Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws. “Author’s Foreword” and “Preface.” Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
The 1757 “Author’s Foreword” to The Spirit of the Laws constitutes a brief reply to his critics, the most formidable of these being the Vatican, which placed the book on its Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1751, three years after its publication. The “Preface” appears in the first edition.
The “Author’s Foreword” consists of three paragraphs, the first of these beginning with the sentence:
In order to understand the first four books of this work, one must note that what I call virtue in a republic is love of the homeland, that is, love of equality.
What Montesquieu calls virtue is, then, not necessarily what Montesquieu’s reader calls virtue, although it resembles a sentiment Machiavelli invokes at the end of The Prince, when he praises Italy and calls for its redemption. (What Machiavelli calls redemption is not necessarily what the Vatican calls redemption.) But why is the love of the homeland the love of equality? It could be that although human beings are not equal in the classical virtues of justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom, nor in the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, they are, or usually are, equally citizens of their country.
Why the first four books? In them Montesquieu addresses, respectively, “laws in general,” “laws deriving directly from the nature of the government,” republican or monarchic, “the principles of the three governments”—that is, the passions animating republicanism (love of country), monarchy (love of honor), and despotism (fear), and “the laws of education,” which “should be relative to the principles,” the passions, “of the government. (In the United States, educator and dictionary author Noah Webster would cite Montesquieu on this point.) [1] Understanding the definitions Montesquieu offers in these preliminary books, his use of old and new words, first and foremost virtue, may clarify his critics’ minds or, perhaps, lead them to think more carefully. Elsewhere, he will announce that he writes his long book not to make people read but to make them think.
It is not moral virtue or a Christian virtue; it is political virtue, and this is the spring that makes republican government move, as honor is the spring that makes monarchy move.
Montesquieu separates political virtue from moral and Christian virtue; in describing it as a spring, he implies a mechanism. Virtus in Latin means strength; love of the homeland strengthens republics physically, as honor strengthens monarchies physically. Montesquieu makes political science first and foremost a physical science, a form of physics, not of ethics. Political virtue is political strength or power. This enables him to separate both politics and knowledge of politics from the Church. Church and State had been distinct but not separate in the sense of, for example, the United States Constitution; European states, feudal and modern, featured established Christian churches. Montesquieu lays a foundation for disestablishment while defending himself against charges of impiety by the Vatican, ruler of the established church of France. I am speaking of a different sort of virtue than the type you uphold, he replies; hold me harmless. In politics, love is a mechanism, not spiritual; political love is not agapic love.
Therefore, I have called love of the homeland and of equality, political virtue.
The republican kind of virtue is political, Montesquieu writes in this central sentence of his first paragraph. This suggests that love of honor, the monarchic virtue, is not political, strictly speaking. In this, Montesquieu follows Aristotle, who defines the political as ruling and being ruled in turn, while identifying monarchic rule as either parent-child rule (kingship) or master-slave rule (tyranny). However, unlike Aristotle, Montesquieu identifies honor, often associated with the rule of the few, especially the aristocracy, with monarchy. Machiavelli denigrates the rule of the few, ‘the great,’ in favor of the regimes of the many (‘republics’) and the one (principalities). Montesquieu here simply ignores the few, silently accepting Machiavelli’s basic regime dichotomy, although he does add a refinement, alluded to above, between two types of the rule of the one: monarchy and despotism. In this, he also departs from Machiavelli’s admirer, Thomas Hobbes, who famously proclaims that tyranny is only “monarchy misliked.”
I have had new ideas; new words have had to be found or new meanings given to old ones.
Hence your confusion, my censors. But hence also a danger to you. If I replace the old meanings of old words with new meanings, I might brush aside the meanings you want those old words to have. And what are these new ideas? I have already suggested one: that one form of virtue, what I have called virtue, is a spring, a mechanism, quite distinct from your virtues, and that it is equally a spring in the republican and the monarchic regimes. More radically, what might this suggest regarding the human soul?
Those who have not understood this have made me say absurdities that would be outrageous in every country in the world, because in every country in the world morality is desired.
To use the word virtue in the mechanistic, political sense elides morality. In itself, love of homeland elides morality. In every country in the world, morality is desired (perhaps most of all by priests?), although this leaves open the question not only of the contents of morality (following Montaigne, Montesquieu will describe a great variety of moral code in a great variety of countries) but of whether those who desire morality desire it primarily for themselves, primarily for others, or both for themselves and for others.
