Note 48 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

There is no final recognition here of religion as even a useful factor in life. In point of fact Montaigne’s whole habit of mind is perfectly fatal to orthodox religion; and it is clear that, despite his professions of conformity, he did not hold the Christian beliefs.48 He was simply a deist. Again and again he points to Sokrates as the noblest and wisest of men; there is no reference to Jesus or any of the saints. Whatever he might say in the Apology, in the other essays he repeatedly reveals a radical unbelief. The essay on Custom strikes at the root of all orthodoxy, with its thrusts at “the gross imposture of religions, wherewith so many worthy and sufficient men have been besotted and drunken,” and its terse avowal that “miracles are according to the ignorance wherein we are by nature, and not according to nature’s essence.”49 Above all, he rejected the great superstition of the age, the belief in witchcraft; and, following the lead of Wier,50 suggested a medical view of the cases of those who professed wizardry.51 This is the more remarkable because his rubber-ball fashion of following impulsions and rebounding from certainty made him often disparage other men’s certainties of disbelief just because they were certainties. Declaring that he prefers above all things qualified and doubtful propositions,52 he makes as many confident assertions of his own as any man ever did. But the effect of the whole is a perpetual stimulus to questioning. His function in literature was thus to set up a certain mental atmosphere,53 and this the extraordinary vitality of his utterance enabled him to do to an incalculable extent. He had the gift to disarm or at least to baffle hostility, to charm kings,54 to stand free between warring factions. No book ever written conveys more fully the sensation of a living voice; and after three hundred years he has as friendly an audience as ever.