In Our Time - Montaigne

Episode Date: April 25, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Born near Bordeaux in 1533, Montaigne retired from a life of public service aged 38 and began to write. He called these short works 'essais', or 'attempts'; they deal with an eclectic range of subjects, from the dauntingly weighty to the apparently trivial. Although he never considered himself a philosopher, he is often now seen as one of the most outstanding Sceptical thinkers of early modern Europe. His approachable style, intelligence and subtle thought have made him one of the most widely admired writers of the Renaissance.With:David Wootton Anniversary Professor of History at York UniversityTerence Cave Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of OxfordFelicity Green Chancellor's Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Michel de Montaigne's essay is first published in 1580, begin rather unconventionally. In a brief note to his readers, Montaigne advises them not to bother continuing any further. He explains, reader, I myself am on the matter of my book. There's no reason you should employ your leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject. Montaigne's essays are among the most unusual, fascinating and influential works of the Renaissance. They deal with an apparently limitless variety of subject from cannibalism to pedantry,

solitude to the human emotions. There's even an essay about thumbs. Although he never saw himself as a philosopher, Montaigne has come to be seen as one of the most important thinkers of the 16th century. His skeptical approach to the world and how well we can understand it is perhaps best summed up in one famous quotation from the essays, what do I know? With me to discuss Montaigne in his SSR, David Wooten,

Professor of History at York University, Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, and Felicity Green, Chancellor's Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh. David Wooden, can you begin by telling us something about Montane's family background? Yes, he's born in 1533.

His father's a soldier. The family have been in business in Bordeaux. They've become very wealthy. They've bought a bigger estate outside the town. his mother's family are immigrants from Spain who have been forcibly converted to Judaism to Christianity so he's got a Jewish side to his family whether he knows this were not quite clear

and he's brought up by his father in a most peculiar way his father's not very well educated and wants Montaigne to have the education that he didn't have but more the family the general family background because it's a time when the family was moving up a notch or two wasn't it? Yes they're extraordinarily wealthy I mean, Montaigne has vast estates

which produce incredible quantities of wine and in later life he's in charge of running these estates and says he has no idea what he's doing he can hardly tell a lettuce from a cabbage, he says. So it's the whole agricultural enterprise that he's supposed to be running. He takes place behind his back effectively. But they got the valuable duh, didn't they?

Yes. It was duh, Montaigne. So how did they get this? This is a world in which you buy yourself into nobility and having bought nobility, it gives you social status. and over several generations, the quality of that status changes. One of the things Monten's father is trying to do by giving him a good education is move him up at the social scale.

And Monten, therefore, is extraordinarily well established in society, even though the fact that he's from a relatively Nouveau-Rich family. But a Nouveau-Rich from a sort of magistrate, isn't it? It's a learned people who are taking important positions in government regionally. That's what they want it to become, yes, that's the aspiration, I think. that's what Montaigne's generation are intended to be. Before we remember, David, can you give us a wider context for about 1533, two or three of the big things that were going on there?

Well, of course, one of the big things that's going on is the Reformation. And the Reformation is tearing, beginning to tear France apart. The French Wars of Religion begin in 1562, and we get 40 years of civil war. And Montane is caught up in this from 1562 onwards. So there's 1562 onwards. So 15th, there's been in Germany already after Luther, 1517 and so on. And a lot of strong.

And a lot of strife in this country. That's right. And the south of France, where Montaigne is, is predominantly Protestant. One of Montaigne's brothers becomes a Protestant. His mother becomes a Protestant. So his own family is divided between Protestants and Catholics. And the countryside around him is divided between Protestants and Catholics. And so he has Protestant armies and Catholic armies marching around.

And he himself is involved in warfare and has experience of warfare. And it's a time of great discoveries by land and by mind, really, isn't it? Yes. So Montaigne is very conscious of the discovery of the New World meets Native of Americans who've been brought back from the new world. He has this sense of an opening up of a... He's living the Renaissance. That's a very simple sense.

