The Other Renaissance, page 28
The Renaissance may have brought about a rebirth of classical knowledge and thought, but as we have seen it was also very much an age of discovery: from the New World to Copernicus’s heliocentric system; from the new realism of its subtle oil painting to Vesalius’s intricate examination of human anatomy. Trying to impose a system on this profusion of new knowledge would only have limited it; indeed, the entire Renaissance can be seen as bursting free from the constraint of systematic medieval thought.
Montaigne’s philosophy insisted upon adhering to this subjective ethos. Best to be overwhelmed by the flood of new knowledge and let it wash over us, rather than try to contain it and direct its flow. Or better still, to wait and see what effect it had on us as human beings, on our humanity; to question, to look, to examine. We should experience as much as we can, and let this knowledge inform our judgement. In this way we will become aware of what we are. And we should not shrink from any frank assessment of ourselves which this knowledge provokes.
This, if anything, is Montaigne’s missing conclusion, his non-existent system, his philosophy which was not a philosophy.
Despite such seemingly free-wheeling thought and a lack of answers, Montaigne’s thinking led him to two important conclusions: his belief in God, and his conviction concerning the nature of true knowledge. He believed firstly that we require faith in God and divine revelation in order to overcome what we discover to be the limitations of human reason. And secondly, that we should act ‘according to the opinion of Plato, who says that steadfastness, faith and sincerity are real philosophy, and the other sciences which aim at other things are only powder and rouge’. His essays (attempts at thinking properly) led him to increase his faith in God. And, following in the footsteps of Erasmus, he regarded science as superficial – mere make-up on the true body of knowledge. Natural philosophy was not real philosophy, as far as Montaigne was concerned.
Here again we come to one of the central anomalies of the Renaissance. Science was being shaken back into life after its long slumber. The seed of the modern idea of progress had begun to germinate. Many of the greatest advances which took place during the Renaissance were scientific – in fields ranging from astronomy, medicine and cartography, to mathematics, architecture and engineering. But for many of its finest thinkers it was the humanities that remained central – science was a mere sideshow, irrelevant to what it meant to be human. Yet it was this very sideshow that was opening up the world, and expanding the vision of humanity as it did so.*
Montaigne came from a moneyed family. His great-grandfather Raymond Eyquem had made a fortune in the herring trade during the 1300s, and bought ‘two noble houses and accompanying vineyards, woods, other lands and mills’. This chateau estate lay some thirty miles east of Bordeaux, and with it came the title ‘de Montaigne’. Montaigne’s father, Pierre, fought with the French army of Francis I in Italy; on his return at the age of thirty-three he made an arranged marriage to Antoinette de Louppes, who came from a wealthy family. Antoinette was half Jewish and of Spanish descent; her family were conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity in order to remain in Spain. She was also a highly practical woman, and appears to have run the family estate.
Montaigne himself records that he was born ‘between eleven o’clock and noon on the last day of February, 1533’. Montaigne’s father was not a learned man, but according to his son he became ‘inflamed with that new ardour with which King Francis I embraced letters and brought them into credit, sought with great diligence and expense the acquaintance of scholarly men, receiving them at his house like holy persons’.
Montaigne appears to have been very close to his father, who was a great influence. He has a lot to say about him in his writings:
He scarcely ever found a man of his condition who was his equal in any bodily exercise… I have even seen some canes filled with lead, with which they say he exercised his arms… and some shoes with leaded soles to train him to be lighter in running and jumping.
Of his father’s character, Montaigne comments: ‘His bearing was one of humble, gentle and very modest gravity. A singular care for neatness and propriety of person and dress, whether afoot or on horseback. A prodigious fidelity in keeping his word…’
An indication of the local regard for Montaigne’s father can be seen in the fact that he was elected mayor of Bordeaux. As the local chronicler Jean Darnal put it, the mayor of Bordeaux was invariably elected ‘from the most noble, valiant, and capable lords of the region’. Such was the man who would organize Montaigne’s education, drawing up a pedagogical plan on the advice of his humanist friends. Despite this, for the first three years of Montaigne’s life he was farmed out to a nearby peasant family. According to his father, this was intended to ‘draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of those, who need our help’.
Upon his return to the family chateau, the young Montaigne was put under the charge of a German tutor who spoke Latin but no French. Similarly, the servants and other family members were only permitted to speak to him in Latin. Not surprisingly, he became fluent at an early age. As part of his father’s pedagogical regime, Montaigne was woken by a musician every morning, and besides learning Latin his educational curriculum also included games, exercises, and periods given up to solitary meditation. This strict education does not appear to have been onerous to Montaigne, who spoke of its ‘liberty and delight’.
At the age of six, Montaigne was sent to board at the College of Guienne in Bordeaux, an establishment famed for its schooling in the liberal arts. The headmaster was the renowned Scottish humanist George Buchanan, a skilled Latin poet and tragedian who had been exiled from Scotland for his opposition to the king. By the age of thirteen Montaigne had completed the curriculum and left the college. Where precisely he went after this remains unclear, but it is known that he studied law.
