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    Islam in Crisis

    by

    Ali A. Allawi: T.: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

    Originally published in the Claremont Review of Books. Fall 2009.

     

    Retired, near the end of his life, Charles de Gaulle wondered about history, “what Rome called Fortune.” He said to his friend André Malraux, “No historian has attempted to analyze the most singular element of History: the moment when the current passes. For us or against us.” Rome rose, declined, fell, but what “gives a soul to a people?”—or an army, the general added. What disorients that soul, inducing it to lose its way? A statesman or a military leader can rally his people, but there are knowable “limits to action,” as even the Caesars and Napoleon learned.

    In France de Gaulle had seen the current shift more than once. He also saw a larger current, in the world. “There remains but one generation separating the West from the entry of the Third World onto the scene.” Malraux observed, “It is the end of empires,” but de Gaulle replied, “Not only of empires. Gandhi, Churchill, Stalin, Nehru, even Kennedy, it is the funeral cortege of a civilization.” Malraux speculated that the West might be replaced by “Mao” (meaning some combination of Chinese nationalism and communism) and “to some degree” by “Nasser” (that is, by Arab or perhaps more generally Third-World nationalism). De Gaulle offered a correction. “Mao, oui. L’Islam, peut-être.” Arab nationalism, so visible at the end of 1969, when the two men conversed, would not shift the new current or guide it. But Islam—dismissed, disparaged religiosity—might do so. As an army officer, de Gaulle had known Syria in the early 1930s, writing to his wife that we French, with our mission civilisatrice, “have not made much of an impression here.” Had he sensed the undercurrent even then?

    Ali A. Allawi sees the direct the now-surfaced current has taken. In The Crisis of Islamic Civilization he wants to understand how and why “the spirit of Islam” has declined and whether it might be revived. A Sufi Muslim who returned to his native Iraq after Americans deposed the tyrant Saddam Hussein, Allawi found not liberation there but sectarian murder and corruption. After serving as minister of defense and minister of finance in the new governments, he retreated to an academic appointment at Princeton University, giving himself time to think about his country and his religion. Like de Gaulle, he wants to understand how and why the current passes—specifically with respect to the decline of he takes to be the genuine “spirit of Islam”—and how that decline might be reversed. He attends to Islam as a set of religious beliefs and as a distinct civilization, a mode and order of civility, wondering whether “a modern society, with all its complexities, institutions and tensions” can “be built on the vision of the divine.”

    In the decades since de Gaulle and Malraux spoke, Islamic observance has increased worldwide, and what is called ‘political’ Islam has gone from the once-obscure writings of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and Pakistan’s Syed Abul A’ala Maududi to being the lifeblood of real regimes and real revolutionary movements. By ‘political’ Allawi means the kind of rule Machiavelli’s prince practices: the acquisition of men and things in an exhibition of virtuosity for the benefit of the prince. But according to Allawi, Islamic civilization—that sense of balance, of proportion, “between the individual and the collective” and “between this-worldliness and other-worldliness”—has been ruinously undermined, “undergoing a monumental crisis.”

    For Muslims, the modern West lacks genuine civilization, overemphasizing individuality in the pursuit of worldly success. Much of the modern East, with Japan in the lead, now pursues such success, too—albeit corporately, not individualistically. West and East alike conjure the impersonal and therefore uncivilized forces of markets and technologies, and succumb to a moral relativism that renders their conquests empty. (As Malraux asked de Gaulle, “Why conquer the moon, if only to commit suicide there?”) Allawi argues that the followers of Allah underestimate the modern West, assuming that they have little or nothing to learn from the adherents to imperfect religions. One may nonetheless think that Muslims correctly judge the atheist currents of the new Western irreligion, consonant with Machiavellianism, for being against the ummah, the body of believers. In particular, Western modernity substitutes Machiavelli’s invention, the centralized and acquisitive modern state, for the tribes and loosely confederated empires of Muhammad’s day, for the ummah, and for the European feudal societies that the armies of the ummah so often conquered.

    In response to Western moral relativism and politique statism, Muslims pray but they also tyrannize and terrorize one another, failing to integrate their inner, devout lives with their public conduct. Although “dozens of nation-states…claim, one way or another, to be guided by Islam,” Allawi sees “few signs that anything like this has been taking place.” He insists that Islam is the only religion that might go beyond a mere critique of modernity to reestablish civilization or genuine politics without sacrificing modernity’s benefits, most notably the discovery of modern science. But he does not go so far as to deem this likely.

