the pages of the ‘Apology’ which follow upon his address to his patroness (p. 628).

However thorough-going the Pyrrhonism in these final pages, scepticism remained for Montaigne – as for many others – a weapon of last resort: a way of demolishing the arguments of would-be infallible adversaries. There was a price to pay, though. The Pyrrhonian method leaves you with no purely human certainties either! But only much later did that worry many Roman Catholics. Among writers variously attracted to Pyrrhonism were St Francis of Sales (who admired Montaigne’s uprightness) and Maldonat (Montaigne’s Jesuit friend).

Opinion is not knowledge. Pyrrhonist sceptics revelled in that fact. Sextus Empiricus systematized that contention into a powerful engine of doubt which helped a wise man to suspend his judgement and so to attain tranquillity of mind.

The rediscovery of the works of Sextus gave a fresh impetus to Renaissance scepticism, but it did not create it; Sextus fell on welcome ears: already in 1546 Rabelais has his wise old evangelical King delighted to find that all the best Philosophers are Pyrrhonists nowadays.

It is deliberately paradoxical that the poet who dominates the Pyrrhonist pages of the ‘Apology’ should be Lucretius. That Latin poet of the first century BC was a follower of Epicurus and remains our principal source for Epicurean doctrine in the realm of physical nature. But Epicureanism is flatly opposed to Pyrrhonist scepticism. Far from asserting that all man’s boasted knowledge is mere opinion, it holds that the senses give Man access to infallible certainty. The point is made clearly and sharply in Denis Lambin’s edition of Lucretius, which Montaigne read with marked attention. (What seems to be Montaigne’s own copy, annotated in his hand, was recently recognized as such by Paul Quarrie when he bought a Lambin Lucretius for Eton College library, where that book now is.) For Lucretius, truth about things must be accessible to our minds from sense-impressions: if they are not, all claims to know truth collapse. So even the Sun can be only a trifle larger than appears to our sight. If we cannot explain why, we must nevertheless make no concessions to those who deny this. Such a view flew in the face of traditional and solid scientific knowledge. Montaigne delights in citing Lucretius’ own words to undermine Epicurean assertions. 20 But Lucretius also serves to undermine other ideas widely supposed to be true – and to warn against superstition.

Montaigne was perhaps first attracted to Lucretius by his arguments against that fear of dying which haunted his youth and young manhood. In the ‘Apology’, however, he chiefly cites him in order to reveal yet another source of darkness and error or, at best, of the kind of partial truths reached by unenlightened sages.

Particularly effective are his exploitations of precisely those verses in which Lucretius tried to refute those who hold that ‘we can know nothing’. Denis Lambin in his edition praised Lucretius for his solid opposition to the doctrine that ‘nothing can be known’. Montaigne eventually succeeds in exploiting the principal opponent of scepticism for sceptical ends! 21

On many matters, Montaigne and Lambin were in agreement. Especially interesting for the Essays is Lambin’s dedication of Book III of Lucretius’ poem to Germain Valence. It shows that the very failure of even Lucretius and the Epicureans to reach Christian certainties about the nature of the soul can be turned into yet another argument in favour of Christian revelation:

Not unjustly we despise their unwise wisdom. We should congratulate ourselves that we have been taught by JESUS CHRIST… (without being convinced or coerced by any human reasons or by any arguments, no matter how well demonstrated – not even by the Platonists) and so are persuaded that no opposing reasons, however sharp or compelling, however probable or verisimilitudinous, however firm or strong (let alone those of Lucretius, which are light and weak) could ever dislodge us from this judgement. 22

The Renaissance was a period of new horizons: one was a vast increase in knowledge of the world and its inhabitants, as Europeans sailed the seas and discovered new lands, new peoples and moral and religious systems new to them; another was the rediscovery of Greek literature in its fullness. New horizons make local certainties seem wrong or parochial: they also open up whole treasure-houses of new facts and facets to the sceptic, who with their aid can increase the sense of the relativity of all Man’s beliefs about himself and the universe in which he lives. Montaigne exploited Sextus Empiricus, but he also devoured the writing of the Spanish historians, including those who told of the horrors of the conquest of the New World. There were also compendia such as Johannes Boemus’ Manners of all Peoples (Paris, 1538), as well as standard works such as Ravisius Textor’s Officina (‘Workshop’) which contains chapters with such titles as ‘Various opinions about God’ and ‘Divers morals and various rites of peoples’ (Montaigne would have read in it a full account of Androcles and the Lion). New books gave him and the Essays a dimension and an actuality lacking to Agrippa and Pico. His universe was open to immense variety. He knew of Copernicus. If he wanted noble savages he could draw on the Indies as well as on the Golden Age; or he could try and talk to American Indians for himself (in Rouen) or question sailors.

But he did not stop there. If he had, he might indeed have been a fideist, claiming that only an arbitrary act of faith could make an irrational leap from a boundless sea of doubt to the rock of certain truth: the Church. Such a theology, never really convincing, was rarely less convincing than in the Renaissance and the nascent scientific world of the following century. If the leap is irrational, why leap to Catholicism and not to a sect or to any other of the teeming religions of the world? Truth must be the same everywhere.

This infinite variety of the world can be put to the service of Pyrrhonism and its universal doubt: it can also be put to the service of Catholic orthodoxy against sect and schism. If Catholic Christianity is true at all it must be universally true, not merely true for Périgordians, Germans or successive English parliaments. Otherwise it is just one opinion among many. Ever since St Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, Catholic truth was categorized as being Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus (‘What has been held always, everywhere and by all’). In the Renaissance the aspiration to make that a reality lay behind the vast, worldwide evangelism by Rome (which contrasted sharply with the local concerns of the rival Churches seeking to reform one City or one Kingdom). The Roman Catholic faith could indeed claim to be taught universally. Therein lay its strength for minds like Montaigne’s.

For Montaigne, the strength of Raymond Sebond’s Natural Theology also lay in universality. He believed that Sebond’s illumination of the universal Book of Nature showed that all Nature everywhere was in strict conformity with Catholic truth.

At the end of Montaigne’s Pyrrhonist pages we are brought to the very brink of uncertainty. Reason has been shaken. So have the senses. If sense-data are unsure, uncertain and often plainly misleading, that does not simply cut us off from any sure and solid knowledge of phenomena: it cuts us off from any sure and certain knowledge of ‘being’. And so ‘we have no communication with Being’ – other than with our own transient one (perhaps).

