Antiquitopia

I teach selections from Michel de Montaigne's incredibly rich Essays this spring. I love reading Montaigne and I love teaching Montaigne. His writing has a vivacity about it even when speaking of death; he is imaginative in writing on the imagination. A review by Frederic Raphael of Sarah Bakewell's new book on Montaigne, How to Live, itself provides a nice primer. Here are some nice snippets on Montaigne and religion: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 and died (following an attack of kidney stones, like his father) in 1592. His mother was of Marrano descent; her family had been Sephardic Jews, forced into Catholicism. Montaigne himself was always formally obedient to the Church. 'Otherwise', he wrote, 'I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I have kept myself intact, without agitation or disturbance of conscience.' In this respect, he was somewhat the precursor of Evelyn Waugh, who said that, had he not been a Catholic, he ...

I have been tagged by Daniel and Tonya at Hebrew and Greek Reader . In this meme, I will give the five books or authors who have shaped my thought the most, whether I like them or not, whether through agreement or opposition, etc. And they can be enduringly or immediately influential. This meme started not too long ago with Ken Brown at COrthodoxy . So, here are my five. For those who read my blog regularly, there probably will not be too many surprises. 1. M.M. Bakhtin . Most immediately, this Russian has profoundly influenced not only the way I approach my work--although he does that--but how I view day-to-day interactions. I was introduced to his thought through his essay on the "Chronotope" in the collected volume, The Dialogic Imagination . I use the Chronotope extensively in my dissertation. Since then, I have branched out to his other works and others' use of him. But even his concepts of the "utterance" from simple day-to-day speech-units to co...

In my class, the most autobiographical writings we read are Augustine' Confessions and Montaigne's Essays . Their pioneering work of self-reflection, creating particular concepts of a self, of the invention of the "inner self" as the book by Philip Cary argues for Augustine, is where their similarities end. Augustine's vision of the self is quite contained, fixed; Montaigne's, fluid, in flux, always changing. The key, in my opinion, to the Augustinian sense of the self is memory; the key for Montaigne, imagination. One looks back over a life; one looks forward, or, more accurately, always seeks living, thinking, acting in the moment. Montaigne, it seems, in his act of writing tries to catch himself in the moment of thinking. I think I personally prefer Montaigne's vision of the unfinalizable self. Susan Sontag, in her essay "The death of tragedy," has a brief comparative moment, using the difference between Augustine and Montaigne as an an...

The first quote is inspired by the comment in the last post: And those men who think they can lessen and check our disputes by referring us to the actual words of the Bible are deluding themselves, since our mind finds just as wide a field for controverting other men's meanings as for delivering its own. (Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience," Essays 3.13; trans. J.M. Cohen) This is a broad-side attack on the entire early Protestant mentality coined by Luther, sola scriptura . And Montaigne has been proven right--there are just as many readings of the biblical text as there are readers. It leads not to agreement, but to fragmentation. Perhaps that is partly beneficial and partly problematic. The problem in Montaigne's day was at a high pitch, since he lived during the wars of religion. He also gave a nice broadside attack on traditional commentary--commentaries of commentaries of commentaries of a text. There is more trouble in interpreting interpretations than i...

No...this is not Derrida; it is Michel de Montaigne: Our disputes are about words. I ask what is Nature, Pleasure, a Circle, and Substitution. The question is couched in words, and is answered in the same coin. A stone is a body. But if you press the point: And what is a body? -A substance.- And what is a substance? and so on, you will end by driving the answerer to exhaust his dictionary. One substitutes one word for another that is often less well understood. (Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience," Essays 3.13; trans. J.M Cohen) Words refer only to other words, which refer to other words. Meaning is always deferred, even diminished, and never stable. It is the endless field of signifiers, a signum of a signum of a signum ad infinitum with no res .

Let me excuse myself for saying what I often repeat, that I rarely repent, and that my conscience is content with itself, not as the conscience of an angel or a horse, but as the conscience of a man; though always with the addition of this refrain--which is no formal refrain but a true and sincere confession--that I speak as one who questions and does not know, referring the decision purely and simply to common and authorized belief. I do not teach, I relate. (Michel de Montaigne, "On Repentance," Essays 3.2; trans. J.M. Cohen) Sounds like he is using Socrates as his model here as one who claims not to know, and as one who does not teach, but always questions.