    Allawi describes how Islamic civilization advanced for a millennium after Muhammad, “nearly always…coeval with rule by Muslims over Muslims”—and, it might be added, rule by Muslims over non-Muslims. The believers held that the Islamic world flourished according to divine right and with divine aid, morally and politically. With respect to morality, the Koran teaches that “there are no human virtues as such,” only divine gifts to individual souls, who cultivate those gifts by observing Islamic law, as reflected in Islamic politics. “The specifically Islamic form of political life” consisted of several elements. The first was empire, but of the pre-modern, non-statist, decentralized sort. Governmental functions included the administration of sharia law and military defense as well as “expansion and conquest.” Kingship was the characteristic Muslim regime, undergirded by a society of tribes and other kinship associations, which Allawi calls “key” to a personal rule that avoided the arbitrariness of modern absolutism and tyranny.

    The Egyptian monarchy was the first regime effectually to subordinate Islam to modernity, including nationalism and statism, although the project was undertaken most dramatically in Turkey under the regime of Kemal Ataturk. “Political” Islam arose even earlier, in the 18th century, in “the uncompromising and literalist monotheism” of Muhammad ib Abd al-Wahhab, who allied with the then-obscure House of Saud. Under the pressure of modernism and Islamism—to which Allawi adds Western imperialism—”by the end of the nineteenth century, the territorial, cultural and psychological unity of Islamic civilization had been torn apart.” The dichotomy between modernizing secularists and self-described fundamentalist reformers of Islam—both severed from the faith’s spiritual roots—more or less guaranteed Muslims’ political weakness from then until now.

    Allawi provides an informative, melancholy survey of some lonely figures who opposed both secularism and the non-spiritual, legalistic, and often militaristic forms of Islam. These men include Muhammad Iqbal, “the great poet of modern Islam” and a defender of Sufi spirituality as “the realization of God’s absolute uniqueness through the uniqueness of the individual”; Badiuzzaman Said Nursi, a Kurdish scholar in Turkey who upheld a civil-associational strategy against statism; and the Algerian scholar Malek Bennabi, who attempted to explain Islam’s decline in Gibbon-like terms, as a complacent triumphalism leading to the absorption of foreign spiritual toxins.

    Israel’s stunning victory over Arab armies in 1967 fatally discredited the nationalist and socialist modernizing regimes behind those armies. The enrichment of the Saudis, and thereby of the Wahhabis, in the 1970s, along with the 1979 Iranian revolution brought political Islam to power in core Islamic states. Allawi argues that this was too little, too late. Scriptural literalism depends upon an understanding of the relevant language, but the Arabic language, the language of the Koran, had lost much of its original meaning, as many words took on definitions adapted to the concepts of modernity. (For example, in modern Arabic deen means religion; in Koranic Arabic it means “the indebtedness of the created to the Creator,” a debt discharged by following the ways of life —the regime—of God as revealed in “Islam or the unsullied revealed religions,” Judaism and Christianity.) The schools in which Muslims now learn Arabic teem with modern notions—secularism, historicism—far removed from Islam learning. As for the madrassas, insofar as they teach political Islam they too lack spirituality, contenting themselves with an “entirely Sharia-defined,” legal-literalist Islam. This is the Islam of the Wahhabists and their offshoots the Salafists, who “radicalize Sunni Islam by weakening its connection with the classical schools of law,” which had been “moderate, restrained and subtle in their decisions,” being sensitive to circumstances of place and of peoples. “The death knell for Islamic law is sounding,” Allawi writes. “All its vitality, originality and appositeness fades away, turning it into a massive manual with rulings often drawn from the shoddy scholarship of bigoted clerics and Islamic activists with little jurisprudential training.”

    Allawi defends a version of Islam that accommodates the variety of Islamic sects as well as resident non-Muslims. He points to the 11th-century theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who made arguments similar to those of Hugo Grotius and some Orthodox Jewish scholars. For these thinkers, the solution to the theological-political question required no endorsement of a natural right to worship peacefully, but rather an acknowledgment o a shared core of beliefs, small in number but indispensable to the health of human souls and societies alike. Within Islam, this is the conviction that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. This Islamic liberalism, so to speak, allowed Shia Muslims to hold high offices under the (Sunni) Abbasid Caliphate, much to the astonishment of today’s Wahhabists and Salafists. “The closing of the Islamic mind,” he avers, “at least in this respect, is very much a modern phenomenon.”

