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JOHN CALVIN and MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE on the EYE Lee JOHN CALVIN AND MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE ON THE EYE Lee Palmer Wandel Son essence est incompréhensible, tellement que sa maiesté est cachée bien loin de tous nos sens, mais il a imprimé certaines marques de sa gloire en toutes ses œuvres, voires si claires et notables, que toute excuse d’ignorance est ostée aux plus rudes et hébétez du monde. John Calvin, Institution de la religion chrestienne, 1560, Book I, Chapter V.1 Aussi n’est-il pas croyable que toute cette machine n’ait quelques marques empreintes de la main de ce grand architecte, et qu’il n’y ait quelque image és choses du monde, raportant aucunement à l’ouvrier qui les a basties et formées. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’, Essais, 1580, Book II, Chapter 12.2 1 John Calvin, Institution de la religion chrestienne, ed. Benoit J.-D. Vol. I (Paris: 1957) 68. In the editions of 1541–1557, the text differed: ‘Veu que Dieu a voulu que la fi n principale de la vie bien-heureuse fust située en la cognoissance de son nom, afi n qu’il ne semble point advis qu’il vueille forclorre a aucuns l’entrée à félicité, il se manifeste à tous clairement. Car comme ainsi soit que de nature il soit incompréhensible et caché à l’intelligence humaine, il a engravé en chacune (1541–1545: ‘en un chacun’) de ses œuvres certains signes de sa maiesté, par lesquez il se donne à cognoistre à nous selon nostre petite capacité. Ie dy signes si notoires et évidens que toute excuse d’ignorance est ostée aux plus aveugles et aux plus rudes du monde’. Ford Lewis Battles’s translation of the Latin differs at a couple of points: ‘Indeed, his essence is incomprehensible; hence, his divineness far escapes all human perception. But upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory, so clear and so prominent that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance’. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeil J.T., ed. Battles F.L. (Philadelphia: 1960) I: 52 [Hereafter Institutes]. 2 Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, eds. P. Villey and V.L. Saulnier (Paris: 2004) 446. This particular passage seems to have undergone no revisions, Les Essais de Mon- taigne, Reproduction typographique, ed. Armaingaud A. (Paris: 1927) II: 99–100. Donald Frame translates this text: ‘And it is not credible that this whole machine should not have on it some marks imprinted by the hand of this great architect, and that there should not be some picture in the things of this world that somewhat rep- resents the workman who has built and formed them’ [The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Frame D.M. (Stanford: 1976) 326]. 136 lee palmer wandel In scholarship on early modern texts, Calvin and Montaigne appear together rarely.3 In some ways, that is not surprising: in the Library of Congress system of classifi cation, John Calvin’s works are to be found under BX9420 – among works of spirituality – while Michel de Montaigne has been assigned PQ1643, among works of literature, their works often stored on different fl oors, the spatial distance a simple extension of the disciplinary division of texts into categories: literature, theology, philosophy, each separated from the others. The assignation of Calvin’s and Montaigne’s texts to discrete disciplines, each with its own methods, syntax, and shared vocabulary, has also led to those texts being read through certain analytic lenses and not others: Calvin, through the lens of theology or church history;4 Montaigne, through the lens of philosophy or literary studies.5 No works among Calvin’s enormous oeuvre belong to the canon of French or Latin literature; none of Montaigne’s Essays appears among works of Reformation the- ology.6 And yet, if one believes Descartes, Montaigne offered the single most devastating critique of Christian epistemology of the sixteenth century, far more powerful, and more destructive, than anything Mar- tin Luther ever wrote. The separation of Calvin’s and Montaigne’s works from one another is a loss at many levels. Works now divided into disciplines circulated quite differently in the sixteenth century than they do now, read according to curiosity, word of mouth, taste, or language. Neither Calvin nor Montaigne rest easily in the categories to which each has been assigned: the volumes debating whether Calvin was a theologian, 3 And when they do, it is usually to contrast them, as R. Hoopes does in “Fide- ism and Skepticism during the Renaissance: Three Major Witnesses”, The Huntington Library Quarterly 4 (1951) 319–347. 4 For an important exception to this, see Frisch A., “In a Sacramental Mode: Jean de Léry’s Calvinist Ethnography”, Representations 77 (2003) 82–106; and her fuller development in Chapter 5, “Presence”, of The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (Chapel Hill: 2004). 5 For a recent example of this division, see Schreiner S.E., “Appearances and Real- ity in Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare”, The Journal of Religion 83 (2003), especially at 357–358. For a particularly splendid engagement with the question of Montaigne’s relationship to ‘philosophy’, see Maclean I., “‘Le païs au delà’: Montaigne and phil- osophical speculation”, in McFarlane I.D. – Maclean I. (eds.), Montaigne: Essays in Memory of Richard Sayce (Oxford: 1982) 101–132. 6 Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani details echoes of Augustine’s Confessions in the Essais, but fi nds the connection autobiographical, rather than theological, “Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans les Essais de Montaigne,” Peacock N. – Supple J. (eds.), Lire les Essais de Montaigne: Actes du Colloque de Glasgow 1997 (Paris: 2001) 211–226..
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