Episode 58 - Michel De Montaigne's Reasons For Not Repenting

I recently had the occasion to reread (because I was going to produce videos on it) an essay among the many by Michel de Montaigne. And it’s from kind of late in his work. It’s called “On Repentance” or “On Repenting,” both of which are decent translations of Du Repentir.

I was struck by his reasoning, which he’s exposing to himself, but also to us, his readers, about why it is that he typically doesn’t feel this affect of repentance.

And before we jump into his reasons (which I find really interesting): so what is it to repent? It’s to feel like not only did you do something wrong in some sort of objective sense, like you didn’t choose the best solution to a problem, or you made a mistake, or you actually chose to do something that you knew was unjust or wrong in some other sense. It’s to feel bad about it as well. That’s an integral component.

And we have it showing up in both philosophical and religious literature very early on. In Greek, it is metanoia, which has this sense of taking your mind or your heart and changing it or turning it. So you realize you had something wrong. It might have seemed right to you at the time, or you might have given in to it, and now you don’t feel or think the same way as you did about something previously. And it bothers you. It makes you feel like you not only did the wrong thing, but maybe for the wrong reasons, or it’s a sign of flaws in your character, or it was a spot that becomes a stain, however you want to frame it.

So Montaigne is saying, “Listen, I don’t really experience that much.” And you could say, “Well, he must think he’s a really great guy. I mean, who could possibly not have anything to feel bad about? Only somebody who, either rightly or wrongly, thinks of themselves as not having made mistakes or being better than the average lot, being better than the rest of us.” And Montaigne doesn’t do that at all.

He actually tells us a couple really interesting things. One of them is that he actually does have a desire or wish that he could be much better than he is, but he doesn’t think that that’s actually repentance. And I think for a lot of people that might bring about repentance. They think, “Oh, I could be better than I am in a sort of theoretical or hypothetical sense. So therefore, I have a duty to be better than I am”. And: “Oh, I’ve let that duty down, and I should have made some other choices or some other commitments. Then I wouldn’t be the schlub that I currently am.”

Montaigne says, “Yeah, this i