    He suggests that if Muslims had glimpsed the Enlightenment’s glare from a distance, they might have followed a Tocquevillian path from monarchy and tribalism to some more republican form of self-rule. But “the maturing of Islam’s political culture into the modern period was thwarted by the violent disruption of Islam’s civilization by European powers.” Absent this imperialism, Islam could have produced, on “its own impetus,” “its own version of checks and balances on rulers and its own system of rights and duties, compatible with its own legacy.” He finds a basis for Islamic self-government in “a short but decisive Quranic verse [Koran 42:38]”: “[The Muslims’] communal business is to be transacted in consultation among themselves.” Allawi prefers an expansive reading of the term “themselves,” maintaining that it refers to the “entire community; in effect, across the entire adult population,” not merely tribal elders or adult males. In this he might be said to register two other Tocquevillian themes, those of social democratization and political republicanism.

    Would such a “civilized” politics include non-Muslims in the ruling body? Allawi does not say if “accommodation” means shared rule. He inclines to brush aside non-Muslim reservations concerning such matters. To associate Islam “with fanaticism and violence” has become a “deeply rooted” habit “in the psyche of westerners.” But in places like Southeast Asia, he asserts, Muslim conquests were mostly not conquests at all but voluntary conversions “prompted by the example of Muslim merchants.” And dhimmitude—the subordination of non-Muslim minorities in majority-Muslim regimes—was primarily an attempt to protect those minorities.

    This description of peaceable, accommodating Islamic rule might be more reassuring if it were more believable. From its beginning, Islam came to sight as a fighting faith. It combined the military conquest and civil rule seen in ancient Israel with the universality of Christianity; Islam has always been imperial in its ambitions. Like the experienced merchant he was, Muhammad never hesitated to negotiate his way to the next expansion, whenever possible; but neither did he shrink from the use of force, especially in the last decade of his life. His successors shrank from it a great deal less.

    Today, Allawi writes, “the issue is whether Muslims want to create and dwell in a civilizational space which grows out of their own beliefs without disrupting the world of others.” Indeed so, but would Muhammad approve? And if he would approve such a strategy as a temporary measure, would he deem ‘live and let live’ a godly policy after such a civilization were achieved?

    Allawi’s testimony itself gives pause. Although “the idea of human rights can be traced both to biblical sources and to the notion of a natural law which would be separate from divine revelation,” modern human rights derive from Western convention or “tradition.” Such modern “ideals” as liberalism, democracy, and secularism, if adopted by Islam, would destroy its “separate civilizational space.” For example, Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees not only the right to choose your religion but to “change it”—a violation of Islamic law, which permits conversion to Islam but never from Islam. This means that Muslims must insist that what’s ours is ours and what’s yours is—negotiable, a stance impossible to reconcile with natural right, ancient or modern, and not easy to reconcile with either the Hebrew or the Christian Bible.

    Allawi assures his readers that Islam is the only major religion that rules no major state—or “core state,” to use Samuel Huntington’s term—and therefore harbors no new empire. Perhaps so, but hasn’t that made terrorism all the more attractive to radical Islamists? Neither the destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, nor the attempted attack on the White House could make America collapse, but they were to say the least vigorous attempts in that direction, and part of a larger war of attrition against the United States and, in principle, all regimes radical Islamists anathematize—a fair number, as it happens. Allawi wants sharply to distinguish classical Islamic rule from modern Islamist tyranny, but the two do rather bleed together at times, despite his best efforts. He doesn’t help his case by insisting that “the war against terror was really a war against Islam itself.”

    These criticisms should not detract too much from what Allawi does well. He strikes me as a successor to the sober, moderate Muslim scholars he admires and writes about with such feeling. In deploring the attempt by modern liberalism to ‘privatize’ religion, to reduce its authority in public life, and at the same time insisting that Muslims govern themselves justly and civilly, has he not, through his very virtues, effectively ‘privatized’ himself within the ummah? Can his  form of Islam, whether the true Islam or not, ever find a home—except in exile? Is he finally, despite his longings, most nearly at home in the natural-rights republic, where George Washington welcomed Catholic, Jews, and Quaker so long as they “demean themselves as good citizens”?

