things but by their opinions about them.’9 Montaigne measures this central tenet against his own lived experiences:
There is an old Greek saying that men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them. If that assertion could be proved to be always true everywhere it would be an important point gained for the comforting of our wretched human condition. For if ills can only enter us through our judgement it would seem to be in our power either to despise them or to deflect them towards the good: if the things actually do throw themselves on our mercy why do we not act as their masters and accommodate them to our advantage? If what we call evil or torment are only evil or torment as far as our mental apprehension endows them with those qualities then it lies within our power to change those qualities. […] Let us see whether a case can be made for what we call evil not being evil in itself or (since it amounts to the same) whether at least it is up to us to endow it with a different savour and aspect.10
The repetition of ‘if’ four times in this passage shows Montaigne’s sceptical mind in action, while the phrase ‘let us see’ marks the movement from theory to personal, practical example. Montaigne is testing the concept set out by the Greek Stoic Epictetus, for can it actually be possible in reality that a person can determine their own emotional responses by regulating their thoughts? Can the theory be translated into practice? And if it can, then why isn’t that the end of all of our problems? Why do we still suffer if it is in our power to transform our suffering by changing the way we think? For the Stoics, the extent to which pain is felt is a choice; its magnitude is determined by how much mental territory it is given to exist within. While certain patterns of thought accommodate pain and give it space to grow, Stoicism was developed as a means of starving and shrinking it.
In his essay ‘On Practice’ Montaigne describes a riding accident that brought him close to death. Before the accident Montaigne had been intently preoccupied with his own mortality, but this experience led to a change in his thinking and was a practical reminder of what Seneca had warned of in his Epistle XIII, ‘Some things torment us more than they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all.’11 For Montaigne, knowledge that is gained through chance or by accident – as happens here – seems to be a particularly important way of learning:
Many things appear greater in thought than in fact. I have spent a large part of my life in perfect good health: it was not only perfect but vivacious and boiling over. That state, so full of sap and festivity, made thinking of illness so horrifying that when I came to experience it I found its stabbing pains to be mild and weak compared to my fears.
Here is an everyday experience of mine: if I am sheltered and warm in a pleasant room during a night of storm and tempest, I am dumbstruck with affliction for those then caught out in the open; yet when I am out there myself I never want to be anywhere else.
The mere thought of always being shut up indoors used to seem quite unbearable to me. Suddenly I was directed to remain there for a week or a month, all restless, distempered and feeble; but I have found that I used to pity the sick much more than I find myself deserving of pity now I am sick myself, and that the power of my imagination made the true essence of actual sickness bigger by half. I hope the same thing will happen with death, and that it will not be worth all the trouble that I am taking to prepare for it.12
Montaigne demonstrates his characteristic mental mobility in this passage as he builds a case for Stoicism out of his own ‘everyday experiences’ and thus translates reality back into philosophy. The riding accident demonstrated to him the disparity between the fearful expectations he had supposed absolute and the sudden upsetting reality of experience. His previous state of health meant that he was both physically and emotionally distanced from illness, leaving space for his imagination to create something much worse than reality. While previously, fear, dread and ‘the power of my imagination’ even in health had warped his perceptions and magnified certain unknowns, making the thought of sickness seem ‘bigger by half’. Montaigne learns through experience to measure the world more accurately. The ability to rescale experiences in order to give them their correct weight and significance is an important part of the attitude that Montaigne cultivated. A vital element of this system of weights and measures is Montaigne’s humour; the lightness of his tone and wry, carefree approach to the world helps to lighten and to shrink potentially large, heavy problems. Wry humour, born of accidents, serves as an alternative to and a defence against tragic fear and dread.
In the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne directs his mocking humour towards – among others – Seneca and the Stoics themselves. This is the longest essay that Montaigne ever wrote and marks a distinct break with Stoic philosophy. It can be read as Montaigne’s manifesto for scepticism or as Donald Frame describes it, ‘a declaration of intellectual independence’.13 In 1569, Montaigne had translated Raymond Sebond’s fourteenth-century text Theologica Naturalis from Latin into French at the request of his father. Sebond had written the book with the aim of proving the existence of God, but his attempt to reconcile philosophy and theology had proven controversial and in 1595 its prologue was placed on the Pope’s list of banned books. In his ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’ Montaigne does not take long to deviate from the task of defending the text and its author, and the essay instead quickly becomes ‘a devastating critique of all dogmatic philosophy’14 which therefore included criticism of Sebond himself.
In the final passage of ‘The Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne takes one particular quotation from Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones and – as he has done so often in the Essays – puts it to the test:
To that very religious conclusion of a pagan I would merely add one more word from a witness of the same condition, in order to bring to a close this long and tedious discourse which could furnish me with matter for ever. ‘Oh what a vile and abject thing is Man,’ he said, ‘if he does not rise above humanity.’
A pithy saying; a most useful aspiration, but absurd withal. For to make a fistful bigger than the fist, an armful larger than the arm, or to try and make your stride wider than your legs can stretch, are things monstrous and impossible. Nor may a man mount above himself or above humanity: for he can see only with his own eyes, grip only with his own grasp. He will rise if God proffers him – extraordinarily – His hand; he will rise by abandoning and disavowing his own means, letting himself be raised and pulled up by purely heavenly ones.
It is for our Christian faith, not that Stoic virtue of his, to aspire to that holy and miraculous metamorphosis.15
Montaigne dismantles Seneca’s argument with three concise clauses which mimic the Roman philosopher’s own succinct style: ‘A pithy saying; a most useful aspiration, but absurd withal.’ The first three editions of the Essays were published with the gentler alternative of ‘There is in all his Stoic school no saying truer than that one: but to make a fistful bigger than a fist.’ But after 1588, this initially hesitant critique of Seneca was substituted by Montaigne’s final crisp verdict. The confidence of the three new clauses correspond with Montaigne’s growing scepticism. Rather than using Seneca for support, here the voices of the two men are distinctly separate. Montaigne deconstructs Seneca’s theory by separating the Stoic’s theoretical man into his physical parts; by giving him a ‘fist’, an ‘arm’, a ‘stride’ and a ‘grasp’ he demonstrates what it would mean in practice for a man ‘to rise above humanity’. For Montaigne, not only would it be impossible for an individual to single-handedly exceed the physical capacities
