Reading Montaigne 1.30: Of moderation

“Of moderation” is a strange little essay. In part, Montaigne is praising the virtues of what I consider common sense. In arguing that excessive zeal and pursuit of power are just as harmful as passivity and lack of ambition, Montaigne observes that “the archer who overshoots the target misses as much as the one who does not reach it. And my eyes trouble me as much when I raise them suddenly to a strong light as when I drop them in the shadow.”

At that point in the essay, Montaigne is speaking of philosophy and–through references points in the same paragraph–politics and religion, but the latter two only in passing.

Montaigne has bigger game in his sights, and it is in this pursuit that he leaves me behind, confused. Moving on from philosophy, Montaigne takes on morality as exemplified by sex and physical affection between man and woman:

The branches of knowledge that regulate men’s morals, like theology and philosophy, enter in everywhere. There is no action so private and secret that it escapes their cognizance and jurisdiction. [...] I want to teach husbands this–if there are still any who are too vehement: that even the pleasures they get in making love to their wives are condemned, unless moderation is observed; and that it is possible to err through licentiousness and debauchery, just as in an illicit affair. Those shameless excesses that our first heat suggest to us in this sport are not only indecently but detrimentally practiced on our wives.

Marriage is a religious and holy bond. That is why the pleasure we derive from it should be a restrained pleasure, serious, and mixed with some austerity.

Montaigne writes as a product of his time of course, but it is an important point if we consider what he says soon after, namely that:

Isn’t man a miserable animal? Hardly is it in his power, by his natural condition, to taste a single pleasure pure and entire, and still he is at pains to curtail that pleasure by his reason: he is not wretched enough unless by art and study he augments his misery…

Sandwiched as this section is, between Montaigne’s opening contention that moderation can itself be pursued with excessive zeal, and musings about how pain and punishment can become a kind of pleasure, a kind of addiction to the scourge, I have a hard time figuring out where Montaigne is trying to go here. It seems he is attempting to revitalize the Stoic idea of moderation, but nowhere does he seem to account for real pleasure…and certainly not the passion which he expressed in the previous two essays, particularly in his account of his singular friendship with Boétie.

Perhaps we are to assume the common sense I mentioned at the beginning of my own reflection, that sexual love is the exception and that passionate enthusiasm and connection is otherwise natural, but it’s not clear to me.