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light of the closing words of the ‘Apology’ that is a vital consideration.
    The Renaissance thinker, like his forebears from the earliest Christian times, had to decide what to do about the great pious men of Ancient days. Were they saved by their loyalty to the Word (the
Logos
) before he was incarnate in Christ? One of the earliest theologians, Justin Martyr, thought they were. Or were they inevitably destined to eternal reprobation, since even their good actions were not directed to the right End? Were some, such as Socrates or Plato, vouchsafed special saving grace? Erasmus would like to think that God would make the same kind of understanding, graded concessions that he himself made to those Ancients who were pious, moral and sensitive to metaphysical realities.
    Montaigne’s admiration for the virtuous heroes of Antiquity was boundless: the moral system he was teasing out for Christian laymen like himself to supplement the Church’s teaching owed nearly everything to them. He insisted nevertheless that they were great with human greatness only and in no wise proto-Christians. Yet the ‘Apology’ also shows by the careful use of theological language that Montaigne did not look on all the Ancients as an undifferentiate ‘mass of damnation’. This is brought out by the way he cited Romans I:20, without the final clause, ‘so that they [the pagans] are inexcusable’.
    Many did attach this clause to St Paul’s assertion that the invisible thingsof God are accessible through the visible: George Pacard did precisely that in the title page of his
Théologie Naturelle
. But many did not; to cite only one example: Allessandro della Torre, Bishop of Sittià, cited this text of Romans three times in his Italian work,
The Triumph of Revealed Theology
(Venice, 1611): each time he omits that damning clause. By doing the same Montaigne and others could stress the human limitations of Socrates or Plato, while avoiding the Jansenist rigour which Pascal read back into the ‘Apology’:
     
There is enough light [Pascal wrote] to lighten the Elect and enough darkness to make them humble. There is enough darkness to blind the Reprobate and enough light to damn them and render them inexcusable.
St Augustine
,
Montaigne, Sebond.
10
     
    Montaigne follows Sebond in dwelling on the errors and the chaotic jumble of ideas expounded by those unenlightened wise men, vainly seeking certain truth with their human reason from the Book of Creatures: but he does not consider their opinions to be all equally ‘inexcusable’. Nevertheless he asserted that ‘human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially when she concerns herself with matters divine’ (‘Apology’, p. 581). Christian mysteries they never grasped as Christians can. But what about God’s ‘Eternal Wisdom and his Godhead’?
    A standard doctrine was, that a grasp of the elements of good morality was possible for all men, Christian or otherwise, though grace was always required for Salvation (even the Mosaic Law would not suffice by itself). That good morality was achieved by pagans is shown by Socrates or by other heroes of Montaigne, such as Epaminondas. (The great moral platitudes are never put in doubt anywhere in the Essays.)
    Montaigne specifically finds pagan monotheism at its best not ‘true’ (in the sense of attaining with certainty to the Christian revelations) but nevertheless ‘most excusable’. This is not a correction to St Paul’s teaching in Romans I:20, but a gloss on it. 11
    Montaigne touches so lightly on some crucial theological points that readers may miss their import. Yet they can be vital, not least in the ‘Apology’, which is centred on religious knowledge and doubt. In at least one respect, Montaigne’s conception of God was that of St Augustine, of many medieval and Renaissance thinkers, and of Pascal: God is a Hidden God, a
Deus absconditus
who hides himself from Man and therefore can only be known from his self-revelation.