Pierre Charron

← Encyclopedia

Pierre Charron was a French Catholic priest, preacher, and philosopher whose De la sagesse (1601) recast the loose, exploratory skepticism of his friend Montaigne into an ordered system of moral wisdom. Born in Paris in 1541, one of a bookseller’s enormous brood, he studied at Paris, Orléans, Bourges, and Montpellier and took a doctorate in law at Montpellier in 1571. A brief, thin career at the bar gave way to the Church. Ordained priest, he became one of the most sought-after preachers in the south and southwest of France, and the books that made his name — and his reputation for danger — came only at the very end of a long pulpit career.

Period engraving of Pierre Charron — unknown engraver, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The preacher and the offices

For some twenty-five years Charron was, above all, a voice in cathedrals. He preached across the dioceses of the southwest — Bordeaux, Cahors, Condom, Bazas, Agen, Lectoure, and beyond — with a reputation for learned, sober, persuasive sermons that drew crowds and ecclesiastical favor in equal measure. He rose to canon and to the office of théologal, the theological canon charged with expounding scripture; he served as preacher in ordinary to Marguerite de Valois, wife of the Bourbon king of Navarre who would become Henri IV; and after his first book he was made grand vicar and théologal of Cahors and held the chantorship and theological canonry of Condom. Twice he tried to enter a religious order — the Carthusians and the Celestines — and twice was turned away, on the grounds that a man of his gifts was needed in the active life of the secular clergy. He remained, to the end, a working priest and administrator, not a man of the university chair.

This matters for everything that follows. The skepticism for which Charron is remembered was not the leisure of a detached intellectual. It was assembled by a preacher of orthodox Catholicism, in the years of the French Wars of Religion, by a man whose office was precisely to make the case for the faith. The tension that runs through his work — that the same arguments which humble reason before revelation can be turned to make morality stand without revelation at all — is the tension of his vocation pressed to its limit.

The friendship with Montaigne

The hinge of the story is the late friendship with Michel de Montaigne — the great essayist of Périgord. The two men were close in Montaigne’s last years; Montaigne died in 1592 without a surviving male heir, and by his will he authorized Charron to bear the Montaigne coat of arms — a near- adoption in the grammar of the period, the passing of a name’s heraldic identity to a chosen heir rather than a son. Charron took up the inheritance in more than heraldry. He read the Essais not as a reader but as a legatee, quarrying them for material and reworking their wandering self-inquiry into something deliberate. Where Montaigne circled a question and let it stand open, Charron sorted, numbered, and concluded. Whole movements of De la sagesse are Montaigne reorganized — the catalog of human inconstancy and self-ignorance, the suspicion of dogmatic reason, the counsel to follow nature — but stripped of the essayist’s playfulness and most of his most unsettling asides, and rebuilt as a doctrine.

The conversion of Montaigne into a system is itself the contested act. To admirers it was the work of an heir making a chaotic genius usable: Charron gave skepticism a spine. To detractors then and since, the spine was the danger — Montaigne’s doubts, held loosely, were one thing; the same doubts marshaled into method and tied to a self-sufficient natural ethics were another.

Les Trois Vérités

Charron’s first book was an apology, not a skeptical treatise. Les Trois Vérités (Bordeaux, 1593) argued three truths against three classes of opponent in turn: against atheists and unbelievers, that there is a God and that religion is owed to him; against non-Christians, that Christianity is the true revealed religion; and against the Protestant churches, that the Roman communion alone keeps that truth whole. The third book — the anti-Protestant polemic — was the longest and the one that won him his reward, the favor of the Bishop of Cahors and the offices that followed.

Already in the Trois Vérités the characteristic engine is visible. Charron does not try to demonstrate God’s existence and nature by reason; he argues that reason cannot do so, that the divine infinitude exceeds the finite mind, and that the very failure of natural theology is what drives the soul to faith and to the Church’s authority. The skeptical preamble is, at this stage, frankly apologetic: doubt about reason’s reach is the servant of belief. What changes in the second book is not the engine but where it is pointed.

De la sagesse: the architecture of wisdom

In 1601, at Bordeaux, Charron published his masterwork, one of the first major works of philosophy composed in French rather than Latin, and within a generation the most influential book in French moral philosophy of its half- century. De la sagesse is built in three books, an ascent from the human condition to the rule of life.

