The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne Read Free Book Online Page A

otherwise how can the same wind be hot to one and cold to another? Nor would anyone maintain that, since a colour appears different to a dog, to other animals and to ourselves, that it differs in its essence. 24
    Montaigne made good use of such notions in the ‘Apology’: they can serve to show the fallibility of sense-data and also to place man where his unaided natural reason ought to place him: among the other creatures. But to go from there and make Truth itself the plaything of individual subjectivity, he never did.
    Aristotle similarly mocked Protagoras and his Man-as-measure; his demonstration was adapted by Montaigne. 25
    Montaigne knew, 26 before he had read a word of Sextus – probably in his days at school in Bordeaux – that in the world of creation nothing ever is; it is only becoming. Plutarch reinforced this. But neither Plutarch nor Plato held that such doctrines cut Man off from a knowledge of God or obliged each person to plunge into pure subjectivism. There were, for Plato, divine revelations; and there was wisdom arising from knowing oneself as Man.
    Within the flux of the created universe, Montaigne strove to follow the Delphic injunction, Know Thyself. He sought to discover the personal, individual, permanent strand in the transient, variegated flux of his experience and sensations, which alone gave continuity to his personality – to his ‘being’ as a Man. 27
    But this was not a merely subjective indulgence. By studying his own form (his soul within his body) he aspired to know Man – not just one odd individual example of humankind. 28
    The
Essays
as a whole do not end with the last words of the ‘Apology’; much exploration of self and of Man remained to be done, but Montaigne had clearly seen that the characteristic property of the creature is impermanence. No creature ever
is
: a creature is always shifting, changing, becoming.
    The Platonic background to such a conclusion – unlike the purely Pyrrhonian one – enabled Montaigne to pass from the impermanence of the everchanging creature to what he presents as a ‘most pious’ concept of the Godhead, accessible to purely human reason: the Creator must have those qualities which Man as creature lacks: he must have unity, not diversity; absolute Being, not mere ‘becoming’. And since he created Time he must be outside it and beyond it.
    It is strikingly right that this natural leap to the Eternal Being of God should be given not in Montaigne’s own words – he is not a pagan – but in a long and unheralded transcription from Plutarch. Montaigne took it from the dense mystic treatise
On the E’i at Delphi
.
    In this powerful work Plutarch grappled with the religious import of the word
E’i
inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. In Greek it can mean ‘Five’; it can mean ‘If’: but above all it means ‘Thou Art’. As such it declares that God has eternal Being. He is the eternal THOU to our transient I . Each individual human being is relative, contingent, impermanent. Buteach ‘I’ can know itself; it can know Man through itself; and it can stretch out to Reality and say THOU ART.
    In doing so, it recognizes God. 29
    The
Natural Theology
of Sebond taught each man to know himself and God. It is, in a sense, the key to that Delphic utterance: Know Thyself. Montaigne’s translation of the
Natural Theology
is all of a piece with the self-exploration of the
Essays
. For both Plutarch and Raymond Sebond ‘knowing oneself’ is, properly understood, a complement to knowing God. Sebond says so on his title pages: Plutarch does so in the closing words of
On the E’i at Delphi
:
     
Meanwhile it seems that the word
E’i
[THOU ART] is in one way an antithesis to that precept KNOW THYSELF , yet in another it is in agreement and accord with it. For one saying is a saying of awe and of adoration towards God as Eternal, ever in Being; the other is a reminder to mortal man of the weakness and debility of his