Montaigne, On Repentance

Montaigne admired independent judgement above knowledge

'Precisely because such a man has written, the pleasure of existing on this earth has been increased'. This was Nietzsche's early comment on his reading of Montaigne's Essays.There is something very agreeable about Montaigne, but there is also much that on first acquaintance is confusing, though this does decrease as one gets to know the man. His essay On Repentence is, I think, a good place to start, partly because it it reviews so many aspects of Montaigne's approach and outlook. Before we turn to that essay, however, we might look first at the following extract from his Apology for Raymond Sebond.  This expresses with great clarity all that Montaigne owes to the tradition of classical - especially - Pyrrhonian scepticism.

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Passage 1: Apology for Raymond Sebond (Book II, 12)

(This extract is taken from Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, translated by Donald Frame, pages 550 to 553).

To judge the action of the senses, then, we should first of all be in agreement with the animals, and second, among ourselves. Which we are not in the least; and we get into disputes at every turn because one man hears, sees, or tastes something differently from someone else; and we dispute about the diversity of the images that the senses bring us as much as about anything else. By the ordinary rule of nature, a child hears sees and tastes otherwise than a man of thirty, and he otherwise than a sexagenarian. 


The senses are in some people more obscure and dim, in others more open and acute. We receive things in one way and another, according to what we are and what they seem to us.  Now since our seeming is so uncertain and controversial, it is no longer a miracle if we are told that we can admit that snow appears white to us, but that we cannot be responsible for proving that it is so of its essence and in truth; and, with this starting point shaken, all the knowledge in the world necessarily goes by the board.


What of the fact that our senses interfere with each other? A painting seems to the eye to be in relief, to the touch it seems flat. Shall we say that musk is agreeable or not, which rejoices our sense of smell and offends our taste? There are herbs and unguents suitable for one part of the body which injure another. Honey is pleasant to the taste, unpleasant to the sight. As for those rings which are cut in the form of feathers without ends, there is no eye that can discern their width and that can defend itself against this illusion, that on one side they grown wider, and narrower and tapering on the other, even when you roll them round your finger; however, to the touch they seem equal in width and everywhere alike.

Those persons who to enhance their voluptuousness, in ancient times used mirrors made to enlarge and magnify the object they reflect, so that the members which they were to put to work should please them the more by this ocular growth: to which of the two senses did they give the victory, to the sight which showed them these members stout and long as they liked, or to the touch which showed them small and contemptible?

It is the senses that lend the object these differing qualities, and do the objects themselves have only one? As we see in the bread we eat: it is only bread, but our use makes of it bones, blood, flesh, hair, and nails ...

The moisture that the root of the tree sucks up becomes trunk, leaf, and fruit, and the air, being but one, by being applied to a trumpet, is diversified into a thousand kinds of sounds.  Is it our senses, I say, which likewise fashion these objects out of various qualities, or do they really have them so? And in the face of this doubt, what can we decide about their real essence? 

Moreover, since the accidents of illnesses, madness, or sleep make things appear to us otherwise than they appear to healthy people, is it not likely that our normal state and our natural disposition can also assign to things an essence corresponding to our condition, and accommodate them to us, as our disordered states do? And that our health is as capable of giving them its own appearance as sickness? Why should the temperate man not have some vision of things related to himself, like the intemperate man, and likewise imprint his own character on them?

The jaded man assigns the insipidity to the wine; the healthy man, the savour; the thirsty man, the relish. 

Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know what things are in truth; for nothing comes to us except falsified and altered by our senses. When the compass, the square and the ruler are off, all the proportions drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are also necessarily imperfect and defective. The uncertainty of our senses makes everything they produce uncertain...

Furthermore, who shall be fit to judge these differences? As we say in disputes about religion that we need a judge not attached to either party, free from prejudice and passion, which as we know is impossible among Christians, so it is in this. For if he is old, he cannot judge the sense of perception of old age, being himself a party in this dispute; if he is young, likewise; likewise, sick, asleep, or wake. We would need someone exempt from all these qualities, so that with an unprejudiced judgement he might judge of these propositions as of things indifferent to him; and by that score we would need a judge that never was. 

To judge the appearances that we receive of objects, we would need a judicatory instrument; to verify this instrument, we need a demonstration; to verify the demonstration, an instrument: there we are in a circle.

Since the senses cannot decide the dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, it must be reason that does so. No reason can be established without another reason: there we go retreating back to infinity. 

Our conception is not itself applied to foreign objects, but is conceived through the mediation of the senses; and the senses do not comprehend the foreign object, but only their own impressions. And thus the conception and semblance we form is not of the object, but only of the impression and effect made on the sense; which impression and object are different things. Wherefore whoever judges by appearances judges by something other than the object.

