Room for Doubt by Wendy Lesser

Author:Wendy Lesser [Lesser, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49760-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

The word “communion” is doing very heavy duty in this passage—and in the guise of questioning Catholic practice, Hume manages to get at all the Christian churches, in part by allowing a non-Christian to deliver the devastating critique. (Averroës, though not necessarily famous to us, is an altogether serious source: a twelfth-century Spanish Moor, he was a classical scholar as well as a respected judge.) But how does this interjection in any way support the idea that monotheism represents progress? It patently doesn't. The so-called argument of the essay has swallowed its own tail, leaving the author nowhere to go but into a kind of stand-up comedy routine in which he proceeds to tell catechism jokes with punchlines like: “How many Gods are there?” “None at all!… You have told me all along that there is but one God: And yesterday I eat him.”

I did not know how to take any of this. Was this the way to make a philosophical argument against religion? Was this the kind of help I had been hoping to get from Hume My Contemporary? God forbid. And yet even as I collapsed in dismay, I also realized that Hume had once again evaded expectations. He was not to be pinned down to any system of thought, even mine; he was not going to allow himself to be merely useful. The Hume I had in mind when I started thinking about the book was a relatively straightforward fellow—I had vaguely imagined I would find a rational explicator who built up his arguments in logical steps—whereas, instead, I was faced with a stylish littérateur who allowed his essay to be pulled hither and yon as each new idea struck him. I had set out looking for Locke's smarter cousin, but I had ended up with the twin brother of Montaigne.

My admiration for Montaigne is unmitigated, but it tends to be expressed in acts of omission rather than commission. I do not, that is, often find myself reading Montaigne, though whenever I do read him, I can see that he's beyond compare. Perhaps it's those scrupulous, fact-brandishing footnotes of his that scare me off; or perhaps it's my sense that by reading him in English— the only way I could possibly read him—I am missing everything that truly matters in his style. That can't be true, though, because he always seems to be recognizably Montaigne (just as Proust is always recognizably Proust) no matter whose translation I read. So something must be getting through.

When I first discerned the secret connection between Hume and Montaigne, I thought it could be my way in. I picked up the huge Screech edition of Montaigne and settled in for a nice long read, starting with the famous “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Soon I put it down again. I just wasn't up to a hundred and ninety-five pages of this undulating thought process. On the shorter essays, maybe, I could manage to stick with Montaigne as he raced around three or four or even five violent switchbacks, but over the longer haul I began to feel carsick.

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