Monday Morning Montaigne: Of four-in-one specials

I’m going to cover four shorter essays this week, because it’s my party.

* * *

Our first essay, Of giving the lie (pp. 611-615), actually continues the conversation from Of presumption, to my gratification (see last week’s post to get an idea of how overwhelming that essay is). Montaigne begins it by discussing the nature of his Essays and the purpose in writing a book of himself, despite his lack of “achievement”. After all, it’s natural for people to want to read the words of great men, but why would the public be interested in the essays of a minor noble who retired from public life at the age of 38? He offers a few defenses for his book, essays for his essays, as it were. First, it’s not for everybody:

This is for a nook in a library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image. Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I have found mine so barren and so meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan.

Maybe it’s for posterity (but probably not):

What a satisfaction it would be to me to hear someone tell me . . . of the habits, the face, the expression, the favorite remarks, and the fortunes of my ancestors. . . .

However, if my descendants have other tastes, I shall have ample means for revenge: for they could not possibly have less concern about me than I shall have about them by that time.

Okay, maybe I’m writing these essays for myself:

And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts? In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me.

Hmm: “It’s meant as a quiet(ish) conversation; it’d be nice if people could refer to it in future to get some idea of who I am/was; the act of writing it has helped me define myself.” Those sure sound like the top three reasons I write Virtual Memories. If only he added, “I’m looking for a three-book deal and a movie option.”

Anyway, M. lets these defenses of his self-writing lead into the topic of lying. “But whom shall we believe when he talks about himself, in so corrupt an age [. . .]? Since mutual understanding is brought about solely by way of words, he who breaks his word betrays human society.”

Lying (and lying about lying) inverts our values, M. contends, by demonstrating contempt for God and fear of men. We — the French of his time, who treated lying like a virtue — take more offense about being accused of lying than of any other sin. He touches on the subject only briefly, but promises to return to the topic sometime to cover “the varied etiquette of giving the lie, and our laws of honor in that matter, and the changes they have undergone.”

So the alleged topic of this essay is undertreated, in favor of M.’s discussion of his own aims and purposes. I didn’t mind that particularly, but the discussion on lying did contain a brief aside that left me hoping for more. In a comment about “certain nations of the new Indies,” M. mentions the “monstrous and unheard-of case” of their conquest, the desolation of which “has extended even to the entire abolition of the names and former knowledge of the places.” Even though he’s discussing their use of blood sacrifice, he’s clearly coming down heavily on the the practice of genocide in the New World. I sure hope he gets back to this topic, even if it’s only in brief allusions like this one.

* * *

The next essay, Of freedom of conscience (pp. 615-619), discusses the damaging effects of hyperorthodoxy. M. contends that, among those who were on the “right” side in France’s civil war, there were many “whom passion drives outside the bounds of reason.” Further, he argues, early Christians who destroyed pagan library “did more harm to letters than all the bonfires of the barbarians.”

The center of the essay is the life of Emperor Julian, the Apostate. M. characterizes Julian as a great man who “[i]n the matter of religion . . . was bad throughout,” and doubts the story that Julian returned to the faith in his dying breath. M. describes him as a harsh enemy of Christianity, “but not a cruel one.”

M.’s question is this: Why do some regimes allow freedom of conscience? Julian permitted this to create general dissension “in the hope that this complete freedom would augment the schisms and factions that divided them and would kepe the people from uniting.” However, the kings of M.’s time used it to reduce dissension; by permitting freedom of religion, they give the people one less thing to fight over.

I prefer to think, for the reputation of our kings’ piety, that having been unable to do what they would, they have pretended to will what they could.

* * *

In We taste nothing pure (pp 619-623), M. explores the way all our sensations alloy to their opposite. He brings up le petit mort in a way that makes me doubt that he enjoyed sex:

Our utmost sensual pleasure has an air of groaning and lament about it. Wouldn’t you say that it is dying of anguish? Indeed, when we forge a picture of it at its highest point, we deck it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities: languor, softness, weakness, faintness, morbidezza: a great testimony to their consanguinity and consubstantiality.

Despite that, M. takes his essay in an interesting direction when he gets away from the alloys of abstractions and explores one of my favorite topics: how we can be too smart for our own good:

[One’s] penetrating clarity has too much subtlety and curiosity in it. These must be weighted and blunted to make them more obedient to example and practice, and thickened and obscured to relate them to this shadowy and earthy life. Therefore common and less high-strung minds are found to be more fit and more successful for conducting affairs. And the lofty and exquisite ideas of philosophy are found to be inept in practice. . . You get lost considering so many contrasting aspects and diverse shapes. . . .

He who seeks and embraces all the circumstances and consequences impedes his choice. An average intelligence conducts equally well, and suffices to carry out, things of great or little weight.

Which puts me in mind of That Damned Hegel Quote, and the smart guy’s tendency to overthink and miss out on life.

* * *

Against do-nothingness (pp. 622-626) turned out to be a lot less interesting than its title led me to hope. It basically says that, if you’re a king, you should accompany your soldiers in war. Kind of a letdown, even if its key example was the death of “Moulay Moloch, king of Fez.”