And as for saying that the impressions of the senses convey to the soul the quality of the foreign objects by resemblance, how can the soul and understanding make sure of this resemblance, having of itself no communication with foreign objects? Just as a man who does not know Socrates, seeing his portrait, cannot say that it resembles him.

Now if anyone should want to judge by appearances anyway, to judge by all appearances is impossible, for they clash with one another by their contradictions and discrepancies, as we see by experience. Shall some selected appearances rule the others? We shall have to verify this selection, the second by a third; and thus it will never be finished.

[CHANGING MAN CANNOT KNOW CHANGING THINGS]

Finally there is no existence that is constant, either of our beings or of that of objects. And we, and our judgement, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion. 

[CHANGING MAN CANNOT KNOW UNCHANGING GOD] 

We have no communication with being, because every human nature is always midway between birth and death, offering only a dim semblance and shadow of itself, and an uncertain and feeble opinion. And if by chance you fix your thought on trying to grasp its essence, it will be neither more nor less than if someone tried to grasp water: for the more he squeezes and presses what by its nature flows all over, the more he will lose what he was trying to hold and grasp. Thus all things being subject to pass from one change to another, reason, seeking a real stability in them, is baffled, being unable to apprehend anything stable and permanent; because everything is either coming into being and not yet fully existent, or beginning to die before it is born. 


Commentary: Some of the key assertions have been put into red italics. Montaigne's argument is an old one, but it is not all that easy to understand. Try formulating this argument in your own words. Also, you might like to assess how good or appropriate are Montaigne's points like the one he makes when he talks about the impossibility of objective assessment. Look, for example, at the three italicised paragraphs.

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PASSAGE 2: On Repentence (Book III, 2) 

Others shape the man; I portray him; and offer to the view one in particular, who is ill-shaped enough, and whom, could I refashion him, I should certainly make very different from what he is. But there is no chance of that.

Now the lines of my portrait are never at fault, although they change and vary. The world is a perpetual see-saw.  Everything goes incessantly up and down - the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt - both with the universal motion and with their own. Constancy itself is nothing but a more sluggish movement. I cannot fix my subject. He is always restless, and reels with a natural intoxication. I catch him here, as he is at the moment when I turn my attention to him. I do not portray his being; I portray his passage; not a passage from one age to another or, as the common people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must suit my story to the hour, for soon I may change, not only by chance but also by intention. It is a record of various and variable occurences, an account of thoughts that are unsettled and, as chance will have it, at times contradictory, either because I am then another self, or because I approach my subject under different circumstances and with other considerations. Hence it is that I may well contradict myself, but the truth, as Demades said, I do ot contradict. Could my mind find a firm footing, I should not be making essays, but coming to conclusions; it is, however, always in its appenticeship and on trial.

I present a humble life, without distinction; but that is no matter. Moral philosophy, as a whole, can be just as well applied to a common and private existenceas to one of richer stuff. Every man carries in himself the complete pattern of human nature.


Commentary: Those of you who know some (old!) French might like to note the following phrases which are translated above: (i) Les autres forment l'homme, je le recite.(ii) Le monde n'est qu'une branloire perenne. (iii) je ne peinds pas l'estre, je peinds le passage. (iv) Si mon ame pouvait prendre pied, je ne m'essaierois pas, je me resoudrois: elle est toujours en apprentissage, et en espreuve. (v) Chaque homme porte la forme entiere, de l'humaine condition.   

Note: The word repentir has two meanings: it means not only 'repent' in the customary religious sense, but also 'repaint' or 'touch up' as a painter might correct and perfect his work just as here Montaigne constantly re-edits and revises his own 'essais' or 'trials', that is to say, his attempts to get to grips with ungraspable, ever-flowing experience.

Here are some questions to consider: 

(i) Montaigne stresses the changeableness of the world around us and of the world within as he experiences his own changing moods and attitudes. What consequences does this view have for our notion of personal identity? 

(ii) Is it true that 'I do not portray his being', i.e., that 'there is no 'essence', no essential human nature for him to portray? Does this mean that all we can hope to do is to portray our movement or passage through time, as Montaigne seems to claim? 

(iii) What does he mean when he says, 'Could my mind find a firm footing, I should not be making essays, but coming to conclusions'? 

(iv) If it is possible to do things intentionally, isn't it possible to refashion ourselves in ways that Montaigne tseems to think are impossible? What would Montaigne say to this?