    Keeping a Republic: Lincoln and Tocqueville

    by

    Statement delivered at the Faculty Roundtable
    “Lincoln, Tocqueville, and America”
    Center for Constructive Alternatives Conference
    Hillsdale College
    Hillsdale, Michigan
    September 17, 2009

     

    Aristocracies seem artificial to us—lords and ladies, with elaborate punctilio, finding quarrel in a straw when honor’s at the stake. But in perpetuating their rule aristocrats behave quite naturally; they transfer social and political authority through the straight path of family inheritance. The Second Duke of Arras receives lands (complete with peasants) and ruling authority over them from his father the First Duke, and intends to pass these down to his firstborn son, the future Third Duke. That’s quite natural, in a way.

    Every regime needs to secure its social and political inheritance through the generations. The Bible records that King David had many sons, most of them worthless. In His wisdom, the LORD takes a firm hand; Solomon inherits.

    How will regimes like ours—commercial and democratic republics—how will they endure? In principle they reject aristocratic and monarchic modes of inheritance. If all men are created equal, what then?

    This conference brings generations of Americans together in order to consider our republic, together. This is the way we Americans pass on our political inheritance—by teaching and learning with and from one another.

    As a young man Abraham Lincoln already understood this. in his 1838 Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, he observed that the generation of the Founders had now passed away. Those men secured the blessings of liberty in a noble quest for honor. As for the lesser souls among the Americans of that time, the hatred and vengefulness they had felt toward the British—”the basest principles of our nature”—had nonetheless advanced the noblest cause: civil and religious liberty. Both the best and the worst in that generation had contributed to the good.

    But today, Lincoln, says, in 1838, the passions of the founding generation, noble and base, have disappeared into the graveyards along with the men they animated. Today, great ambition and petty resentment alike might seek to overthrow the Founders’ republic. What to do?

    Revere the laws, Lincoln answers, including the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. Let “reverence for the laws” become “the political religion of the nation,” not to replace the Christian religion but to reinforce “reason, cold, calculating unimpassioned reason,” which commends the republican constitutional union to us. Under the circumstances of 1838, passions noble and base no longer serve to unite Americans but to divide them. In the absence of passions which happen to work for the good, reason will now supply all the materials for this political religion. But its energy will come from the sentiment of reverence not only for the laws but for the Framers of those laws, of whom the greatest was George Washington.

    Tocqueville also understood the subtle complementarity of reason and reverence with respect to the perennial problem of political inheritance. In upholding a regime founded upon natural rights, and particularly “the natural equality of man,” the French revolutionaries had followed the Americans and their intellectual sources, the writings of the philosophers of natural rights. But in attacking Christianity the French revolutionaries had departed from the American way, and in this manner as in so much else Tocqueville stood with the Americans.

    The rules of conduct prescribed by religions, he explained, “are based on human nature itself.” Christianity—in one sense the precious inheritance of aristocracy because it, like aristocracy, urges men to look above themselves, not around themselves, for their moral compass—these Christian laws, these rules of conduct finally undermined societies of masters and slaves. At the same time, despite its indirect influence, Christianity had often proved politically feeble: “The Roman Empire in its greatest decadence was full of good Christians,” Tocqueville writes. “But what will never exist in such societies [as the Rome of Suetonius] are great citizens, and above all a great people, and I am willing to state that the average level of hearts and minds will never cease to decline as long as equality and despotism are combined.” To achieve human greatness, to actualize the nature of man that Christianity fully reveals, peoples must combine equality with self-government, with republicanism, for only in political life—in discussion, in responsibility, in civility—can what Tocqueville calls the natural greatness of man find a home in the modern world, the world of social equality.

    At the same time, both religion and republicanism can act fanatically, as Christianity had done, as Islam had done, as the French revolutionaries did. Robespierre may have been personally ‘incorruptible,’ but unlike genuine Christians the people he sought to govern lacked “the desire to help one another,” a desire that had atrophied after 150 year under a monarchic and centralized state. With their civil associations and their republicanism, Americans (at that time, Americans very nearly alone) governed themselves and helped one another, displaying the humility of Christian equality before God, charity toward one another, along with the natural greatness of man, the capacity to rule and to be ruled reasonably, and to defend themselves against those who sought to stop them.

