The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne Read Free Book Online

Christianity is true at all itmust be universally true, not merely true for Périgordians, Germans or successive English parliaments. Otherwise it is just one opinion among many. Ever since St Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, Catholic truth was categorized as being
Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus
(‘What has been held always, everywhere and by all’). In the Renaissance the aspiration to make that a reality lay behind the vast, worldwide evangelism by Rome (which contrasted sharply with the local concerns of the rival Churches seeking to reform one City or one Kingdom). The Roman Catholic faith could indeed claim to be taught universally. Therein lay its strength for minds like Montaigne’s.
    For Montaigne, the strength of Raymond Sebond’s
Natural Theology
also lay in universality. He believed that Sebond’s illumination of the universal Book of Nature showed that all Nature everywhere was in strict conformity with Catholic truth.
    At the end of Montaigne’s Pyrrhonist pages we are brought to the very brink of uncertainty. Reason has been shaken. So have the senses. If sense-data are unsure, uncertain and often plainly misleading, that does not simply cut us off from any sure and solid knowledge of phenomena: it cuts us off from any sure and certain knowledge of ‘being’. And so ‘we have no communication with Being’ – other than with our own transient one (perhaps).
     
To conclude: there is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of judgement and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly; nothing certain can be established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever shifting and changing. 23 (‘Apology’, p. 680)
     
    But this – despite the words ‘to conclude’ (
finalement
) – is not the end of the ‘Apology’: it is the end of a chain of arguments which can leave man ignorant, or, on the contrary, show him a new way to proceed. If it had been Montaigne’s conclusion, then Sextus Empiricus would literally have had the last word, for the Pyrrhonist basis is evident. But it is precisely here that Pyrrhonism joins Plato and Aristotle in joint hostility to a sophistical trust in individual subjectivity.
    At the end of the long section which immediately precedes Montaigne’s address to his Royal patroness, just as he was about to embark on hisPyrrhonian arguments, Montaigne added an important comment in the margin of the Bordeaux copy of his works he was preparing for the press. It concerns Protagoras, the arch-Sophist who was trounced by Sextus, Plato and Aristotle in very similar terms and for identical reasons:
     
And what can anyone understand who cannot understand himself?… Protagoras was really and truly having us on when he made ‘Man the measure of all things’ – Man, who has never known his own measurements.
     
    Protagoras meant – that is what shocked Plato, Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus – that there is no universal standard of truth: each human being is severally and individually the sole criterion; all is opinion, and all opinions are equally true or false.
    For Montaigne, Protagoras’ ‘measure of Man’ is ‘so favourable’ to human vanity as to be ‘merely laughable. It leads inevitably to the proposition that the measure and the measurer are nothing.’
    Montaigne countered Protagoras, immediately, by citing Thales (the Greek sage to whom he himself had been likened): ‘When Thales reckons that a knowledge of Man is very hard to acquire, he is telling him that knowledge of anything else is impossible.’ (‘Apology’, p. 628) Hence the growing importance of the study of Man throughout the
Essays
, especially in Book III and in the hundreds of additions made to the chapters of the two previous Books when the new Book was written and the others were revised.
    In the
Theaetetus
, Socrates treated Protagoras and his ‘measure’ as a clever man talking nonsense –