I’ve been reading (or rather re-reading) Montaigne. I’d always told myself that in retirement I would read and re-read him, and a recent brush with death has made me realise that I shouldn’t put off pleasures while they are still available. I hope the reading will, like Montaigne’s, turn into writing, though I am not sure yet quite what sort of writing. In the course of my career I’ve abandoned at least three promising projects. Perhaps this too will run into the sand, like the pools of water in my backyard after today’s heavy rain.

There’s a particular reason why Montaigne is a knotty topic. He’s quite clear that the most important subject he writes about is religion; yet his religion is a mystery. A long tradition took him to be some sort of atheist; but modern scholarship insists on portraying him as a pious Catholic. I’ve been reading, for example, the wonderful book by the late Malcolm Smith on Montaigne and the Roman Censors. When Montaigne went to Rome all his books were seized for inspection. Amongst them was his own copy of the first edition of the Essays. A French-speaking theologian was assigned to read them and came up with a list of problematic passages: over and over again he had used the pagan word ‘fortune’ instead of the Christian word ‘providence’; he had praised Theodore Beza’s poetry, though Beza was an arch-heretic; he had praised the emperor Julian the apostate; he had opposed cruel executions, which were of course a speciality of the Inquisition; he had said a well-brought-up man should be capable of any vice; he had complained that no complete copy of Tacitus had survived because Tacitus had said a few unpleasant things about Christians, and so the Christians had destroyed his books; he had said one should not pray unless one intended to amend one’s life.

Montaigne persuaded the authorities that the censor was wrong, that his Essays were pious, and in later editions he reinforced and defended the passages that had been criticised. Smith himself was a pious Catholic, and welcomes the civilised discussion between Montaigne and the Roman censors. But the central problem with the ‘pious Catholic’ thesis (also upheld by M.A. Screech, the translator of the newer Penguin editions, who was ordained late in life) is that there is no reliable way of distinguishing between Montaigne the pious Catholic and Montaigne pretending-to-be-a-pious-Catholic, between (as the French would say) Montaigne croyant and Montaigne merely pratiquant.

Montaigne offers numerous justifications for pretending rather than believing:

i) you should always hold to the established religion, because this is the basis of political stability. He invents what we call conservatism: ‘I have no taste for innovation of any kind.’ Religious change is always for the worse.

ii) religion – e.g. praying – has important psychological benefits if done right (and doing it right does not require believing in it). This is the psychotherapeutic argument.

iii) the claims made for ‘our’ religion (miracles, divine inspiration, etc.) cannot be shown to be superior to or different from the claims made for religions we believe to be false. The relativism argument.

iv) the Christian religion is at odds with sound philosophy, which is compatible with belief in an eternal universe, a divine principle which is not distinct from the universe, and denial of immortality – in other words proto-Spinozism or pantheism. This is the argument from philosophy, which makes belief an impossible leap in the dark.

But, it is said, Montaigne always levels with his reader. He is never deceptive. If he meant to advocate mere practice rather than belief he would have done so directly. This is surely not true because (a) he says he is as frank as social conventions permit him to be, which is much less than would be required to prove piety and (b) the consequence of openly advocating pretence would have been death.

It might be thought that someone who gives lots of arguments for mere practice is unlikely to be pious. But this will not do. Take the great anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard. EP, as he was known, studied witchcraft, oracles, and magic amongst the Azande, and then converted to Catholicism. He practiced sortition: when a doctoral student came to him with a problem he would pull down a Bible from his bookshelf, read out a verse at random, and then politely ask ‘Does that help?’ All the political, anthropological, sociological, and psychological arguments for pretence will have been familiar to EP, but it would be strange indeed to claim that he was merely pretending to be a Catholic in order to access those benefits, for he could have openly advocated mere practice had he wanted to, or at least declared himself to be a Graham Greene Catholic, a Catholic atheist.

EP’s colleague, friend, and fellow Catholic Godfrey Lienhardt has claimed that his Catholicism had no impact on his anthropology; my difficulty is understanding why the anthropology didn’t have an impact on his Catholicism. There is no reason to think that EP’s conversion was not genuine, that he thought that Catholicism was, like Azande oracles, merely useful. Montaigne, it is often correctly said, thinks like an anthropologist – and indeed when traveling he behaved like an anthropologist, dressing like the natives, eating their food, practicing their religion (including, in Rome, attending a synagogue), doing everything he could to blend in. Unlike EP, he gives us no conversion story. In Montaigne’s case I think the anthropological attitude was destructive of religious belief; he sought to blend in with Christianity while observing it dispassionately.