    Tocqueville and Lincoln alike never forgot the truth of the self-evident truth that all men are created equal or the hard fact that it and other truths are not self-evident to everyone. The Founders wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” not that you do. King George III didn’t. John C. Calhoun didn’t. Stephen Douglas didn’t. Most Europeans didn’t—to say nothing of Asians and Africans. Tocqueville observes that even the Greek philosophers didn’t—that “it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” An American generation might arise that no longer saw this; both worried that such a generation might already have arisen. A generation might even need to fight a great civil war in order to humble itself so as to see those truths again. And it might need a statesman to show them what the war meant. The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address are to the Declaration and the Constitution what the New Testament is to the Old Testament in the eyes of Christians: a renewal of the old law and its extension in practice to all human beings under its rule. A consideration of the Biblical allusions Lincoln places in those speeches confirms this. For their part, the American Founders had had occasion to consider what one of their philosophic mentors calls the reasonableness of Christianity. With Tocqueville, Lincoln saw that reason and its insights need the right kind of regimes—the right human political order and the real City of God—to see more clearly and to act with more justice. To perpetuate such regimes and to cause them to flourish on, not perish from, the earth will continue to require us to learn from the American Founders, from Tocqueville, and from Lincoln in places like this, whose numbers are diminishing.

    Montaigne’s Politics

    by

    Biancamaria Fontana: Montaigne’s Politics: Authority and Governance in the ‘Essais.’ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

     

    Far from being politically detached or disengaged from the political life of his country, Montaigne worked in his provincial parliament (albeit not in its main assembly) and served at both the Parisian court of Henry III of Valois and the provincial court of Henry of Navarre, the future king. He spent four years as Mayor of Bordeaux during a period of civil unrest. France itself found itself torn by civil wars of religion throughout his lifetime, reason enough for his famed guardedness in writing. The certainty and indeed fanaticism of partisans and the confusion of authorities alike pointed him toward skepticism concerning all claims to rule. Biancamaria Fontana, a historian at the University of Lausanne, nonetheless defends Montaigne from suspicions of religious unbelief. She does notice divergences from Christian teachings: denial of original sin in view of the “plasticity” of “human nature”; adherence to Christian sentiments but not to articles of faith; appreciation for the “exotic kaleidoscope of human practices,” suggesting that “conscience” contains little “science” or knowledge; the suspicion that laws derive more from custom than from God; and Montaigne’s inclination to equate belief with opinion. Fontana equally defends Montaigne against charges of Machiavellianism, rightly considering him less openly audacious than the Florentine. I am reminded of young Henry Adams, who recalls asking the old political fixer Thurlow Weed, “Is no political man to be trusted?” Weed mused, “I never encourage a young man to begin by thinking so.” Fontana may be said to encourage new readers of the Essais not to begin by thinking Montaigne Machiavellian.

    She begins by observing that Montaigne aims at redirecting his readers away from “abstract schemes and models” in politics and towards a consideration of “the complexity and instability of human circumstances.” Is it not wiser to stay closer to the experiences and sentiments of ordinary and practical people, “rather than addressing them”—indeed one another—”from above”? Appeals to the ‘above’ enable clever men to “commit crimes under the pretense of serving justice or religion, insulting their victims with their hypocrisy and arrogance”—’adding insult to injury,’ as we might say. “If he was an attentive reader of the City of God, and if he brought into the Essais echoes of its tragic vision of humanity, Montaigne placed his own analysis on rather different ground.” Indeed: But what was it?

    Preliminarily, Fontana proposes that Montaigne grounded his thought on himself. “Against the tide of debased, deceitful discourse, the author of the Essais was determined to speak ‘by his own universal being,’ not ‘as a grammarian, poet, or jurisconsult but as Michel de Montaigne’; the expression of a personal viewpoint, divested of any technical authority, would alone prove truly universal,” universally understood and felt. Montaigne humbly presents himself as the least authoritative man, as a man nonetheless speaking to other men from and to what is common to them all. Which is to say that he humbly presents himself as the Universal Man, as distinct from God Who Became Man, and from men who claim to speak for that God.