The second paragraph begins:
It should be observed that there is a very great difference between saying that a certain quality, modification of the soul, or virtue is not the spring that makes a government act and saying that it is not present in that government.
A spring is a cause. It is a mechanism that puts something in motion. The mechanism in which it is contained, or which it puts in motion from the outside, may have other features. A “certain quality,” “modification of the souls,” or “virtue” (in your sense of the word) might still be present in a republic or a monarchy, without being its spring, its motivating cause. This may imply that the moral and Christian virtues are less ‘effectual’ than the political virtue in a republic or than honor in a monarchy.
If I were to say that a certain wheel, a certain gear, is not the spring that makes this watch move would one conclude that it is not present in the watch?
Surely not. But if I were to say that, would I also not say that the wheel or gear that you care about is not what makes the watch move, that neither moral virtue nor Christian spirit really motivates political movement? And would this not make both classical and Christian moralists, and classical-Christian moralists, profoundly uneasy about Montesquieu’s political science?
And centrally: Far from excluding moral and Christian virtues, monarchy does not even exclude political virtue.
Not at all, but monarchy, the regime of the regnant Bourbons, does exclude those virtues from the status of what Aristotle would call the ‘efficient’ cause of monarchic regimes, and of republican ones, too. They do not set regimes in motion.
In a word, honor is in the republic though political virtue is its spring; political virtue is in the monarchy though honor is it spring.
Christian virtue has disappeared with this sentence. It seems to have nothing to do with politics or with monarchy, in and of themselves. In this, Montesquieu concurs with Machiavelli. Honor in republics and love of homeland in monarchies are virtues set further down the causational chain than love of homeland in republics and honor in monarchies.
In conclusion, the third paragraph states:
Finally, the good man discussed in Book 3, chapter 5, is not the Christian good man, but the political good man, who has the political virtue I have mentioned.
The title of that chapter is “That virtue is not the principle of monarchical government.” There, Montesquieu “begs” his readers “not to be offended” by this claim. He wants to assure them that he simply means that because in a monarchic regime “the state continues to exist independently of love of homeland,” of virtue as he has defined it, “in a monarchy it is very difficult for the people to be virtuous.” Honor goes to the king (the “Sun King,” in Louis XIV’s formulation); “desire for true glory, self-renunciation, sacrifice of one’s dearest interests, and all those heroic virtues we find in the ancients and know only by hearsay” are replaced by laws fitted to the monarchic regime. This does not preclude good Christian men from existing among the people. In other words, Montesquieu gives and takes from his critics at the same time. He takes from them their charge of atheism or ‘Spinozism’ while silently indicating Machiavelli’s critique of Christianity—that it ruins politics in both republics and principalities by leaving no place for the spirit of the city, which Machiavelli redefines not as the ancient Roman’s virtus but as his own virtù—the desire to acquire made effectual. Montesquieu will refine Machiavelli’s teaching on this point, too, pointing republics and monarchies not to conquest, as in the ancient Rome of republican Cato and monarchic Caesars, but to commerce, the more effectual and lasting means of acquisition.
He is the man who loves the laws of his country and acts from love of the laws of his country.
It is the modern republic, the commercial republic with laws that support peaceful acquisition, that Montesquieu esteems the most. The passion of love for such laws is an effect of the love of peaceful acquisition.
The “Preface” to The Spirit of the Laws consists of sixteen paragraphs; consequently, there is no central paragraph.
If, among the infinite number of things in this book, there is any that, contrary to my expectations might give offense, at least there is none that has been put here with ill intent.
An infinite number of things, indeed! Much information is provided in the course of it, through nearly 800 pages in the two-volume French edition I own and the 700 pages in one-volume the English translation. [2] The translator notes that he has translated espoir and its variants as “expectation” or, here, “expectations” rather than hope. Montesquieu is nothing if not a writer who prefers the concrete to the airy, in the case of espoir the expectation of something rather than some vague, idealized hope, mother of wishful thinking. On the other hand, it may also be that Montesquieu in this case does not really expect that he will not give offense but that he does hope that he won’t, given the malign consequences of offending the French regime and the Catholic Church. No “ill intent,” messieurs. It is quite possible that ill intent as defined by Montesquieu is quite different from ill intent as defined by the French regime and the Catholic Church, even as virtue means something quite different to him than it does to them.
By nature, I have not at all a censorious spirit.