I can’t, in short, persuade myself that Montaigne believed that Christ was the Son of God who had died to redeem the sins of the world – and it is rather noticeable that he falls consistently short of asserting that that is his belief, and when translating the natural theology of Sebond he undermines Sebond’s claims to that effect. He said the Lord’s Prayer daily – but in the Catholic not the Protestant version, without what is called the doxology (‘For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever’), with its implication that the Messiah has already come. ‘For Montaigne,’ writes Starobinski in Montaigne in Motion, ‘there is no incarnate mediator.’

When he (exceptionally) mentions Christ as our saviour it is to pursue some other subject: ‘in establishing the salvation of the human race and bringing about His glorious victory over sin and death’, God willed that there should be no threat to the established political order  and ‘allowed many years to go by while this fruit without price came to ripen.’ Thus the revolutionary doctrine that Christ is our saviour is introduced only to make the point that Christianity was never and should never be, when it comes to politics, a revolutionary doctrine. Just when we seem to have encountered Montaigne croyant we are back with Montaigne pratiquant, and forced to confront the puzzle that God’s providence, so apparent in the founding of Christianity, seems no longer at work, for Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, has indeed become a threat to political stability.

If, in Renaissance France, croyant and merely pratiquant are very difficult to distinguish, does this mean we must simply abandon the attempt to excavate Montaigne’s authentic religious convictions? I don’t think so. Rather I think we must explore more carefully the concept of mere practice.

On his mother’s side Montaigne’s ancestors were converso Jews. He might be describing his own maternal grandparents when he describes the persecution of the Jews in Iberian Spain (three of his close relatives in that generation were murdered by the Inquisition). He describes the plan of Manuel I:

His plan was that all [Jewish] children below the age of fourteen were to be torn from the hands of their mothers and fathers, and taken away from their sight and away from contact with them, to a place where they would be instructed in our religion. They say that when this order was carried out, the sight was appalling: for the natural love between parents and children and, furthermore, their zeal for their ancient faith, ran directly counter to this violent decree. Many times, fathers and mothers were seen killing themselves and — what is even more shocking — hurling their young children into wells out of love and compassion for them, so as to evade the law. Moreover, when the time which he had allotted them [to leave the kingdom] ran out, since they had no resources, they became slaves again. Some became Christians — but few Portuguese place any reliance on their faith, or on the faith of their descendants, even today, a hundred years later, though custom and the passage of time are more strongly persuasive than any other pressure.

Was Montaigne aware that he was a descendant of Iberian Jews? Had he read up on the subject because he was exploring the history of his own family? It is one of the mysteries of the Essays that he says so little about his mother, who (like most of Montaigne’s neighbours) had converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. Montaigne never mentions his Jewish heritage, but it is hard to believe he was unaware of it, and consequently hard to believe that his account of the persecution of the Iberian Jews did not reflect a doubt in his own mind about his own faith, even if custom and the passage of time are strongly persuasive.

Moreover, Judaism is not primarily about faith or belief. You can be an atheist and an observant Jew. There is no Jewish creed, and no Jewish heresy (unless it be to say that the Messiah has already come). It is often said that Spinoza was ‘excommunicated’ by his synagogue in Amsterdam, which implies that he was a heretic or something like it. Spinoza’s primary offence, like that of Uriel da Costa before him, may well have been that he openly denied the immortality of the soul, which was expressly forbidden by the Dutch government. He was banned not for wrong thinking but for failing to keep his thoughts to himself and for breaking Dutch law, and thus being a liability, a threat to the continuing toleration of Jews in Holland.

It seems to me entirely possible that Montaigne’s attitude to religion was that of a converso: he was an observant Catholic, not a believing Catholic.

Rodney Needham (another Oxford anthropologist, one who was also a philosopher) has denied that there is any cross-cultural experience that corresponds to ‘belief’ (indeed he denies that belief, even within Christianity, is strictly-speaking an experience at all), and following him historians of classical Greece and Rome have argued that to think of pagan religions in terms of belief is to impose a Christian frame of reference on a set of rituals and myths which did not require belief in the Christian sense. Montaigne’s first language was Latin, and the Essays draw more heavily on pagan Latin sources than on Christian ones. It seems to me perfectly possible that Montaigne was a ‘pious’ Christian in the sense (and only the sense) that Cicero was pious: fully practicing the state religion (indeed Cicero was an augur, a priest), criticising atheistical unbelief, but holding that religion was not literally true.

Montaigne quotes Cicero: ‘Where religion is concerned, I follow the high priests Titus Coruncanius, Publius Scipio and Publius Scaevola, not [the philosophers] Zeno or Cleanthes or Chrysippus.’ Sequor, I follow: this is a statement of allegiance, not belief. So too where religion was concerned Montaigne ‘followed’ the Catholic Church.

