The Permanence and Change in the development of Montaigne’s Thoughts

In studying the development of Montaigne’s thought we must not, of course, forget the element of permanence. Often he remarks on how little he has changed. “I am nearly always in place, like heavy and inert bodies,” he writes. “For the firmest and most general ideas I have are those which, in a manner of speaking, were born with me.” In himself as in others he finds a ruling pattern that successfully opposes any radical change. Many views, attitudes, and feelings of the young Montaigne were only confirmed by age and experience, Young or old, he is still Montaigne.

His mental temper, for example, seems always to have been skeptical. Skeptical in the etymological sense of one who judiciously stops to look before he takes a mental leap, who considers all sides before he commits himself. Skeptical because his mind is always more sensitive to diversity than to uniformity; because nature as he sees it, has made things more unlike than like, so that all comparisons are lame and all statements oversimplifications. Skeptical because his historical and personal perspective always reminds him that the views of his time, his country, and himself are by no means absolute truths. Skeptical from experience and judgment, which have shown him his own intellectual follies and those of others. Skeptical finally because he is deeply aware of the unceasing change in us and in all earthly things which keeps anything constant and permanent like absolute truth from dwelling in us.

But his was not the pure skepticism of unending consideration that never leads to decision or action. His strong poetic streak, the proud impetuosity of the Gascon noble mean, the hard-headed common sense of the son of able merchants-all these kept him from withdrawal into a dubitative shell Montaigne was a wholly practical man whose dominant concern was living. Thinking is a part of living; but to do nothing but think about living is be only partly alive. Even if absolute truth is beyond us, there are relative, subjective, human truths that we can live by. Our experience of it-as Descartes was to see later-is something that we know. Thus experience teaches us to be skeptical and at the same time not to be utterly skeptical. Here as everywhere moderation is the rule.

One realm that Montaigne always places beyond doubt is the Catholic religion. Even the critics who think he undermines it se no change in his theory that skepticism about human knowledge is the securest basis for religious faith. For Montaigne, everything here below is becoming and not being, appearance and not reality God alone is his truths alone are eternal and absolute. In this rather Platonic dualism there is no way, no ladder of love or progressive abstraction, by which man unaided may climbed to the realm of truth. God alone can raise man up, and by his grace, not by any merit of ours. Thus God and his truth, infinitely remote, are as inaccessible and immune to our judgment as to our efforts. It is for God to know and to command, for us to accept and to obey. This fideism of Montaigne, no longer orthodox but acceptable then as a weapon against Protestant exegetical presumption, seems constant. So does his conviction that our helplessness to rise toward Gold leaves us free to work out our own lives on human terms with a clear conscience.

Again we come back to Montaigne’s central concern-man and his life. It is hard to prove just when and how he came to see that he was the subject of his book and that he and man were one, but it is clear that from the first his subject was man and that he knew it. The here and the now, men and their neighbours, why they behave as they do and how they should behave-these were always his meat, and all else was futile and insipid.

Human conduct is the central point of all. Keen psychologist though he was, Montaigne was always ultimately a moralist. His curiosity was always alert, but his judgment was always waiting to assess and apply the results. All the learned about himself and others was only partly an end in itself. It was also a means to his only final end: to live life well and appropriately, and-when he had learned how-to teach others to do so.

As constant as his central concern is Montaigne’s central rule-follow natural. The precise meaning of the phrase may change a little, but the principle remains constant. So do the vices that Montaigne ridicules, notably presumption and her daughter ambition, and those he hates, notably falsity, hypocrisy, treacher, cruelty. Nature is on the other side, that of wisdom, integrity, good humour, and happiness: and so is Montaigne.

But if Montaigne is always Montaigne, still he changes; and he knows it. “I want,” he says, “to represent the course of my humours, and for people to see each part at its birth. I wish I had begun earlier, and would take pleasure in recognizing the train of my mutations.” Over and over in his late essays he tells how the years have altered him in soul and body and how he is fighting the illusions and excesses of age as he used to fight those of youth. Concerning the first appearance of his Essays, in 1850, he writes: “Since then I have grown older by a long stretch of time; but certainly I have not grown an inch wiser. Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed tow; but when better, I simply cannot say.”

Montaigne knew that he had in him both permanence and change. So long as we do not forget the first, we may now turn to the other.