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by
Will Durant
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April 24 - May 1, 2021
Bernini returned to Rome a disappointed man. Now (1667) he made his remarkable chalk drawing of himself, at present in Windsor Castle—white locks receding over a powerful head, a face lined and gnarled with work, the once gentle eyes become hard and fearful, as if seeing whither the paths of glory lead.
In history we must chercher not la femme but le banquier.
Nowhere else on the globe had religion such power over the people, and therefore over the government. Spain rejected not only the Reformation, but—except for an Erasmian moment—the Renaissance as well. It remained medieval amid modernity, and contentedly so. The poverty of the people gloried in the wealth of the Church.
The Inquisition prided itself on preserving the medieval faith undiluted, and on saving Spain from the religious disunity that was convulsing France. Its emphasis on belief rather than conduct left the protection of morals to the clergy—who were themselves notoriously lax in their behavior—and to civil officials whose authority with the public was impaired by their subjection to Inquisition imprisonment and fines.
Under Philip II the level of morality was kept as high as the beauty of the women or the imagination of the men allowed; the natural venality of officials was moderated by the watchfulness of the King; and until the defeat of the Armada the morale of the nation was sustained by the belief that Spain was leading a holy war against Islam, the Netherlands, and England. When that dream broke, Spain collapsed in body and soul.
In the relaxing of morals that followed Philip’s death, female dress became fancier, fans were flaunted in wordless badinage, rouge glowed on faces, shoulders, bosoms, and hands, and mysterious legs were concealed in hoopskirts so ample that theater owners charged each such inflated woman for two seats.
He had done the best he could with an intelligence too cramped by education, too narrow for his empire, too inflexible for his diverse responsibilities. We cannot know that his faith was false; we only feel that it was bigoted and cruel, like almost all the faiths of the age, and that it darkened his mind and his people while it consoled their poverty and supported his pride.
“Virtue ennobles the blood.”24“Every man,” he tells Sancho, “is the son of his own works.”
In his characteristic Quixotic way he had predicted a sale of thirty million copies of his Don Quixote; the world smiled at his naïveté, and bought thirty million copies. The great story has been translated into more languages than any book except the Bible.
In that same year he dared the Inquisition, and scandalized and delighted Spain, by painting the shapely back and buttocks of The Rokeby Venus, so called from its long stay in the home of an English family that bought it for £500 and sold it to the London National Gallery for £45,000. A suffragette, angry at such an exposure of trade secrets, slashed that rosy back in six places, but it was sewed up again alluringly.
Over his tomb, by his instructions, were inscribed his name, a skeleton, and two words, Vive moriturus—”Live as though about to die.”
Only the monasteries and the churches remained, clinging to their enormous, inalienable, untaxable properties, and multiplying monks in costly idleness. While religion appeased poverty with promissory notes on Paradise, stifled thought, and invited Spain to live on its past, France and England rewarded industry, captured commerce, and entered the future. Adjustment to a changing environment is the essence of life, and its price.
In the broil of Europe between the Reformation (1517) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), this collective competition used religion as a cloak and a weapon for economic or political ends. When, after a century of struggle, the combatants laid down their arms, Christianity barely survived among the ruins.
Royal absolutism, which was the cause of civil war in England, was the effect of civil war in France.
Poverty continued, partly because of war, pestilence, and taxes, partly because the natural inequality of ability, amid the general equality of greed, ensures in each generation that the majority of goods will be absorbed by a minority of men.
His many years of campaigning had given him the bearing, morals, and odor of a soldier: strong, active, tireless, too busy to indulge in cleanliness or to duly change his clothes; sometimes, said a friend, “he stank like a corpse.”
To minds frozen in the perspective of today, the royal absolutism desired by Richelieu seems but a reactionary despotism; in the view of history, and of the great majority of Frenchmen in the seventeenth century, it was a liberating progress from feudal tyranny to unified rule. France was not ripe for democracy; most of its population were ill-fed, ill-clothed, illiterate, darkened with superstitions and murderous with certainties.
The middle classes, the artisans, and the peasants approved the absolutism of the king as the only protection they could see from the absolutism of the lords.
Richelieu defended the execution as a necessary notice to the aristocracy that they too were subject to the laws. “Nothing so upholds the laws,” he said, “as the punishment of persons whose rank is as great as their crime.”
THE religion whose varieties gave specious excuses for so many wars was beginning to suffer from its political employment; there was a growing number of men who questioned the divinity of doctrines that argued by the competitive shedding of blood; and in the upper classes doubts of the Christian ethic began to mingle with skepticism of the creed.
the complaisance of the women lagged behind the eagerness of the men, and prostitutes labored to meet the swelling demand. Paris recognized three types: the chèvre coiffée (she-goat with a hairdo) for the court, the petrel (chattering bird) for the bourgeoisie, and the pierreuse, who served the poor and lived in a stone basement.
There were educated tarts for aristocrats, like Marion Delorme, who, dying, confessed ten times, since after each shriving she reminded herself of untold sins.
