The life and Essays of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French Catholic philosopher, reveals how accepting the will of God helps a person face the overwhelming fear of mortality–in other words, to embrace death. 

Montaigne was neither saint, priest, nor monk, rather a worldly man who lived in a secular time of conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Montaigne was a landowner, a government official, and soldier. He was as well a Catholic layman who preserved his faith in light of the Protestant challenge during the sixteenth century. He struggled with the new ideas of the Renaissance, such as humanism, which placed humans as near equals to God. He questioned new scientific ideas that seemed to challenge Biblical authority. Montaigne was a thinker who penetrated self in search of answers for his faith, his heritage, and his relationship with God. His response, the Essays, have been variously interpreted as the work of a humanist, a skeptic, perhaps an atheist. Rarely are Montaigne’s Essays considered for what they are in fact, the ruminations of a Catholic layman searching for answers that are in response to his understanding of divine providence.

Montaigne faced many serious challenges in his life; the most recurrent, terrifying challenge he faced was with death. The fear of death defined him. How could it not? Montaigne and his wife Francoise de La Chassaigne had six children, all girls; all of the babies save one died within three months; the lone survivor died in childhood. Besides the melancholy of burying his six children, Montaigne lost his father to kidney stones. Michel watched his father Pierre suffer and die, anticipating his own disease and death. 

These years of anticipation were filled with self-induced trauma. Montaigne was a ruminator. He could not keep his mind from obsessing about illness and death. Each moment was potentially a singular experience of joy and wonder if it were not that the passing seconds moved one closer to the end. At the same time that he counseled himself to accept God’s “divine and inscrutable wisdom,” he was descending deeper into the unforgiving world of thought. He ironically thanked God for the constant “brooding over my own thoughts” so that “death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long before.” 

Montaigne wrote the course of his life into his book. He wrote Essays about his varying emotions, need for solitude, vanity, fear, and cowardice; his friendship and suffering; the importance of conquering the fear of death; about his inconsistency and contradictions; his intellectual influences; and, in his longest essay, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, he challenged the human presumption of reason, questioned what can be known, and explored the dependence of humans upon God. The thirteen essays of Book Three are introspective, intuitive essays in which Montaigne discovered the universality of his own experiences, confronted his own mortality, and discovered the means of achieving contentment. 

During this time in which Montaigne awaited the onset of disease, he began his Essays. He wanted to know why he feared death. Why did this feeling about an as yet unknown future so dominate his existence? The imagination, if not put to good use, restricted from idleness, will “run into a thousand extravagances”–fear. Yearning to understand his images of doom, “to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them in writing, hoping in time to make [my mind] ashamed of itself.” Montaigne feared fear, which was his constant companion. The abstractions of his mind took off “like a  horse that has broke from his rider.” Death appeared to Montaigne as “so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design.”

Daily Montaigne reasoned with himself, preached to himself, trying to make an apparent evil good, trying to bring pleasure out of suffering. He worked to convince himself that the stone was an ultimate good that was slowly preparing him for mortality. He would not have wished it, yet it was a benefit that he acquired it. He convinced himself that he was joining the company of the ancient Stoics, through God’s will, controlling the body, elevating the mind. He rationalized his ailment. “But thou dost not die because though art sick, thou diest because thou art living. Death kills thee without the help of sickness.” His illness granted him a unique personal experience: in a single moment he could experience the joys and horrors of life: “Is there anything delightful in comparison of this sudden change, when from excessive pain, I come, by the voiding of a stone, to recover, as by a flash of lightning, the beautiful light of health, so free and full?” Montaigne discovered death’s irony that amid its universality is the uniqueness of the particular experience in countless moments of time, never again to be repeated. Human death mirrors human life, human existence, human history, as infinite unique events become the past moving toward the future. The oneness yet individual uniqueness of humans is seen most clearly through death. And if one feels terror because of death one also feels beauty and love, for without death life itself would be meaningless. Montaigne sensed that though his ruminations were beneficial, and helped him to endure uncertainty and crippling fear, that ultimately some other tactic must be relied upon. Such is the route to faith. “What is it we do not lay the fault to, right or wrong?” Some even “exceed all folly, forasmuch as impiety is joined therewith,” blaming “God Himself.” That was an option of course. God is behind all things, and Montaigne knew it. God is the ultimate source of disease, of suffering, of fear. Many have occupied their minds blaming Providence. Not Montaigne. 

“Of Prayers” reveals Montaigne’s belief that God orders reality. God is inscrutable; divine wisdom, justice, and order are unchanging. Montaigne felt total awe toward this Being, so much so that he did not agree with the common person praying to God, for prayer must be completely pious, pure, uncorrupted by human motives and desires. One must have a certain basis in religious knowledge to approach God. In the Apology for Raimond Sebond Montaigne shows how much we do not know, just how unstable human reason is. If there is absolute knowledge, and if we are so distant in our relation to knowledge, if we realize that in our instability we can rarely penetrate the inscrutability of God, yet as humans we cannot help but seek this knowledge, then we must go to that single source, knowledge of self, as the only real means of ever hoping to approach knowledge of something more than just passing temporal affairs. Who am I to know God?, Montaigne asks. How can I truly know God? By examining the self. Examine each moment, he told himself, each event in life brought about by the will of God, and his response to the challenge of time. In dying, what is the response? In suffering and death, what is the response? To live life: it “is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations.” Montaigne anticipated the eighteenth-century Jesuit philosopher Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence in his comments about the simplicity of God’s providence, the simplicity of life: “We are great fools. ‘He has passed his life in idleness,’ say we: ‘I have done nothing today.’: “What! have you not lived? . . . “Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books.” In short, “the glorious masterpiece of man is to know how to live to purpose.” And what is it to live to purpose? To live in conformity to God’s will.

The time spent reading, contemplating, ruminating, searching, seeking the path to happiness, to knowledge, eventually appeared, Montaigne concluded at the end of his life, impious. Why should humans, should he, seek, question, ask, decide, move, plan, force, act upon those matters reserved for the will of God? What is the point to all of the rules of objective scholarship and scientific detachment if what we know or do not know, do or do not do, are in God’s hands anyway? One must accept. “I have let myself go as I came,” Montaigne confessed in Of Physiognomy; “I contend not.” Balancing knowledge is ignorance; next to will is passivity. Though reason calls, one must learn the value of faith. Mystery and miracles contradicted the well-trained philosopher’s mind of Montaigne. And yet the so-called stoic, skeptic, rationalist, atheist Montaigne, the Montaigne of the modern scholar, learned “that to condemn anything for false and impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the will of God.” Carved in the ceiling of his library was the line from the Psalmist, “Thy judgments are like a great deep.”

Montaigne’s battle to accept himself in light of his understanding of God’s will is the story of his life’s work. The closing theme of the Essays is faith. Montaigne believed his life’s struggle with death and his duty to accept God’s providence were common to all humanity. Ultimately, as St. Augustine showed, and as other thinkers who came after Montaigne, such as Jean-Pierre Caussade, would continue to emphasize, to relinquish control to God in death is in the end a very simple act–an act of faith.

(Quotes from The Works of Montaigne, ed. W. Hazlitt, 1856)