    Fontana divides her book into six chapters on six topics: laws, virtue, toleration, opinion (particularly conscience), trust (particularly political legitimacy), and politics. “The practice of the law representing Montaigne’s main public activity,” as his subcommittee work in the Bordeaux Assembly centered on litigation—what we today would call administrative law. He criticizes French law as “a judicial monstrosity,” an incoherent combination of Roman law, feudal custom, and kingly edicts, too numerous to be understood yet never enough to cover every case, and all further confused by a “vertiginous accumulation of interpretations and commentaries” by jurists. With the rule of law so profoundly compromised, corruption and sectarian cruelty took hold, sparking and fueling the civil wars. Tradition, long-established custom, offered no help in a country in which the Reformation decried existing customs as tainted, while Catholics denounced the Reformers as damnable heretics. At the same time, customs will always be with us; human beings need regular habits, some accepted way of life, even if the ways of life in one country differs sharply from those in another. To top matters off, appeals to a higher, divine law will also fail, inasmuch as “human beings had simply no access to a certain knowledge of the law of God and could never reach an agreement about its content.” At best, the law of God might enter through the individual conscience, whereby men “recogniz[e] instinctively when some obvious instance of injustice, abuse, or cruelty had occurred.” This too had evidently proved a weak reed, easily bent by passions secular and religious.

    What then of virtue, an appeal to character? Augustine’s critique of “pagan” virtue, and Machiavelli’s invitation to transform Roman virtus into his commended virtù had left men without any clear, rational standard of morality. Montaigne doubted Augustine’s emphatic critique of classical virtue as refuted by the Biblical teaching on original sin, but he also saw substantial evidence before his eyes that any valorization of the military virtues, as seen either in Rome or, in a more sinister way in Machiavelli would not strengthen but weaken societies pervaded by its spirit. “People became fatalistic, careless of danger, indifferent to the sufferings of others as well as to their own, insensitive to cruelty”; in Montaigne’s words, with such an ethos “any opinion is strong enough to make men espouse it at the price of life.” Accordingly, Montaigne “pursued an emphatically unheroic, modern ideal of ‘ordinary’ virtue.” In Fontana’s estimation this amounts to a peaceable form of Christianity, although underneath this piety there may be a peaceable form of Machiavellianism. On that point, David Lewis Schaefer’s careful exegesis of the Essais in his The Political Philosophy of Montaigne remains persuasive.

    Whether a tamed Christianity or a tamed Machiavellianism animates Montaigne’s soul, that soul does strive to tame other souls in addition to itself. One sees this in what Fontana aptly calls his “politics of toleration,” and specifically in the essay “Of Freedom of Conscience,” “set at the center of the text, in the middle of Book II.” In what some readers may see as a sobering feature, and others as a sly one, Montaigne constructs his argument “around a single historical figure, the Roman emperor Julian, known as ‘the Apostate,'” in the process “turning this traditional enemy of Christianity into a classical hero and a great tragic figure.” Fontana also notices that Montaigne doesn’t openly call for religious pluralism, quite understandably regarding religious contention dangerous to civic peace. Instead, he confines himself to castigating cruel treatment of heretics and to questioning the self-righteous certitude of those who practice such treatment. The political circumstances of sixteenth-century France differed radically from those of, say, 1920s America; H. L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow would not have survived. Montaigne was preeminently a ‘survivor.’

    In treating matters of conscience generally, Fontana describes Montaigne’s Julian as a “heroic figure”—”a reborn Alexander the Great without the Macedonian’s drinking habits,” “the incarnation of a classical ideal that had sadly disappeared from the modern world.” One recalls Machiavelli’s similar use of ‘ancient’ figures for his own ‘modern’ purposes.  Among those ‘modern’ purposes for Montaigne was his support of his patron Henry of Navarre, a man of very dubious faith in the eyes of French Catholics, for the French throne. A professing Protestant, Henry faced a problem: “If he chose to recant in order to take up his crown, the king was exposed to the risk of becoming ‘a state Catholic,’ while an opportunistic conversion would turn him into an atheist, with no particular attachment to any religion.” Henry successfully rose to this challenge by exercising a decidedly Montaignian skill, namely, obfuscation, “blurr[ing] in his statement some aspects of the Catholic doctrine he found especially unconvincing, such as the cult of saints and the existence of purgatory.” With Henry, “Catholic” meant “catholic” or universal, and not so much identification of Catholicism with “the Church of Rome.”

