the confessions of montaigne蒙田的自白.pdfVIP

Religions 2012, 3, 950–963; doi:10.3390/rel3040950 OPEN ACCESS religions ISSN 2077-1444 /journal/religions Article The Confessions of Montaigne John Jeffries Martin Department of History, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA; E-Mail: john.j.martin@ Received: 24 September 2012; in revised form: 10 October 2012 / Accepted: 11 October 2012 / Published: 15 October 2012 Abstract: Montaigne rarely repented and he viewed confession—both juridical and ecclesiastical—with skepticism. Confession, Montaigne believed, forced a mode of self-representation onto the speaker that was inevitably distorting. Repentance, moreover, made claims about self-transformation that Montaigne found improbable. This article traces these themes in the context of Montaigne‘s Essays, with particular attention to ―On Some Verses of Virgil‖ and argues that, for Montaigne, a primary concern was finding a means of describing a self that he refused to reduce, as had Augustine and many other writers before and after him, to the homo interior. Keywords: Montaigne; self; confession; prayer; repentance; interiority; sexuality; sincerity Montaigne occupies a salient, even a privileged place in the history of the self. His Essays—begun in 1571 and revised almost continuously down to the time of his death in 1592—constituted, after Augustine‘s Confessions, the single most important work of introspec