The law school at the University of Bordeaux was not highly esteemed at the time, and there is speculation that he studied at Toulouse and then Paris – for according to his biographer Donald Frame he claimed that ‘Paris had his heart since childhood’. After serving in various legal positions, he returned to Bordeaux and was appointed counsellor to the Parlement, a high court post where he acted as magistrate in numerous cases. This introduced him to a wide range of human experience which would later inform his writings. Though his heart was not in the enforcement of justice: ‘I am so squeamish about hurting that for the service of reason itself I cannot do it. And when occasions have summoned me to sentencing criminals, I have tended to fall short of justice.’
As he remarked to himself: ‘How many condemnations I have seen more criminal than the crime.’ He could find no philosophical backing to the law:
Now laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority… They are often made by fools, more often by people who, in their hatred of equality, are wanting in equity; but always by men, vain and irresolute authors.
Living amidst such violent times, he was witness to many ‘reminders of man’s cruelty, courage, anger, and folly’. In one essay he tells of seeing a peasant:
left for dead stark naked in a ditch, his neck all bruised and swollen from a halter that was still hanging from it, by which he had been dragged along all night at a horse’s tail, his body pierced in a hundred places with stabs from daggers… who had endured all that… rather than promise anything.
It was during these years that he formed a close friendship with the humanist, poet and political theorist Étienne de La Boétie, whose best-known work was his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (or Anti-Dictator). La Boétie’s emphasis on liberty was far ahead of his time. The twentieth-century political theorist Murray Rothbard best sums up La Boétie’s position:
To him, the great mystery of politics was obedience to rulers. Why in the world do people agree to be looted and otherwise oppressed by government overlords? It is not just fear, Boétie explains in the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, for our consent is required. And that consent can be non-violently withdrawn.
Despite the inspiring, indeed incendiary anti-authoritarian ideas of his friend, Montaigne served for two years as a courtier at the court of Charles IX. He would be with the king at the vital siege of Rouen in 1562, which lasted for five months at the port closest to Paris before the defending Huguenots were overrun and Paris was once again opened up to overseas trade.
On the other side of the coin, it was at Rouen, after it had been taken by royalist forces, that Montaigne accompanied Charles IX when they encountered three cannibals recently shipped from Brazil. Montaigne learned from the cannibals that ‘they have an idiom in their language which calls all men “halves” of one another’. When the cannibals ‘were shown our manners, our ceremonial and the layout of a fair city… someone asked them what they thought of all this and wanted to know what they had been most amazed by’. Montaigne noted how ‘they had noticed that there were men among us fully bloated with all sorts of comforts while their halves were begging at their doors, emaciated with poverty and hunger: they found it odd that those destitute halves should put up with such injustice and did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses’. Later, Montaigne would come to see these cannibals as exemplars of the honesty which he strove to achieve in his writing: ‘Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.’
Montaigne ends the story of his meeting with the cannibals by describing how he had a long conversation with one of them ‘[using] a stupid interpreter who was so bad at grasping my meaning’ and learned how they lived and behaved towards one another – before concluding with heavy sarcasm: ‘Not at all bad, that. – Ah! but they wear no breeches…’
Around this time, Montaigne was awarded the collar of the Order of Saint Michael, thus becoming a member of the most exclusive chivalric order of French nobility, ‘a distinction all the more exceptional as Montaigne’s lineage was from recent nobility’. Montaigne’s biographer Donald Frame sees this as an instance of Montaigne’s ‘love of glory’, remarking on his ‘ostentation in his youthful studies and certain purchases of books’. Frame goes on to characterize Montaigne as ‘neither gregarious nor withdrawn, he dislikes small talk and thrives on candid communication. He is keen to enjoy life… relishes all wines and sauces – he follows his natural love of pleasure. One of his favourite pleasures is the pursuit of women.’
It seems unlikely that Montaigne curtailed these pursuits when at the age of thirty-three he entered into an arranged marriage with a rich merchant’s daughter named Françoise de La Chassaigne, whose father was the president of the Parlement of Bordeaux. This appears to have been a conventional French marriage of the period. Françoise would produce six daughters, only one of whom survived infancy.
Montaigne’s wife and child are barely mentioned in his free-ranging writings, which cover almost everything else in his life. Though he does comment on marriage in general:
In marriage, alliances and money rightly weigh at least as much as attractiveness and beauty. No matter what people say, a man does not get married for his own sake… I know no marriages which fail and come to grief more quickly than those which are set on foot by beauty and amorous desire.
On the other hand, Montaigne’s father receives frequent loving mention – as does his close friend La Boétie, who besides being an accomplished poet and political writer was also a fellow magistrate at the Bordeaux Parlement. Montaigne’s conversations with the idealistic La Boétie were undoubtedly a major feature of his early manhood. As he wrote of their friendship, ‘I think it was by some ordinance of heaven.’ Indeed, the intensity of their friendship has led some to speculate that it may have contained an element of homosexual love.