    As philosophers will do, Montaigne deepened his analysis of a political dilemma into a consideration of “the puzzling nature of belief” itself. In the longest essai, the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne denies that faith derives from “human reasons and discourses” but from “irrational, ultimately superhuman motivations.” This sounds like the work of the Holy Spirit. But Montaigne distinguishes the superhuman dimension of faith from its “imperfect human dimension,” which consists of “a package of myths, norms, and practices that defined a specific culture”; thus, “one was a Christian in the same way in which one happened to be German or from Périgord, by an accident of birth.” In “this anthropological dimension,” Christianity “was just like any other religion.” In this sense “Montaigne used opinion and croyance as synonymous.” Politically speaking, questions of faith have no spiritual dimension at all, but remain in the realm of eminently fallible but formidable public opinion. Opinion is neither rational nor spiritual but a matter of passion, imagination, and habit; “the content of opinion was generally arbitrary.” Given that, as Fontana finely phrases it, Montaigne thought that “Christianity had already accumulated a sufficient number of martyrs and did not need to add to an already impressive score.”

    Faith suggests trust and, politically considered, trust constitutes the bulk of legitimacy or lawfulness. In this way Fontana recurs to the theme of her opening chapter, having guided the reader to a more thoughtful understanding of the foundation of law. Montaigne raises a rather high standard, when it comes to trust generally. “If an authoritative Christian writer like Saint Augustine described a miraculous event…supporting his narrative with the testimony of two learned bishops, one should perhaps suspend one’s judgment before dismissing the whole story as simply incredible.” He starts with distrust, hedging trust with a doubtful “perhaps,” thereby leaving the authority of the “authoritative Christian writer” in question.

    In political societies, Machiavelli had argued that force crucially supplements trust or fidelity. Again, Montaigne holds back, given the malign effects of force seen in the French civil wars. He blames the recourse to violence on prior “corruption of public discourse,” on “the Machiavellian tradition” commending the use of “deceit and mendacity as suitable instruments of governance.” Similarly, violations of the rule of law lead societies to violence by destroying public trust. Despite his apparent support for monarchy, Montaigne then argues that the very position of the monarch, ruling alone, has proved “morally disabling,” inasmuch as they seldom experience any of “the essential components of a good moral education,” namely, “the sincere appraisal of their conduct and the confrontation, on a ground of equality, with the abilities and views of others.” Flattery corrupts them, from childhood on. He therefore applauds his patron Henry IV, who invited an assembly of notables at Rouen to give him their counsels, vowing to trust them. Even if Henry didn’t quite “transform the nature of the French monarchy” by such gestures, Montaigne “believed him at least capable of performing convincingly enough in this novel role of monarch ruling by popular consent.” One is left wondering if this is not really a Machiavellian adjustment of Machiavellianism misused.

    Use and misuse are matters of practice, not theory, and Fontana concludes her book with a discussion of Montaigne as a practitioner of politics, or more precisely Montaigne’s reflections upon the practice of politics. Given the weakness of human reason in political life and men’s inability “to act consistently according to God’s law”—in other words the political inadequacy of both reason and revelation—the Machiavellian attempt to conquer fortune must be scaled back. It is not clear, even on Fontana’s account, that this means that the attempt must be abandoned altogether. If “mediocrity” must replace “grandeur,” and yet Aristotelian “mediocrity”—the location of virtue in the middle of extremes, with courage (for example) amounting to a “mean” between cowardice and rashness—also seems unattainably rational, what then? By Fontana’s accounting, Montaigne recommends that the prince turn not to God but to a wise advisor. And what might such a man look like? How will the prince know him when he meets him?

    He will be “someone of middling condition, independent and satisfied with his own status,” a man who “would have nothing to lose from telling the truth, and nothing to gain from concealing it,” a man with connections “with ordinary people,” not only the elites. A man not unlike Michel de Montaigne, as he presents himself in the Essais, one is inclined to think. No fideist, no rationalist, but a man of experience. In America, two centuries later, Benjamin Franklin listened and learned.

    Fontana avers that “Montaigne’s work shows a stern attachment to basic Christian principles such as individual responsibility, freedom, charity, and mercy, an attachment that is indicative of the writer’s moral disposition, even if it can tell us little about the precise nature of his religious beliefs”—such as, for example, whether he attached himself to Jesus as the Christ. “What was truly original about Montaigne’s contribution was not his defense of Christian values (or possibly of some unorthodox version of these), but the tension the Essais masterfully established between the values themselves, and their practical enforcement in the context of existing human societies.” In terms of the practice, the experience Fontana recognizes as Montaigne’s test for truth, “The Essais gradually but effectively dismantled the view that the legislation of human societies had its foundation in natural law; they also utterly destroyed the credibility of the claim that Christian states, and Christian rulers, were the guardians and enforcers of a divine order on earth.” There might still be natural law and/or a divine order, but no one quite knows what they are, if anyone ever did.