Engraved title page of Charron’s De la sagesse (Of Wisdom) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Book One is the knowledge of oneself — the Delphic know thyself taken as the foundation of all wisdom. Here Charron assembles, in cold order, the inventory of human weakness: the vanity, inconstancy, misery, and presumption of the creature; the rule of the passions; the dependence of opinion on custom, climate, and accident; and above all the incapacity of the mind to reach certainty in the highest matters. This is Montaigne systematized and Pyrrhonist in temper — though Charron’s deeper affinity is with the Academic skepticism transmitted by Cicero, the suspension of assent that leaves the wise man free rather than the radical doubt of the ancient Pyrrhonists. The point of the demolition is not despair. It is clearance: a mind that has measured how little it can know is freed from the tyranny of its own opinions.

Book Two lays down the general rules of wisdom — the disciplines of the freed mind. Foremost among them are full freedom of judgment (holding opinions provisionally, refusing to be enslaved by any), universality of spirit, and, crowning all, preud’hommie: integrity, probity, the settled disposition to be a good man. Charron’s preud’hommie is the load-bearing concept of the whole work, and the most provocative. It is goodness drawn from nature itself — prior to and independent of hope of heaven, fear of hell, statute law, or even revealed religion. The truly wise man is good because his nature, rightly followed, is good; he would be good were there no reward and no commandment. Religion, in this scheme, is added to preud’hommie, the crown set on an integrity that already stands; it is not the root from which integrity grows.

Book Three descends to particulars, ordering the offices of wisdom under the four cardinal virtues inherited from antiquity by way of the Stoics and Cicero — prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The borrowing from Stoicism is heavy and avowed: the constancy of the sage, the rule of following nature, the mastery of the passions through judgment. The result is a complete ethics — an account of the good life laid out as a coherent natural discipline, addressed to a reader who is simply a human being and not, in the first instance, a Christian.

The fideist core

Charron’s position is a fideism, and a sharp one. Reason cannot reach certainty in the highest matters; the truths of religion therefore rest not on demonstration but on faith and authority. To the historian of ideas this places him in a recognizable lineage — the early-modern revival of ancient skepticism turned to apologetic ends, what later scholars have called a Christianized Pyrrhonism, in which the wreckage of natural reason becomes the argument for revealed truth. If the mind cannot establish God by its own power, then God must be received, not proved; the more thoroughly skepticism humbles the philosophers, the more securely faith is delivered from their quarrels.

This is fideism in the strict sense, and it separates Charron from the confidence of the schools. He stands apart from the Aristotelian natural theology of the medieval doctors, and apart too from the Renaissance Platonists such as Marsilio Ficino who sought a prisca theologia, an ancient wisdom converging by reason on Christian truth. For Charron there is no such ladder. Reason climbs, and finds the rungs give way; what is left is the disposition to receive. The faculty of reason is not abolished — it orders and applies what faith and authority deliver — but it cannot generate the foundational truths. This is the structural move that links him, across two and a half centuries, to later Catholic fideists who would press the same severance under different pressures, Louis Bautain chief among them; it is also the move that John Henry Newman would deliberately refuse, building instead an account of how belief is rationally held with certainty short of formal proof.

The charge of the libertines

The same severance of reason from faith that armed the Church could be turned the other way, and Charron’s contemporaries were quick to turn it. If reason is powerless to establish religious truth, and if a whole ethics of preud’hommie can be raised on natural self-knowledge with religion set, as Charron’s own order has it, on top rather than underneath — then a thoughtful reader might keep the wisdom and quietly shelve the faith. De la sagesse was read exactly so. It was denounced as a manual for libertines; the Jesuit François Garasse (1585–1631) branded Charron a patriarch of the freethinkers, an atheist in clerical dress; the Sorbonne examined the book and it was nearly suppressed.

Charron answered. He prepared a softened second edition, recasting the passages that gave most offense and clarifying the orthodox intent, and he drafted a short self-defense, the Petit traicté de sagesse, to answer the charge that he had written for unbelievers. He did not live to see the work through. On 16 November 1603, in a Paris street, he fell dead of an apoplexy while the second edition was at the press, only a few sheets printed. The revised Sagesse appeared posthumously in 1604, and it is that toned-down text, not the bolder first edition, that later editors followed.