It may be helpful to compare Montaigne’s view of Christianity with the belief in a ‘higher power’. Some literally believe in the existence of this power; but many find it reassuring, and helpful, to act and even think as if they do. So too Montaigne’s Christianity, for ‘the Christian religion has every mark of complete justice and usefulness.’ We need a religion, this is the one we have (and one should always stick to the one that one has — Montaigne makes no attempt to conceal his approval of those native Americans who told the Conquistadors that they intended to retain the religion of their fathers); luckily this is a comparatively good one.

Much of the evidence adduced to show that Montaigne was a pious Catholic is evidence that confirms that he was pratiquant, but does not tell us that he was croyant. It is claimed he attended Mass daily in his private chapel, and that, since his bedroom was above the chapel, he could hear Mass even when ill. But Montaigne, a judge and a rule-abiding chap, was a knight of St. Michael, and required by the laws of the order to attend Mass daily.

Montaigne exclaims, after rejecting the pagan deities ‘Oh, God! How obligated are we to the goodness of our Lord and Creator who detached our belief from the folly of these fickle and arbitrary cults, and secured it upon the eternal foundation of his holy word.’ But this simply won’t do as a sincere expression of Montaigne’s views, for earlier in the same essay (and the passage is quoted a few pages earlier by Smith in his other fine book, Montaigne and Religious Freedom) Montaigne had written:

Just think what errors and falsehoods have been derived from the most clear, pure and perfect utterance! Has there ever been a heresy which has failed to find in such utterances a perfect pretext and abundant justification for its continued existence? That is why the authors of such errors always want to stick to one kind of proof, the one which relies on the interpretation of words.

So it is evident that our belief isn’t securely founded on the Bible text; if it were there would be no religious warfare between Christians.

This example seems to me to capture exactly where the Roman censors (and Smith, following closely in their footsteps) went wrong. They were looking for individual statements that were heretical. The French-speaking censor who read the Essays felt sure there was something wrong in the book, and so he did his best to locate statements supporting this reading. But the heresy in Montaigne’s Essays does not consist in individual statements. It consists in indirect implication: perhaps Cicero is right to ‘follow’ the high priests without believing. And it consists in the movement from one idea to another, from the relativist claim that texts are open to an infinite variety of interpretations to the pious claim that the Bible represents a secure foundation for our faith. The best book on Montaigne is Starobinski’s Montaigne in Motion: it is the movement of his thinking, not his individual thoughts, which is never pious, though always pratiquant.

And this I think gives us a new understanding of Montaigne’s title: Essays. Essays are, in Montaigne’s French, not yet ‘essays’; they are assays, trials, tests, experiments. Take away belief, whether in philosophy or religion, and what do you have left? What you have is your own enquiring mind. Montaigne is the first modern because he is the first (although there were some classical precedents) to find himself without belief, at which point man becomes the measure of all things, endlessly trying and testing but never finding an eternal foundation. Montaigne is, in Richard Rorty’s language, the first anti-foundationalist. It is precisely because he is not a believer that Montaigne is constantly in movement, always adding, revising, rewriting, unable to settle. Had Montaigne been a pious Catholic the Essays would never have been written; they are, as it were, the record of his failure to believe (except, of course, in friendship). They are also a guide for readers, readers whom Montaigne assumes will be pratiquant but not necessarily croyant. (He is impatient with those who practise Protestantism while believing in the truth of Catholicism, or vice versa; there is no similar condemnation of those who practise without having any belief.)

To chronicle himself, Montaigne, the most conservative of thinkers, invented a new literary form. Malcolm Smith writes wonderfully about him, but he thinks and writes like a Roman censor, albeit a highly civilised one; to do Montaigne justice one would have to write like Montaigne, one would have to assay the Essays. And perhaps that too, like Montaigne’s constant, quiet distinguishing between belief and practice, can only be done indirectly, as in Carlo Ginzburg’s wonderful essay ‘The Soul of Brutes’, where Montaigne’s famous line ‘When I am playing with my cat how do I know that it is not rather she who is playing with me?’ is of course present even though it is, like Montaigne’s Jewish ancestry in the Essays, never mentioned.

Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet. (Tacitus) ‘Happy the day when you can think what you like and say what you think.’ It’s comparatively easy to write about authors who think what they like and say what they think. The Essays presents itself as such a book; it isn’t, which is why it is difficult to write about it. In my yard the pools of water have sunk into the Suffolk sand. And yet ‘There are figures from the past that time seems to bring closer and closer to us. Montaigne is one such figure.’ (Ginzburg) Writing about Montaigne is difficult, but surely not, in these times of conflict and uncertainty, impossible.