Beyond Repentance and Renunciation

My dear friend Carol is taking a seminar this summer on Montaigne’s Essays. I have not read them, but she asked if I would be willing to read them with her. As I read them, slowly, I’m asking myself what makes the Essays a work of philosophy? This is a common question for anyone who thinks about philosophy when they read these essays. Clearly these essays don’t easily add up to a metaphysics, ontology or epistemology. If we seek these within or beyond the text, we’ll rightfully be disappointed. They are squarely and unapologetically a work of ethics — an “art of living” to use Alexander Nehamas’ characterization. I want to use this meditation to focus on “Of repentance” because it offers an ethical view of the self that breaks away from the common Christian view that seeks self-renunciation for past sins and a break with the past to find salvation in a new self.

Augustine is a paradigmatic example of the Christian version. It’s fairly common to compare Montaigne’s Essays with Augustine’s Confessions. Both are intensely and relentlessly personal narratives. This is well known in the scholarship. But I’d like to dwell for a moment on the parallel structure of the titles. “Essays” and “Confessions” share a similar disposition to the subject matter, which will be the author himself. Both titles intimately tie the text itself to the personal expression of the author doing the writing. Both are also entirely new genres as their single-word titles announce. There were, at the time of their writing, no other Confessions or Essays to differentiate from. For this reason, both authors feel compelled to explain their titles to their readers as new genres and therefore explain how the texts are to be read.

There are, of course, very significant differences which have to do with the conception of the self that underlies each. Some of the differences are contained in the titles. A confession is the speaking of a wrong-doing. It is necessarily a retrospective on one’s past behavior. In Augustine’s hands, this retrospective is totalizing and self-judgmental. It looks at the whole of his life as it had been lived up to that moment of writing. Confessions summarizes that life and organizes it into a story of self-renunciation and conversion. The Confessions therefore has a narrative arch that is chronological and that weaves together well-defined moments of self-transformation on a retrospective journey. Without the conversion in the Milanese garden, the Confessions doesn’t have a purpose; it wouldn’t hold together as a narrative of self-transformation.

Augustine’s self-transformation is also explicitly a self-renunciation. The old self must be traded in because it is flawed. For Augustine, his renunciation is intensely personal and involves a bifurcation of his will. It moves beyond ritual and symbolic acts that wash away original sin. Nor are two separate selves competing for dominance within him. He is quite clear that he is a unified person who is at odds with himself in a “monstrous condition.” At the core of this self is a bifurcated will:

In my own case, as I deliberated about serving my Lord God (Jer. 30: 9) which I had long been disposed to do, the self which willed to serve was identical with the self that was unwilling. It was I. I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling. So I was in conflict with myself and was dissociated from myself. The dissociation came about against my will. Yet this was not the manifestation of an alien mind but the punishment suffered in my own mind. (VIII x 22)

The entire narrative drives to this moment of self-alienation. The self is the fully contained scene of the drama with no “manifestation of an alien mind” coming from the outside. For Augustine, the struggle is wholly and completely internal and personal. Yet, there is an outside looking in. The bifurcation of the will is driven by a relentless attempt to understand and convert his desires to God’s Truth as revealed in scripture. The power of conversion that comes from reading is a repeated episode in the Confessions. One just has to find the right text when implored to “pick up and read.” The breaking down of the will is a function of embracing an external Truth that demands a totalizing judgment of one’s past so that it can be completely and thoroughly remade on new foundations. It is important that the Confessions is not only chronological but retrospective. It is written after his conversion; all the events of his life lead to that moment of self-renunciation and conversion of the will. In other words, the events of his youth get their meaning as preliminaries leading to the critical moment of renunciation and conversion.

For this reason, self-interpretation is essential to the Confessions. By this I mean that the events of one’s life are subject to a conceptual framework that gives meaning one’s thoughts and feelings. The use of Biblical passages through0ut the Confessions is part of this exercise in self-interpretation. They help him give meaning to what he has gone through and writing about in retrospect.