Forward channel

Whether the libertine reading was the betrayal of Charron’s intent or its fulfillment, it was the reading that traveled. Through the seventeenth century De la sagesse was the book a generation of French thinkers argued with. The libertins érudits — Gabriel Naudé, Guy Patin, François de La Mothe Le Vayer, and, as a young man, Pierre Gassendi — defended and extended him; Charron’s Wisdom was among the springs of Gassendi’s first book, the anti-Aristotelian Exercitationes of 1624. René Descartes, in the standard reading descending from Richard Popkin and developed by José Maia Neto, took up the skeptical clearance and the figure of the self-possessed wise man and pressed the doubt further than Charron would — to a radical methodic doubt that does not rest, as Charron’s did, in a natural wisdom following nature, but drives on toward a single indubitable foundation. And Blaise Pascal made Charron’s self-sufficient skeptical sage one of the chief targets of his projected defense of Christianity: the man who has measured human wretchedness and yet declines the leap to faith, content with a wisdom of his own — precisely the figure Pascal’s apology was built to unsettle. Charron thus stands at a crossing where the skeptical inheritance ran in opposite directions at once: toward the rationalist certainty of Descartes, the revived empiricism and Epicurean naturalism of Gassendi, and the anti-rationalist faith of Pascal.

His proper companions are the other minds of the late-Renaissance crisis of authority — the period that also produced Giordano Bruno, burned for an unbounded cosmos, and Guillaume Postel, seeking a universal reconciliation of religions — each, in his way, testing how far the inherited certainties could be questioned and what, if anything, held when they gave way. On the narrower question of reason and faith, Charron’s nearest medieval precedent is the line of late-scholastic doubt about reason’s reach to which Pierre d’Ailly belongs — a different man, a fourteenth-century cardinal, but a kindred suspicion that the highest truths exceed demonstration.

Scholarship and the texts

The standard reception narrative is Richard H. Popkin’s The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (1960; revised and expanded with José R. Maia Neto as The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, Oxford University Press, 2003), which made Charron a central figure in the “skeptical crisis” that ran from the recovery of Sextus Empiricus through Montaigne to Descartes and Bayle. José R. Maia Neto’s Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy 1601–1662 (Springer, 2014) traces the specifically Charronian line into Gassendi, La Mothe Le Vayer, Descartes, and Pascal, and argues for the Academic rather than Pyrrhonist character of Charron’s skepticism. Maryanne Cline Horowitz’s “Natural Law as the Foundation for an Autonomous Ethic: Pierre Charron’s De la Sagesse” (Studies in the Renaissance, 1974) makes the case that the preud’hommie of Book Two amounts to an ethics deliberately freed from religious sanction. For an accessible overview of the wider movement and Charron’s place in it, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Renaissance Skepticism sets him beside Montaigne, Francisco Sanches, and the recovery of the ancient skeptical corpus.

The primary text survives in English from soon after Charron’s death. Samson Lennard’s Of Wisdome appeared in London early in the seventeenth century, and George Stanhope’s fuller rendering, Of Wisdom, Three Books … With an Account of the Author, was first published in 1697; the Stanhope translation is hosted in full, with its life of Charron, in the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership edition at the University of Michigan. The French Sagesse is best read in the corrected 1604 second edition, the version Charron was preparing when he died and the basis of all subsequent critical texts.

The unresolved man

Two Charrons can be read off the same pages, and the texts will not adjudicate between them. One is the orthodox priest whose skepticism is the servant of faith: a preacher who spent his life arguing the Church’s cause, who humbled reason precisely so that revelation might stand unchallenged, and who, stung by the libertine reading, rushed to soften his book and draft a defense of his good intent. The other is the quiet freethinker who found in the language of faith a durable shelter for a wisdom that needed no faith at all: a man who built a whole ethics on nature and self-knowledge, set religion on top of it as an ornament rather than a root, and let readers draw the conclusion he was too prudent to print. The second edition’s softening and the Petit traicté are evidence for the first reading; the architecture of preud’hommie — goodness owed to nature before it is owed to God — is evidence for the second. Charron the canon of Condom and Charron the patriarch of the libertines are the same man writing the same sentences, and what he meant by them died with him in a Paris street with his corrected pages still wet at the press.

→ Related: Pierre D Ailly · Rene Descartes · Blaise Pascal · Pierre Gassendi · Stoicism · Cicero · Reason · Empiricism · Marsilio Ficino · Giordano Bruno · Guillaume Postel · Louis Eugene Marie Bautain · John Henry Newman