The life and Essays of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French Catholic philosopher, reveal how accepting the will of God helps a person face the overwhelming fear of mortality; in other words, they help us to embrace death.
Montaigne was neither saint, priest, nor monk, but a worldly man who lived in a secular time of conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Montaigne was a landowner, a government official, and a soldier. He was also a Catholic layman who preserved his faith during the Protestant challenge of the age. He struggled with the new ideas of the Renaissance, such as humanism, which placed humans as near equals to God. He questioned new scientific ideas that seemed to challenge Biblical authority.
Montaigne’s search for answers to his faith, his heritage, and his relationship with God led him to write his Essays. These works have been variously interpreted as those of a humanist, a skeptic, perhaps an atheist; rarely are they considered for what they are in fact—the ruminations of a Catholic layman, seeking to understand the nature of divine providence.
Montaigne faced many serious challenges in his life—the most recurrent, terrifying challenge being death. The fear of death defined him. Montaigne and his wife Francoise de La Chassaigne had six children, all girls; but all the babies, save one, died within three months, and the lone survivor died in childhood. Besides the melancholy of burying his six children, Montaigne watched his father suffer and die from kidney stones. This experience triggered a fearful anticipation of his own death by the same means.
These years of anticipating his death were filled with self-induced trauma. Montaigne was a ruminator. He could not keep his mind from obsessing about illness and death. Each moment was potentially a singular experience of joy and wonder, if it were not that the passing seconds moved one closer to the end.
Although he’d counsel himself to accept God’s “divine and inscrutable wisdom,” he was descending deeper into the unforgiving world of thought. He ironically thanked God for the constant “brooding over my own thoughts” so that “death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long before.”
Montaigne wrote the course of his life into his book. He wrote Essays about his varying emotions, need for solitude, vanity, fear, and cowardice; his friendship and suffering; the importance of conquering the fear of death; his inconsistencies and contradictions; his intellectual influences; and, in his longest essay, the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” he challenged the human presumption of reason, questioned what can be known, and explored the dependence of humans upon God. The thirteen essays of Book Three are introspective, intuitive essays in which Montaigne discovered the universality of his own experiences, confronted his own mortality, and discovered the means of achieving contentment.
During this process, he wanted to know why he feared death. Why did this feeling about a yet unknown future dominate his existence? The imagination, if not put to good use or restricted from idleness, will “run into a thousand extravagances,” namely fear. Yearning to understand his images of doom, “to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them in writing, hoping in time to make [my mind] ashamed of itself.” Montaigne feared fear, which was his constant companion. The abstractions of his mind took off “like a horse that has broke from his rider.” Death appeared to Montaigne as “so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design.”
Daily Montaigne reasoned with himself, preached to himself, trying to make an apparent evil good, trying to bring pleasure out of suffering. He worked to convince himself that the kidney stones he eventually suffered were an ultimate good that were slowly preparing him for death. He would not have wished for them, yet it was a benefit that he acquired them.
He convinced himself that he was joining the company of the ancient Stoics, through God’s will, controlling the body, elevating the mind. He rationalized his ailment: “thou dost not die because though art sick, thou diest because thou art living. Death kills thee without the help of sickness.”
His illness granted him a unique, personal experience: in a single moment, he could experience the joys and horrors of life:
Is there anything delightful in comparison of this sudden change, when from excessive pain, I come, by the voiding of a stone, to recover, as by a flash of lightning, the beautiful light of health, so free and full?
Montaigne discovered death’s irony in that amid its universality is the uniqueness of the particular experience in countless moments of time, never again to be repeated. Human death mirrors human life: the oneness yet individual uniqueness of humans is seen most clearly through death. And if one feels terror because of death, one also feels beauty and love, for without death life itself would be meaningless.
Montaigne sensed that, although his ruminations were beneficial and helped him to endure uncertainty and crippling fear, ultimately some other tactic must be relied upon—such is the route to faith. “What is it we do not lay the fault to, right or wrong?” Some even “exceed all folly, forasmuch as impiety is joined therewith,” blaming “God Himself.” Blaming God for his suffering was an option, of course. God is behind all things, and Montaigne knew it. God allows disease, suffering, fear. For this, many have blamed Providence. But not Montaigne.
His essay “Of Prayers” reveals Montaigne’s belief that God orders reality. God is inscrutable; divine wisdom, justice, and order are unchanging. Montaigne felt total awe toward this Being, so much so that he did not agree with the common person praying to God, for prayer must be completely pious, pure, and uncorrupted by human motives and desires. He believed that one must have a certain basis in religious knowledge to approach God.
In the “Apology for Raimond Sebond,” Montaigne shows how much we do not know and just how unstable human reason is. If there is absolute knowledge, and if we are so distant in our relation to knowledge, if we realize that in our instability we can rarely penetrate the inscrutability of God, yet as humans we cannot help but seek this knowledge, then we must go to that single source, knowledge of self, as the only real means of ever hoping to approach knowledge of something more than just passing temporal affairs. Who am I to know God? Montaigne asks. How can I truly know God? By examining the self, he writes.
Examine each moment, he told himself, each event in life brought about by the will of God and examine one’s responses to the challenge of time. In dying, what is the response? In suffering and death, what is the response? To live life: it “is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations.”
Montaigne anticipated the eighteenth-century Jesuit philosopher Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence in his comments about the simplicity of God’s providence, the simplicity of life: “We are great fools. ‘He has passed his life in idleness,’ say we: ‘I have done nothing today’: What! Have you not lived? . . . Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books.” In short, “the glorious masterpiece of man is to know how to live to purpose.” And what is it to live to purpose? To live in conformity to God’s will.
The time spent reading, contemplating, ruminating, searching, seeking the path to happiness and to knowledge eventually appeared impious, Montaigne concluded at the end of his life. Why should humans, why should he seek, question, ask, decide, move, plan, force, act upon those matters reserved for the will of God? What is the point to all the rules of objective scholarship and scientific detachment if what we know or do not know, do or do not do, are in God’s hands anyway?
One must accept. “I have let myself go as I came,” Montaigne confessed in “Of Physiognomy,” “I contend not.” Balancing knowledge is ignorance; next to will is passivity. Though reason calls, one must learn the value of faith. Mystery and miracles contradicted the well-trained philosopher’s mind of Montaigne. And yet the so-called stoic, skeptic, rationalist, atheist Montaigne, the Montaigne of the modern scholar, learned “that to condemn anything for false and impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the will of God.” Carved in the ceiling of his library was the line from the Psalmist, “Thy judgments are like a great deep.”
Montaigne’s battle to accept himself in light of his understanding of God’s will is the story of his life’s work. The closing theme of the Essays is faith. Montaigne believed his life’s struggle with death and his duty to accept God’s providence were common to all humanity. Ultimately, as St. Augustine showed, and as other thinkers who came after Montaigne, such as Jean-Pierre Caussade, would continue to emphasize, to relinquish control to God in death is in the end a very simple act—an act of faith.
Editor’s Note: This is part 5 in a series on understanding Divine Providence as revealed to us by God and interpreted by man throughout history. Catch up on the series here.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