He's also encountering a whole series of new text that are appearing in print for the first time or being translated from Greek into French and so on. So he's got this sense of a whole opening up of new opportunities for learning as well as for new experiences of the world. And just back to that estate, did they build a big chateau? Did they buy a chateau? They've got this vast chateau on it.

and it has two towers. Monten lives in one tower, his wife lives in the other tower. There's a big space in between, which is apparently inhabited mainly by his mother. And so Monten, when he retires to his chateau, retreats to his tower, and this becomes his little bastion where he lives out his life. Policity Green, David touched on Montane's upbringing. Could you tell us more about it? Yes, well, most of what we know about Montane's early years really comes from his account in the essays themselves.

It does seem like he had quite an unusual and experimental education. His father, as David was saying, was very keen to apply the latest ideas to Montaigne's education. First of all, as a very young baby, he was actually sent off to live with a family of local peasants in a nearby village. Was this to be

wean, first of all? Yes, until the point where he was weaned. So the practice of sending out a child to be wet nursed by a more low status person wasn't that unusual, but the idea of actually sending your child to live in a common family was quite an experimental idea. Why did you do that? Well Montaigne says that his father did this, partly in order to accustom him to a kind of more austere, more simple way of living, but partly also to attach Montaine to the common people for whom he would have had responsibility as a nobleman when he grew up.

So in a way it's training him for that work as an estate manager later in life. So is that Andrew Lewis 3? It's curious that you can be trained as an estate manager by being put out to a cottage. At least you would have an understanding and a sympathy with the people you were taking care of. And then what? And then he comes back to Montaigne, and the next sort of step is to teach Montaigne to speak Latin, sorry, as his first language, in preference, in fact, to French. So his father hires a German-speaking tutor who doesn't speak a word of French

and gets this tutor to speak to Montaigne exclusively in Latin and also gets the household servants and the rest of the family to do so as well. So Montaigne is really brought up in this immersive environment where Latin is his first language. Why did his father want to do that? Well, this is again in keeping with the latest sort of humanist pedagogical ideas, the idea that Latin should be treated as a living language, a spoken language, and not just a dead language, was very fashionable at this time.

And it's really the language is a gateway to the whole of classical culture. So this isn't just about learning to speak Latin like a native. It's also about learning to think like the ancients and to live like the ancients. So there's that keen concern to immerse Montaigne from the very beginning in that classical. world. We're told, is it by him, you'll tell me that by the age of six he was fluent in Latin? That's what he says, so it does seem to have been successful in that respect. And certainly the quotations roll out throughout these essays again and again.

Yes, yeah, there's almost as much Latin as there is French in this text. Yes. Can you tell us why, just explore a little bit more, why a classical education at that time was so important? Well, it's partly a pragmatic thing, I think as David was mentioning, Latin was something which you would be able to use in your future career as a wealthy elite individual. You would need Latin in your public career, whether as a diplomat or as a lawyer. So it's sort of a vital skill in that sense. But there's also a wider kind of cultural, intellectual ideal.

This is the Renaissance. So people are sort of looking to the ancient world in order to figure out how to do things in the present. And so there's a very natural sense in which Latin is the conduit to all that wisdom and to all that knowledge. So it's part of that movement of the painters going to the past and the sculptors going to the past and taking their lessons from the past and skipping over. Yes, it's that intuition that the way forward is to look back towards antiquity.

Of the classical authors, can you give us two or three who are most influential on him or most important to him? He singles out among philosophers Plutarch and Seneca as being his two favourites. He gives two reasons for that. firstly the format in which they produce their writings. So he speaks of them as being detached pieces, which you can kind of dip into on all kinds of different topics.

And that's clearly a model for Montaigne's own. What subjects are you interested in in Plutarch? He's very interested in questions to do with ethics, the question of how to live and how to conduct one's life and how to prepare for death. And in both Plutarch and Seneca, he finds a very fruitful distinction between the external objects, such as wealth or worldly success or glory

and the inner sort of state of contentment that lies within the soul. So that distinction between the external objects and the inner self is something which he takes from both Plutarch and Seneca and which he is going to develop himself in his own work. Are those two rather like? Is there anyone giving a supplementary or even competing point of view that he takes on board? These are his two favourites, but he actually reads very widely and he quotes from a wide range of authors.

