Montaignean Muridiyya

Few readers of Montaigne have ever managed to come to grips with his relationship to religion. It is disappointing, indeed, to read commentators who consider his remarks on religion insincere; equally disappointing are those commentators who think him fervent in belief. For my money, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has demonstrated, to date, the most sensitive feel for Montaigne's religiosity. I excerpt from Richard McCleary's translation of Merleau-Ponty's essay "Reading Montaigne" in the collection Signs (Northwestern University Press, 1964), 198-210.

Having set out in this way, attentive to all that is fortuitous and unfinished in man, he is at the opposite pole from religion, if religion is an explanation of and key to the world. Although he often puts it outside the range of his inquiries and beyond his reach, nothing he says is a preparation for belief. (202)

What he retains of Christianity is the vow of ignorance. Why assume hypocrisy in the places where he puts religion above criticism? Religion is valuable in that it saves a place for what is strange and knows our lot is enigmatic. All the solutions it gives to the enigma are incompatible with our monstrous condition. As a questioning, it is justified on the condition that it remains answerless. It is one of the modes of our folly, and our folly is essential to us. When we put not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence, we can neither obliterate the dream of an other side of things nor repress the wordless invocation of this beyond. What is certain is that if there is some universal Reason we are not in on its secrets, and are in any case required to guide our lives according to our own lights... (203)

It is from doubt that certainty will come. So we must measure the extent of it. Let us repeat that all belief is passion and makes us beside ourselves, that we can believe only by ceasing to think, that wisdom is a resolution to be irresolute, that it condemns friendship, love, and public life. And so here we are back to ourselves again. And we find chaos still, with death, the emblem of all disorders, on the horizon. Cut off from others, cut off from the world, incapable of finding in himself (like the Stoic wise man) and in an inner relationship to God the means of justifying the world's comedy, Montaigne's wise man, it would seem, no longer has any conversation except with that life he perceives welling madly within him for a little while longer, any resource except the most general derision, any motive except despising himself and all things. In this disorder, why not give up? Why not take animals for a model...[o]r to invent, against the feeling of death, some natural religion...This movement is to be found in Montaigne. But there is another one too, which appears just as often. For after all the doubts, there remains to be explained...why we believed to begin with that we held truths, and why doubt needs to be learned. (205-206)

The critique of human understanding destroys it only if we cling to the idea of a complete or absolute understanding. If on the contrary we rid ourselves of this idea, then thought in act, as the only possible thought, becomes the measure of all things and the equivalent of an absolute. (206)

The critique of passions does not deprive them of their value if it is carried to the point of showing that we are never in possession of ourselves and that passion is ourselves. At this moment, reasons for doubting become reasons for believing. The only effect of our whole critique is to make our passions and opinions more precious by making us see that they are our only recourse, and that we do not understand our own selves by dreaming of something different. Then we find the fixed point we need (if we want to bring our versatility to a stop) not in the bitter religion of nature (that somber divinity who multiplies his works for nothing), but in the fact that there is opinion, the appearance of the good and true. Then regaining nature, naivete, and ignorance means regaining the grace of our first certainties in the doubt which rings them round and makes them visible. (206, emphasis added)

The fact of the matter is that true skepticism is movement toward the truth, that the critique of passions is hatred of false passions, and finally, that in some circumstances Montaigne recognized outside himself men and things he never dreamed of refusing himself to, because they were like the emblem of his outward freedom, and because in loving them he was himself and regained himself in them as he regained them in himself. (207)

It is unconditional freedom which makes us capable of absolute attachment. Montaigne says of himself: I have been so sparing in promises that I think I have kept more than I have promised or owed. (210)

Il a cherché et peut-être trouvé le secret d'être, dans le même temps, ironique et grave, libre et fidèle.

(from the French edition, Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1960, 208).