Justified True Belief

(●) The Catholic gentleman who invented the essay by writing about himself, and taught Europe to ask how much a man really knows. + In 1571 a lawyer of thirty-eight in southwestern France quit his job, climbed to the top floor of a round tower on his estate, and started writing down whatever he happened to be thinking about. He called the pieces essais, which in his French meant trials or attempts, the way you might assay a coin to see how much silver is really in it. Nobody had written a book quite like it before, and within a century half of Europe was imitating it. The English word "essay" comes from him. What he was attempting, over and over, was a weighing of his own mind. He found it a poor instrument. Montaigne lived through the French Wars of Religion, eight civil wars between Catholics and Protestants in the thirty years from 1562 to his death, fought by men on both sides who were entirely certain they were right, and the spectacle of that certainty burning villages left a permanent mark on him. He set against it the emblem he had struck on a medal, a balance hanging level, and the question he came to read into it: Que sais-je? What do I know? He mattered to Christian thought in two opposite ways, and both are worth knowing. He was a believing Catholic who died at Mass, and he argued at book length that human reason left to itself cannot reach God, so that faith has to be a gift. He also handed the next two centuries a skepticism so thorough that it forced philosophers and apologists to build again from the ground up. Pascal read him constantly, argued with him constantly, and produced out of that quarrel the most famous defense of Christianity written in French. One small fact makes him unusually close at hand. His own printed copy of the 1588 edition survives in the municipal library at Bordeaux, its margins crammed with additions in his own handwriting, still being expanded in the last year of his life. He struck out very little. He simply kept adding, which is exactly what the book is about.

(●) 1533 AD: Born at a château in Périgord and taught Latin before he learned a word of French. + Michel Eyquem was born on 28 February 1533 at the family château of Montaigne, about thirty miles east of Bordeaux. The nobility was recent and had been bought: his great-grandfather Ramon Eyquem, a Bordeaux merchant who dealt in wine, fish and dyer’s woad, the plant the cloth trade fermented into blue dye, purchased the estate and its name in 1477. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes, came from a family of Spanish merchants of converted Jewish descent who had settled in Toulouse. His father Pierre, who had soldiered in Italy and come home full of Italian schemes about education, served as mayor of Bordeaux from 1554 to 1556. Pierre tried out those schemes on his eldest son. The baby was sent to be nursed in a poor village so that he would grow up knowing the people who worked the land. He was woken each morning by music, on the theory that a child dragged out of sleep is a child who learns badly. And he was given a German tutor who spoke no French and was forbidden to use any language with him but Latin; the whole household, servants included, picked up enough kitchen Latin to keep the rule. Montaigne says he was six years old before he learned any French, and that he came to Latin without ever being beaten for it or shedding a tear over a grammar. At six he was sent as a boarder to the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, the best humanist school in France, where the Scottish scholar George Buchanan was among his masters. He had worked through the whole course by thirteen. Then came law, probably at Toulouse. After that the record simply goes quiet, and the years immediately after are a blank even to his biographers, which is an odd thing to have to say about this particular man. He would eventually tell the world how his bowels worked, and he left almost no record of his own twenties.

(●) 1557 AD: A magistrate’s seat in the Bordeaux parlement brought him his friend and his wife. + He became a magistrate at Périgueux in 1556, and when that court was folded into the parlement of Bordeaux in 1557 he moved with it. A parlement in sixteenth-century France was not a legislature but a high court of law, which also registered royal edicts and could object to them, and Bordeaux’s was the chief court of the southwest. Montaigne sat there for thirteen years and disliked most of it: the procedural fog, the tortured Latin, the sight of men condemned on evidence nobody could really weigh. What he did find there was Étienne de La Boétie, a fellow councillor two years his senior who had written, as a very young man, a blazing essay against tyranny. Montaigne had been shown that essay long before he ever met the man, and each had heard the other’s name; then in 1559 they fell into conversation by chance at a town festivity, and the friendship that followed was the deepest experience of Montaigne’s life. He reckoned it afterwards at four years. In August 1563 La Boétie went down with a violent dysentery, and Montaigne sat by the bed for six days and wrote the whole death out afterwards in a long letter to his father: the arrangements, the jokes, the delirium, the last requests. La Boétie died at three in the morning on Wednesday 18 August 1563, aged thirty-two years, nine months and seventeen days. Montaigne counted the days. Two years later, on 22 September 1565, he married Françoise de la Chassaigne, the daughter of another councillor of the same court. He wrote about the marriage with a dryness that has embarrassed his admirers ever since, and about his children hardly at all, which is the more striking because of what happened to them. Six daughters were born. Five died in infancy. Only Léonor, born in September 1571, grew up.