The first mention of nature refers to Montesquieu himself, the individual. It is a Montaignian gesture, not Aristotelian and most assuredly not ‘churchy.’ This is also the first mention of spirit, again referring to Montesquieu the individual. Montesquieu’s “spirit” has a “nature.” What, then, is nature? Is it spiritual in the Christian sense? The references to nature and spirit, whatever they may mean, begin a bit of a joke and a jab. Those who take offense very often incline to censoriousness. I, Montesquieu, intend no ill to anyone. My critics, those honor-loving monarchists (or are they courtiers of a fear-inspiring despot?), those Christian-spiritual denizens of the Vatican, evidently do have censorious spirits. It is not I who acts with ill intent.
Plato thanked heaven that he was born in Socrates’ time, and as for me, I am grateful that heaven had me born in the government in which I live and that it wanted me to obey those whom it had me love.
That individual, Plato, piously thanked “heaven”—not exactly the gods said to dwell in that part of nature—that he was born in Socrates’ time, that is, in the time of the philosopher who brought philosophy down from the heavens, away from the cosmologically-centered philosophy that preceded him, to the polis, to consideration of human nature, a less speculative but crucially important topic for philosophers, since philosophers, being human themselves, must understand themselves, know themselves as one oracle famously put it, before they can soberly undertake the (then) necessarily speculative investigation of the heavens. Montesquieu’s gratitude (a passion neither ill-intended nor censorious) springs not from the presence of a philosopher in his time and place but from the government of France and those it wanted him to obey and love. This sentence might assuage any feelings, any passions or springs of offense that might have been taken by sensitive readers of the joke-jab immediately preceding.
I ask a favor that I fear will not be granted; it is that one not judge by a moment’s reading the work of twenty years, that one approve or condemn the books as a whole and not some few sentences.
Fear is the passion of despotism. Censorious men incline to, as one now says, ‘cherry-pick’ passages in building their case against authors. Censorious men have, by nature, a spirit of impatience as well as a certain libido dominandi. Don’t be that way, Montesquieu hopes without really expecting. At the same time, he offers sound and well-intended advice to serious judges: consider the argument I make as a whole argument. Just as Montesquieu will consider the laws not in isolation from one another but as they relate to one another, consider the words and sentences in my book as they relate to one another.
If one wants to seek the design of the author, one can find it only in the design of the work.
The Spirit of the Laws and other authorial works have a design, a design indicative of the (true) design of their authors. In this way, books resemble buildings; they are architectonic, designed with “design,” with intent. My book will tell you what my intent is, enabling you to come to a just judgment as to whether its design, a reflection of my design, is ill- or well-intended. It may even incline you to redefine what you mean by the words good and ill.
I began by examining men, and I believed that, amidst the infinite diversity of laws and mores, they were not led by their fancies alone.
Individuals have natures and it may be that human beings taken as a group, despite the infinite diversity they exhibit in their laws and mores, have certain commonalities. It may be that there is an underlying nature to human beings as such.
I have set down the principles, and I have seen particular cases conform to them as if by themselves, the histories of all nations being but their consequences, and each particular law connecting with another law or dependent on a more general one.
The principles are the passions, of which there is a finite number of politically relevant ones. The histories or stories of all, not some, nations follow from those passions. Laws do, too, and systems of laws, connections or relations among the laws which help to constitute a regime amount to such consequences, complicated by the complex relations among the particular laws so caused. It seems likely that the Montaignian/Montesquieuian individual also enters into complex relations with other individuals and the laws caused initially by the passions and to some extent sustain by them.
When I turned to antiquity, I sought to capture its spirit in order not to consider as similar those cases with real differences or to overlook differences in those that appear similar.
Spirit, again, still undefined, although a clue to its meaning may have been offered in the mention of relations. Laws have a spirit, according to the book’s title, and a period of time, antiquity, may have one, too. The way words change meaning anticipates the way the spirit of a set of laws or of a time may change and thereby deceive those who inquire into other systems and earlier times.
I did not draw my principles from my prejudices but from the nature of things.
“The nature of things”; a glance at Lucretius, that great counter-Roman Roman, that Roman philosopher? To identify passions as “principles” surely partakes of no ‘idealist’ philosophy, although philosophy of any kind will attempt to clear away prejudices, unexamined or unreasoned opinions. Lucretian Epicureanism finds no favor with Churchmen, at least in their public writings, or in the Bible.
Many of the truths will make themselves felt here only when one sees the chain connecting them with others.
