The Complete Essays Read Online Free PDF Page B

Montaigne lightly but specifically attributes that concept to St Paul. When in Athens, Paul saw an altar dedicated to ‘an unknown God’ – Athenian philosophers could get that far. In the ‘Apology’ those words appear as ‘a
hidden
, unknown God’. That enables Paul (in the ‘Apology’) to find the Athenian worshippers to be ‘most excusable’ (‘Apology’, p. 573). The same doctrine appears in the medieval theologian Nicolas of Lyra. 12
    Such deft and telling use of words should scotch the notion that Montaigne was theologically naïve. (No theologians who had studied his translation of Sebond could make such a gaffe.) And in this case it should help to undermine the curiously coarse interpretation of the ‘Apology’ as a work championing ‘fideism’, one, that is, which denies that there ever can be any rational basis for Christianity since all depends on unfettered faith – faith as trust and faith as credulity. For Montaigne there is a hierarchy of religious opinion among the pagans. (The ‘Apology’ ends with one of the most impressive of them all: Plutarch’s.) Yet Montaigne held with Sebond that even the best of pagans failed to penetrate through to most of the vital truths contained in the Book of Creatures. 13
    The defence of Raymond Sebond against the second charge – that his arguments are weak – falls into several parts, all marked by varying degrees of scepticism. By turning his sceptical gaze on Man and his cogitations, Montaigne denies that it is possible to find better arguments than Sebond’s anywhere whatsoever. This assertion is governed (as are all the long answers to the second objection) by a declaration of intent which applies to all the many pages which are to follow:
     
Let us consider for a while Man in isolation – Man with no outside help, armed with no arms but his own and stripped of that grace and knowledge of God in which consist his dignity, his power and the very ground of his being. (‘Apology’, p. 502)
     
    Today the very word scepticism implies for many a mocking or beady-eyed disbelief in the claims of the Church to intellectual validity. It did not do so then. You can be sceptical about the claims of the Church: or you can be sceptical about rational attempts to discredit them…
    The unenlightened rivals to Sebond have both their hands tied firmly behind their back. Sebond has grace and illumination: they have not. In this second, longer part of the ‘Apology’, comments are occasionally addressed to this unilluminated ignorance on the basis of revealed wisdom, but the ignorance remains unilluminated and so can only fortuitously, randomly and hesitantly ever arrive at the goal gracefully reached by Sebond’s natural theology. That is what makes the
Essays
as a whole so interesting. Instead of calmly orthodox certainty, we are exhilarated by following all the highways and byways and sidetracks travelled along by Man’s questing spirit in his search for truth about God, Man and the Universe. Montaigne did his job thoroughly: that is why the
Essays
were pillaged for anti-Christian arguments by the
beaux esprits
of later centuries.
    Montaigne is so lightly untechnical that it is easy to overlook that, in a fascinatingly personal and idiosyncratic way, he is saying what learned Latin treatises also taught about the opinions of fallen man. Since sixteenth-century Jesuits appreciated Montaigne, one could cite Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., who (with the help of St Augustine’s
City of God
) was struck by the ‘monstrous opinions’ of those unenlightened pagans who ‘even went so far as to make gods of vines and garlick’. 14 But where Bellarmine finds bleak error Montaigne finds – also – fascinating and inevitable variety.
    Montaigne answers the second lot of criticism of Sebond by first crushing human pride: no purely human reasons can show conclusively (as Sebond can) that Man – for all his ‘reason’ – is in any way higher than the other