When Death Becomes the Ultimate Exit Strategy — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne had long observed that most of the ancients concur in this: it is high time to die when there is more ill than good in living, and to preserve life to our own torment and inconvenience is contrary to the very rules of nature. Stobaeus supplies the old laws. Either a tranquil life or a happy death. It is well to die when life is wearisome. It is better to die than to live miserable.

To push contempt of death so far as to employ it to remove our thoughts from honours, riches, dignities, and the other goods of fortune, as if reason were not sufficient to persuade us to avoid them, Montaigne had never seen commanded or practised until a passage of Seneca fell into his hands. Seneca advises Lucilius, a man of great power and authority about the emperor, to leave his voluptuous and magnificent way of living and retire from worldly vanity and ambition to some solitary, quiet, philosophical life. Lucilius alleges difficulties. Seneca answers that he leave that life of his, or life itself. He would advise the gentle way, to untie rather than break the knot Lucilius has indiscreetly knit, provided that if it cannot otherwise be untied, he resolutely break it. There is no man so great a coward that had not rather once fall than be always falling. Montaigne finds the counsel conformable enough to Stoical roughness. It appears the more strange for being borrowed from Epicurus, who writes the same thing upon the like occasion to Idomeneus. He thinks he has observed something like it, with Christian moderation, amongst his own people.

Saint Hilary, Bishop of Poictiers, that famous enemy of the Arian heresy, being in Syria, has intelligence that Abra, his only daughter, left at home under her mother's eye, is sought in marriage by the greatest noblemen of the country, a virgin virtuously brought up, fair, rich, and in the flower of her age. He writes to her that she should remove her affection from all the pleasures and advantages proposed to her, for he has in his travels found a much greater and more worthy fortune, a husband of much greater power who would present her with robes and jewels of inestimable value. His design is to dispossess her of worldly delights and join her wholly to God. The nearest and most certain way, as he conceived, being the death of his daughter, he never ceased by vows, prayers, and orisons to beg of the Almighty that He would call her out of this world. Soon after his return she died, at which he expressed a singular joy. This seems to outdo Seneca, for Hilary applies himself to this means at the outset, which they only take subsidiarily, and besides it was towards his only daughter. Montaigne will not omit the latter end of the story. Hilary's wife, having understood how the death was brought about by his desire and design, and how much happier their daughter was to be removed than to have stayed, conceived so vivid an apprehension of heavenly beatitude that she begged of her husband, with the extremest importunity, to do as much for her. God, at their joint request, shortly after calling her to Him, it was a death embraced with singular and mutual content.