Lucretius is probably also an important figure to mention here and his philosophical poem on the nature of things and we actually have Montaigne's own copy of that text which he annotated and underlined and which is a fascinating source in its own right and from Lucretius I think he takes two things really firstly a sense of the contingency and randomness of life and secondly an emphasis on pleasure and tranquility

peace of mind as being the goals that you should be pursuing in seeking to live. When you mentioned Plutarch and Seneca, did you say, a half sentence saying, he learned from them that you were things that you couldn't control, therefore you should learn to ignore them? Not to ignore them, perhaps,

but certainly to detach yourself from them. Yes, there are things which are not within your power, which are within the power of fortune, and in order to live wisely and contentedly, you need to kind of detach yourself mentally from those things, be able to deal with the fact that they might be taken away from you. Terence Gay, Mondein had a career as a public servant which lasted about 14 years until

I retired. Would you tell us about his work, what he was doing, and the effect it had on his writing? Yes. The office that he held was called Consigneur, counsellor, to the Parliament. We have to use French words here because none of these words map onto any modern concepts.

Especially Parliament is quite an easy one. Yeah, but it doesn't mean Parliament. That's the problem. Can you explain what it does mean? Yeah, it's a regional court with wide-ranging legislative and executive powers. So it, in fact, does a good deal of local administration as well as acting as a court. And Monten's job specifically was to prepare documents to be presented to the judge on both sides of a case, for example. so he spent a lot of time appraising documents, conflicting documents,

and it has been argued recently by leading Monten specialists that this was a very important formative experience for Monten and influenced the way he wrote the essays. He's always willing to think of things from both sides, as it were, and not just from one angle. And so in that sense, his work in the law, was a very important formationally experience from Montaigne. Is there more than that, the turn?

Is he finding out about matters to do with almost everyday life or everyday disputes that he couldn't find out in any other way? Yes, I think it's fair to say that, though Monten did get around more than some people think. They think he sequestered himself in his tower and wrote the essays for 20 years from 1570 to 92, fact he travelled to Rome and met the Pope's livers. Kist the Pope's livers.

Didn't like that much. That's right. He acted as a diplomat, a mediator between the two, between the Protestant king, Henry of Navarre, and the French crown. That's an amazing thing to do, doesn't it? Yeah. Well, he knew the King of Navarre very well and was a kind of friend. He was appointed, what's he called, gentleman to the king's bed,

chamber by both monarchs, both the Catholic king Charles 9th and the Protestant King of Navarre at different moments. That didn't mean he hung out in the king's bedrooms all the time. I don't think that would have been very pleasant. But it showed that he was very well connected. He moved in the highest circles. And this public life that he led is also reflected, though very indifferent. directly in the way he talks about things in the essays.

It is indirect, isn't it? Because you sort of expect from that time with a natural vanity that he protests in his opening statement that he would talk a lot about this. I mean, to know that, to bring this reconciliations about, this is very high level, very high level diplomacy, at a very crucial intellectual time. Well, he doesn't document that work as such,

but he does talk about it. He talks about it, for example, in the first essay of book three on, well, you can translate the title various ways on the useful and the honest. The useful and the honourable is perhaps a better way of putting it. It's the argument which runs from classical times between expediency and moral decisions. So you can either do something because it's expedient

or because it's morally right. And this is a question for kings, monarchs, princes, and those in any kind of power. So he talks about that in some detail, and he refers to his diplomatic experience in that chapter. In 38, the age of 38, he decided to retire. There are almost two questions. Why did he, being so wealthy as David has given a stone,

why did he want to work in the first place? And then why did he retire at 38? Well, why did he work in the first place? I think it interested him, but also because he thereby became a member of the class of parliament officials, which formed a kind of new aristocracy called, excuse the French, nobles de hob, legal aristocracy, which in the late 16th century was beginning to challenge the power of the old feudal military aristocracy.

