CHAPTER XVIIIMONTAIGNE
In the Middle Ages it used to be said that city air made for freedom.
That was true.
A man behind a high stone wall could thumb his nose safely at baron and priest.
A little later, when conditions upon the European continent had improved so much that international commerce was once more becoming a possibility, another historical phenomenon began to make itself manifest.
Done into words of three syllables it read: “Business makes for tolerance.”
You can verify this statement any day of the week and most of all on Sunday in any part of our country.
Winesberg, Ohio, can afford to support the Ku Klux Klan, but New York cannot. If the people of New York should ever start a movement for the exclusion of all Jews and all Catholics and all foreigners in general, there would be such a panic in Wall Street and such an upheaval in the labor movement that the town would be ruined beyond the hope of repair.
The same held true during the latter half of the Middle Ages. Moscow, the seat of a small grand ducal count, might rage against the pagans, but Novgorod, the international trading post, must be careful lest she offend the Swedes and Norwegians and the Germans and the Flemish merchants who visited her market place and drive them to Wisby.
A purely agricultural state could with impunity regale its peasantry with a series of festive autos da fé. But if the Venetians or the Genoese or the people of Bruges had started a pogrom among the heathen within their walls, there would have been an immediate exodus of all those who represented foreign business houses and the subsequent withdrawal of capital would have driven the city into bankruptcy.
A few countries which were constitutionally unable to learn from experience (like Spain and the papal dominions and certain possessions of the Habsburgs), actuated by a sentiment which they proudly called “loyalty to their convictions,” ruthlessly expelled the enemies of the true faith. As a result they either ceased to exist altogether or dwindled down to the rank of seventh rate Ritter states.
Commercial nations and cities, however, are as a rule governed by men who have a profound respect for established facts, who know on which side their bread is buttered, and who therefore maintain such a state of spiritual neutrality that their Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and Chinese customers can do business as usual and yet remain faithful to their own particular religion.
For the sake of outward respectability Venice might pass a law against the Calvinists, but the Council of Ten was careful to explain to their gendarmes that this decree must not be taken too seriously and that unless the heretics actually tried to get hold of San Marco and convert it into a meeting-house of their own, they must be left alone and must be allowed to worship as they saw fit.
Their good friends in Amsterdam did likewise. Every Sunday their ministers fulminated against the sins of the “Scarlet Woman.” But in the next block the terrible Papists were quietly saying mass in some inconspicuous looking house, and outside the Protestant chief-of-police stood watchlest an over-zealous admirer of the Geneva catechism try to break up this forbidden meeting and frighten the profitable French and Italian visitors away.
This did not in the least mean that the mass of the people in Venice or Amsterdam ceased to be faithful sons of their respective churches. They were as good Catholics or Protestants as they had ever been. But they remembered that the good will of a dozen profitable heretics from Hamburg or Lübeck or Lisbon was worth more than the approbation of a dozen shabby clerics from Geneva or Rome and they acted accordingly.
It may seem a little far-fetched to connect the enlightened and liberal opinions (they are not always the same) of Montaigne with the fact that his father and grandfather had been in the herring business and that his mother was of Spanish-Jewish descent. But it seems to me that these commercial antecedents had a great deal to do with the man’s general point of view and that the intense dislike of fanaticism and bigotry which characterized his entire career as a soldier and statesman had originated in a little fish-shop somewhere off the main quai of Bordeaux.
Montaigne himself would not have thanked me if I had been able to make this statement to his face. For when he was born, all vestiges of mere “trade” had been carefully wiped off the resplendent family escutcheon.
His father had acquired a bit of property called Montaigne and had spent money lavishly that his son might be brought up as a gentleman. Before he was fairly able to walk private tutors had stuffed his poor little head full of Latin and Greek. At the age of six he had been sent to high-school. At thirteen he had begun to study law. And before he was twenty he was a full-fledged member of the Bordeaux town council.