To conclude: there is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of judgement and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly; nothing certain can be established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever shifting and changing. 23 (‘Apology’, p. 680)

But this – despite the words ‘to conclude’ (finalement) – is not the end of the ‘Apology’: it is the end of a chain of arguments which can leave man ignorant, or, on the contrary, show him a new way to proceed. If it had been Montaigne’s conclusion, then Sextus Empiricus would literally have had the last word, for the Pyrrhonist basis is evident. But it is precisely here that Pyrrhonism joins Plato and Aristotle in joint hostility to a sophistical trust in individual subjectivity.

At the end of the long section which immediately precedes Montaigne’s address to his Royal patroness, just as he was about to embark on his Pyrrhonian arguments, Montaigne added an important comment in the margin of the Bordeaux copy of his works he was preparing for the press. It concerns Protagoras, the arch-Sophist who was trounced by Sextus, Plato and Aristotle in very similar terms and for identical reasons:

And what can anyone understand who cannot understand himself?… Protagoras was really and truly having us on when he made ‘Man the measure of all things’ – Man, who has never known his own measurements.

Protagoras meant – that is what shocked Plato, Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus – that there is no universal standard of truth: each human being is severally and individually the sole criterion; all is opinion, and all opinions are equally true or false.

For Montaigne, Protagoras’ ‘measure of Man’ is ‘so favourable’ to human vanity as to be ‘merely laughable. It leads inevitably to the proposition that the measure and the measurer are nothing.’

Montaigne countered Protagoras, immediately, by citing Thales (the Greek sage to whom he himself had been likened): ‘When Thales reckons that a knowledge of Man is very hard to acquire, he is telling him that knowledge of anything else is impossible.’ (‘Apology’, p. 628) Hence the growing importance of the study of Man throughout the Essays, especially in Book III and in the hundreds of additions made to the chapters of the two previous Books when the new Book was written and the others were revised.

In the Theaetetus, Socrates treated Protagoras and his ‘measure’ as a clever man talking nonsense – otherwise how can the same wind be hot to one and cold to another? Nor would anyone maintain that, since a colour appears different to a dog, to other animals and to ourselves, that it differs in its essence. 24

Montaigne made good use of such notions in the ‘Apology’: they can serve to show the fallibility of sense-data and also to place man where his unaided natural reason ought to place him: among the other creatures. But to go from there and make Truth itself the plaything of individual subjectivity, he never did.

Aristotle similarly mocked Protagoras and his Man-as-measure; his demonstration was adapted by Montaigne. 25

Montaigne knew, 26 before he had read a word of Sextus – probably in his days at school in Bordeaux – that in the world of creation nothing ever is; it is only becoming. Plutarch reinforced this. But neither Plutarch nor Plato held that such doctrines cut Man off from a knowledge of God or obliged each person to plunge into pure subjectivism. There were, for Plato, divine revelations; and there was wisdom arising from knowing oneself as Man.

Within the flux of the created universe, Montaigne strove to follow the Delphic injunction, Know Thyself. He sought to discover the personal, individual, permanent strand in the transient, variegated flux of his experience and sensations, which alone gave continuity to his personality – to his ‘being’ as a Man. 27

But this was not a merely subjective indulgence. By studying his own form (his soul within his body) he aspired to know Man – not just one odd individual example of humankind. 28

The Essays as a whole do not end with the last words of the ‘Apology’; much exploration of self and of Man remained to be done, but Montaigne had clearly seen that the characteristic property of the creature is impermanence. No creature ever is: a creature is always shifting, changing, becoming.

The Platonic background to such a conclusion – unlike the purely Pyrrhonian one – enabled Montaigne to pass from the impermanence of the everchanging creature to what he presents as a ‘most pious’ concept of the Godhead, accessible to purely human reason: the Creator must have those qualities which Man as creature lacks: he must have unity, not diversity; absolute Being, not mere ‘becoming’. And since he created Time he must be outside it and beyond it.

It is strikingly right that this natural leap to the Eternal Being of God should be given not in Montaigne’s own words – he is not a pagan – but in a long and unheralded transcription from Plutarch. Montaigne took it from the dense mystic treatise On the E’i at Delphi.

In this powerful work Plutarch grappled with the religious import of the word E’i inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. In Greek it can mean ‘Five’; it can mean ‘If’: but above all it means ‘Thou Art’. As such it declares that God has eternal Being. He is the eternal THOU to our transient I. Each individual human being is relative, contingent, impermanent. But each ‘I’ can know itself; it can know Man through itself; and it can stretch out to Reality and say THOU ART.

In doing so, it recognizes God. 29

The Natural Theology of Sebond taught each man to know himself and God. It is, in a sense, the key to that Delphic utterance: Know Thyself. Montaigne’s translation of the Natural Theology is all of a piece with the self-exploration of the Essays. For both Plutarch and Raymond Sebond ‘knowing oneself’ is, properly understood, a complement to knowing God. Sebond says so on his title pages: Plutarch does so in the closing words of On the E’i at Delphi:

Meanwhile it seems that the word E’i [THOU ART] is in one way an antithesis to that precept KNOW THYSELF, yet in another it is in agreement and accord with it. For one saying is a saying of awe and of adoration towards God as Eternal, ever in Being; the other is a reminder to mortal man of the weakness and debility of his nature.

Plutarch could reach that pious height: a Roman Stoic could also assert that if a man is to aspire towards God he must ‘rise above himself’. So far so good.

We are doubtless stirred by such eloquent aspirations. But the final words of the chapter tip over the house of cards. If any human being is to rise up towards that Eternal Being glimpsed by Plutarch, it will not be through Greek philosophy or proud Stoic Virtue: it will be ‘by grace’ or, more widely, ‘by purely heavenly means’. That will be an event ‘extraordinary’ – outside the natural order of the universe. In the process, the individual human being will not raise himself but be raised to a higher form. He will (in the last word of the chapter) be ‘metamorphosed’: transformed and transfigured. 30

That leaves Montaigne free as always to continue to explore his ‘master-mould’; to examine his relative ‘being’ – his body-and-soul conjoined.