So it was a kind of identity for him to belong to this centre of regional power, and of course it gave him access to all kinds of networking as well. Why he retired, well, he said he was just heartily tired of it and he wanted leisure to think for himself and devote himself as he puts it to the learned muses. But it's interesting, the word you use there, which is he related to think for himself. He didn't retire to be a writer. No.

He said he wanted to think, make notes on these authors. that Felicity's told us about that he read and so on and so forth. And so he went back to these vast estates, which you didn't know, cabbage from a letter, so going to David, but still there were his estates, they were his estates, and he settled down to sink. Yes, in a library. In this tower, he had a room fitted out as a library full of books.

So he worked amid the books that Felicity's been talking about and taking down a volume here and there when he needed to remind himself. passage. He has an awful lot in his memory as well, quite clearly, given the number of quotations and so on. Can I read a very short quotation? Please do. Just to tell listeners, the book he's studied with quotations, but it isn't sort of lumbered with them, is it? No. It's a pity that one can't read Latin nowadays. But you give this translation. We get translations here, thank goodness.

But you don't get the aesthetic value of the poetry. It's beautiful poetry. Montaen loved poetry. he couldn't write it but he loved it and I think one has to remember that these quotations are not just name-dropping but something that was very valuable to him but okay we're now going back to 1571 the very very earliest stage when Montaigne began

to write the essays he first started to think then he was writing a few things down and there's a one-page essay number eight in the first book very short essay where he gives us a fascinating glimpse of the genesis of the essays. Okay, this is the quotation.

When I recently retired to domestic life, I thought I would allow my mind the leisure to settle and find a fixed point in itself. But I find that on the contrary, it bolts off like a runaway horse and breed so many grotesque and fantastical monsters one on top of the other without order or relevance

that in order to contemplate their strangeness at my leisure, I've begun to make a record of them, and that's a crucial word for Montaigne to making a record of his thoughts as they flow through his mind. He uses the word a lot of times in the essays, and there are different terms for this. But I think we can stick with the single word record, register he says he uses as well.

And on he went, David Wooden. So he's there he's writing, we can call it a commonplace, book at that time. We can call it a few notes. He's just writing when he feels like it. But as he was writing, a great friend of his died, would you explain who this friend was? He was married. He was married, about marrying. He had six daughters, five of them died, so that's that. Yes, right now. Before he marries, before he retires,

when he's 24, he meets Etienne de la Boise. And he sets out to meet him. He's heard about him. When the two of them meet, they fall in love with each other. They adore each other. And this is a world partly in which women are not supposed to be the equals of men. And so the assumption is that if you're going to find someone to whom you can entrust your soul, it'll be a fellow man. And Monten says his friendship with Laboesee is one of very few and recorded history. It's like David and Jonathan. It's four or five great friendships. And he is extraordinary privileged to have had this friendship. It matters to him more than anything

else. When he sits down to write the essays... Who is this fellow then? He's a minor lawyer like Montaigne. He has one extraordinary feature, which is very difficult to make sense of in the context of Montaigne, which is he writes a little text which is translated nowadays as under the title of the anti-dictator, where he asks, why do we have authority? And his answer is, we shouldn't. All rulers, we put them there perhaps to think that they'll help us. All rulers exploit us.

And we should get rid of them. He becomes known as the first anarchist. text. So this man is a peculiar radical who, living an outwardly normal life. And Monten, I think one has to think that Monten is a rather divided personality. He loves Laboese and he loves about Laboese, his radical thought. And when he originally wants to publish the essays, he wants to put at the middle of book one, with the rest of his essays a sort of frame around it, Laboese is anti-dictator.

He can't in the end because Laboosi gets published by somebody else. it then gets banned by the censors, a subversive work. And he says, well, I can't publish this here, so I'll put in some poems by La Boisey instead. But originally the whole enterprise is one of a memorial to La Boisee. And the whole task of recording Montaigne's own thoughts is a substitute for talking to his lost friend.

In the absence of someone to talk to, he talks to himself. Keep track of his conversation with himself, he writes it down. Well, it stands for saying with the runaway horse of his imagination, thank. But what specifically in that essay on friendship is he saying that if you can just pick out the core of it? I think one of the things he's saying is that what matters in life is that sort of relationship. What do you mean by that sort of relationship? The complete openness to the other person, the sharing of everything,

the sense that the other person is another yourself, that what matters to them is the most important thing to you. What we think of as an aspect of romantic love. that sense of losing your own personal identity in someone else and putting them, regarding them as more important than yourself, and sharing everything with them. What Monta is doing with the essays is turning each of us into his friend, sharing everything with us.

Felicity Green, one thing that's very noticeable about the essays, even if you just flick to the contents, is there are extraordinarily range. Could you give listeners some idea of that range, if you just say a few titles, and then try to talk about why he went in for that. Okay, so you're absolutely right that it covers this huge range of subject matter. He tackles, for example, sort of classical ethical themes like the virtues,

so we have essays on constancy and on moderation. He tackles the passions, on sadness, on fear, on anger. He also discusses topics of more contemporary interest, so witchcraft, the new world, this is as a sense, already been mentioned, the question of reason of state in that essay on the useful and the Honourable that has also been mentioned. And as you said in your introduction, he also goes in for slightly more eccentric, unusual topics like thumbs. There's also an essay on smells. So really his...

And also are far-reaching things. Why sons are like their fathers, which takes him all over the place. Yes. And the other thing to say is that even when the title sort of announces a particular theme, the essay itself doesn't necessarily, in fact generally doesn't stick on that theme. So it's very much a patchwork. He talks with the book as being like a kind of monster or a grotesque or a mermaid. So it's this odd combination of different pieces that have been bolted together in a monstrous, grotesque kind of way.

But what ties it all together, really, he says, is the fact that these are his thoughts and the things that are going through his mind. So he himself really is the common thread that runs through all those different topics. Torrance Cave, he seems to be rather dividend about the hymn himself in it, and yet he is planted right in the middle of it, in that introduction. So don't read it because it's a vain and frivolous person talking about himself. And yet that is the thing that, as Felicity said, that really binds it together. And where is he going to go next?

In the one I just read last night about how sons are influenced by their fathers. He's talking about a drop of semen one minute. Away he goes. And it's quite wonderful. You really don't know what's going to happen, do you? So I'm asking you, how would you describe his status? Sorry, I didn't ask the question. Oh, his style, yes. Okay.

All right. Well, if one's thinking of style in the classical sense, models were nearly always classical in that period. The closest model is against Seneca. We find Seneca here again. Seneca wrote in an identifiable pro style, was known in that period, which was a relatively informal one,

with relatively long sentences somewhat rambling, and interrupted at times with very pithy statements. And Monten actually writes quite like that himself. There are long sentences that go in all sorts of directions, as you were saying about the essays themselves. And then suddenly he says something very pithy, something like, I don't teach, I tell. something that sums up his point in a nutshell as it were.

But Seneca also wrote letters. I mean, he wrote famously the letters to Lusilius. Philosophy in letter form. And the letter genre is a very important model for the essays. Some of the essays are themselves written as letters addressed to individuals. All of them are noble women that Monten knew. And a great deal of the style of the essays could be classified as a development of the style of the familiar letter, the letter to friends and family, first person singular, improvised, you range from one topic to another,

and very much focused on the moment on particular occurrences in the life of the individual. You emphatically said that it's not only unique in its time, but there's never been a book like it since. Yes, I did say that once. Monten says it's the only book of its kind in the world and it's wild and extravagant in conception.

And I think we've heard some of the reasons. reasons why that's so. The reason why nobody's written a book like it since, I think, is that, well, this will take a while, we need to backtrack a bit. Is this okay? And to ask about the word essay, what an essay is. Because when Monten called his book essays, he wasn't slotting himself neatly into a pre-existing genre of the essay. Nobody written essays before in that sense. After Montaigne, everybody, but he starts writing essays, you know, Bacon, Cornwallis, all kinds of people. Locke, you know, essay on human understanding, Charles Lamb, particularly in England it's picked up. But nobody did it the way that Montaigne did. And nobody combined, in particular, this loose weave, reflective mode of writing with an intensive pursuit of the first person singular of self-examination.

as it were. And if I could just add that one of the strands that comes out of the essays is in fact autobiography, but it's not an autobiography because it's, of course, not organised like one. David Wooten, he comes back. The idea of death in preparing for death, he sympathises with the dying but not with the debt. Can you give us some information on that? Yeah. I mean, the word essay means a test, a trial. And for Montana, the great test is death. death is the point at which you discover who you are. This is how he thinks at the beginning at any rate. And he's gone through the death of his friend Etienne de la Boise.

La Boisee gets the plague. He dies over several days in great agony. And while he dies, he delivers great speeches to all and sundry. His family gather around him. Monten is there. Monten says his speeches are a little long. He goes on and on about how brave he's being. And this becomes for Montaigne a sort of model of how to die.

This is the stoic, heroic model of death, where you bear pain with fortitude and tell everyone that you're doing this. And so multi-nerat's an essay is to philosophise is to learn how to die. And the point of that essay is that we must always... He says, when death comes from us, we must have our boots on.

We must be ready to travel. We don't know when we're going to die. It can happen at any moment. And at that moment, we should be prepared for it. So in a sense, the assays are a series of tests of himself for his own preparedness for death. And then in 1571, I think it is... It also has a view that when you've got to a certain age,

almost any age, you had enough, that's all right. so you need some fussing. Indeed. And this he gets from Lucretius. You've either had a good life in which case it's all right. You've got nothing to complain about or you've had a bad life. In which case, what's the point of fussing? You might as well move on. And I say move on.

Of course, one of the questions is very rarely writes as if there's anything after death. Death is the end most of the time in what he says. And certainly from Lucretius is one of his sources. Death is absolutely the end. Lucretius writes as an atheist. So Monten is preparing for death. And then he has this. extraordinary experience a little before he retires where he's knocked up his horse and rendered unconscious.

And he comes to and he doesn't know what's happened at all, and he's lost all memory. And he's very in pain and writhing, but he doesn't actually feel the pain. And he makes a sort of discovery that maybe death, maybe you could die without really knowing you've died. Maybe death could just be a moment that you're not even experiencing. And in that sense, he moves in his thinking about death. So at the very end, he revises his essays. in the different editions, the wording changes. The very end of his,

the final version of one of his essays, he says that he wants a peaceful death and a quiet, silent death, very much unlike Laboesee, who died ranting about what a fine person he was. Although we're told that when Montaigne was near to death in 1588, in Paris, he had a very painful medical condition, the stone, kidney stones,

that he behaved like Laboesee and was brave and bothered. Felicity Green, can you tell us about the philosophy of scepticism, which had a strong influence on him? Yes, well this is again connected to this idea of essaying as a trial. So Montaigne is not in the business really of presenting knowledge as something which is definitive or certain or reliable and stable. All of his thoughts have a much more provisional status and a much more skeptical status. So skepticism being the idea that we have no certain. foundation for knowledge.

What do I know? Exactly, what do I know? And the fact that that's asked in the form of a question is also significant. We can't even know whether we can know things with certainty or not. Even that is in doubt. So he's really very important in the history of scepticism in that he takes the Peronian ideas of this ancient thinker, Sextus and Pirog's.

So Piro was an ancient skeptic and his brand of skepticism was this very radical form of skepticism. in which, as I was saying, even the certainty of knowledge is in doubt. So it's not a form of scepticism that says we cannot know anything. Even that assertion is problematic. So there's nothing really that we can either affirm or deny. Everything has to remain in suspension. So we suspend judgment. And that idea, that Pyrinist idea,

Sextus Empiricus, another ancient author, is a sort of important conduit for that. And Montaigne is not the first person to read him, but he's really one of the main people who popularizes these ideas in the central essay of the book, The Apology for Raymond Sabon, which is by far the longest of the essays and also in that vital position in the middle of the work,

and which is really a demolition of human claims to knowledge. And human presumption in general, he also talks about the ways in which we think of ourselves as being nobler or more important than animals and how those presumptions don't have a secure foundation. So there's a great interest on his part in that, that spirit of doubt. And he does the same.