(●) 1571 AD: On his thirty-eighth birthday he retired to a tower lined with a thousand books. + His father died on 18 June 1568, and Michel, the eldest of eight, inherited the estate, the lordship and the name. Pierre had left him one piece of unfinished business. Some years earlier a visitor had given the old man a fifteenth-century Latin book, the Natural Theology of the Spanish theologian Raymond Sebond, which argued that every article of the Christian faith could be established from nature and reason alone. Pierre, who read no Latin easily, had asked his son to put it into French. Montaigne did, and the translation was printed in Paris in 1569; his dedication to his father is dated 18 June 1568, the very day the old man died. In 1570 he sold his seat in the parlement. On the last day of February 1571, his thirty-eighth birthday, he had a Latin inscription painted on the wall of a small room next to his library, and it is still legible today. It says that Michel de Montaigne, long since weary of the servitude of the courts and of public office, while still sound, has withdrawn to the bosom of the learned virgins, meaning the Muses, to spend in quiet what is left of a life already more than half over, and that he has consecrated this place to his freedom, his tranquillity and his leisure. The library was on the third floor of a round tower, above a chapel and a bedroom, and it held over a thousand books, a serious collection for a country gentleman. What a visitor noticed first was the ceiling. Montaigne had sentences painted along the oak joists, sixty-seven of them, and he lived under that reading for twenty years. Sextus Empiricus, the ancient Greek skeptic whose works had just been printed in Latin in 1562, supplied several: "I suspend judgment," "I determine nothing," "to every argument an equal argument is opposed." Beside them ran Ecclesiastes, "all is vanity," and Paul, "If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know" (1 Corinthians 8:2). A skeptic and a preacher and an apostle on the same beams, saying much the same thing about the reach of the human mind. Within a year he had begun to write.

(●) 1580 AD: The first Essays went to press, and their author rode across Europe looking for a cure. + Simon Millanges of Bordeaux published the Essais in two books in the spring of 1580. Montaigne was forty-seven and had been passing kidney stones for years, an inherited misery he had watched kill his father. The stones are the reason for what came next. A man in that century who wanted relief from them went to the mineral springs, drank the water and bathed in it and hoped, and so in June Montaigne set out for the baths of Germany, Switzerland and Italy, and stayed away for seventeen months and eight days. The travel journal his secretary kept, and which Montaigne later took over himself, is the least guarded thing he ever produced, because he never meant it for print. It records the beds, the sauces, the small German glasses and the insipid wine, the Protestant ministers he sought out in Swiss towns to argue theology with, and, in detail that would horrify a modern editor, every stone he passed. In Rome he was received by Pope Gregory XIII, had his book inspected by the papal censors, who returned it with mild objections and no ban, and was made an honorary Roman citizen, a piece of flattery that delighted him more than he liked to admit. One passage in it catches him exactly. He travelled with no fixed route, and if anyone complained that he had doubled back, his answer was that he had no settled course and only meant to see places he had not seen. He was like a man reading a fine story, the journal says, who begins to dread coming to the end of it.

(●) 1581 AD: Bordeaux elected him mayor while he was in Italy, and he governed four years between two armed religions. + He was still at the baths at Lucca on 7 September 1581 when a letter told him that Bordeaux had elected him mayor on 1 August. He tried to refuse. He was home at the end of November, and there a letter from Henry III himself caught up with him, dated the twenty-fifth, saying that the king required and expressly commanded him to take up the office without delay, and that a refusal would greatly displease him. Montaigne was sworn in that December. The job was harder than the title suggests. Bordeaux was a Catholic city in a province full of Protestants, seventy miles from Nérac and the court of Henry of Navarre, the Protestant heir to the French throne who would eventually become Henry IV. Montaigne was known to both of those men and, what was rarer, trusted by both, which in those years amounted to nearly a profession in itself, and he spent four years keeping a lid on a city that each side wanted for its own. His fellow citizens re-elected him in 1583 for a second two-year term, an honour granted only twice before, and he could say afterwards that he left behind neither hatred nor cause of offence. The end of it was ugly, and it is the one episode for which he is still reproached. In June 1585, in the last weeks of his second term, plague reached Bordeaux and eventually killed something like half the city. Montaigne was outside the walls. On 30 July, from Libourne, he wrote to the magistrates that he would not come in for the ceremony of handing over, offered to meet them anywhere outside the town, and said he would do whatever they judged the public service required. They did not ask him to come. He never entered the city again as mayor, and the following spring the war and the plague drove him and his household out of their own house for six months, wandering as guests wherever they could be taken in.

