MONTAIGNE
In the Middle Ages it used to be said that city air made for freedom.
That was true.
A man behind a high stone wall could thumb his nose safely at baron and
priest.
A little later, when conditions upon the European continent had improved
so much that international commerce was once more becoming a possibility,
another historical phenomenon began to make itself manifest.
Done into words of three syllables it read: “Business makes for
tolerance.”
You can verify this statement any day of the week and most of all on
Sunday in any part of our country.
Winesberg, Ohio, can afford to support the Ku Klux Klan, but New York
cannot. If the people of New York should ever start a movement for the
exclusion of all Jews and all Catholics and all foreigners in general,
there would be such a panic in Wall Street and such an upheaval in the
labor movement that the town would be ruined beyond the hope of repair.
The same held true during the latter half of the Middle Ages. Moscow, the
seat of a small grand ducal count, might rage against the pagans, but
Novgorod, the international trading post, must be careful lest she offend
the Swedes and Norwegians and the Germans and the Flemish merchants who
visited her market place and drive them to Wisby.
A purely agricultural state could with impunity regale its peasantry with
a series of festive autos da fé. But if the Venetians or the Genoese
or the people of Bruges had started a pogrom among the heathen within
their walls, there would have been an immediate exodus of all those who
represented foreign business houses and the subsequent withdrawal of
capital would have driven the city into bankruptcy.
A few countries which were constitutionally unable to learn from
experience (like Spain and the papal dominions and certain possessions
of the Habsburgs), actuated by a sentiment which they proudly called
“loyalty to their convictions,” ruthlessly expelled the enemies of
the true faith. As a result they either ceased to exist altogether or
dwindled down to the rank of seventh rate Ritter states.
Commercial nations and cities, however, are as a rule governed by men
who have a profound respect for established facts, who know on which
side their bread is buttered, and who therefore maintain such a state of
spiritual neutrality that their Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and
Chinese customers can do business as usual and yet remain faithful to
their own particular religion.
For the sake of outward respectability Venice might pass a law against
the Calvinists, but the Council of Ten was careful to explain to their
gendarmes that this decree must not be taken too seriously and that
unless the heretics actually tried to get hold of San Marco and convert
it into a meeting-house of their own, they must be left alone and must be
allowed to worship as they saw fit.
Their good friends in Amsterdam did likewise. Every Sunday their
ministers fulminated against the sins of the “Scarlet Woman.” But in
the next block the terrible Papists were quietly saying mass in some
inconspicuous looking house, and outside the Protestant chief-of-police
stood watch lest an over-zealous admirer of the Geneva catechism try to
break up this forbidden meeting and frighten the profitable French and
Italian visitors away.
This did not in the least mean that the mass of the people in Venice or
Amsterdam ceased to be faithful sons of their respective churches. They
were as good Catholics or Protestants as they had ever been. But they
remembered that the good will of a dozen profitable heretics from Hamburg
or Lübeck or Lisbon was worth more than the approbation of a dozen shabby
clerics from Geneva or Rome and they acted accordingly.
It may seem a little far-fetched to connect the enlightened and liberal
opinions (they are not always the same) of Montaigne with the fact that
his father and grandfather had been in the herring business and that
his mother was of Spanish-Jewish descent. But it seems to me that these
commercial antecedents had a great deal to do with the man’s general
point of view and that the intense dislike of fanaticism and bigotry
which characterized his entire career as a soldier and statesman had
originated in a little fish-shop somewhere off the main quai of Bordeaux.
Montaigne himself would not have thanked me if I had been able to make
this statement to his face. For when he was born, all vestiges of mere
“trade” had been carefully wiped off the resplendent family escutcheon.
His father had acquired a bit of property called Montaigne and had spent
money lavishly that his son might be brought up as a gentleman. Before
he was fairly able to walk private tutors had stuffed his poor little
head full of Latin and Greek. At the age of six he had been sent to
high-school. At thirteen he had begun to study law. And before he was
twenty he was a full-fledged member of the Bordeaux town council.