Montaigne’s Essays are also intensely personal, but they don’t have the totalizing judgement of a current self over his past. In fact, he repeatedly and relentlessly rejects this disposition. Therefore, the Essays has no need for a chronological narrative arch like that of the Confessions. Montaigne’s perspective on his self does not have this retrospective and totalizing judgment. The older self is not necessarily wiser than the younger self. In the final paragraphs of “Of repentance,” Montaigne explicitly rejects taking a judgmental retrospective on his youth. Old age is not more objective than youth. Each moment of life can only be taken on its own terms and cannot be accurately judged from a wiser and older perspective: “I find that in my past deliberations, according to my rule, I have proceeded wisely, considering the state of the matter proposed to me, and I should do the same a thousand years from now in similar situations. I am not considering what it is at this moment, but what it was when I was deliberating about it” (618, emphasis added). This moment is on equal footing with the past moment and holds not special privilege over it. The past retains its autonomy and escapes the totalizing repentence-driven rearview mirror of Christian renunciation.

Montaigne’s use of the “essay” as a genre doesn’t allow for Augustine’s concept of retrospective judgement. Rather, the Essays have a very different concept of time and narrative. If Augustine is looking backwards to make sense of himself as he progressed toward his pivotal moments, Montaigne’s narrative is in real time: “In this case we go hand in hand and at the same pace, my work and I” (611-12).

I do not portray being: I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute. My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention. This is a record of various and changeable occurrences… (611)

Far from being a self-interpretation, the Essays are a real-time “record.” Each essay moves in real time with the thoughts, feelings and emotions of Montaigne himself. In this sense, it is more purely personal that Augustine’s Confessions, which are an interpretive template for the personal Confessions of others. In other words, everyone ought to be able to write their own Confessions using substantially the same generic elements and interpretive framework. Insofar as the Confessions are fundamentally a self-interpretation using conformity to an external ahistorical Truth as its lens, everyone should be able to tell their own similar story — at least those who have been converted.

Montaigne’s Essays provide no such template. When he writes, “Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate” (611), he is not saying that he is interpreting and revealing human nature in the Essays. He is emphasizing the irreducible individuality of human nature as lived experience. Our nature, as humans, is to live with oneself and others, making your way as best each of us can. This is, and can only be, moment to moment. There is no earned wisdom that would allow one to make a totalizing judgment of oneself in retrospect. In fact, as we age, we become less capable of fairly evaluating our past: “Miserable sort of remedy, to owe our health to disease!… I should be ashamed and resentful if the misery and misfortune of my decrepitude were to be thought better than my good, healthy, lively, vigorous years, and if people were to esteem me not for what I have been, but for ceasing to be that”(619).

There is, therefore, no room in Montaigne’s view of the self for “repentance.” For there to be repentance, one must achieve an objective position from which one can look backwards and retrospectively judge one’s past self. He refuses “to attach, monstrously, the tail of a philosopher to the head and body of a dissipated man; or that this sickly remainder of my life should disavow and belie its fairest, longest, and most complete part.”

I want to present and show myself uniformly throughout. If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived. I have neither tears for the past nor fears for the future. (620)

To look back from this vantage point is to engage in “that accidental repentance that age brings” (619).

This does not mean that one lives one’s life passively accepting events as they occur. One must make an effort to become better. This is Montaigne’s indebtedness to Stoicism, particular Seneca’s brand of “Stoic precepts, which indeed order us to correct the imperfections and vices that we recognize in us, but forbid us to be repentant and glum about them” (617). For Seneca, self-correction is always about looking forward and never with a totalizing view backward. See, for example, his well-known nightly review of his day in On Anger 3.36. There is no repentance in this review. Rather, there is only the commitment “to do better next time.”

This kind of moment by moment self-correction is the essence of Montaigne’s ethics. It stems from a desire to be better and to improve oneself, but it has little time for totalizing judgmental retrospectives on oneself or others:

As for me, I may desire in a general way to be different; I may condemn and dislike my nature as a whole, and implore God to reform me completely and to pardon my natural weakness. But this I ought not to call repentance, it seems to me, any more than my displeasure at being neither an angel no Cato. My actions are in order and conformity with what I am and with my condition. I can do no better. And repentance does not properly apply to the things that are not in our power; rather does regret. (617)