Montaigne: Life Without Law by Pierre Manent (review)

—After a brief introduction, Manent begins with a chapter by chapter analysis of Montaigne’s Essays. But it is more than that. Manent finds in the Essays lessons for today. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 is entitled, “The War of Human Beings”; chapter 1, “To Save One’s Life.”

The stage has already been set by Paul Seaton, who in an informative preface provides an overview of Manent’s intellectual journey from his early years under the influence of Leo Strauss to the present. Seaton traces the origin of Manent’s interest in the failure of Europe to defend itself to his 1982 publication, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. This book was followed by Metamorphosis of the City: On the Dynamics of Western Civilization in 2015, and in 2017 by the prestigious Etienne Gilson Lecture delivered at the Institute Catholicque, Paris, and published the following year as La loi naturelle et les droits de l’homme. At present, Manent conducts an ongoing seminar on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as professor at L’Ecole des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

In chapter after chapter, the question looms large: What has happened to Europe that it lacks the will to defend its cultural heritage? Has Western civilization exhausted itself, as some have claimed? Manent responds: “In servitude and misery, our forefathers created and placed their hopes in science and the power of liberty to create the conditions of well-being on which we have lived during three or four centuries.” What happened?

Toward the end of the Cold War, Manent noticed what he called “a worrisome depolitization and attendant denationalization of life and thought in Western Europe.” He rose to become the European Union’s foremost critic. “The idea of humanity [favored by the architects of the E.U.] is patently false and politically debilitating,” Manent declared. He goes on to defend a recognition of the nation state against the internationalists and multiculturalists. “The West becomes intelligible only if one takes into consideration the city, the nation and the empire, along with the Christian Church.” The Church, Manent insists, is an important form of authoritative human association, one that both enriches and indeed complicates the social order.

Luther and Calvin, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in their break with Rome, decisively changed the role of the church in society. The priesthood of the faithful entailed the rejection of the ordained priesthood, and sola scriptura placed each believer on his own before the saving Word of God. The Catholic Church, theretofore the mediator between human beings and the divine, was decisively excluded from its role of providing spiritual guidance. Historians generally agree that the Reformation ended the Middle Ages and prepared the way for Modernity. Or, put another way, Luther’s revolt had the effect of gradually transforming Europe from a world permeated by Christianity to one in which religion would be separated from public life.

Speaking of the relief of our wretched human condition, Manent separates Montaigne from the Greek perspective as well as from the Christian perspective. For Greek philosophy it is a question of perfecting our nature, of directing our human endowment to its natural end. For Christians it is a question of healing our nature wounded by sin, that is, to consent to its healing by grace that alone suffices.

In another interesting passage, Montaigne claims the liberty to judge princes after their death. This is the only way, he maintains, of reconciling respect for the political order and establishing obedience due to the office of the prince, whether he be good or bad. The populace must have the freedom to judge, without which there can be no recognition of a just order, broken though it may be.

Manent on the last page of the Essays writes, “Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord, supernatural thought and subterranean conduct.” He continues, “Man is...