(v) Is it true that 'Every man carries in himself the complete pattern of human nature'? Is Montaigne justified in making this big assumption? Is it an assumption or something better? (vi) What implications does this view of human nature have for Montaigne's own attempts to fix that portrait in writing?
(vii) And, finally, what kind of person would one have to be to have such an attitude to life and experience?

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Passage 3: Of Repentance 

Some sins are impulsive, hasty, and sudden:  let us leave them aside. But as regards those other sins which are so often repeated, mediated, and considered, whether they are temperamental sins, or arise from our profession and vocation, I cannot imagine their being implanted so long in one and the same heart, unless the reason and conscience of the man who harbours them constantly wills them and intends them to be there.  And I find it somewhat hard to call up a picture of that repentance which, according to this thief’s boast, comes on him at a certain prescribed moment.

I do not agree with the Pythagorean sect, that men take on a new soul when they approach the images of the gods, to receive their oracles. Unless what he meant to say was that it must be a strange, new soul, borrowed for the occasion, since their own show so little sign of the purification and cleansing needed for this ceremony. 

They do just the opposite of the Stoic precepts, which indeed order us to correct the imperfections and vices that we recognize in us, but they forbid us to be repentant and glum about them. These men make us believe that they feel great regret and remorse within; but of amendment and correction, or interruption, they show us no sign. Yet it is no cure if the disease is not thrown off. If repentance were weighing in the scale of the balance, it would outweigh the sin. I know of no quality so easy to counterfeit as piety, if conduct and life are not made to conform with it. Its essence is abstruse and occult; its semblance, easy and showy. [Montaigne is talking in this paragraph about people who ‘sin’ and who then claim to ‘repent’ of their sins].

As for me, I may desire in a general way to be different; I may condemn and dislike my nature as a whole, and implore God to reform me completely and to pardon my natural weakness. But this I ought not to call repentance, it seems to me, any more than my displeasure at being neither an angel nor Cato. My actions are in order and conformity with what I am and with my condition. I can do no better. And repentance does not properly apply to the things that are not in our power; rather does regret. I imagine numberless natures loftier and better regulated than mine, but for all that, I do ot amend my faculties; just as nether my arm nor my mind becomes more vigorous by imagining another that is. If imagining and desiring a nobler conduct than ours produced repentance of our own, we should have to repent of our most innocent actions, inasmuch as we rightly judge that in amore excellent nature they would have been performed with greater perfection and dignity, and we should wish to likewise.

When I consider the behaviour of my youth in comparison with that of my old age, I find that I have generally conducted myself in an orderly fashion, according to my lights; that is all my resistance can accomplish. I do not flatter myself; in similar circumstances I should always be the same. It is not a spot, it is rather a tincture with which I am stained all over. I know no superficial, halfway, and perfunctory repentance. It must affect me in every part before I call it so, and must grip me by the vitals and afflict them as deeply and as completely as God sees into me. 


Commentary: 

(i) 'Montaigne thinks that it is not possible to remove single faults in our characters through a process of repentance?' Is this true? If so, what reasons might he have for thinking this? (ii) What does 'repentance' mean for Montaigne? 
(iii) Is it possible in Montaigne's view to repent of 'impetuous, prompt and sudden' sins? How do these differ from those sins where repentance is not possible on his view? 
(iv) Has Montaigne got it right by and large? What implications might his view have for life in time?
(v) If it is true that we are tied to ourselves and have no possibility of large or permanent reform, what implications does this have for our lives as married people and as parents and for our attitudes to those who break the law?

Evidences of the Divine

'But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground....'

'Two of the most influential books of the nineteenth century, still in print, were William Paley's A View of the Evidences of Christianity, of 1794, and his Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, of 1802. The first question posed above could be reformulated anachronistically as an attempt to establish what Sophocles' or Pindar's "Evidences" might have looked like. In a sense there is a single, simple answer to that question, and one evidence that easily outweighs all others, even if the Greeks did not formulate the matter in quite this way. When Nicomarchus was charged in 399 with impiety for altering the traditional sacrificial calendar of Athens, the prosecutor argued: 'Our ancestors, who only made the sacrifices prescribed in Solon's code, bequeathed to us a city which was the greatest and happiest in all Greece; and so we ought to make the same sacrifices as them if for no other reason, for the good luck that they brought." In the past, when sacrifices were performed more regularly, the weather too was more regular, says Isocrates. Every dedication set up by a Greek in fulfillment of a vow is testimony that the prayer accompanying the vow has been fulfilled. The greatest evidence then for the existence of the gods is that piety works: the reward for worshipping the gods is ways hallowed by tradition is prosperity. The converse is that impiety leads to disaster; and, the piety-prosperity nexus is not often used as a proof of the existence of the gods, the afflictions of the wicked are indeed a much-cited evidence. "Father Zeus, you gods still exist on high Olympus, if the suitors have really paid the penalty for their reckless insolence", says Laertes in the Odyssey; "The gods exist," delightedly exclaims the chef in Menander's Dyskolos when his enemy, whom he regards as impious, falls down a well. We seem to catch here the tones of excited colloquial speech.