More advice on how to read this book. The book itself is ‘relational,’ its elements related to one another in the manner of laws and mores. What is the “chain” connecting the truths to one another? What is the general principle or passion animating the book and its author, the forger of the chain? The truths, whatever they turn out to be, will be felt—a way of knowing distinct from sight (associated with knowing things that cannot be touched, ideas) and from hearing (associated with things that can be neither seen nor touched but revealed by speech). Machiavelli prefers knowledge by touch, felt knowledge, to either the philosophic knowledge offered by the ancients or the spiritual knowledge offered by the Bible. Montesquieu evidently concurs, to some extent, the reader will only feel the truths after seeing the chain, first. But what he means becomes clearer in the following sentence.
The more one reflects on the details, the more one will feel the certainty of the principles.
Reader, pay attention to the details, the particular truths. Then, reflect upon them, thinking rather than merely reading. See the chain that links those truths together. You will then feel those facts, really know them. And in such seeing and feeling, you then feel something beyond the particular truths, namely, the certainty of the principles of the nature of things that Montesquieu has discovered and now presents to you.
As for the details, I have not given them all, for who could say everything without being tedious?
You may be able to supply your own corroborating particular truths. You might even discover some principles of the nature of things not explicitly stated by the author but implied by him. To be too explicit with regard to principles might encourage unphilosophic thoughtlessness in readers, making them prey to prejudices, dogmas. And wouldn’t that, too, be tedious?
The salient traits that seem to characterize present-day works will not be found here.
The translators identify “salient traits” as a term from architecture. The architectonics of my book are not those of contemporary books. How so?
As soon as matters are seen from a certain distance, such salient traits vanish; they usually arise only because the mind attaches itself to a single point and forsakes all others.
The salient traits of present-day works—books to be sure, but perhaps others?—amount to mirages. Mirages emerge in the mind when it fixes on one point, rather as censorious persons fix on one or a few sentences, distorting an author’s intention. The principles drawn from the nature of things, too, might well be distorted by such fixations, a failure to consider the whole of nature because one has selected one or a few of the things. And to be sure, Montesquieu again eschews censoriousness:
I do not write to censure that which is established in any country whatsoever.
This, in marked contrast to the practice of Church-directed, Church-inspired conquests, inspired by censorious writings. Is the Bible itself censorious, in Montesquieu’s estimation?
Each nation will find here the reasons for its maxims, and the consequence will naturally be drawn from them that changes can be proposed only by those who are fortunate enough to fathom by a stroke of genius the whole of a state’s constitution.
Despite the infinite variety of laws and mores, which may find their abridged expression in the term “maxims,” all maxims have underlying “reasons,” which are, as Montesquieu has insisted, are passions. For the first time, Montesquieu suggests that one might wish not only to understand but to change laws and mores, redirect or even change the passions that underlie them. Not anyone can do this, however. Only those “fortunate enough” to “fathom”—to probe deeply—”the whole of a state’s constitution”—the system of its laws and mores but also its still-undefined “spirit”?—will be able to propose such changes—sensibly, at any rate. That is, the reformer or ‘founder’ of new modes and orders will need a mind capable of both probing deeply and ranging widely. A man like Montesquieu? Surely not men like his censors.
It is not a matter of indifference that the people be enlightened.
Surely not, given despotism’s preference for rule by fear, aided by ignorance, and republicanism’s need for an education that offers genuinely salient reasons for loving one’s country, for loving equality instead quailing in subservience.
The prejudices of magistrates began as the prejudices of the nation.
Censorious rule by fear arises not from rulers but from the people they rule. The spring of prejudice, so to speak, may be seen in the people, a particular people, whose prejudices then become the secondary springs of the rulers who keep them prejudiced, ruled by fear, censored. Enlightenment must then reach the people, spread among them first, perhaps by the means of a book written by one fortunate enough to fathom by a stroke of genius the whole of the existing, despotic state’s constitution, or whatever constitution may prevail in a given state.
In a time of ignorance, one has no doubts even while doing the greatest evils; in an enlightened age, one trembles even while doing the greatest goods.
An “age,” which might or might not be distinguishable from a “time,” but evidently has some relation to one. Antiquity, the age of republicanism or love of homeland, might or might not have been a time of ignorance. Neither is an age of enlightenment, an age in which the people lose many of their prejudices, a ‘democratic’ or republican age in which a people or perhaps many peoples love their homelands and equality. Montesquieu now ventures a moral contrast that differs sharply from the moral contrasts in the minds of the ignorant and censorious. In times (and, no doubt, regimes) of ignorance, of rule by fear, one may do “the greatest evils” with the certainty of those who fixate on one point in nature, obedient to the mirage that such fixation conjures. But in an age of enlightenment, one feels as it were a salutary fear, questioning one’s actions even when they bring great goods. What will eventually be called ‘liberalism’ should be animated by this hesitation.