However, the consensus is that the relationship between Montaigne and La Boétie was one of brotherly love. La Boétie was three years older than Montaigne, and may well have fulfilled the role of the older brother that Montaigne never had. Similarly, La Boétie was orphaned at an early age, ‘and may have welcomed such a link with the brilliant but still somewhat rudderless Montaigne’.
La Boétie’s writings were not all as idealistic as his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. In reply to Catherine de’ Medici’s Edict of 1562, which attempted to appease the Huguenots by allowing them more freedom of worship, La Boétie wrote a detailed analysis warning against the country tearing itself apart. Two religions in the one country could only lead to anarchy, he said. ‘The Church has much to answer for; the Indulgences of 1517 should have been condemned when Luther pointed them out.’ Such hindsight is of no more practical value than the anarchic implications of his Discourse. Likewise his remedies for the situation, which end up suggesting that ‘Protestants must return to the religion of their ancestors or leave the country’, seem equally drastic. As advice this was of little help – even though it was pretty much what would happen in the end.
Montaigne remained very much of the Catholic persuasion, while his friend was more inclined to even-handedness. However, such disagreements were not divisive between La Boétie and Montaigne; if anything, their intense discussions drew them closer together. As Montaigne would later write of their friendship: ‘If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.’
Inevitably, it came as a profound shock to Montaigne when in August 1563 La Boétie suddenly fell ill, and died ten days later. Montaigne was at his friend’s bedside and described La Boétie’s death in a long, detailed letter to his father. This appears to have been somewhat revised before its publication, which brings out resemblances to the death of Socrates, including ‘equable discussions on death, comforts to the weeping wife, and friends’.
La Boétie’s death would leave a vast absence in Montaigne’s life, and it has been suggested that the tone of his later essays, in their frankness and honesty, is an echo of his conversations with La Boétie.
Five years later, Montaigne’s beloved father would die. This marked a turning point in his life. Montaigne resigned from his legal duties at the Parlement of Bordeaux and prepared himself for the second half of his life. He would retire to the tower in the grounds of his chateau and begin setting down his thoughts in the form of his essays.
Montaigne had almost certainly had this idea in mind for some years beforehand. He definitely went about his preparations for his retirement in a thorough fashion. He had the tower completely refurbished, installing a private chapel, a bedroom, and most important of all a library and study. These were all furnished according to his precise requirements. The walls featured murals of classical scenes, while the library included over a thousand books which he had acquired during his life so far.* The beams, joists and sideboards of the library were adorned with some sixty-seven maxims, mostly taken from the Bible and classical authors – especially the Roman playwright Horace, the materialist poet Lucretius, the Ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles and the Roman philosopher Sextus Empiricus, whose works contain the surviving remnants of the fourth-century Greek philosopher Pyrrhus, the founder of Pyrrhonism (a form of scepticism). Pyrrhus advocated that we should withhold our judgement and not become involved in controversies regarding the possibility of certain undeniable knowledge. Indeed, we should accept things as they are without indulging in superfluous analysis. This philosophical outlook is perhaps best summed up in the maxim by the Ancient Roman dramatist Terence: ‘Nothing human is alien to me’ – which takes pride of place in Montaigne’s attitude to life.
The bravery and honesty inherent in this remark would inform all of Montaigne’s essays. Not for him the easy dismissal of human actions or monstrous behaviour as simply ‘evil’, ‘barbarous’, ‘depraved’ or the like. It is by means of these words of disapproval that we distance ourselves from such acts. Montaigne insisted that we instead identify ourselves with such acts, and try to understand how we ourselves might have committed them. This Renaissance idea marks nothing less than a tectonic shift in human self-understanding – one which remains far from being fulfilled to this day.*
Such is the bedrock beneath Montaigne’s pleasant, discursive, informative and often highly entertaining essays. They are not horror stories. To repeat: as Montaigne said, the subject matter of his work is ‘I… myself ’. And as such he meant all human beings. A list of the titles of his essays gives an indication of the quotidian nature of their content: ‘On Idleness’, ‘On Educating Children’, ‘On Solitude’, ‘On Friendship’ (a detached examination in the light of his friendship with La Boétie). Yet his essays are also informed with his knowledge of all aspects of life: ‘On the Lame’, ‘On Drunkenness’, ‘On Fear’, ‘On Cruelty’…
Montaigne’s tower was no ivory tower. Even the life he led during this period was not that of a saintly hermit, removed from the world. His wife gave birth to five of his six children after he ‘retired’ to his tower. Their births (and deaths) are recorded in Montaigne’s copy of Ephemeris by the contemporary German humanist Michael Beuther. For instance:
May 16 1577. There was born to Françoise de La Chassaigne, my wife, the fifth child of our marriage. It was a girl, who died one month later. My brother… and my sister… baptized her without ceremony.
Montaigne’s laconic style here, and the absence of the child’s name – to say nothing of the title in which he chose to record these events – would seem to indicate a lack of feeling on his behalf. Does this indicate that Montaigne did not always practise, at least at home, the much-vaunted empathy he preaches in his essays? His biographer Frame offers an original defence of Montaigne here – one whose ingenuity does not necessarily detract from its possible truth:
