The Complete Essays (59 page)

A bishop has testified in writing
¹⁷
that there is, at the other end of the world, an island which the Ancients called Dioscorides, fertile and favoured with all sorts of fruits and trees and a healthy air; the inhabitants are Christian, having Churches and altars which are adorned with no other images but crosses; they scrupulously observe feast-days and fasts, pay their
tithes meticulously and are so chaste that no man ever lies with more than one woman for the whole of his life; meanwhile, so happy with their lot that, in the middle of the ocean, they know nothing about ships, and so simple that they do not understand a single word of the religion which they so meticulously observe – something only unbelievable to those who do not know that pagans, devout worshippers of idols, know nothing about their gods apart from their statues and their names. The original beginning of Euripides’ tragedy
Menalippus
went like this:

O Juppiter, car de toy rien sinon
Je ne connois seulement que le nom…

[O Juppiter – for I know nothing nothing of thee but thy Name…]
¹⁸

[B] I have also seen in my time criticisms laid against some books for dealing exclusively with the humanities or philosophy without any admixture of Theology. The opposite case would not be totally indefensible, namely: that Christian Doctrine holds her rank better when set apart, as Queen and Governor; that she should be first throughout, never ancillary nor subsidiary; that Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic should [C] perhaps [B] choose their examples from elsewhere not from such sacred materials, as also should the subjects of plays for the theatre, farces and public spectacles; that Divinity is regarded with more veneration and reverence when expounded on its own style rather than when linked to human reasoning; that the more frequent fault is to see Theologians writing like humanists rather than humanists like Theologians (Philosophy, says St Chrysostom, has long been banished from the School of Divinity as a useless servant judged unworthy of glimpsing, even from the doorway when simply passing by, the sanctuary of the holy treasures of sacred doctrine); that the language of men has its own less elevated forms and must not make use of the dignity, majesty and authority of the language of God. I myself let it say – [C]
verbis indisciplinatis
[using undisciplined words] – [B] fortune, destiny, accident, good luck, bad luck, the gods and similar phrases, following its own fashion.
¹⁹

[C] I am offering my own human thoughts as human thoughts to be considered on their own, not as things established by God’s ordinance,
incapable of being doubted or challenged; they are matters of opinion not matters of faith: what I reason out
secundum me
, not what I believe
secundum Deum
²⁰
–
like schoolboys reading out their essays, not teaching but teachable, in a lay not a clerical manner but always deeply devout.

[B] And might it not be said, apparently reasonably, that a decree forbidding anyone to write about religion (except very reservedly) unless expressly professing to do so would not lack some image of usefulness and justice – as perhaps would one requiring me too to hold my peace on the subject?

[A] I have been told that for reasons of reverence even those who are not of our Church forbid the use among themselves of the name of God in their everyday speech.
²¹
They do not want it to be used as a kind of interjection or exclamation, nor to support testimony nor when making contracts; in that I consider they are right. Whenever we bring God’s name into our affairs or our society let it be done seriously and devoutly.

I believe there is a treatise in Xenophon somewhere in which he shows that we ought to pray to God less often, since it is not easy for us to bring our souls so frequently into that controlled, reformed and supplicatory state needed to do so; without that, our prayers are not only vain and useless: they are depraved. ‘Forgive us’, we say, ‘as we forgive them that trespass against us.’ What do those words mean if not that we are offering God our souls free from vengeance and resentment? Yet we call on God and his help to connive at wrongdoings [C] and to invite him to be unjust:

[B]
Quæ, nisi seductis, nequeas committere divis
.

[Things which you would not care to entrust to the gods, except when drawing aside.]
²²

[A] The miser prays God for the vain and superfluous preservation of his hoard; the ambitious man, for success and the achievement of his desires; the thief uses God to help him overcome the dangers and difficulties which obstruct his nefarious designs or else thanks God when he finds it easy to slit the gizzard of some passer-by. [C] At the foot of the mansion which
they are about to climb into and blow up, men say their prayers, while their purposes and hopes are full of cruelty, lust and greed.

[B]
Hoc ipsum quo tu jovis aurem impellere tentas,
Dic agedum, Staio, pro Juppiter, ô bone clamet,
Juppiter, at se se non clamet Juppiter ipse?

[Try telling Statius what you are up to, what you have just whispered to Jove: ‘By Jove!’ he’ll say: ‘How dreadful!’ – ‘Well, cannot Jove say
By Jove!
to Himself?’]
²³

[A] Queen Margaret of Navarre relates the tale of a young ‘prince’ – and, even though she does not name him his exalted rank is quite enough to make him recognizable; whenever he was out on an assignation (lying with the wife of a Parisian barrister) he would take a short-cut through a church and never failed to make his prayers and supplications in that holy place, both on the way there and on the way back. I will leave you to judge what he was asking God’s favour for when his soul was full of such fair cogitations! Yet she cites that as evidence of outstanding devotion. But that is not the only proof we have of the truth that it hardly befits women to treat Theological matters.

A devout reconciliation with God, a true prayer, cannot befall a soul which is impure and, at that very time, submissive to the domination of Satan. A man who calls God to his aid while he is actually engaged in vice is like a cutpurse calling on justice to help him or like those who produce the name of God to vouch for their lies:

        [B]
tacito mala vota susurro
Concipimus
.

[we softly murmur evil prayers.]
²⁴

[A] Not many men would care to submit to view the secret prayers they make to God:

Haud cuivis promptum est murmurque humilesque susurros
Tollere de templis, et aperto vivere voto
.

[It is hardly everyone who could take his murmured prayers whispered within the temples and say them aloud outside.]

That is why the Pythagorians believed that prayer should be public and
heard by all, so that God should not be begged for things unseemly or unjust – like the man in this poem:

clare cum dixit: Apollo!
Labra movet, metuens audiri: pulchra Laverna,
Da mihi fallere, da justum sandumque videri.
Noctem peccatis et fraudibus objice nubem
.

[he first exclaims, ‘Apollo!’ loud and clear; then he moves his lips, addressing the goddess of Theft and fearing to be overheard: ‘O fair Laverna: do not let me get found out; let me appear to be just and upright; cloak my sins with night and my lies with a cloud.’]
²⁵

[C] The gods heavily punished the unrighteous prayers of Oedipus by granting them: he prayed that his children should fight among themselves to decide who should succeed to his inheritance, he was wretched enough to be taken literally.

We should not ask that all things should comply with our will but that they should comply with wisdom.

[A] It really does seem that we use prayer [C] as a sort of jingle and [A] like those who exploit God’s holy words in sorcery and practical magic.
²⁶
As for their effect, we apparently count on their structure, their sound and the succession of words, [A1] or on our outward appearance. [A] For, with our souls still full of concupiscence, untouched by repentance or by any fresh reconciliation with God, we offer him such words as memory lends to our tongue, hoping in that way to obtain the expiation of our sins.

Nothing is so gentle, so sweet, so gracious as our Holy Law:
²⁷
she calls us to her, all sinful and abominable as we are; she stretches forth her arms and clasps us to her bosom, however base, vile and besmirched we may be now and shall be once again. But we on our part must look favourably upon her. We must also receive her absolution with thanksgiving and – at least for that instant when we address ourselves to her – have a soul loathing its own shortcomings and hostile to those [C] passions [A] which
²⁸
drove us to offend her.

[C] Neither the gods nor good men, Plato says, accept gifts from a wicked man:
²⁹

[B]
Immunis aram si tetigit manus,
Non sumptuosa blandior hostia
Mollivit aversos Penates
,
Farre pio et saliente mica
.

[If the hands which have touched the altar are undefiled, then, even when they are not commended by some costly sacrifice, they can appease the hostile household gods with a simple cake of meal sprinkled with salt.]
³⁰

57. On the length of life

[Montaigne, who published the first two books of his
Essays
when he was forty-seven, looks back at youth and sees thirty as the watershed dividing vigour from decline. The last word of this chapter, and so of Book I, is ‘apprenticeship’. At thirty a wise man’s ‘apprenticeship’ should doubtless be over, but, for those who make good use of their time, can knowledge and experience grow with the years?]

[A] I cannot accept the way we determine the span of our lives.
¹
I note that wise men shorten it considerably compared to the common opinion. ‘What!’ said Cato the Younger to those who wanted to stop him killing himself: ‘Am I still at the age when you can accuse me of leaving life too soon?’
²
Yet he was only forty-eight. He reckoned, considering how few men reach it, that his age was fully mature and well advanced. And those who keep themselves going with the thought that some span of life or other which they call ‘natural’ promises them a few years more could only do so provided that there was some ordinance exempting them personally from those innumerable accidents (which each one of us comes up against and is subject to by nature) which can rupture the course of life which they promise themselves.