One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself.
The felt truths, the truth that the abuses are indeed abuses—very often felt as bruises and bleeding wounds—lead to a truth of sight, of perceiving the chains of a system that will end the felt abuses. But the reformer or founder of a new regime, a new set of laws, will see, perhaps even foresee, bruises and wounds inflicted by the new regime and especially those inflicted when the correction is being put in place. Montesquieu understands that if you want to make an omelet you must break some eggs; he is no ‘idealist.’ But neither is he a Jacobin (and much less a Stalinist) avant le lettre. He is a liberal, a liberator from regimes of fear, not a fomenter of regimes of ‘Terrors.’ He remains a liberal of mesure. Accordingly,
One lets an ill remain if one fears something worse; one lets a good remain if one is in doubt about a better.
Neither religious nor Cartesian certainty bodes well for political life. Thinking while you read is a habit well adapted to other kinds of action, as a measured caution leads to thoughtful moderation, away from fanaticism in thought or action.
One looks at the parts only in order to judge the whole; one examines all the causes in order to see the results.
There is a purpose to attending to the particular truth: to see the whole and only then to judge it. That goes for reading Montesquieu’s book and to reading regimes. Parts are related to other parts and the chain which draws them together makes them a whole. If philosophy means love of wisdom, then to philosophize will mean an ardent inquiry into the nature of felt things understood only when seen as parts of a whole. To philosophize requires the virtue of love of homeland understood as love of the whole, attention to the whole.
If I could make it so that everyone had new reasons for loving his duties, his prince, his homeland and his laws and that each could better feel his happiness in his own country, government, and position, I would consider myself the happiest of mortals.
“If”: it may not happen, the prudent philosopher acknowledges. The newness of the reasons means the replacement of the old meanings of words with new meanings, the virtues of the ancients and the Christians with new virtues, at least in the political realm, the realm of laws and the regimes constituted in part by laws. To introduce new reasons, especially in the political realm, endangers the one who introduces them. He must measure the risk and act, specifically write, with practical as well as with theoretical wisdom.
If I could make it so that those who command increased their knowledge of what they should prescribe and that those who obey found a new pleasure in obeying, I would consider myself the happiest of mortals.
“If,” again. This too may not happen. The people may be the source of the magistrates’ prejudices but the magistrates, the ones who rule, who command, are the ones who read such books as The Spirit of the Laws, with its extensive descriptions and recommendations respecting laws and regimes. They are the ones capable of knowing, if secondarily, from reading works of philosophers. Those who obey do not often read such books, unless they are philosophers who obey out of practical wisdom and in a way that accords with that wisdom. The ruled are, however, capable of pleasure if not knowledge, and they, who most immediately feel the abuses of misrule, may find pleasure in obedience. That may be what Montesquieu means by the consent of the governed. Such consent surely would make the duties of rulers easier to perform. They would need to depend far less on fear.
I would consider myself the happiest of mortals if I could make it so that men were able to cure themselves of their prejudices.
Whether rulers or ruled, those who command or those who obey, men will be “able” to “cure themselves of their prejudices” only if they consent to understand what the philosopher, this philosopher among others, discovers for them. All must consent to be ruled by the new philosophers, Montesquieu very prominently among them, if they are to live happily, a condition that will itself make the new philosophers happy in their own way.
Here I call prejudices not what makes one unaware of certain things but what makes one unaware of oneself.
That is, as with Socrates, for whom Plato was grateful, one needs to know oneself, to know the nature of one’s spirit but also the nature of human beings as such and the nature of the spirit of interactions among individuals living together in their homelands and according to their laws, laws rightly framed by men enlightened by the new philosophers.
By seeking to instruct men one can practice the general virtue that includes love of all.
Montesquieu is such an instructor, soon to present his thoughts on the nature of education in the several regimes. But his book as a whole will resemble the love of all, the charitable or agapic love seen in Christianity, which attends both to Jew and to Greek. Yet this charity may differ from Christian charity in its foundation; we have seen the word “divine” in these pages but not the word “God.” When we do see it, Montesquieu will write “god,” more or less as Spinoza inclines to do. Charity will become ‘secularized.’