Nowhere else in the Essays does Pyrrhonian scepticism make the running – it does not make all of it even in the ‘Apology’. But to the solid bastion of his faith Montaigne added a shield of last resort, ever ready in reserve to use against those who sought to oppose his Church’s infallibility by a rival one. As Edward Stillingfleet, Dean of St Paul’s, perceived in the following century, Pyrrhonism comes into play only when men are not content to ‘take in the assistance of Reason, which, though not Infallible, might give such Evidence, as afforded Certainty, where it fell short of Demonstration’. But as soon as ‘Epicurus thought there could be no Certainty in Sense, unless it were made Infallible’, he could only defend his hypothesis with absurdity: ‘the Sun must be no bigger than a bonfire’. 31

Of course Pyrrhonian scepticism shocked many. It always does. But when Montaigne’s Essays were examined by a courteous censor in Rome, such little fuss there was at the time came from factions among the French. The Maestro del Sacro Palazzo, Sisto Fabri, told him to take no notice and do what he thought fit. 32

In the following century Montaigne’s respect for the beasts and his distrust of unaided human reason brought him many enemies among dogmatic philosophers and theologians; they brought him many friends as well, ranging from Francis Bacon to Daniel Huët, Bishop of Avranches. In his Philosophical Treatise on the Weakness of the Human Spirit (1723) Huët reminded his readers that when Pyrrhonism was rejected in Ancient times, it was nothing to do with Christians fearful for the Faith but of pagans fearful for their Science. What is dangerous to Christianity, he added, is not Pyrrhonism but Pride. 33

But Montaigne had done his job well – well enough for many free-thinkers including those of the Enlightenment to see him as a forerunner of their sceptical Deism or atheistic naturalism. This was in part inevitable: truth is one and unchanging while men are everchanging. Truth cannot be set finally in words. It was a sound theologian, Bishop Wescott, who said, ‘No formula which expresses clearly the thought of one generation can convey the same meaning to the generation which follows.’ In a different climate of opinion, Montaigne’s protestations of loyalty to his Church in several of his chapters were taken to be moonshine. Allusions to ‘Christian folly’ were interpreted as smirking and knowing ackowledgements that Christianity was silly or stupid, fit for fools. Read in this way, selectively, the Essays could, did and do provide weapons and delight to a variety of readers. This became more easily possible after Hellenistic philosophy lost its hold on many in the eighteenth century. Hellenistic Christianity (like Hellenistic Philosophy) accepts that the true nature of things lies behind their visible appearances, and beyond time and space. It holds with Plotinus that nothing that is can ever perish. 34 Such a conviction dominated the thought of Renaissance Christians including Ficino, Erasmus, Rabelais and Montaigne. Without such a conviction and a respect for its roots in Platonism, the end of the ‘Apology’ (and much else in the Essays) may seem purely arbitrary – arbitrary and ironic, or a meaningless tactical bow to authority.

But we know from Montaigne’s Journal (discovered in 1772 and never intended for publication) that he was a practising Christian whose devotion was as superstitious as Newman’s. He could attach great importance to the pious family ex-voto which he paid to be displayed in the Church of Santa Maria de Loreto (in the shrine of the Holy House of the Virgin, transported by angels to Loretto, was it not, on 2 December 1295) and to the miraculous cure there of Michel Marteau. 35

This was a great shock to those philosophes and wits who had grown used to exploiting the Essays as an anti-Christian weapon-house. They had done so all the more mockingly after the Essays had been put on the Index in 1697. But that act of absurdity can be better attributed not to the Essays as such as to Jansenist zeal and to horror at the use made of them by the free-thinking libertins. 36

In Montaigne’s own day Rome knew better – and presumably does so now. The Vatican Manuscript No. 9693 records the granting of Roman citizenship to Montaigne. It states that it was granted to ‘the French Socrates’.

And that Christian Socrates died in the bosom of his Church. (But, even then, André Gide persuaded himself that he only pretended to do so because of moral blackmail from his wife…)

Citing Plutarch at the end of the ‘Apology’ does more than vindicate Raymond Sebond: it vindicates St Paul. In retrospect it can be seen that Romans I:20 gave authority not only to Montaigne’s defence of natural theology in his reply to the first charge against the book he had translated: it governs the long reply to the second charge. St Paul declared that what can be grasped by natural theology (‘from the things that are made’) are God’s ‘eternal power’ and his ‘divinity’. Plutarch shows that that is true: Plutarch did so. But Plutarch is nevertheless only one pagan voice among many, one ray of light in confused darkness.

Montaigne is exemplifying a tradition codified at least as early as Nicolas of Lyra, the thirteenth-century scriptural commentator who suggested that by the words ‘from the creation of the world’ (in the Vulgate Latin, ‘a creatura mundi’) Paul meant from Man (who is the ‘creature of the world’ par excellence). Montaigne does not say this explicitly, but his whole enterprise in the Essays is driven forward by a desire to know Man and his place in the Universe (not simply one example of Mankind, himself, though that is his means to the greater end). The seeking of God ‘from the things that are made’ is explained by Nicolas of Lyra to mean ‘per creaturas’ (‘through the creatures’ – through all that God created). And what Man can discover concerns ‘the divine Essence’: ‘from the creatures a man can learn that that eternal Essence is “One, Uncompounded and Infinite”.’ 37

Of course, none of this ‘natural theology’ brings fallen Man effectively to the Triune God: that needs grace. 38

An appreciation of the balance between religious certainty and rational doubt and inquiry which Montaigne struck in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’ is a great help in following his whole intellectual venture as he takes us through an astonishingly varied series of topics which lead us into the mind of a man who, though he lived four hundred years ago, yet remains fresh and stimulating and well able to speak for himself.

Montaigne’s contemporaries were impressed by his reflections on his experience as a soldier and statesman. Both his Italian translator, G. Naselli, and his English one, John Florio, stress on their title pages that these Essays include moral, political and military discourses. For them they were primarily that. On matters of war and politics Montaigne was listened to throughout Europe as a gentleman who knew from experience, and not from book-learning alone, what he was talking about. 39 Up to our own time Montaigne has spoken directly to many who have had experience of war and of military life. Many who have been spared such experiences have at times undervalued the part played by the experience of battle, of parleys and of political negotiations in the formation of Montaigne’s way of thinking. 40 That is a pity, for to undervalue this aspect of his life is to some extent to falsify the Essays which, where such matters are concerned, are not simply based upon hearsay. It is because Montaigne knew directly of barbaric cruelty that he could write so movingly of ‘cannibals’ and of the crimes of the Conquistadores. It is because he had seen and talked to ‘savages’ and, say, to women languishing in prisons under the accusation of witchcraft that he could write of them with such a sense of humanity. It is because he was privileged to experience a very special friendship with Estienne de La Boëtie that he could write on affectionate relationships more evocatively than even Cicero could. Only a man who loved poetry and had experienced the love of a wife and, especially in youth, of other women could have written so probingly on sexuality and its limitations, as well as on matrimony and the running of a household with their calmer joys and risks of daily irritations. And it is as a seasoned traveller that Montaigne wrote of his experience in Germany and Italy.