Then followed a career in the army and a period at court, until at the age of thirty-eight, after the death of his father, he retired from all active business and spent the last twenty-one years of his life, (with the exception of a few unwilling excursions into politics), among his horses and his dogs and his books and learned as much from the one as he did from the other.
Montaigne was very much a man of his time and suffered from several weaknesses. He was never quite free from certain affections and mannerisms which he, the fish-monger’s grandson, believed to be a part of true gentility. Until the end of his days he protested that he was not really a writer at all, only a country gentleman who occasionally whiled away the tedious hours of winter by jotting down a few random ideas upon subjects of a slightly philosophic nature. All this was pure buncombe. If ever a man put his heart and his soul and his virtues and his vices and everything he had into his books, it was this cheerful neighbor of the immortal d’Artagnan.
And as this heart and this soul and these virtues and these vices were the heart and the soul and the virtues and the vices of an essentially generous, well-bred and agreeable person, the sum total of Montaigne’s works has become something more than literature. It has developed into a definite philosophy of life, based upon common sense and an ordinary practical variety of decency.
Montaigne was born a Catholic. He died a Catholic, and in his younger years he was an active member of that League of Catholic Noblemen which was formed among the French nobility to drive Calvinism out of France.
But after that fateful day in August of the year 1572 when news reached him of the joy with which Pope Gregory XIII had celebrated the murder of thirty thousand FrenchProtestants, he turned away from the Church for good. He never went so far as to join the other side. He continued to go through certain formalities that he might keep his neighbors’ tongues from wagging, but those of his chapters written after the night of Saint Bartholomew might just as well have been the work of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or any of a dozen other Greek or Roman philosophers. And in one memorable essay, entitled “On the Freedom of Conscience,” he spoke as if he had been a contemporary of Pericles rather than a servant of Her Majesty Catherine de’ Medici and he used the career of Julian the Apostate as an example of what a truly tolerant statesman might hope to accomplish.
It is a very short chapter. It is only five pages long and you will find it in part nineteen of the second book.
Montaigne had seen too much of the incorrigible obstinacy of both Protestants and Catholics to advocate a system of absolute freedom, which (under the existing circumstances) could only provoke a new outbreak of civil war. But when circumstances allowed it, when Protestants and Catholics no longer slept with a couple of daggers and pistols underneath their pillows, then an intelligent government should keep away as much as possible from interfering with other people’s consciences and should permit all of its subjects to love God as best suited the happiness of their own particular souls.
Montaigne was neither the only, nor the first Frenchman who had hit upon this idea or had dared to express it in public. As early as the year 1560, Michel de l’Hôpital, a former chancellor of Catherine de’ Medici and a graduate of half a dozen Italian universities (and incidentally suspected of being tarred with the Anabaptist brush) had suggested that heretics be attacked exclusively with verbal arguments. Hehad based his somewhat startling opinion upon the ground that conscience being what it was, it could not possibly be changed by force, and two years later he had been instrumental in bringing about that royal Edict of Toleration which had given the Huguenots the right to hold meetings of their own, to call synods to discuss the affairs of their church and in general to behave as if they were a free and independent denomination and not merely a tolerated little sect.
Jean Bodin, a Parisian lawyer, a most respectable citizen (the man who had defended the rights of private property against the communistic tendencies expressed in Thomas More’s “Utopia”), had spoken in a similar vein when he denied the right of sovereigns to use violence in driving their subjects to this or that church.
But the speeches of chancellors and the Latin treatises of political philosophers very rarely make best sellers. Whereas Montaigne was read and translated and discussed wherever civilized people came together in the name of intelligent company and good conversation and continued to be read and translated and discussed for more than three hundred years.
His very amateurishness, his insistence that he just wrote for the fun of it and had no axes to grind, made him popular with large numbers of people who otherwise would never dream of buying (or borrowing) a book that was officially classified under “philosophy.”