In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla gives Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful Montaigne book, How to Live, what begins as a nice review. He praises it as a genuine introduction to Montaigne’s work and to the circumstances in which it was written; and he takes the occasion to deplore the “scholarly detritus” that has supplanted the informative prefaces that used to be aimed at the general reader.

Bakewell begins at ground zero, much as Montaigne did, without assuming anything more than that her readers have an interest in themselves and a desire to live well, which she addresses by cleverly organizing her book as a series of suggestions Montaigne makes for doing just that.

Then Lilla sums up the contemporary consensus about Montaigne, which is that his essays have no agenda. As Bakewell puts it, Montaigne’s collections of self-portraits and miscellaneous musings “does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it.” With this proposition Lilla heartily disagrees, and he spends the rest of his lengthy review making a case that Montaigne’s transparency is an illusion wrought by his immense influence: he is, as many readers feel him to be without perhaps knowing why, the father of modern man.  

tated in a positive sense, Montaigne was the first liberal moralist. Ancient virtues like valor and nobility, and Christian ones like piety and humility, were unattainable for most people, he thought, and only made them vicious and credulous. But rather than say that directly, a suicidal act, Montaigne sang a song of Montaigne, giving himself virtues that we accept without question today as being more reasonable and attractive: sincerity, authenticity, self-awareness, self-acceptance, independence, irony, open-mindedness, friendliness, cosmopolitanism, tolerance. He was an idealist, though, not a realist. And his ideal reshaped our reality. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the reason Montaigne knows us so well is that he made us what we are (or at least what we profess to be).

In the very next sentence, Lilla contradicts this claim: “But he did not entirely remake us.” No, what Montaigne couldn’t alter was the desire for transcendance that springs naturally in the human breast. He could counsel against yielding to it, by referring to the horrors that the search for transcendance throws off in its most widespread form, organized religion. Montaigne was writing through the religious wars that wracked France in the final third of the Sixteenth Century; in no other country did the old faith and the new struggle so relentlessly to  extirpate the other. Lilla finds that, the more you read of Montaigne — especially if you read the Essays in order, and more or less all at one go — the more clearly an anti-transcendance message emerges. Lilla construes this as necessarily an anti-Christian message, as well as an anti-heroic one. And he faults Bakewell for not pointing out that Montaigne is a corrupter.

Lilla takes the longing to transcend the limitations of everyday life — and the corresponding contempt for the “mediocre life” extolled by Montaigne, that connoisseur of comforts — as a natural good. He writes with the air of a breathless messenger who, by reminding us of something vital, something that we had been lulled into forgetting, brings us back to our senses at the last minute, before we rashly sign away everything important about life.

By refusing to recognize the grandeur in our desire for transcendence, our urge to understand what is, to experience rapture, to face and overcome danger, to create something bold and lasting, Montaigne offered no guidance for coping with it, let alone directing it to good ends. And his silence had consequences. The Essays not only inspired a skeptical Enlightenment that aimed to make modern life softer, freer, and more humane, with some success; they also, through Rousseau, helped inspire a Romantic cult of the self that beatified the individual genius and worshiped his occult powers—also with some success. The easy inner reconciliation Montaigne offered his readers has proved as impossible for them to attain as sainthood was for his Christian contemporaries. Suggesting, perhaps, that the most we can ever hope to achieve is reconciliation to the fact that we will never be reconciled.

I’m not so sure. Reading Bakewell’s book, I felt encouraged to hope that Montaigne may inspire a third development, that of a society of sociable individuals, of men and women who have outgrown the urges that Lilla enumerates — the rapture and danger and boldness and grandeur that always beckon from outside and beyond our mortal frames but that only carry us deeper into the prison of our own individual experience (no matter how powerful the illusion of connecting with “something greater” — it is the subjective feeling that matters). I read the other day that children are natural philosophers; I agree, and I think that it says something about systematic philosophy, which in the last couple of years has come to seem to me to be rather astonishingly juvenile (given its august if dusty place in the scheme of things), yet another attempt to justify persisting in a childish pastime by giving it a serious look.

Now that I am an old man, these caperings are more obvious as such. Whenever I hear the word “hero,” I think of the adolescent impusles that seasoned old codgers have been exploiting for millennia. I draw the self-sacrificing line at taking risks in order to assist those who are weaker; self-immolation is to be confined to the opera stage. I remember all the outsized longings, but I regard them as signs of immaturity, and I’m delighted to have survived them.

I depend enitrely upon my fellow man and woman for meaning and pleasure. I hope that a few men and women can depend upon me for some of the same, but I myself am not a source of interest to me. Ive necessarily got to take an interest in the fact of myself, as a problem-in-progress, if you like. But that’s a responsibility, not a pursuit. I have no objection to your concern for a soul, if you believe yourself to be possessed of one, but I do object to your placing that concern ahead of your concern for the rest of us. I believe that Jesus shared this objection.

You know there’s a commandment against murder. Where would you draw the line? Would you say murder is wrong, but beating someone is maybe a little less wrong, and just being angry with them isn’t wrong at all? I’m telling you that if you’re angry with a brother or a sister, by which I mean anyone at all, even if you’ve just got a grudge against them, don’t dare to go and offer a gift in the temple until you’ve made your peace with them. Do that first of all.

That’s part of the Sermon on the Mount as reconceived by Philip Pullman in his wonderful little book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. It’s interesting to note that, for all his talk of Christian values, Mark Lilla mentions Jesus only once, and then only in passing, as a byword for Christianity. The Christian wisdom that he likes to quote from goes back to Augustine, the inventor of many onerous and unforgiving Christian dogmas. Before launching tirades against the likes of Montaigne, Lilla ought to examine his own Christianity with a view to casting out the un-Jesus-like selfishness of seeking personal redemption. Happily, he is not so preoccupied by the need “to become other than we are” that he can’t share his well-put thoughts with us. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.