Man, that flexible being who adapts himself to the thoughts and impressions of others, is equally capable of knowing his own nature when it is shown to him, and of losing even the feeling of it when it is concealed from him.
Man’s nature (as distinguished from the natures of plants and of beasts), founded on passions, partakes of the flexibility of passions, by their nature not usually steadfast, even if sometimes quite stubborn. Man’s natural flexibility gives the philosopher and the ruler reason both to hope and to fear. Such men undertake a task which will require a sort of Sisyphean persistence combined with patient mesure. Censoriousness and violence will not prevail in the long run because they attempt to fix a nature that is not readily fixed, and never permanently fixed. The fixations that comport with attempts to fix the ‘unfixable’ are mirages, prejudices that cannot prevail forever.
Many times I began this work and many times abandoned it; a thousand times I cast to the wind the pages I had written; every day I felt my paternal hands drop; I followed my object without forming a design; I knew neither rules nor exceptions; I found the truth only to lose it.
Hesitation, despair, futility, aimlessness, ignorance, confusion: Montesquieu has shared the dilemma of all men so far. Casting pages to the wind, the editors note, alludes to the Aeneid 6.75, when Aeneas, having escaped Troy, having wandered Odysseus-like throughout the Mediterranean, seeking safe landing at Latium, implores the Sybil not to write her prophetic verses “on the leaves, lest they fly, disordered playthings of the rushing winds.” With no prophetess to guide him, Montaigne himself threw his preliminary work to the wind. The paternal hands that drop allude to the Aeneid 6.33, where Aeneas recounts the story of Daedalus, father of Icarus, builder of the labyrinth in which the monster, the Minotaur, is imprisoned, now seeking to escape the prison of the Cretan tyrant Minos, “attempts to fashion” wings for himself and his son, so that they may fly to freedom. Daedalus succeeds in making the wings, famously to see his son disobey his advice to “take the middle way” between the sun and the sea, fly too high, too close to the sun, fatally. In seeking to free men from tyranny, intending them to take the middle way, avoiding both soaring fanaticism and lowly subservience to despots, Montesquieu’s hands faltered. His labyrinthine work, intended to confine political and clerical monsters, his set of wings, intended to liberate humanity from the prison of prejudice, his philosophic quest, nearly failed.
But when I discovered my principles, all that I had sought came to me, and in the course of twenty years, I saw my work begin, grow, move ahead, and end.
Latium found. Pious Aeneus’ journey took seven years; it was Odysseus’ journey that took twenty. Guided by the Sybilline prophecy, Aeneus found the ‘principle’ that enabled him to discover and settle Latium in the golden fruit of the Golden Bough; guided by his intellect, Odysseus returned home. The way of the intellect takes longer than the way of prophecy. But it is steady, like nature, with its beginning, growth, progress, and culmination.
If this work meets with success, I shall owe much of it to the majesty of my subject; still, I do not believe that I have totally lacked genius.
Montaigne does not wish to be thought lacking in humility, even if that humility is not thoroughgoing. The spirit of the laws has majesty; it rules the laws. It attracts the attention of readers because they want to understand such a majestic thing. Genius, too, attracts.
When I have seen what so many great men in France, England, and Germany have written before me, I have been filled with wonder, but I have not lost courage.
Who might these be? In France, Bodin? In England, Bacon, Locke? In Germany, Leibniz? That is, philosophers of the modern state, of commercial republicanism, of modern science? Wonder is the beginning of philosophy; nature as a whole and the philosophers who, each in his own way, seek to master nature, surely induce wonder, not the fear inspired by despotism. They strengthen one who would join them in philosophic inquiry, even if they might intimidate the one who seeks to philosophize, initially.
“And I too am a painter,” have I said with Correggio.
So Correggio is said to have said, by the Correggio-obsessed art collector and historian Sebastiano Resta, in his Series of the Work of Eminent Painters, published in 1739. Correggio had been contemplating The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia by Raphael. In the painting, the martyr holds a lyre; of the five figures, she is the only one with her eyes fixed on Heaven. She is the saint who protects musicians. So, even in elevating himself to fellowship with philosophers, Montaigne strikes a faint note of piety, albeit piety toward a saint who loved the Muses along with God.
Notes
- See “Educating the American Mind: The Founders’ View” on this website under the category “American Politics.”
- De L’Esprit des lois. Two volumes. (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1949).
Recent Comments