Montaigne opens on a field that cannot be checked. The true subject of imposture, he says, is things unknown. Their strangeness lends them credit, and because they are not subject to ordinary reasons they deprive us of the means to dispute them. Plato finds it much more easy to satisfy hearers about the nature of the gods than about the nature of men, since ignorance gives the speaker a large and fair career. Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know, nor any people so confident as those who entertain us with fables: alchemists, judicial astrologers, fortune-tellers, and physicians. To that pack Montaigne would, if he durst, join the people who take upon them to interpret and control the designs of God Himself, prying into the secrets of the divine will to discover the incomprehensible motive of His works. The variety and discordance of events toss them from east to west. They still persist in their vain inquisition, and with the same pencil paint black and white.
In a nation of the Indies, when anything befalls them amiss in battle, the people publicly ask pardon of the sun, their god, imputing good or evil fortune to divine justice and submitting their own judgement. A Christian, Montaigne says, may believe that all things come from God and receive them thankfully, with what face soever they present themselves. He does not approve what he sees in use: affirming and supporting religion by the prosperity of enterprises. Belief has other foundation enough, without authorising it by events. People accustomed to such plausible arguments may stagger in their faith when success fails. In the present war upon the account of religion, those who had the better at Rochelabeille made great brags of that success as an infallible approbation of their cause. After the misfortunes of Moncontour and Jarnac they called the losses fatherly scourges, taking two sorts of grist out of the same sack, and with the same mouth blowing hot and cold. Don John of Austria's late naval battle against the Turks was a fine victory. God has also, at other times, let us see as great victories at our own expense.
It is a hard matter to reduce divine things to our balance without wasting a great deal of the weight. Who would give a reason that Arius and his Pope Leo, the principal heads of the Arian heresy, should die at several times of so like and strange deaths, both giving up the ghost upon the stool, might as well add Heliogabalus, slain in a house of office, and Irenaeus involved in the same fortune. God, pleased to show that the good have something else to hope for and the wicked something else to fear than the fortunes of this world, applies these according to His own occult will and deprives us of the means foolishly to make thereof our own profit. Those who pretend to dive into these mysteries by the strength of human reason never give one hit that they do not receive two for it. We are to content ourselves with the light it pleases the sun to communicate by his rays. Who will lift up his eyes to take in a greater, for the reward of his presumption, may there lose his sight. The essay stops on the line it quotes and does not answer: who of men can know the counsel of God.
Coming Up in Chapter 32
The ancients, Montaigne has long noticed, agree on this: it is high time to die when living holds more ill than good, and to preserve a tormented life breaks nature's rule. Then a letter of Seneca to Lucilius goes further than he expected. Leave that luxurious life, Seneca says, or leave life itself.