(●) 1588 AD: A third book, a night in the Bastille, and a young reader who would carry his work past his death. + He went up to Paris in early 1588 with a manuscript. Abel L’Angelier printed it in June: a fifth edition, adding a whole third book of thirteen long chapters and some six hundred additions to the first two. It was the last edition Montaigne saw through the press. Paris that year was a city in insurrection. The Catholic League, the hardline Catholic party that wanted the Protestant heir excluded by force, drove Henry III out of his own capital in May. In July Montaigne was arrested and shut in the Bastille by a League commander as a reprisal against the king. Catherine de’ Medici, the queen mother, intervened, and he was released the same day. He was back at his business the next morning, which at that moment included carrying messages between Henry III and Henry of Navarre. The historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou, who walked with him in the courtyard at Blois that winter, remembered him saying that the troubles could not end without the death of either Navarre or the Duke of Guise. That spring he had met a reader. Marie de Gournay was a young woman from Picardy who had taught herself Latin without a master, had come across the Essays at eighteen, and had travelled to Paris specifically to meet the man who wrote them. Montaigne called her his fille d’alliance, his daughter by adoption, and stayed with her family for some months. It was the best thing that happened to his book. When he was dead, she edited it.

(●) 1592 AD: He died at fifty-nine, in his own room, at the elevation of the host. + He spent his last three years at home, still adding to the book. Henry of Navarre, now Henry IV, invited him to court in 1590 and he answered that he was too ill to come. Then quinsy took him, an abscess in the throat that swells until a man cannot swallow or speak. Étienne Pasquier, a lawyer and correspondent who gathered the details afterwards, reported that Montaigne lay three days in full possession of his mind but unable to say a word, so that he had to write down what he wanted. He asked his wife to send for certain neighbouring gentlemen to say goodbye to them. When they had come, he had Mass said in his bedroom, and at the elevation, the moment in the service when the priest raises the host, the consecrated bread of communion, above his head for the room to see, Montaigne fell forward on the bed with his arms stretched out in front of him and died. It was 13 September 1592. Three years later Marie de Gournay published the edition that made his reputation, working from a corrected copy his widow had sent her. That copy is lost. But Montaigne’s own annotated 1588 volume, the one scholars call the Bordeaux copy, came through, and anyone may see there what he was doing in the last months: not revising, exactly, but talking on, filling every white space with second thoughts.

What He Taught

(T1) Human reason is a far weaker instrument than its owners suppose, and the honest question is what do I know. + Think of the last time you were absolutely sure of something and turned out to be wrong. Not mistaken about a fact you had never checked, but sure, the kind of sure you would have bet money on. Montaigne collected those moments the way other men collect coins, and he collected them from history and from travellers’ reports as well as from himself: the things every nation knows for certain, and the next nation over knows the opposite just as certainly. Out of that he built the longest chapter he ever wrote, the "Apology for Raymond Sebond," which runs to about a sixth of the whole book. An apology in the old sense is not an expression of regret but a defense, a speech made on somebody’s behalf, and the somebody here was a theologian long dead whose book Montaigne had once translated. The argument is that our senses deceive us, that our reasoning is steered by our digestion and our mood and the customs we were raised in, that animals do by instinct what we congratulate ourselves on doing by intellect, and that in two thousand years the philosophers have not managed to agree on a single conclusion. The name for all of this is skepticism, and the word needs a little care, because we use it today in a narrower way than he did. Call a man a skeptic now and you mean he refuses to believe things. An ancient skeptic was not a man who denied things. He was a man who, finding the arguments on each side evenly matched, suspended judgment and lived quietly without a verdict. The Greek for it, epecho, "I suspend judgment," was painted on one of Montaigne’s ceiling beams. Around 1576 he had a medal struck for himself, his age on one face and on the other a pair of scales hanging level under that same Greek word. Later, in the "Apology," he gave the balance a French question to carry: Que sais-je?, What do I know? Not "I know nothing," which would be a claim like any other and would refute itself. A question, held open. Where does this leave a Christian? Montaigne thought it left him exactly where he ought to be: emptied of self-confidence and therefore teachable. His critics, then and since, have thought it leaves a man with nothing to hold a belief by except habit. Both readings can quote him, and the argument over which is right is most of his reception history.