Preachers complained about the calculated risk that ladies took in only partly covering their curves; if we may believe Montaigne, who was not often guilty of wishful thinking, “our ladies (dainty-nice though they be) are many times seen to go open-breasted as low as the navel.”
it was from Italy that the salon—like the violin, the château, ballet, opera, and syphilis—came to France.
Next to travel, the best education is history, which is travel extended into the past.
He agreed with most philosophers that the itch to detumesce is no reason for marriage. “I see no marriages fail sooner, or more troubled, than such as are concluded for beauty’s sake, or huddled up for amorous desires.”
Marriage should be arranged by “a third hand”; it should reject the company and conditions of [sexual] love” and should try “to imitate those of friendship”; marriage must become friendship to survive.
While Paris and some provinces murdered Protestants in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, Montaigne wrote the supreme work of French prose.
Seldom has a man so relished solitude, which is almost our direst dread. A man must sequester and recover himself from himself … We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves … altogether ours … wherein we may hoard up and establish our true liberty. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know how to be his own.
He was a humanist insofar as he loved the literature and the history of old Greece and Rome; but he was no indiscriminate idolater of classics and manuscripts; he thought Aristotle superficial and Cicero a windbag.
He admired Virgil, but preferred Lucretius.
He pretends to most of the vices, and assures us that if there is any virtue in him it entered by stealth. He had many nevertheless: honesty, geniality, humor, equanimity, pity, moderation, tolerance. He tossed explosive ideas into the air, but caught and extinguished them before they fell. In an age of dogmatic slaughter he begged his fellow men to moderate their certainties this side of murder; and he gave the modern world one of its first examples of a tolerant mind. We forgive his faults because we share them. And we find his self-analysis fascinating because we know that it is about us
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To understand himself better he studied the philosophers. He loved them despite their vain pretensions to analyze the universe and chart man’s destiny beyond the grave. He quoted Cicero as remarking that “nothing can be said so absurd but that it has been said by one of the philosophers.”
In the brave morning of his thought he adopted Stoicism. Since Christianity, splitting into fratricidal sects and bloodying itself with war and massacre, had apparently failed to give man a moral code capable of controlling his instincts, Montaigne turned to philosophy for a natural ethic, a morality not tied to the rise and fall of religious creeds. Stoicism seemed to have approached this ideal; at least it had molded some of the finest men of antiquity.
The only sin that he recognized was excess. “Intemperance is the pestilence which killeth pleasure; temperance is not the flail of pleasure, it is the seasoning thereof.”
(Here, at the very outset of the Age of Reason, a generation before Bacon and Descartes, Montaigne asks the question that they would not stop to ask, that Pascal would ask eighty years later, that the philosophers would not face till Hume and Kant: Why should we trust reason?)
Man is no more the center of life than the earth is the center of the universe. It is presumptuous of man to think that God resembles him, or that human affairs are the center of God’s interest, or that the world exists to serve man. And it is ridiculous to suppose that the mind of man can fathom the nature of God. “O senseless man, who cannot make a worm and yet will make gods by the dozen!”
“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known,” and “a persuasion of certainty is a manifest testimony of foolishness.”
The Indians he had seen at Rouen inspired him to read the reports of travelers; from these accounts he composed his essay “Of Cannibals.” Eating dead people, he thought, was less barbarous than torturing live ones. “I find nothing in that nation [Indian America] that is either barbarous or savage, unless men call that barbarism which is not common among themselves.”
Was his obeisance to religion sincere? Obviously his classical foraging had long since weaned him from the doctrines of the Church. He retained a vague belief in God conceived sometimes as Nature, sometimes as a cosmic soul, the incomprehensible intelligence of the world. At times he presages Shakespeare’s Lear: “The gods play at handball with us, and toss us up and down”;
He is willing to accept the immortality of the soul on faith, but finds no evidence for it in experience or reason;89 and the idea of eternal existence appalls him.
He notes that he is a Christian by geographical accident; otherwise “I should rather have taken part with those who worshiped the sun.”
So, after all his barbs at Christianity, and because all faiths alike are cloaks to cover our shivering ignorance, he advises us to accept the religion of our time and place.
being of Erasmian lineage, he liked the genial and worldly cardinals of Rome more than the Loyola of Geneva or the lion of Wittenberg. He regretted particularly that the new creeds were imitating the intolerance of the old. Though he laughed at heretics as fools who raised a fuss over competitive mythologies, he saw no sense in burning such mavericks. “After all, it is setting a high value on our opinions to roast people alive on account of them”
In politics too he ended as a comfortable conservative. There is no use changing forms of government; the new one will be as bad as the old, because it will be administered by men.
He was not neutral in the duel for France, but “my interest has not made me forget either the commendable qualities of our adversaries or the reproachful qualities of those whom I have supported.”
Montaigne was the most civilized of Frenchmen in that savage age.
Pascal went almost insane trying to salvage his faith from Montaigne’s questionings.
Of Montaigne, as of few authors before the eighteenth century, it may be said that he is read today as if he had written yesterday.
We are more deeply moved by Pascal’s desperate attempt to save his faith from Montaigne than by Montaigne’s willingness to have no faith at all.