Nowadays a collection of essays can be read in any order, with each essay taken as a unit. Montaigne’s Essays are not presented like that. His Essays form three Books, each Book divided not into self-contained units but into chapters. Book III, written unexpectedly after his first two, ends with a discourse ‘On experience’, which is not an ‘essay’ which happens to come last but the final chapter of the final book. It marks the end of Montaigne’s quest. He was not, he tells us, a man over-given to bookish interests, but what he did seek from books and from experience he sought with passion and tenacity. ‘On experience’ (III, 13) gives us the distillation of his mature thought, showing us how to live our lives with gratitude.

The Essays had begun with thoughts of ambiguity, sadness and of emotions which make men beside themselves: Montaigne, after a thousand or so pages of thought and after reflecting on a lifetime of experience, starts his final chapter with a ringing challenge. He alludes to the opening words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, words which every serious reader knew: ‘All men naturally desire knowledge.’ Why, even schoolboys knew them! Those words of Aristotle had for centuries evoked theological certainties, since they formed part of a standard chain of argument claiming to prove on Platonico-Christian grounds that the soul is immortal:

All men naturally desire knowledge; But no man’s desire for knowledge is satisfied in this life; Yet Nature does nothing in vain; Therefore there must be an afterlife in which that desire will be satisfied.

Aristotle wrote that first sentence of his Metaphysics to introduce the notion that experience, when collated, weighed and pondered over, can produce an ‘art’ (a techné). Such an art, he asserts, can help man towards knowledge in areas where pure reason proves inadequate. The two ‘arts’ most evidently based on such weighed experience are law and, above all, medicine, which was usually known in Montaigne’s day as ‘the Art’, or, by a corruption of the Greek, simply as ‘Tegne’. 41 But Montaigne, having throughout the Essays shown how fallible reason is, rejects any notion that certain knowledge can be based on fallible experience either; experience is finite: circumstances are infinitely varied. Hence the importance of judgement, of temperance and moderation, by the help of which the wise know how to think and to live in the midst of unresolvable uncertainties.

Montaigne was an excellent pupil of the School of Athens and of its Latin disciples. He realized that wisdom did not consist in simply studying Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the schools of philosophy which the Ancient Greek and Latin world derived from them: wisdom consists in following precepts, not in knowing them off by heart. Aristotle may well point the way, but Montaigne was not content to know the words of his Metaphysics and his Physics (and even less merely to pick his way through a maze of commentaries upon them): more than any other object he studied his own ‘self’: that study was his metaphysics; that study was his physics; with their aid he could judge whether or not Aristotle or anyone else was probably talking sense or nonsense.

His ‘self’, he found, was more than his soul. His ‘being’, like that of any person, consisted in a soul (‘form’) linked to a body (‘matter’). (That was another scholastic axiom: ‘Form gives being to matter.’) But as his body aged it was racked with pain. (The colic paroxysms produced by his stone were recognized as being suicidal. 42 ) Once he had grasped how ‘wonderously corporeal’ human beings are he saw that wisdom lies in keeping body and soul together in loving harmony, not in segregating the soul from the body to keep it pure and purely intellectual. Those Socratic injunctions to seek to ‘practise dying’ – to strive, that is, to enable the soul to leave the body for a while and ‘go outside’ – those ecstatic activities which send the soul soaring aloft from the body, are by most men to be rejected. As for those baser ecstasies which lead the body to wallow in the mire of lust and drunkenness, bereft of its soul, they are not ‘bestial’ (beasts do not act like that): they are sub-human.

Christian rapture is a great thing. Yet only a tiny handful of the Elect – only privileged ascetic contemplatives touched by grace – can safely neglect their bodies’ transitory necessities while their souls feed by anticipation on lasting heavenly food. For ordinary folk to strive to ape them leads to madness: for madness, too, consists in the pulling apart of soul and body. Since Platonic times there was thought to be a hierarchy of souls within creation. Above the human souls were classed the souls of angels; below the human souls were classed the souls of beasts. But, concludes Montaigne, attempt, without a special gift of grace, to soar aloft and rank with the angels and you will end up a maniac: not an angel but below a beast; not supernally moral but subterrestrially immoral.

Socrates and Plato, are, up to a point, good guides for that Elect: Aristotle is a safer guide for all the rest of us. And so (despite his own moral weakness and his inflated tongue) is Cicero. That Man should welcome his body and that his soul should love it, are ideas which Montaigne found in Cicero, in Erasmus, in Raymond Sebond and even, surprisingly, in Lucretius. From Raymond Sebond directly, no doubt, Montaigne derived the idea that the body and soul should live as in a loving marriage. Marriage he conceives of course as Christians did: as a mutually loving union of two unequals, each with duties to the other, each helping the other until death them do part. For either to neglect its duties, for either to regret or neglect its rightful pleasures or those of its partner, is to fall into the sin of ingratitude. During this life the soul needs the body, and the body needs the soul. As a Christian Montaigne knows that the body itself shares unimaginably in the afterlife. Except for a chosen few, the plain and explicit duty of each human being is to see that the body helps the soul; the soul (even more so), the body.

This civilized and humanizing concept of duty is supported by a long quotation from St Augustine’s City of God (XIV, 5). That passage was well chosen, for it is drawn from a section in which Augustine censures the Manichees (who condemned matter, and hence the body, as evil). St Augustine also, as Montaigne does, draws support at this point from Cicero, whose treatises On the ends of good and evil and On duties, as well as the Tusculan Disputations, are alluded to here in Renaissance editions of the City of God. Those are specifically the treatises of Cicero on which Montaigne came to draw. Montaigne might not like Cicero’s chatter, but he owed a great deal to his wisdom.

An elect group of Christian mystics are vouchsafed the gift of rapture. That gift of grace segregates them from all the rest of humanity, including philosophers and sages. Montaigne’s conclusion is that all other human beings should acknowledge their humanity; acknowledge that even their greatest thoughts and discoveries are not all that important; acknowledge that there is ample time for the soul to enjoy its pabulum once the body has been fed and its few necessities wisely catered for. After all, even when a man is perched high on a lofty throne, what part of his body is he seated upon? Everything for mankind is ‘selon’, an expression still current in popular French but strangely technical nowadays in English. Everything is secundum quid, ‘according to something’. Montaigne wishes to be judged, he says, ‘selon moy’, that is ‘secundum me’, ‘in accordance with myself’, ‘according to my standards’. If a man insists upon living in court he will have to dodge about and use his elbows, living ‘according to this, according to that and according to something else’. The wiser man will live (in harmony with creation, of which he knows he forms a part) secundum naturam, ‘according to nature’. All schools of philosophy tell him to do so, but none now tells him how to do so, having obscured Nature’s footsteps with their artifice. As always art or artifice is the antithesis of nature.

