Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton (review)

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton is a cogently argued and gracefully written comparativist work. Bold swathes are cut through European intellectual history using brilliant readings of a chosen breviary of works. However the yoking together of its central categories is achieved at the cost of a homogenization of its authors and the specificities of their respective oeuvres.

The wide-ranging nature of such a study means that it is able to make two surprising connections across national literatures: between Montaigne and Milton as writers and between skepticism and the sublime as intellectual movements via France, Britain and Germany. It intends to be a major contribution to the pre-history of the sublime, showing how skepticism enabled this essentially aesthetic mode to emerge in all of its forms. As Sedley sees it, Kant takes the sublime from Pascal who took it from Montaigne via the Essais' skeptically inflected "ruinous discourse"; Burke takes his sublime from Milton's acceptance of doubt as the path to the sublime as a counter to the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost. The conceptual link between skepticism and the sublime emerges via the "waning of the Renaissance" thesis (Popkin, Hampton) that as ancient exempla, theologico-cosmological certainties and their attendant attitude of wonder fell into desuetude over the course of the late sixteenth century, innovative modes of thought and writing arose to heal the wound, the best of which in writers like Montaigne and Milton recognized the loss honestly. For them, it is our very inability to know the truth anymore, whether it be that of the world or of God, that promotes an appreciation for the obscure "beyond" and a broken-backed, fragmentary "sublime" style to match.

The strength of the book resides in the readings themselves which are convincing and beautifully paced, weaving thematic rigor with lucidly orchestrated transitions and subtle syntactic analyses. In Chapter One Sedley shows how Montaigne's Journal de Voyage refuses to indulge in the conventional wonder at Rome's greatness figured by the ruins, instead relying on the very impossibility of reconstituting it to develop what Sedley calls, powerfully, its "infinite grandeur." Chapter Two extends this transvaluation of the 'lost world' into the very fabric of the Essais' writing and citational practice which "does not conserve wonder but rather transforms it through his art of fragmentation." Extensive and innovative readings of two short and neglected essays ("C'est folie de rapporter le vray et le faux à notre suffisance" 1, 27 and "Du jeune Caton" 1, 37) are used to provide evidence of the move. Chapter Three views Comus as a response to Baconian science that employs the uncertain ontological status of perceptual phenomena and divine intervention as a goad rather than as an obstacle. Sedley argues that Milton exploited skepticism to make poetry in the teeth of Bacon's desire to move beyond echo's unpredictability or the royalist masque's ultimate sanctioning of visible authority. Chapter Four focuses on Satan's prideful self-assertion as a refusal of skepticism about his own powers, occasionally filtered through a strategic employment of skeptical arguments, which ends in horror (for him) and a lesson (for us) that sincere and pervasive doubt about our eminence is beneficial and can, paradoxically, be edifying. The Conclusion retraces the post-Boileauvian genealogy of the sublime, now shown to have been decisively inflected by the skepticism that had gradually infiltrated European culture in a stealthy as well as open fashion.

As can be seen from this summary, Sedley studies, quantatively speaking, a very limited selection of his chosen authors' main works. His interest is in their illustrative potential for his conceptual claims. Indeed he willingly compounds the un-representativity of his corpus by spending two and a quarter chapters out of four on minor works (Montaigne's Journal de Voyage, Milton's Comus and Marvell's "On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost") for the same reason. It is the articulation of the sublimity-skepticism axis that determines which works...