It takes the same attitude of cannibals. We think they're barbarians. They've ever right to think we are barbarians. And I'll prove that we are barbarians. Absolutely. So when he's talking about the ways of life of New World peoples, that's the strategy that he's deploying a kind of defamiliarization where barbarians look like barbarians from our point of view.

But when you look at their culture from the standpoint of their own customs, we look just as outlandish, just as absurd as they do to us. So there isn't, again, there's not. not a solid foundation upon which to ground these things. Custom kind of fills the gap that could have been taken by reason. Terence Cave, Montaigne was living at a period, all sorts of things have happened, but it was a period of great religious intensity and conflict. The Reformation had come with a host of new ideas which threatened the foundations of the old Roman Catholic religion. David's mentioned, as David Wooten's mentioned it, but can you just tell us a bit more about

Can we map an attitude to religion that he has? Yes. I think the first thing to say is that we can't, of course, have access to his most secret thoughts and knowing what the state of somebody's belief is is always difficult anyway. Historically speaking, he lived at a time when most people, though not everybody, accepted some sort of religious explanation of the universe. the religious institutions were very strong and quite coercive, of course. And so there's every reason to accept as genuine Montaigne's decision to respect to respect the institution of the Catholic Church in which he was born, into which he was born.

and his acknowledgement that the church mediated the truth of religion, that meant he didn't have to worry about them anymore. And he could go on talking, having made that kind of excuse, which he says on several occasions, one, for example, in an essay on repentance, where he talks about it in quite different ways in the way the church talks about penitence. He calls it repentance.

He says you can't really repent. It would mean changing yourself, which is not possible. That's very interesting, isn't it? If you say what you've done is what you shouldn't have done, you're becoming a different person, and so what's the point? Yeah. But he starts that essay with a kind of formal excuse. I acknowledge the truth, teachings of the church.

So he gives himself license to speak otherwise outside the frontiers of the knowledge religious doctrine without getting into trouble, because it's very important to say that when you went to Rome, kiss the slippers of the Pope and all that stuff, The papal censors got hold of a copy of his book which he carried round with him. Probably he was marketing it, I don't know.

And they checked it through to see if there was anything that would worry them in it. They found a few references to Fortune, which is a sort of pagan personification that they thought was a bit dodgy. But they said in a friendly way just to correct some of these, and he didn't, for the most part. And no more fuss. A hundred years later, he was on the index of prohibited books and Catholic Church, because by then

the kind of way he spoke about things in the essays had influenced a whole generation of free thinkers who were much more explicitly atheistic. Felicity Green, just briefly because we mentioned it in an earlier reply

you gave about cannibals. It became a very celebrated essay more than cannibals, and there's reason to believe that because the English translation of Montagnar's made very early, just after 16,000, Shakespeare may well have ready to come his way and there seems to be direct reference to it in the tempest. Yes.

But what did you say about cannibals that took people's interest so strongly? I think the really sort of striking thing about on cannibals is it's almost ethnographic approach to the new world. So he doesn't want to offer a kind of moralising discussion of cannibalism. He wants to situate cannibalism in the context of the whole kind of cultural system that these indigenous peoples have. So he talks about their everyday habits, the houses they live in, the kind of food they eat, the kind of songs they sing,

and also about their metaphysical beliefs, their religious beliefs, their moral values. And he wants to interpret cannibalism in that context. And that sort of dispassionate view of a whole cultural system is a real kind of anticipation of anthropology and ethnography. You've got into an aria of appreciation about them, though, doesn't it? There's two or three pages where these wonderful people. He does. I mean, he does present them as these wonderful people,

and that certainly has a legacy in later writers, such as Rousseau, who are very interested in this idea of the noble savage, this real idealisation of savage peoples as being closer to nature. And there is that in Montaigne. But I think there's also something else in Montaigne. There's also a sense that these people are, in their closest to nature, also more violent, more cruel, perhaps, than more civilised peoples. So it's not just a straightforward idealisation.

not the savage. I don't agree quite with that. He's living in a world in which people are tortured regularly as a form of legal inquiry, a legal inquiry that he's participated in, in which people are executed in the most extraordinary painful ways. And I think one of the things he wants to say is, he writes an essay on cruelty and he treats cruelty as one of the most dreadful vices. And one of the things he wants to say is, we think they're cruel, but that's because we are blind to our own forms of cruelty. Yes, and he does very much want to draw that comparison. So I think he says, in fact that tearing people apart when they're dead, as cannibals do, is much less dreadful than tearing them apart when they're alive as we do now.