Classical philosophy, not least among the Latins, had taught men how to die. Yet the body and soul will know how to separate well enough when the time comes. Man needs to learn how to live! Meanwhile old age can be indulged and the Muses can bring joy and comfort. But the very last words of the Essays convey a warning: old men may go gaga. (Even the wisdom of Socrates, we were told, is at the mercy of the saliva of some slavering rabid cur.) At the end of his quest Montaigne gave, as a philosopher well might, the last word to Latin poetry, to Horace evoking the patron deity of health and the Muses. Montaigne had learned how to come to terms with ill-health and was grateful for pain-free interludes. He had schooled his soul to help its body over its bouts of anguish. He had gratefully discovered in old age that the Muses continued to make life worth living. The Muses, for a sick old man, meant mainly books and such social intercourse as still came his way, now that he had learned detachment and so prepared himself to part from those he loved. But Horace’s words evoke the fear of fears for a man of Montaigne’s turn of mind: senile dementia: and his last word of all encapsulates the dread of old folk throughout the ages: want – not in his case want of food or money or position but of what the Muses bring: ‘nec cythera carentem’.

ALL SOULS COLLEGE OXFORD

ALL SOULS DAY, 1989

Note on the Text

There is no such thing as a definitive edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. One has to choose. The Essays are a prime example of the expanding book.

The text translated here is an eclectic one, deriving mainly from the corpus of editions clustering round the impressive Edition municipale of Bordeaux (1906–20) edited by a team led by Fortunat Strowski. This was further edited and adapted by Pierre Villey (1924); V.-L. Saulnier of the Sorbonne again revised, re-edited and adapted the work for the Presses Universitaires de France (1965). Useful editions were also published by J. Plattard (Société ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1947) as well as by A. Thibaudet and M. Rat for the Pléiade (1962). These editions largely supersede all previous ones and have collectively absorbed their scholarship.

I have also used the posthumous editions of 1595, 1598 and 1602 and, since it is good and readily available at All Souls, the Edition nouvelle procured in 1617 by Mademoiselle Marie de Gournay, the young admirer and bluestocking to whom Montaigne gave a quasi-legal status as a virtually adopted daughter, a fille d’alliance.

The Annotations

Marie de Gournay first contributed to the annotation of Montaigne by tracing the sources of his verse and other quotations, providing translations of them, and getting a friend to supply headings in the margins.

From that day to this, scholars have added to them. The major source has long been the fourth volume of the Strowski edition, the work of Pierre Villey. It is a masterpiece of patient scholarship and makes recourse to earlier editions largely unnecessary. Most notes of most subsequent editions derive from it rather than from even the fuller nineteenth-century editions subsumed into it. This translation is no exception, though I have made quite a few changes and added my own. Montaigne knew some of his authors very well indeed, but many of his exempla and philosophical sayings were widely known from compendia such as Erasmus’ Adages and Apophthegmata. His judgements on women and marriage are sometimes paralleled in a widely read legal work on the subject, the De legibus connubialibus of Rabelais’ friend Andreas Tiraquellus. Similarly some of his classical and scriptural quotations and philosophical arguments in religious contexts are to be found in such treatises as the De Anima of Melanchthon or in the theological books of clergymen of his own Church writing in his own day. I have taken care to point out some of these possible sources, since Montaigne’s ideas are better understood when placed in such contexts.

References to Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca are given more fully than usual. Although Montaigne read Plato in Latin, references are given to the Greek text (except in ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’) since most readers will not have access to Ficino’s Latin translation. References to Aristotle too are always given to the Greek: that will enable them to be more easily traced in such bilingual editions as the Loeb Classics. For Plutarch’s Moralia detailed references are given to the first edition of Amyot’s translation (Les Oeuvres morales et meslées, Paris, 1572); for Plutarch’s Lives however only general references are given under their English titles (many may like to read them in North’s Plutarch).

For historical writers of Montaigne’s own time only brief references are given. All of them derive from Pierre Villey’s studies in which the reader will find much relevant detail: Les Livres d’histoire modernes utilisés par Montaigne, Paris, 1908, and Les sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne, Paris, 1908 (second edition 1933). Those books are monuments of scholarship and have not been superseded.

The classical quotations (which from the outset vary slightly from edition to edition of the Essays) are normally given as they appear in the Villey/Saulnier edition: most readers discover that the quickest way to find a passage in another edition or translation is to hunt quickly through the chapter looking for the nearest quotation. Once found in the Villey/Saulnier edition a passage can be followed up in the Leake Concordance and traced to other standard editions.

My studies of Montaigne have been greatly helped by the kindness of the Librarian of University College London, the Reverend Frederick Friend, who has authorized several volumes to be made available to me on a very long loan. I am most grateful to him and to University College London.

I am most grateful to those readers who have suggested corrections or improvements, many of which have been included in this 1994 reprinting. A special word of thanks is due to Mr Jan Stolpe, the distinguished translator of Montaigne into Swedish, and to Donald Upton Esq., Dr Jon Haarberg, Dr Andrew Calder, M. Gilbert de Botton, Dr Bernard Curchod, Professor David Wiggins, Mrs Thalia Martin and Dr Jean Birrell.

*

Postscript:

Since my ordination by the Bishop of Oxford in 1993 I am often asked if I find Montaigne Montaigne’s arguments for his Church still convincing. Clearly not: I was not ordained in his Church, but I do think that Montaigne can still succeed in getting many to take Christianity – and religion in general – seriously.

M.A.S. All Souls College, Oxford.

June 2003.

Note on the Translation

I have tried to convey Montaigne’s sense and something of his style, without archaisms but without forcing him into an unsuitable, demotic English. I have not found that his meaning is more loyally conveyed by clinging in English to the grammar and constructions of his French: French and English achieve their literary effect by different means. On the other hand I have tried to translate his puns: they clearly mattered to him, and it was fun doing so. Montaigne’s sentences are often very long; where the sense does not suffer I have left many of them as they are. It helps to retain something of his savour.

