“Le Vain Bastiment”: Human Systems and Philosophy in Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond

Michel de Montaigne as a philosopher is often reduced to helping revive and popularize Pyrrhonism; by extending skeptical tendencies into a crisis affecting all knowledge, he influenced Descartes and founded "an important intellectual movement that continued to plague philosophers in their quest for certainty." (1) Although Montaigne's Essais clearly establish him as a skeptical thinker influenced by Pyrrho, by itself this view of his writings does not do justice to the deeply philosophical and distinctive nature of Montaigne's own thought. (2) This active and novel development is nowhere more evident than in his longest and most philosophically oriented essay. Since its publication in 1580, the Apologie de Raimond Sebond has generated much bewilderment among its readers; Floyd Gray dubbed it "undoubtedly one of the most curious works of literature ever written." (3) Much of this peculiarity stems from the very nature of the project. Sebond, the author Montaigne claimed to defend, wrote a work of natural theology in which he argued for central tenets of Christianity based on what man could discover without the Bible, through reason alone. Yet, throughout the Apologie, Montaigne argues that human reason alone is incapable of ascertaining truth. Sebond, arguing from a typically medieval view, presents God as the architect of the ordered universe, while Montaigne considers both God and man as builders and challenges the notion that their different constructions of nature correspond to each other. This study of the Apologie explores the way Montaigne addresses the philosophical question of how structure might play a role in bridging our perception of reality with reality itself, thereby placing Montaigne more centrally in dialogue with the core themes of Western philosophy. That Montaigne's Apologie should be preoccupied with the nature of human structures follows from the treatise it proposes to defend. Sebond's work of natural theology can in itself be described as an "architectural" project, insofar as its goal is to create the foundations of the knowledge from which Christian doctrine can be argued. As Sebond himself explains, "son but est de confirmer ce qui est couche aux saintes Escritures, et de jetter les fondemens, sur lesquels nous puissions bastir ce que s'ensuit en icelles obscurement" ["its goal is to confirm what is round in the Sacred Scriptures, and to lay down the foundations on which we can build what follows inscrutably from them"] (9: ix). (4) Employing the language of architecture to introduce the notion of belonging in the universe, Sebond explains that through his sin, man is distanced from himself and from "his rightful house" ["absent de sa maison propre"] (9: 2). Man must climb the ladder of creation, with its "perfectly proportioned rungs" ["un bel ordre de rangs de tres-juste proportion"] (9: 3), starting from the small things and heading toward the larger ones, until he can regain his home in the universe. This vision of a ladder symbolizes the ability to move from large to small, and vice versa, enabled by the conception of a macrocosm / microcosm identity. Throughout the Theologia, Sebond presents nature as being hierarchical. God is the architect of this building of the world, a creator who can be uncovered through the methods of natural theology: "Tu as trouve l'ouvrier qui a basti et mesure tous ces ordres" ["You have round the builder who built and measured all these orders"] (9: 17). To Sebond, God has constructed the world in such a way as to provide all creatures, including humans, with an appropriate habitation. Consequently, Sebond's language suggests that the vocabulary of architecture is not simply a metaphor for the relationship between God and His creation; rather, it represents the true nature of the universe, a purposeful construction. Within the same paragraph, Sebond slips easily from calling the earth "le monde" to "[le] bastiment qu'il construisoit" ["the building He constructed"], suggesting that, to him, the world truly is a building (9: 36). …