(Q) "This fancy is more certainly understood by interrogation: 'What do I know?' as I bear it in the emblem of a balance." + Source: Montaigne, Essays II.12, "Apology for Raymond Sebond" (Cotton translation, W. C. Hazlitt’s revision, 1910 printing). He has just explained the skeptics’ difficulty: as soon as they say "I doubt," someone catches them by the throat and makes them admit they are at least certain they doubt. A question, he says, escapes that trap in a way a statement cannot.

(T2) A man who studies himself honestly finds the whole human condition in there. + Here is the move that makes him original. Having decided that he cannot know the world, Montaigne turns to the one specimen he has continuous access to, and writes down what he finds: that he has a bad memory, that he cannot bear to be woken suddenly, that he is afraid of doctors, that he contradicts himself between breakfast and supper. Sixteenth-century readers found this astonishing and some of them found it indecent. Books were supposed to be about great matters. His defense is not that he is interesting. It is that he is ordinary, and that the ordinary is where the human race actually lives. Every man, he says, carries the entire form of the human condition. Study yourself far enough down and you are no longer studying yourself; you are looking at the thing all of us are made of. That is why he keeps insisting that a private life will carry the whole weight of moral philosophy as well as a famous one will. The method is in the title. An essai is a trial run, a testing, and the point of a trial run is that it may fail. Montaigne is not reporting settled conclusions from a finished mind; he is showing the mind at work, changing, catching itself out. "I cannot fix my object," he writes in the same chapter: "I do not paint its being, I paint its passage." A reader who has kept a journal and gone back to it a year later knows the sensation exactly. Christian readers have always found this double-edged and have said so from the start. Self-examination is a Christian discipline older than Montaigne by fifteen centuries: "Search me, O God, and know my heart!" (Psalm 139:23). But the psalmist examines himself before God and asks to be shown what is wrong. Montaigne examines himself before himself, and reports.

(Q) "I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: 'tis all one; all moral philosophy may as well be applied to a common and private life, as to one of richer composition: every man carries the entire form of human condition." + Source: Montaigne, Essays III.2, "Of Repentance" (Cotton translation, W. C. Hazlitt’s revision, 1910 printing). He is answering the obvious objection, that a country gentleman with no great deeds to his name has no business writing a book about himself. A few lines earlier he admits he may contradict himself from one minute to the next, and adds that he never contradicts the truth.

(T3) Reason cannot climb up to God; faith is a gift let down from above. + The "Apology" grew out of the errand his father had set him. Sebond, whose Latin Montaigne had turned into French at the old man’s request, had claimed that every article of Christian belief could be proved from the book of nature, and by Montaigne’s day two objections were being made against him. The first was that Christians ought not to rest their faith on human reasoning at all. The second was simply that his reasonings were weak. Montaigne answers the first by half agreeing with it and the second by arguing that nobody’s reasonings are strong, so Sebond is in no worse company than Plato. The first answer is the one that matters here, and it has a name: fideism, from the Latin fides, faith. A fideist holds that the central truths about God are received by faith rather than reached by argument. Montaigne’s version is not crude. He does not say reason is worthless or that Christians should stop thinking; he says plainly that putting our God-given faculties to the service of our faith is the noblest use we can make of them, and that a Christian can have no better aim than to extend and strengthen the truth of his belief. What he denies is that the ladder reaches. If faith were something men could argue their way into, he says, then out of all the first-rate minds of the past ages, surely somebody would have managed it. So the hand has to come down from above, and Montaigne says so at the end. He closes the whole vast chapter by quoting a line from the Stoics, the ancient school that taught a man to steady himself by mastering his own passions and accepting whatever nature sends. Man is a vile thing, the line runs, unless he raises himself above humanity. Montaigne calls that a good wish and an absurd one, since a man can no more stride beyond his own legs than make the handle bigger than the hand, and then he says where the raising actually comes from. Christians have divided over this ever since, and the division is not simply Catholic against Protestant. Thomas Aquinas, three centuries before, had argued that reason really does establish some truths about God, and Reformed writers after Calvin held that the creation itself preaches. Set beside Paul writing to the Romans, Montaigne concedes too much: "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them" (Romans 1:19). Set beside the smugness of his own century, he is saying something the New Testament also says, that no one comes to the Father by being clever.