It is seldom possible to translate one word in one language by one only in another. I have striven to do so in two cases vital for the understanding of Montaigne. The first is essai, essayer and the like: I have rendered these by essay or assay or the equivalent verbs even if that meant straining English a little. The second is opinion. In Montaigne’s French, as often in English, opinion does not imply that the idea is true: rather the contrary, as in Plato.

Montaigne’s numerous quotations are seldom integrated grammatically into his sentences. However long they may be we are meant to read them as asides – mentally holding our breath. I have respected that. To do otherwise would be to rewrite him.

When in doubt, I have given priority to what I take to be the meaning, though never, I hope, losing sight of readability.

Of versions of the Classics Jowett remarked that, ‘the slight personification arising out of Greek genders is the greatest difficulty in translation.’ In Montaigne’s French this difficulty is even greater since his sense of gender enables him to flit in and out of various degrees of personification in ways not open to writers of English. Where the personification is certain or a vital though implied element of the meaning I have sometimes used a capital letter and personal pronouns, etc., to produce a similar effect.

Explanation of the Symbols

[A] or ’80: all that follows is (ignoring minor variations) what Montaigne published in 1580 (the first edition).

[A1]: all that follows was added subsequently, mainly in 1582 and in any case before [B].

[B] or ’88: all that follows shows matter added or altered in 1588, the first major, indeed massive, revision of the Essays, which now includes a completely new Third Book.

[C]: all that follows represents an edited version of Montaigne’s final edition being prepared for the press when he died. The new material derives mainly from Montaigne’s own copy, smothered with additions and changes in his own hand and now in the Bibliothèque Municipale of Bordeaux.

’95: the first posthumous edition prepared for the press by Montaigne’s widow and by Marie de Gournay. It gives substantially the text of [C] but with important variants. (The editions of 1598 and 1617 have also been consulted, especially the latter, which contains most useful marginal notes as well as French translations, also by Marie de Gournay, of most of Montaigne’s quotations in Classical or foreign languages.)

Summary of the Symbols

[A] and ’80: the text of 1580

[A1] the text of 1582 (plus)

[B] and ’88: the text of 1588

[C] the text of the edition being prepared by Montaigne when he died, 1592

’95: text of the 1595 posthumous printed edition

In the notes there is given a selection of variant readings, including most abandoned in 1588 and many from the printed posthumous edition of 1595.

By far the most scholarly account of the text is that given in R. A. Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration, 1972, Chapter 2, ‘The Text of the Essays’.

Appendices

I

Montaigne’s dedication of his translation of Raymond Sebond’s Natural Theology to his father.

TO MY LORD, MY LORD OF MONTAIGNE

My Lord, following the task you gave me last year at Montaigne, I have tailored and dressed with my hand a garment in the French style for Raymond Sebond, the great Spanish Theologian and Philosopher, divesting him (in so far as in me lay) of his uncouth bearing and of that barbarous stance that you were the first to perceive: so that, in my opinion, he now has sufficient style and polish to present himself in good company.

It may well be that delicate and discriminating people may notice here some Gascon usages or turns of phrase: that should make them all the more ashamed at having neglectfully allowed a march to be stolen on them by a man who is an apprentice and quite unsuited to the task.

It is, my Lord, right that it should appear and grow in credit beneath your name, since it is to you that it owes whatever amendment or reformation it now enjoys.

And yet I believe that if you would be pleased to reckon accounts with him, it will be you who will owe him more: in exchange for his excellent and most religious arguments, for his conceptions lofty and as though divine, you, for your part, have brought only words and language – a merchandise so base and vile that who has most is perhaps worth least.

My Lord, I beg God that he may grant you a most long and a most happy life.

From Paris: this 18th of June, 1568. Your most humble and obedient son, MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.

II

Montaigne’s translation and adaptation of the Prologus of Raymond Sebond.

Book of the Creatures of Raymond Sebond.

Translated from the Latin into French.

Preface of the Author.

To the praise and glory of the most high and glorious Trinity, of the Virgin Mary, and of all the heavenly Court: in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, for the profit of all Christians, there follows the doctrine of the Book of the Creatures (or, Book of Nature): a doctrine of Man, proper to Man insofar as he is Man: a doctrine suitable, natural and useful to every man, by which he is enlightened into knowing himself, his Creator, and almost everything to which he is bound as Man: a doctrine containing the rule of Nature, by which also each Man is instructed in what he is naturally bound towards God and his neighbour: and not only instructed but moved and incited to do this, of himself, by love and a joyful will.

In addition this science teaches every one to see clearly, without difficulty or toil, truth insofar as it is possible for natural reason, concerning knowledge of God and of himself and of what he has need for his salvation and to reach life eternal; it affords him access to understanding what is prescribed and commanded in Holy Scripture, and delivers the human spirit from many doubts, making it consent firmly to what Scripture contains concerning knowledge of God and of oneself.

In this book the ancient errors of the pagans and the unbelieving philosophers are revealed and by its doctrine the Catholic Faith is defended and made known: every sect which opposes it is uncovered and condemned as false and lying.

That is why, in this decline and last days of the World it is necessary that Christians should stiffen themselves, arm themselves and assure themselves within that Faith so as to confront those who fight against it, to protect themselves from being seduced and, if needs be, joyfully to die for it.

Moreover this doctrine opens up to all a way of understanding the holy Doctors [of the Church]; indeed, it is incorporated in their books (even though it is not evident in them) as an Alphabet is incorporated in all writings. For it is the Alphabet of the Doctors: as such it should be learned first. For which reason, to make your way towards the Holy Scriptures you will do well to acquire this science as the rudiments of all sciences; in order the better to reach conclusions, learn it before everything else, otherwise you will hardly manage to struggle through to the perfection of the higher sciences: for this is the root, the origin and the tiny foundations of the doctrine proper to Man and his salvation.

Whoever possesses salvation through hope must first have the root of salvation within him and, consequently, must furnish himself with this science, which is a fountain of saving Truth.

And there is no need that anyone should refrain from reading it or learning it from lack of other learning: it presupposes no knowledge of Grammar, Logic, nor any other deliberative art or science, nor of Physics nor of Metaphysics, seeing that it is this doctrine which comes first, this doctrine which ranges, accommodates and prepares the others for so holy an End – for the Truth which is both true and profitable to us, because it teaches Man to know himself, to know why he has been created and by Whom; to know his good, his evil and his duty; by what and to Whom he is bound.

What good are the other sciences to a man who is ignorant of such things? They are but vanity, seeing that men can only use them badly to their harm, since they know not where they are, whither they are going nor whence they came. That is why they are taught here to understand the corruption and defects of Man, his condemnation and whence it came upon him; to know the state in which he is now: the state in which he originally was: from what he has fallen and how far he is from his first perfection; how he can be reformed and those things which are necessary to bring this about.