Then followed a career in the army and a period at court, until at the
age of thirty-eight, after the death of his father, he retired from all
active business and spent the last twenty-one years of his life, (with
the exception of a few unwilling excursions into politics), among his
horses and his dogs and his books and learned as much from the one as he
did from the other.
Montaigne was very much a man of his time and suffered from several
weaknesses. He was never quite free from certain affections and
mannerisms which he, the fish-monger’s grandson, believed to be a part of
true gentility. Until the end of his days he protested that he was not
really a writer at all, only a country gentleman who occasionally whiled
away the tedious hours of winter by jotting down a few random ideas upon
subjects of a slightly philosophic nature. All this was pure buncombe. If
ever a man put his heart and his soul and his virtues and his vices and
everything he had into his books, it was this cheerful neighbor of the
immortal d’Artagnan.
And as this heart and this soul and these virtues and these vices were
the heart and the soul and the virtues and the vices of an essentially
generous, well-bred and agreeable person, the sum total of Montaigne’s
works has become something more than literature. It has developed into
a definite philosophy of life, based upon common sense and an ordinary
practical variety of decency.
Montaigne was born a Catholic. He died a Catholic, and in his younger
years he was an active member of that League of Catholic Noblemen which
was formed among the French nobility to drive Calvinism out of France.
But after that fateful day in August of the year 1572 when news reached
him of the joy with which Pope Gregory XIII had celebrated the murder of
thirty thousand French Protestants, he turned away from the Church for
good. He never went so far as to join the other side. He continued to go
through certain formalities that he might keep his neighbors’ tongues
from wagging, but those of his chapters written after the night of Saint
Bartholomew might just as well have been the work of Marcus Aurelius or
Epictetus or any of a dozen other Greek or Roman philosophers. And in
one memorable essay, entitled “On the Freedom of Conscience,” he spoke
as if he had been a contemporary of Pericles rather than a servant of
Her Majesty Catherine de’ Medici and he used the career of Julian the
Apostate as an example of what a truly tolerant statesman might hope to
accomplish.
It is a very short chapter. It is only five pages long and you will find
it in part nineteen of the second book.
Montaigne had seen too much of the incorrigible obstinacy of both
Protestants and Catholics to advocate a system of absolute freedom, which
(under the existing circumstances) could only provoke a new outbreak
of civil war. But when circumstances allowed it, when Protestants and
Catholics no longer slept with a couple of daggers and pistols underneath
their pillows, then an intelligent government should keep away as much
as possible from interfering with other people’s consciences and should
permit all of its subjects to love God as best suited the happiness of
their own particular souls.
Montaigne was neither the only, nor the first Frenchman who had hit upon
this idea or had dared to express it in public. As early as the year
1560, Michel de l’Hôpital, a former chancellor of Catherine de’ Medici
and a graduate of half a dozen Italian universities (and incidentally
suspected of being tarred with the Anabaptist brush) had suggested that
heretics be attacked exclusively with verbal arguments. He had based his
somewhat startling opinion upon the ground that conscience being what it
was, it could not possibly be changed by force, and two years later he
had been instrumental in bringing about that royal Edict of Toleration
which had given the Huguenots the right to hold meetings of their own,
to call synods to discuss the affairs of their church and in general to
behave as if they were a free and independent denomination and not merely
a tolerated little sect.
Jean Bodin, a Parisian lawyer, a most respectable citizen (the man who
had defended the rights of private property against the communistic
tendencies expressed in Thomas More’s “Utopia”), had spoken in a similar
vein when he denied the right of sovereigns to use violence in driving
their subjects to this or that church.
But the speeches of chancellors and the Latin treatises of political
philosophers very rarely make best sellers. Whereas Montaigne was read
and translated and discussed wherever civilized people came together in
the name of intelligent company and good conversation and continued to be
read and translated and discussed for more than three hundred years.
His very amateurishness, his insistence that he just wrote for the fun
of it and had no axes to grind, made him popular with large numbers of
people who otherwise would never dream of buying (or borrowing) a book
that was officially classified under “philosophy.”