So there definitely is that critical element. He's difficult to pigeonhole, David Woodland, as Terran's cave as made clear. He became more and more accepted. His influence went right over the century, right up to today, Golvidal, towards the end of his life thought the only person was reading and read himcessantly and tried to imitate him. would you say was a philosopher, could we call him a philosopher? Well, I would want to call him a philosopher.

He carefully sort of says, I'm a philosopher by accident. I'm not really a philosopher. And he won't do philosophy in the sense in which it's been done primarily in the 16th century, which is Aristotinian philosophy, where you go through a series of arguments which ends up with by proving something because his whole point is you can't prove anything. What he's practicing is a rather different sort of philosophy. He's studying how you should live.

And one of the things he thinks he's learning is that you must live in the moment, that if he tells a little story of an ancient Greek philosopher who's talking to a king and the king, he asks the king what he's going to do. And the king says, well, I'm going to conquer Italy. And he says, what are you going to do after that? I'm going to conquer Africa. What are you going to do after that? I'm going to conquer the world.

What are you going to do after that? I'm going to sit down and have a glass of wine and relax. Oh, why don't you just sit down now and have a glass of wine and relax? Bontent, the answer to life is why go on doing all these things which are about becoming important if all that really matters is sitting down and having a glass of relaxing and being at peace with yourself. And so the whole enterprise is one about learning how to live with yourself. And you can only do that, he thinks, if you learn to escape from some of these anxieties and vanities that drive you.

Terence Kay, can you give the list of some brief idea, I'm afraid? The number of philosophers and thinkers' rights he influenced over the next four or five hundred years. That's a difficult one. But he was certainly read immediately by, immediately by, thinkers of various kinds. Charon is one example who plagiarized nearly the whole of Montaigne in order to make his own philosophical statement. The first major figure, one would refer to as Descartes, who doesn't acknowledge Montaigne, but he must have read him. And Descartes has almost the opposite take on skepticism to Montaigne. He admits that you can doubt everything. But he says,

if you doubt everything, you come to the conclusion that at least you know your thinking, I'm thinking, therefore I am. And so Descartes then makes the step of notoriously separating mind from body. Mind is immaterial and the body is material and so on. Monten doesn't do that. You know, if you

go back historically beyond Descartes to Montaigne, you find somebody who thinks through the body. And I would have liked to say more about that, but I think we haven't. No, we haven't. But you wanted a number of people. Well, one or one or two more

I'm awfully sorry, but we're coming to the end of the programme. I think I would choose the 18th century philosophers, as they're known, the informal philosophers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, who adopted very much the same kind of relativistic view as in the cannibal, culturally relativistic view of the world, but were much further on in terms of an open willingness to doubt the truth of the church or the institution of the church. the church.

Yes, curiously, although it's almost an exact contemporary of Shakespeare, he seems more an Enlightenment figure, doesn't he, David Woodman? Yes, the Enlightenment loves him. And the fact that he's on the index and a prohibited book is fine as far as as they're concerned. And the fact that he talks very openly and frankly about sex is fine as far as they're

concerned. And the fact that he rejects conventional Christian morality and replaces it by the pursuit of pleasure and happiness is fine as far as they're concerned. What Monten lacks which the Enlightenment does have is the desire to change

and reform the world. He very much thinks that there's no point in trying to improve things. By and large if you're trying to improve things, you just make them worse. You have to accept things as they are and learn to live with them. And have a glass of wine. And have a glass of wine. Which he had tonnes and tons. Being a mangrove. Well, thank you

very much, Felicity Green, David Wooden and Terence Gave. Next week we'll be talking about the ancient belief of Gnosticism, nosis, from the Greek word knowledge. And thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash radio 4.