And therefore this doctrine is common to the laity, the clergy and all manner of people: and yet it can be grasped in less than a month, without toil and without learning anything off by heart; no books are required, for once it has been perceived it cannot be forgotten. It makes a man happy, humble, gracious, obedient, the enemy of vice and sin, the lover of virtue – all without puffing him up or making him proud because of his accomplishments.

It uses no obscure arguments requiring deep or lengthy discourse: for it argues from things which are evident and known to all from experience – from the creatures and the nature of Man; by which, and from what he knows of himself, it proves what it seeks to prove, mainly from what each man has assayed of himself. And there is no need of any other witness but Man.

It may, meanwhile, at first appear contemptible, a thing of nothing, especially since its beginnings are common to all and very lowly: but that does not stop it from bearing great and worthwhile fruit, namely the knowledge of God and of Man. And the lower its starting-point, the higher it climbs, rising to matters high and celestial.

Wherefore, whosoever wishes to taste of its fruit, let him first familiarize himself with the minor principles of this science, without despising them: for otherwise he will never have that taste, no more than a child ever learns to read without a knowledge of the alphabet and of each individual letter. And, finally, let him not complain about this labour by which, in a few months, he becomes learned and familiar with many things, to know which it would be proper to spend long periods reading many books.

It alleges no authority – not even the Bible – for its end is to confirm what is written in Holy Scripture – and to lay the foundations on which we can build what is obscurely deduced from them. And so, in our case, it precedes the Old and New Testaments.

God has given us two books: the Book of the Universal Order of Things (or, of Nature) and the Book of the Bible. The former was given to us first, from the origin of the world: for each creature is like a letter traced by the hand of God: this Book had to be composed of a great multitude of creatures (which are as so many ‘letters’); within them is found Man. He is the main, the capital letter.

Now, just as letters and words composed from letters constitute a science by amply marshalling different sentences and meanings, so too the creatures, joined and coupled together, form various clauses and sentences, containing the science that is, before all, requisite for us.

The second Book – Holy Scripture – was subsequently given in default of the first, in which, blinded as he was, he could make out nothing, notwithstanding that the first is common to all whereas the second is not: to read the second book one must be a clerk. Moreover, the Book of Nature cannot be corrupted nor effaced nor falsely interpreted. Therefore the heretics cannot interpret it falsely: from this Book no one becomes an heretic.

With the Bible, things go differently. Nevertheless both Books derive from the same Author: God created his creatures just as he established his Scriptures. That is why they accord so well together, with no tendency to contradict each other, despite the first one’s symbolizing most closely with our nature and the second one’s being so far above it.

Since Man, at his Birth, did not find himself furnished with any science (despite his rationality and capacity for knowledge) and since no science can be acquired without books in which it is written down, it was more than reasonable (so that our capacity for learning should not have been given us in vain) that the Divine Intelligence should provide us with the means of instructing ourselves in the doctrine which alone is requisite, without a schoolmaster, naturally, by ourselves.

That is why that Intelligence made this visible world and gave it to us like a proper, familiar and infallible Book, written by his hand, in which the creatures are ranged like letters – not in accordance to our desires but according to the holy judgement of God, so as to teach us the wisdom and science of our salvation. Yet no one can [now] see and read that great Book by himself (even though it is ever open and present to our eyes) unless he is enlightened by God and cleansed of original sin. And therefore not one of the pagan philosophers of Antiquity could read this science, because they were all blinded concerning the sovereign good; even though they drew all their other sciences and all their knowledge from it, they could never perceive nor discover the wisdom which is enclosed within it nor that true and solid doctrine which guides us to eternal life.

Now, in anyone capable of discernment, there is engendered a true understanding from a combining together of the creatures like a well-ordered tissue of words. So the method of treating this subject in this treatise is to classify the creatures and to establish their relationships one with the other, taking into consideration their weightiness and what they signify and, after having drawn forth the divine wisdom which they contain, fixing it and impressing it deeply in our hearts and souls.

Now, since the Most Holy Church of Rome is the Mother of all faithful Christians, the Mother of Grace, the Rule of Faith and Truth, I submit to her correction all that is said and contained in this my work.

Chronology

1477 Ramond Eyquem, a rich merchant in Bordeaux trading in wines and salt fish, purchases the estates of Montaigne.

1497 Birth of Pierre Eyquem (Montaigne’s father) at the family estates.

1519 Pierre Eyquem, as a result of deaths in the family, inherits the estates at Montaigne and leaves to fight in Italy, entailing an absence of several years.

1528 Pierre Eyquem marries Antoinette de Louppes, of a rich and politically influential family. The Louppes, a pious Christian family, were descended from Iberian Jews.

1530 Pierre Eyquem is premier jurat (first magistrate) and Provost of Bordeaux. Birth of Etienne de la Boëtie.

1533 28 February: birth of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne at the family estates.

1534 A brother, Thomas, is born.

1535 Montaigne’s German tutor’s aim is to make Latin his first language.This continues his father’s scheme from the outset.Another brother, Pierre, is born.

1536 A sister, Jeanne, is born.

1539/40 Montaigne enters the Collège de Guyenne at Bordeaux, where the tutors include Mathurin Cordier, Buchanan (the humanist playwright and future Scottish Reformer) and Elie Vinet. He stays there for six years. His understanding tutors encouraged his delight in Latin poetry. He acquired some Greek, but Latin was his literary language.

1546 Montaigne probably studies philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at Bordeaux.

1548 Civil disobedience and riots in Bordeaux, fiercely suppressed. Mayors now to be elected for periods of two years only. The Huguenots become established and numerous in the City and its environs.

1552 Birth of Montaigne’s second sister, Lénor.

1554 Michel follows his father and becomes counsellor at the Cour des Aides at Périgueux. This Cour is suppressed three years later and the counsellors join the Parlement of Bordeaux. His father becomes Mayor of Bordeaux. Birth of third sister, Marie.

1557/8 Montaigne meets Etienne de la Boëtie, also a member of the Parlement de Bordeaux; their deep and special friendship begins.

1559 Montaigne visits Paris, and follows King François II to Bar-le-Duc. Amyot’s translation of Plutarch: it greatly influences Montaigne both in thought and style.