(Q) "'Tis faith alone that vividly and certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion." + Source: Montaigne, Essays II.12, "Apology for Raymond Sebond" (Cotton translation, W. C. Hazlitt’s revision, 1910 printing). The widely circulated Project Gutenberg text garbles the sentence at exactly this point, and the printed page is the safer witness. It stands near the opening of the chapter, before the long demolition of human certainty begins, and the sentence immediately following says that fitting our natural faculties to the service of our faith is a brave and laudable attempt. Both halves are Montaigne (T3).

(T4) We call barbarous whatever is not our own custom, and so we never see the cruelty nearest us. + Behind this one lies an afternoon at Rouen. Montaigne gives no year, only that it happened while the late King Charles IX was there, which puts it most likely in 1562, when the boy king came to the city after its siege. Three men from the Brazilian coast were brought to meet him, and Montaigne, then twenty-nine, got to talk with one of them, a war captain, through an interpreter so bad that he could get almost nothing out of him. He asked the men what had struck them most about France. They said they found it strange that so many big armed men should obey a child, and stranger still that half the population went hungry at the doors of the other half without taking those others by the throat or setting fire to their houses. There had been a third observation. Montaigne had forgotten it by the time he wrote, and says he is troubled about it. Out of that afternoon came "Of Cannibals," which begins by conceding everything horrifying about the practice its title names, and then turns the mirror. Those people eat their enemies after killing them. We rack living men, roast them by degrees, and set dogs on them, and we have done it lately, he says, not to foreign enemies but to neighbours and fellow citizens, and under colour of piety and religion. He is writing within a few years of the massacre of French Protestants that began in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Every reader knew what he meant. The logic underneath is that custom is nearly invisible to the person formed by it. We have no measure of truth and reason, he says, except the opinions and habits of the place we happen to live, and so whatever is not done at home gets filed under barbarism. He is not saying that all customs are equally good; he says flatly that these people are barbarous by the rule of reason, and he still thinks torture worse. He is saying that the one set of cruelties you will certainly fail to notice is your own.

(Q) "I am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own." + Source: Montaigne, Essays, Book I, "Of Cannibals" (chapter 30 in Cotton’s numbering, 31 in modern editions; Cotton translation, W. C. Hazlitt’s revision, 1910 printing). The sentence directly afterwards is the one that got him remembered: there is more barbarity in tearing a man apart alive, by racks and torments and dogs, than in eating him after he is dead, and this has been done not by strangers but by neighbours, under colour of piety and religion (T4).

(Q) "He shall rise if God extraordinarily lends him His hand; he shall rise by abandoning and renouncing his own proper means, and by suffering himself to be raised and elevated by means purely celestial. It belongs to our Christian faith, and not to his Stoical virtue, to pretend to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis." + Source: Montaigne, Essays II.12, "Apology for Raymond Sebond" (Cotton translation, W. C. Hazlitt’s revision, 1910 printing). The "he" of the sentence is man in general, any man at all, and these are the last words of the longest chapter Montaigne ever wrote: his own verdict on where four hundred pages of demolished certainty leave a person standing. The Stoic had said that man is vile unless he lifts himself above humanity. Montaigne answers that the wish is good and the method impossible, and that the lifting, if it happens, is done by another hand than ours.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Pascal read him daily, quarrelled with him on every page, and built an apologetic out of his diagnosis. + Blaise Pascal knew the Essays so well that he could reproduce Montaigne’s turns of phrase without noticing he was doing it, and he said so in the Pensées, the bundle of notes toward a defense of the Christian faith that he left unfinished at his death: "It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him." That is affection, or something close to it. He also thought the man was dangerous. His list of complaints is blunt and worth quoting at its full sharpness: the lewd words, the credulity, the opinions on suicide and on death, and then the charge that does the real work, that Montaigne "suggests an indifference about salvation, without fear and without repentance." Both passages come from W. F. Trotter’s translation, fragments 63 and 64. But look at what Pascal did with him rather than only at what he said about him. In 1655, at Port-Royal, Pascal had a long conversation with the theologian Isaac Le Maistre de Saci which someone wrote down, and in it he sets two books side by side. Epictetus the Stoic knows man’s duty and greatness and knows nothing of his weakness, so he ends in pride. Montaigne knows man’s weakness to the bottom and has no account of his greatness, so he ends in ease and doubt. Each is half right and each is ruined by what he lacks. Only the gospel, Pascal says, holds both together, because it knows where to put each half: everything weak in us belongs to a nature ruined by sin, and everything strong in us to grace. That is why the Pensées reads in places less like a book of meditations than like an answer to one specific opponent. Its picture of the human being as the glory and the refuse of the universe, restless, diverted, unable to sit alone in a room, is Montaigne’s inventory of human weakness taken over entire and then turned to a use Montaigne never intended. The greatest apologist in the French language got half his evidence from a skeptic.

