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Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne

David Brook’s The Road to Character is a biographical box of chocolates and this chapter, like many of the others has a treat composed of two kinds of sweets.

He begins the chapter with Samuel Johnson with his amazing giftedness and his famously torturous life. Half way through he draws our attention to Michel de Montaigne, someone whose work I was completely unfamiliar with until a couple of weeks ago, nothing citations to him in Charles Taylor, CS Lewis and Brooks himself. In his address to the Redeemer Faith and Work group Brooks noted “I’m really into dualisms” and this comes through most clearly in this chapter.

Both Montaigne and Johnson were brilliant essayists, masters of shifting perspective. Both were humanists in their way, heroically trying to use literature to find the great truths they believed the human mind is capable of comprehending but also doing so with a sense of humility, compassion, and charity. Both tried to pin down the chaos of existence in prose and create a sense of internal order and discipline. But Johnson is all emotional extremes; Montaigne is emotionally moderate. Johnson issues stern self-demands; Montaigne aims at nonchalance and ironic self-acceptance. Johnson is about struggle and suffering, Montaigne is a more genial character, wryly amused by the foibles of the world. Johnson investigated the world to become his desired self; Montaigne investigated himself to see the world. Johnson is a demanding moralist in a sensual, competitive city. He’s trying to fire moral ardor and get ambitious bourgeois people to focus on ultimate truths. Montaigne is a calming presence in a country filled with civil war and religious zealotry. Johnson tried to lift people up to emulate heroes. Montaigne feared that those who try to rise above what is realistically human end up sinking into the subhuman. In search of purity they end up burning people at the stake.

Brooks, David (2015-04-14). The Road to Character (pp. 233-234). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This is the way of David Brooks trying to figure out the world. He loves his dualisms so the best way to figure things out is to put two things, both alike and different side by side so that we can compare, contrast, see and learn. This was clear in the chapter on Randolph and Rustin. Now he follows Johnson, who he will finally place above Montaigne.

Johnson was a fervent dualist, believing that only tensions, paradoxes, and ironies could capture the complexity of real life. He was not a theorist, so he was comfortable with antitheses, things that didn’t seem to go together but in fact do. As the literary critic Paul Fussell observed, the buts and yets that dotted his prose became the substance of his writing, part of his sense that to grasp anything you have to look at it from many vantage points, seeing all its contradictory parts.

Brooks, David (2015-04-14). The Road to Character (p. 222). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The goal for Brooks is to see. Continue reading →