1560 Birth of Montaigne’s brother, Bertrand.

1561 Second visit to Paris and the Royal Court, partly in connection with the serious religious strife in Guyenne.

1562 Proclamation of the Edict of the Seventeenth of January 1562 granting limited rights of assembly to members of the ‘so-called Reformed Church’. In June, Etienne de la Boëtie writes a mémoire on that Edict. Montaigne, still in Paris, makes a public profession of Roman Catholicism before the First President of the Parlement de Paris. In October he follows the Royal Army when Rouen is retaken from the Huguenots; he meets there Indians from Brasil. Massacre of Huguenots at Wassy.

1563 February: Montaigne returns to Bordeaux.18 August: death of La Boëtie at Germinant at the home of Montaigne’s brother-in-law, Lestonnat. Montaigne writes of it to his father. Assassination of François de Guise.

1564 16 October: Montaigne finishes reading the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius and notes at the end the date and 31 (his age). The flyleaves are all covered with dense Latin notes. Several topics in the Essays go back to that initial reading. On a subsequent reading Montaigne made many notes on the pages of the text in French. This edition of Lucretius by Lambinus had been published either late in 1563 or early in 1564.

1565 January: visit of Charles IX to Bordeaux.Marriage of Montaigne to Françoise de la Chassaigne, the daughter of a colleague in the Parlement de Bordeaux.

1568 Death of Montaigne’s father, Pierre. Montaigne becomes Seigneur de Montaigne and inherits the domain. (Difficulties with his mother over the inheritance.)

1569 Montaigne publishes his French translation of the Theologia Naturalis of Raimon Sebon (Raymundus de Sabunde), with the printer G. Chaudière of Paris.

1570 Montaigne sells his counsellorship of the Parlement de Bordeaux. Goes to Paris to publish works left by Etienne de la Boëtie (Latin, then French).Birth of his first daughter, Toinette, who dies three months later.

1571 Montaigne returns to his estates, to consecrate his life to the Muses: to scholarship, philosphy and reflection. He receives the Ordre de Saint-Michel and is named Gentleman of the Chamber by Charles IX.Birth of Léonor (the only one of his six daughters to live).

1572 24 August: massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day. Uprisings at La Rochelle (a stronghold of the Reformed Church).Publication of the French translation of the Moral Works of Plutarch by Bishop Amyot. It joins other authors studied by Montaigne in the tower of his château.

1572–4 During the civil wars Montaigne joins the royalist forces. Montaigne dispatched to Bordeaux to advise the Parlement to strengthen their defences.

1574 Anonymous publication (adapted to Reformed propaganda) of La Boëtie's short treatise De la Servitude volontaire.

1575 Reads Sextus Empiricus’ Hypotyposes.

1576 Strikes a medal with the Greek motto I abstain. He is working on his Apology of Raimon Sebon.

1577 Henri de Navarre names Montaigne Gentleman of the Chamber. About this time suffers his first attack of the stone.

1580–81 1 March: publication of the Essays (Simon Millanges, Bordeaux). Montaigne leaves on his travels. At Paris he offers his book to Henri III, who is delighted with it. On his travels (partly to take the waters) Montaigne visits Plombières, Mülhauser, Basle, Baden, Augsburg, Munich, Innsbruck, the Tyrol, Padua, Venice, Ferrara and Rome (which was reached on 30 November). At Rome his books are impounded, but relations are good. The maestro di Palazzo offers suggestions for changes to be made by Montaigne in his Essays, without further interference. Montaigne has an audience of the Pope, Gregory XIII. On his way back he makes a pilgrimage to Loretto and has medals of the Virgin blessed for his wife and daughter as well as himself. Travels via Florence and Pisa and the baths at Lucca.17 September: leaves on learning that royal approval requires him to become Mayor of Bordeaux.30 September: arrives home.

1582 Second edition of the Essays published with the same publisher. Gregory XIII reforms the calendar, a reform accepted in France, but not in England.

1583 Montaigne reelected Mayor of Bordeaux for a further two years.

1582–5 During his Mayoralty Montaigne visits Paris and often stays on his estates. Henri de Navarre, now heir to the throne, visits Montaigne and stays in his château. Montaigne is concerned with high politics as well as local affairs. In 1585 the plague ravages Bordeaux. Montaigne, absent, does not return to the town: he and his family are forced to leave their home, Montaigne, and wander about in search of a safe lodging.

1587 24 October: the King of Navarre dines at Montaigne.

1588 16 February: Montaigne, en route for Paris, is attacked and robbed by soldiers of La Ligue. His goods and freedom are restored to him. His third edition of the Essays is published in Paris by L’Angelier.Mlle de Gournay sends him greetings from her lodgings in Paris. Montaigne visits her. She becomes eventually his fille d’alliance, virtually an adopted daughter.June: publication of the greatly expanded edition of the Essays, which now includes a new third book (Paris, L’Angelier).10 July: Montaigne is arrested in Paris and sent to the Bastille apparently to serve as a hostage. He is restored to freedom the same day by order of Catherine de’ Medici.

1589 2 August: death of Henri III.

Montaigne begins working on a further expanded edition of the Essays.

1590 18 June: marriage of Montaigne’s daughter Léonor to François de La Tour. Though ill, Montaigne writes to Henri de Navarre (now Henri IV), who replies to him (20 July) and invites him to come as (probably) his adviser.

1591 Birth of François de La Tour, Montaigne's grand-daughter.

1592 13 September: death of Montaigne during a Mass said in his bed-chamber.

1595 Montaigne's widow, Pierre de Brach and Marie de Gournay produce the first posthumous edition of the Essays incorporating Montaigne's last additions and changes.

1601 Death of Montaigne's mother.

1613 John Florio's translation of the Essays.

To the Reader

[A] You have here, Reader, a book whose faith can be trusted, a book which warns you from the start that I have set myself no other end but a private family one. I have not been concerned to serve you nor my reputation: my powers are inadequate for such a design. I have dedicated this book to the private benefit of my friends and kinsmen so that, having lost me (as they must do soon) they can find here again some traits of my character and of my humours. They will thus keep their knowledge of me more full, more alive. If my design had been to seek the favour of the world I would have decked myself out [C] better and presented myself in a studied gait. 1 [A] Here I want to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday fashion, without [C] striving 2 [A] or artifice: for it is my own self that I am painting. Here, drawn from life, you will read of my defects and my native form so far as respect for social convention allows: for had I found myself among those peoples who are said still to live under the sweet liberty of Nature's primal laws, I can assure you that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole, and wholly naked.

And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.

Therefore, Farewell:

From Montaigne; this first of March, One thousand, five hundred and eighty. 3