Abstract

This contribution doesn’t aim to give a new answer to the question of ”Montaigne’s religion’, which is a biographical, not a philosophical concern. Through his habits, attitude, and commitments, Montaigne gave a public answer to this question, by presenting himself as a ”Catholic nobleman’, recognized and honored by his own contemporaries. Our purpose is not to provide new developments on the old hackneyed topic of Montaigne’s ”religious thought’ or ”religious ideas’, either as they were developed in the secret of his own heart of hearts, or as they could be reconstructed from the Essays, on a systematical, dogmatic, or non-dogmatic ground, and ranked in well-defined categories in order to probe the orthodoxy of Montaigne’s faith. The Essays are a collection of discourses on various subjects, and Montaigne only defined his book as a personal portrait through the lens of rhetoric and moralia. So we will examine in a simpler way the nature, the evolution, and the pragmatic stakes of the discourses dealing with religious matters publicly held in the Essays.