(†) His revival of ancient doubt forced a whole generation to rebuild, and it reached English readers in time to shape Shakespeare and Bacon. + The timing here matters. The works of Sextus Empiricus, the ancient Greek skeptic, had been sitting almost unread until Henri Estienne printed a Latin translation in 1562. Montaigne read it, absorbed it, and did something no scholar had done: he put it into a charming book that laymen wanted to read. The historian of philosophy Richard Popkin, whose The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes is the standard account, called the result a crisis, and traced its consequences through the next century. Those consequences were constructive. René Descartes, sitting down a generation later to find something that could not be doubted, was answering the challenge Montaigne had made popular, and his famous starting point, I think therefore I am, is the reply of a man who has been handed the "Apology" and told to do better. Natural theology, the attempt to argue from the world to God, had to be done more carefully afterwards, and it was. Francis Bacon, who read French, borrowed the form and the title for his own Essays as early as 1597, and made of it something much drier and more useful. The whole book reached English readers in 1603, in John Florio’s exuberant translation, and Shakespeare read that: Gonzalo’s speech about an ideal commonwealth in The Tempest lifts its details from Florio’s "Of the Caniballes," almost phrase for phrase. The shape Montaigne invented, a short piece in which a writer thinks aloud in his own voice about one thing, turned out to be the shape Christian writers in English would reach for again and again: it is the form of Chesterton’s newspaper columns and of Lewis’s wartime broadcasts. The church’s official verdict was less friendly, and it came very late. Rome placed the Essays on the Index of Prohibited Books, the standing list of titles Catholics were forbidden to read, in 1676, eighty-four years after Montaigne’s death and nearly a century after Roman censors had read the book in his presence and let it pass. It stayed on the list for something close to two hundred years.

(†) Where his own record falls short: a faith held as an inheritance, and a death faced like a Stoic. + Montaigne was a Christian and never pretended otherwise, so the account against him is a short one. Short is not the same as empty, though, and three entries belong in it. - Faith as custom. He saw the problem clearly: "We are Christians by the same title that we are Perigordins or Germans," he wrote in the "Apology," meaning that most people hold their religion because of where they were born, and that such a hold is worth very little. It is a rebuke, and a good one. What he never supplies is the remedy. His own counsel is to keep quietly to the religion of one’s country and its established forms, which leaves the reader exactly where the rebuke found him. Scripture asks for something else: a faith that knows its object and can say why. "I know whom I have believed" (2 Timothy 1:12), and "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15). - Reason retired. His case against human understanding is so complete that it takes down more than he wanted. If our faculties cannot deliver anything, they cannot deliver the recognition that a revelation has arrived, and faith becomes a bare leap in the dark rather than trust in someone known. Paul assumes the opposite when he argues that the creation leaves men without excuse (Romans 1:20), and the Gospels appeal to witnesses, to evidence and to a body that could be handled. - Dying like a Stoic. Pascal’s hardest charge is also the fairest. Montaigne wrote about death constantly and almost always as an ancient would: as a natural event to be met with composure. In "A Custom of the Isle of Cea" he collects the noble suicides of antiquity at length and with evident admiration, pausing only once, halfway through, to defer to the divine will, and in his last book he advises that if you do not know how to die, nature will tell you what to do on the spot. Christian hope is not composure. It rests on a resurrection, and on judgment after death (Hebrews 9:27), neither of which Montaigne’s pages let a reader feel. He died at Mass, and there is no reason to doubt his religion. The fair verdict is the one Pascal reached: a man who told the truth about how little we are, and stopped one step short of the news that would have made that truth bearable.