Pierre Villey famously argues that Montaigne ‘evolves’ during the course of the Essays, from Stoicism to Pyrrhonism to ‘prudence’ or hedonism. Book I reflects Montaigne’s ‘Stoic’ stage.
This is indeed the impression Montaigne gives. In his book Montaigne in effect ‘tries on’ any number of philosophic identities, Stoicism being the foremost of these in Book I. In so doing, Montaigne invites his readers to do the same, to relax their hold on their own identities, including their opinions, deeply ingrained, which help to constitute those identities. The question to which there can never be any dogmatic answer is: Is Montaigne evolving, or is he deliberately bringing us along toward a goal he knows? Montaigne, it might be said, deliberately makes it very difficult to determine what his intentions are, to say for sure who this apparently open and genial man is. Montaigne deliberately wants to make dogmatism of any sort difficult.
Stoicism? Yes, but…. In Montaigne there is always a ‘Yes, but….’ Consider the very first essay. Montaigne has gone to Italy. He retrieves not Seneca but Machiavelli. There he is, hiding in plain sight, embedded in Montaigne’s account of means and ends. If we have offended someone—surely a serious problem for an essay of heterodox opinions?—shall we throw ourselves on their mercy? Or shall we defy them openly, prepare to fight to the death? There is no dogmatic answer to these questions, Montaigne shows us, as either reaction might work or fail, given circumstances. But if you are a ruler, he more than suggests, the way to end vacillation between cruelty, pity, and admiration for your enemy’s courage is policy: Secretly have your enemies drowned at sea. Or (no dogmatic recommendations for rulers, either) be like Alexander: openly merciless. That is, ‘be’ (that is, use) the fox or the lion. To be able to use the fox or the lion is of course to ‘be’ both, to enlist in the Machiavellian army. Montaigne can ‘be’ lion, fox, Stoic, Epicurean, Pyrrhonist, Socratic, Christian, and—what not?
Is Montaigne a Machiavellian, then? Not so fast, the charming Mayor of Bordeaux says, ‘Stay. Have some wine. Cheer up. Relax for a while. Virtù? What virtù? I’m really quite harmless. Leave your fortress and come out to parley. I am a man of honor, like the ancients, and besides—I haven’t the energy to be a prince. Are my essays not casual, easy, and written in no order? (Not that I am altogether aimless: “The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself”). But my goal is only pleasure, and what harm can my pleasure be to you? “One is punished for defending a place obstinately and without reason,” so open up a bit and converse with me.
‘What shall we talk about?’ you wonder. What not? Sadness, idleness, liars, prognostications, kings, cabbages, fear—the list can go on forever. But centrally, in my First Book, let’s talk about friendship. (Why look at the center in Montaigne’s book? Because he tells us to, at the beginning of his essay on friendship.) I had a true friend once, Montaigne recalls, but now he is dead. Friendship eliminates “separation and distinctions.” I would offer to show you my friend’s uniquely valuable work, “On Voluntary Servitude”—an obligation to top all obligations—but I’ve changed my mind. I forbid you the fruit of his labors, precious and indispensable thought it is, and I substitute for it 29 love sonnets—which, come to think of it, may also disappear from my table before long.’
When, with Adam-like curiosity, the reader seeks out and tastes friend Etienne de la Boétie’s essay, he finds a protest against having one master or several. Neither monotheism nor polytheism, so to speak, satisfies Montaigne’s best friend. Servitude to the one or the many depends finally upon one thing: our own consent. Our manacles are mind-forged. “There is nothing a human being should hold more dear than the restoration of his own natural right” to be a man and not a “beast of burden.” [1] The violence of tyrannicide—and of wars of religion, too?—is not absolutely necessary if enough of us simply stop believing. (No wonder Montaigne demurs when it comes to show us this work; neither the Protestant nor the Catholic side would find such a solution to the brutal religious strive of Sixteenth-century Europe very satisfying.) The brotherliness of friendship will always undermine the tyranny of the one or the few. As for the One, the Supreme Tyrant, “it is because he doews not know how to love that he ultimately impoverishes his own spirit and destroys his own empire.” Philia can replace agape as agape destroys its devotees in wars spiritual and corporeal.
(As for Montaigne’s twenty-ninth essay, following the one on friendship—by amazing coincidence in a book whose writer professes to proceed in such a desultory fashion, the essay refers us to a collection of exactly twenty-nine sonnets—a glance confirms that love and tyranny go together. The fifteenth or central sonnet of the sequence describes a moment of self-rule or liberty, quickly lost to the power of love’s tyranny. It isn’t easy for a solitary soul to resist tyranny. You need friends, brothers, allies. Montaigne himself gets along without them, now, but not everyone is Montaigne.)
(Montaigne, through de la Boétie, follows the ‘modern’ strategy: deliberately meld agapic with erotic love, interpret the former as the sublimation of the latter, then dismiss both as ineffectual. The difference between Montaigne and Machiavelli seems to be that Montaigne thinks you will need at least one friend, one unindictable co-conspirator. But perhaps you will be able in large measure to invent that friend, even as you invent your variety of selves.)
But all of this is buried deep—not merely in the center of Book I but beneath the text altogether. Everywhere else, Montaigne follows the advice of the forty-seventh essay: “It is dangerous to attack a man whom you have deprived of every other means of escape but that of weapons, for necessity is a violent schoolmistress.” Give your enemy many options; his own uncertainty of judgment will do, or undo, the rest. Montaigne is supremely the writer of many options offered. How to condemn a man with no fixed identity? Pascal formulated a way, but long after Montaigne needed to worry about it.
And so near the end of this remarkable Book I, he writes an essay on prayer that makes one smile, or even laugh. In these essays, he says, he puts forth “formless and unresolved notions” in order to “submit them” to the worthy guardians of “the holy proscriptions of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman church,” guardians who enjoy “absolute power over me.” Thus he will have his liberty and enjoy protection from Church persecution. Lion and fox, but more often fox, living quietly in his burrow in a lion’s den.
Toward this end, he prudently recommends a means: a division of labor in an age when theologians write too humanly, humanists too theologically. This is the beginning of the ‘secularist’ version of the separation of church and state. In the face of God and His vicegerents, how dangerous can a deferential, self-effacing nice guy like Montaigne possibly be? Pass over him (Montaigne prays), so that he may live into the old age that is the final topic of Book I, and be well on his way to extending his influence everywhere.
Note
- Etienne de la Boétie: The Politics of Obedience. Harry Kurtz translation. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975, p. 50.
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