What madness it is to expect to die of that failing of our powers brought on by extreme old age and to make that the target for our life to reach when it is the least usual, the rarest kind of death. We call that death, alone, a natural death, as if it were unnatural to find a man breaking his neck in a fall, engulfed, engulfed in a shipwreck, surprised by plague or pleurisy, and as though our normal condition did not expose us to all of those harms. Let us not beguile ourselves with such fine words: perhaps we ought, rather, to call natural anything which is generic, common to all and universal. Dying of old age is a rare death, unique and out of the normal order and therefore less natural than the others. It is the last, the uttermost way of dying; the farther it is from us, the less
we can hope to reach it; it is indeed the limit beyond which we shall not go and which has been prescribed by Nature’s law as never to be crossed: but it is a very rare individual law of hers which makes us last out till then. It is an exemption which she grants as an individual favour to one man in the space of two or three centuries, freeing him from the burden of those obstacles and difficulties which she strews along the course of that long progress.

Therefore my opinion is that we should consider whatever age we have reached as an age reached by few. Since in the normal course of events men never reach that far, it is a sign of that we are getting on. And since we have crossed the accustomed limits – and that constitutes the real measure of our days – we ought not to hope to get much farther beyond them; having escaped those many occasions of death which have tripped up all the others, we ought to admit that an abnormal fortune such as that which has brought us so far is indeed beyond the usual procedure and cannot last much longer.

It is a defect in our very laws to hold that false idea, for they do not admit that a man be capable of managing his affairs before the age of twenty-five, yet he can scarcely manage to make his life last that long! Augustus lopped five years off the old Roman ordinances and decreed that it sufficed to be thirty for a man to assume the office of judge. Servius Tullius exempted knights who had passed the age of forty-seven from obligatory war-service; Augustus remitted it at forty-five.
³
Sending men into inactivity before fifty-five or sixty does not seem very right to me. I would counsel extending our vocations and employments as far as we could in the public interest; the error is on the other side, I find: that of not putting us to work soon enough. The man who had power to decide everything in the whole world at nineteen
⁴
wanted a man to be thirty before he could decide where to place a gutter!

Personally I reckon that our souls are free from their bonds at the age of twenty, as they ought to be, and that by then they show promise of all they are capable of. No soul having failed by then to give a quite evident pledge of her power ever gave proof of it afterwards. By then – or never at all – natural qualities and capacities reveal whatever beauty or vigour they possess.

[B] Si
l’espine nou pique quand nai,
A peine que piqu jamai

[If a thorn pricks not at its birth,
It will hardly prick at all]

as they say in Dauphiné.

[A] Of all the fair deeds of men in ancient times and in our own which have come to my knowledge, of whatever kind they may be, I think it would take me longer to enumerate those which were made manifest before the age of thirty than after. [C] Yes, and often in the lives of the very same men: may I not say that with total certainty in the case of Hannibal and his great adversary Scipio? They lived a good half of their lives on the glory achieved in their youth: they were great men later compared with others, but not great compared with themselves. [A] As for me, I am convinced that, since that age, my mind and my body have not grown but diminished, and have retreated not advanced.

It may well be that (for those who make good use of their time) knowledge and experience grow with the years but vitality, quickness, firmness and other qualities which are more truly our own, and more important, more ours by their essence, droop and fade.

[B]
Ubi jam validis quassatum est viribus ævi
Corpus, et obtusis ceciderunt viribus artus,
Claudicat ingenium, delirat linguaque mensque
.

[When the body is shattered by the mighty blows of age and our limbs shed their blunted powers, our wits too become lame and our tongues and our minds start to wander.]
⁵

Sometimes it is the body which is the first to surrender to old age, sometimes too the soul; and I have known plenty of men whose brains grew weak before their stomachs or their legs; and it is all the more dangerous an infirmity in that the sufferer is hardly aware of it and its symptoms are not clear ones.

But now [A] I am complaining not that the laws allow us to work so late but that they are so late in putting us to work.

It seems to me that, considering the frailty of our life and the number of
natural hazards to which it is exposed, we should not allow so large a place in it to being born, to leisure and to our apprenticeship.
⁶