Note 31 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

Probably those very deaths availed more for the rousing of critical thought than did the dialectic of the Pyrrhonist. To the life of the reason may with perfect accuracy be applied the claim so often made for that of religion—that it feeds on feeling and is rooted in experience. Revolt from the cruelties and follies of faith plays a great part in the history of freethought. In the greatest French writer of that age, a professed Catholic, but in mature life averse alike to Catholic and to Protestant bigotry, the shock of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew can be seen disintegrating once for all the spirit of faith. Montaigne typifies the kind of skepticism produced in an unscientific age by the practical demonstration that religion can avail immeasurably more for evil than for good.31 A few years before the Massacre he had translated for his dying father32 the old Theologia Naturalis of Raymond of Sebonde; and we know from the later Apology in the Essays that freethinking contemporaries declared the argument of Raymond to be wholly insufficient.33 It is clear from the same essay that Montaigne felt as much; though the gist of his polemic is a vehement attack upon all forms of confident opinion, religious and anti-religious alike. “In replying to arguments of so opposite a tenour, Montaigne leaves Christianity, as well as Raimond Sebonde, without a leg to stand upon. He demolishes the arguments of Sebonde with the rest of human presumption, and allows Christianity, neither held by faith nor provable by reason, to fall between the two stools.”34 The truth is that Montaigne’s skepticism was the product of a mental evolution spread over at least twenty years. In his youth his vivid temperament kept him both credulous and fanatical, so much so that in 1562 he took the reckless oath prescribed by the Catholic Parlement of Paris. As he avows with his incomparable candour, he had been in many things peculiarly susceptible to outside influences, being always ready to respond to the latest pressure;35 and the knowledge of his susceptibility made him self-distrustful. But gradually he found himself. Beginning to recoil from the ferocities and iniquities of the League, he yet remained for a time hotly anti-Protestant; and it seems to have been his dislike of Protestant criticism that led him to run amuck against reason, at the cost of overthrowing the treatise he had set out to defend. The common end of such petulant skepticism is a plunge into uneasy yet unreasoning faith; but, though Montaigne professed Catholicism to the end, the sheer wickedness of the Catholic policy made it impossible for him to hold sincerely to the creed any more than to the cause.36 Above all things he hated cruelty.37 It was the Massacre that finally made Montaigne renounce public life;38 it must have affected likewise his working philosophy.