{"id":2311,"date":"2008-08-25T11:35:05","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T15:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=2311"},"modified":"2008-08-25T11:35:05","modified_gmt":"2008-08-25T15:35:05","slug":"monday-morning-montaigne-an-apology-for-raymond-sebond-take-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-an-apology-for-raymond-sebond-take-2","title":{"rendered":"Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wow. This Apology for Raymond Sebond<\/em> continues to flummox me. Last week, I wrote about the nature of the Apology<\/a> and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153covered\u00e2\u20ac\u009d pages 387-435 of the Everyman’s translation<\/a>\"\" of the essays. This week, I only managed to read another 50 pages, since I was busy with work and a much more entertaining book called When Genius Failed<\/a>\"\".<\/p>\n

So this week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Monday Morning Montaigne stays in the Apology, and covers the sections that translator Donald Frame calls Man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s knowledge cannot make him happy<\/em> (435-446) and Man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s knowledge cannot make him good<\/em> (446-449). I have about 20 pages left in Man has no knowledge<\/em> (449-508), but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a rough slog. The bulk of that section consists of refutations of various schools of philosophy, particularly pre-christian ones, as a way of showing the futility of man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pursuit of knowledge. With a tease like that,<\/em> you’re sure to come back for more next Monday!<\/p>\n

Man’s knowledge cannot make him happy:<\/em><\/p>\n

[W]e have as our share inconstancy, irresolution, uncertainty, grief, superstition, worry over things to come, even after our life, ambition, avarice, jealousy, envy, unruly, frantic, and untamable appetites, war, falsehood, disloyalty, detraction, and curiosity. Indeed we have strangely overpaid for this fine reason that we glory in, and this capacity to judge and know, if we have bought it at the price of this infinite number of passions to which we are incessantly a prey.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See, instead of reason, M. contends that humility and obedience to God should be our highest values: “From obeying and yielding spring all other virtues, as from presumption all sin. . . . Do you want a man to be healthy, do you want him disciplined and firmly and securely poised? Wrap him in darkness, indleness, and dullness. We must become like animals in order to become wise, and be blinded in order to be guided.”<\/p>\n

M. cavils a bit by letting us know that there’s a place for knowledge and some feeling — “he who would eradicate the knowledge of evil would at the same time extirpate the knowledge of pleasure, and in fine would annihilate man” — but he still contends that philosophy, reason, memory and the like are delusions. The good life, he says, seems to derive from ignorance-become-innocence. I’m just lost.<\/p>\n

Man’s knowledge cannot make him good:<\/em><\/p>\n

Christians have a particular knowledge of the extent to which curiosity is a natural and original evil in man. The urge to increase in wisdom and knowledge was the first downfall of the human race; it was the way by which man hurled himself into eternal damnation. Pride is his ruin and his corruption; it is pride that casts man aside from the common ways, that makes him embrace novelties and perfer to be the leader of an erring troop that has strayed into the path of perdition, perfer to be a teacher and tutor of error and falsehood, rather than to be a disciple in the school of truth, led and guided by another’s hand, on the straight and beaten path.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Got that? Curiosity is an evil. I’m finding it awfully difficult to reconcile these passages with the writer who so deftly explored his own character and aspects of man’s nature throughout the preceding essays. Further, wisdom — by which M. means the choice between good and evil — has no relation to God: “What has he to do with reason and intelligence, which we use to arrive at apparent things from things obscure, seeing that there is nothing obscure to God?” And since evil cannot touch God, then wisdom comes only from man, while faith is “a pure present of another’s liberality.”<\/p>\n

More bothersome to me than M.’s message is his sheer stridency, an “Onward Christian soldiers” mode of writing. Perhaps he was writing in this style because of the nature of the piece and its publication — a long apologia, as opposed to his typical essays — but I find it utterly off-putting. I’ll struggle through the rest of the Apology, but I’m hoping he manages to regain some of his charm as he moves away from his all-encompassing topic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wow. This Apology for Raymond Sebond continues to flummox me. Last week, I wrote about the nature of the Apology and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153covered\u00e2\u20ac\u009d pages 387-435 of the Everyman’s translation of the essays. This week, I only managed to read another 50 pages, since I was busy with work and a much more entertaining book called When … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[45],"tags":[118],"class_list":["post-2311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-montaigne","tag-montaigne"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-Bh","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2411,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-back-next-week","url_meta":{"origin":2311,"position":0},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Back Next Week","author":"Gil","date":"September 8, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I was too busy\/addled this weekend to write my Monday Morning Montaigne post, dear readers. But I did finish the Apology for Raymond Sebond, and have (what I think) are some neat observations about it. I was gratified to see that M. loosened up a bit more in this last\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2266,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-an-apology-for-raymond-sebond-take-1","url_meta":{"origin":2311,"position":1},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 1","author":"Gil","date":"August 18, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for the long-unawaited return of Monday Morning Montaigne! You ask, \"What is MMM?\" It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s me, working my way through the Everyman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Library edition of Montaigne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Complete Works (only the essays, which comprise 1,045 pages; I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m on page 450 right now). Every Monday, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll post about some aspect of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1400040213","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2239,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-the-reloadening","url_meta":{"origin":2311,"position":2},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: The Reloadening!","author":"Gil","date":"August 12, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I gave up on my Monday Morning Montaigne project a year ago for two reasons. The first one was that I reached Apology for Raymond Sebond, the central essay of the second book. This essay -- the introduction to (and kindasorta defense of) Sebond\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Natural Theology, which Montaigne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dad asked\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2438,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-an-apology-for-raymond-sebond-take-4","url_meta":{"origin":2311,"position":3},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 4","author":"Gil","date":"September 15, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"As promised, it's the final part of my writeup on the Apology for Raymond Sebond (have fun with parts 1, 2, and 3 and you'll see why I gave up on this project for a full year)! After this, it's back to shorter, less preachy (I hope) essays! But this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2347,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-an-apology-for-raymond-sebond-take-3","url_meta":{"origin":2311,"position":4},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 3","author":"Gil","date":"September 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I made it through the longest portion of the Apology, dear readers! And while it was as depressing and sermonistically strident as the preceding 60 pages, some light popped up at the end of the tunnel! This segment of the Apology -- go back to previous installments of this series\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4722,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/what-it-is-12709","url_meta":{"origin":2311,"position":5},"title":"What It Is: 12\/7\/09","author":"Gil","date":"December 7, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"What I'm reading: I finished Up in the Air last week, and enjoyed the heck out of it. I'm still sifting through my impressions of the book as a time capsule of the end of the '90's. It was published in 2001, just a few months before 9\/11. While that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Comic books & strips"","block_context":{"text":"Comic books & strips","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature\/comics"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0307476294","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2311"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2317,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions\/2317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}