'When fair weather and flourishing crops are seen as a reward of piety, the argument rests implicitly on the assumption that the natural environment is under divine control. Here then potentially is another evidence: if every shower of rain comes from Zeus - and "Zeus" or "god" "is raining" was used more or less interchangeably in Greek with an impersonal "it is raining" - then direct contact with divine power is an everyday experience. It surely will not have felt like that, even for the pious: rain for them was rain, part of normality, as it is for us, not an epiphany. But when rain declined to fall, it could be prayed for; thunderbolts were embodiments of "Zeus who descends," storms could be caused by human pollution, winds could be summoned or averted by sacrifice, an untimely earthquake or eclipse could cause a general to be replaced, military activity to be abandoned or delayed. According to the messenger in Aeschyllus' Persai, when an unseasonable storm froze the Strymon in the face of the retreating Persian army; "people who hitherto paid no regard to the gods (θεοὺς δέ τις / τὸ πρὶν νομιζων οὐδαμοῦ)" then turned to prayers; though ascribed to Persians, the psychology is also perfectly Greek.

'This was the level at which pre-Socratic philosophy, with the premise of a rule-bound natural order, came into conflict with popular religious assumptions; and, for those educated in the philosophical schools, storms and eclipses ceased necessarily to convey any message about the divine. (But there was always the possibility of a both and / or "double determination" explanation, whereby god worked through the natural order.) Even for the less educated, such messages were only intermittently audible; this was the religion of crisis situations. Nature was a great mechanism for the transmission of communications from, and about, the divine, but the mechanism was only recognized as operating occasionally. The vaguer proposition, however, that piety is the soil in which good crops grow was a permanent if unemphatic presumption. 

Germanicus

'The "rewards of piety" argument is in principle empirical: the gods' concern for humanity is confirmed by their differential treatment of the good and the bad. The pragmatism of this approach leads to the theoretical possibility of abusing the gods when they maltreat the good just as one praises them when they punish the bad.  Complaints and even threats against unjust gods are raised by characters in literature, but there are no early Greek parallels for the popular response to the tragic early death of the Roman prince Germanicus, when temples were stoned. Perhaps our sources have censored such incidents; more probably there was a tendency in such circumstances to seek out ritual omissions and so exculpate the gods. The Rewards of Piety is in reality a pseudoempirical argument, deriving its force from selective vision, inertia, and traditionalism. Yet psychologically it doubtless remained for most Greeks the most potent of all evidences.

'Can others be found? Paley's second book, the Natural Theology is a presentation of the argument from design. It begins with a famous comparison:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that for anything I know to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch came to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might always have been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz., that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose... The inference we think inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.

'And exactly the same reasoning applies to the universe as a whole. The ancients had no watches, but from a certain point they certainly had the argument from design: its origins are uncertain, but the phenomenon of providential design is alluded to in several passages in the late fifth century, and the reverse argument (because the world is providentially designed, therefore a provident designer exists) is fully worked out by Socrates in two passages in Xenophon's Memorabilia. Thenceforth, "intelligent design" is taken for granted by all philosophers from Plato onward except the Epicureans, who struggle hard to argue against it, and perhaps the Cynics; it forms the core of the Stoic case in Cicero's De natura deorum, where a quite close anticipation of the modern image of a "monkey on a typewriter producing the works of Shakespeare" can be found ("If an enormous number of letter were thrown on the ground, could they ever form themselves into the Annals of Ennius?) In the early mythological cosmologies, however, the world is not made, but simply happens, and though in passing allusions the gods may be said to have "made" this or that, there is no elaborated concept of a creator god. One of the central arguments of David Hume's The Natural History of Religion is that natural man is not alert to those features of the universe that seem to bespeak designedness; philosophical reflection is required to create such an awareness. The caution is certainly applicable to the Greek case. We cannot allow the argument any wide diffusion before the fourth century.'

The above paragraphs are taken from Robert Parker's excellent book On Greek Religion, Cornell, 2011, pages 2-6. Robert Parker is also the author of an earlier now classic text, Miasma, which is a study of the concept of pollution in ancient Greek religion. It seemed to me worthwhile making this lengthy quotation because it draws attention to what he sees as the fundamental drive behind the phenomena that we see as examples of piety. If you do not agree with him, you would I think be hard pressed to come up with a n alternative explanation.