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Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher

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Ann Hartle has written a 'wonderful' book about Montaigne through a close reading of his Essays. She attempts to understand Montaigne as he understood himself. She explores what Montaigne means that he is an accidental philosopher during the great religious upheavals in France. She shows how he differs from deliberative philosophers (the ancients and the scholastics) and the moderns that are his contemporaries in order to show a person more open to the world and tolerant of others. The key seems to be his understanding of being a contingent being in the world. One can almost see her sitting next to Montaigne chatting. The conversation is warm and one can see that the company is good.

She sees in Montaigne the hints of a Christian republican; but, it is a Christianity different from orthodoxy and divorced from one's understanding of miracles as an exception/interruption of the natural world. One suspects his Christianity is more the result of imbibing milk at his mother's breast than being 'reborn'. There seems nothing transcendent in his religious faith for being Christian seems to be no different from being a Frenchman, an Englishman or a German.