Quiet (1/2): transcending our traits

Susan Cain

For a long time, during my rewarding years as a psychologist working with and fascinated by people, something which ran alongside an active engagement with the Bahá’í community, I puzzled over how all that could be reconciled with a highly introverted temperament.

Susan Cain’s inspiring book, Quiet, gives a fascinating insight into the dynamics of introversion and dispels many of the myths attached to that label. Her book covers a huge amount of ground and it would be impossible to do justice to its complexity in a couple of blog posts. So, I’ve chosen just two aspects to look at in more detail: Free Trait Theory and Introvert/Extravert partnerships.

The first of those is one of the most important in her book, at least for anyone who wants to combine introversion with social effectiveness. It helps resolve the puzzle that perplexed me for so long. She discusses the extent to which we are prisoners of our temperament. This thread runs through the whole book but there is a particularly telling section towards the end. It concerns this concept of Free Trait Theory. What she means by that will become clear as we go on.

Clearly if introversion condemned introverts to pass their days as hermits many of us, not least all Bahá’í introverts, would have a huge problem with that. Many of us want to be making an impact of some positive kind on the social world within which we live and, as Cain explains, there is no reason at all why we shouldn’t be able to do exactly that and very effectively as well. This is where Free Trait Theory comes in (pages 209-210):

According to Free Trait Theory, we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits — introversion, for example — but we can and do act out of character in the service of “core personal projects.”

In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly.

There is a sense in which this could fairly be seen to involve some degree of forcing oneself against the grain. This doesn’t mean that a socially active introvert is some kind of hypocrite.

Felix Aylmer as Polonius

She quotes Polonius from Hamlet: ‘To thy own self be true.’ The full quote, which she doesn’t include, continues: ‘And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ As a former English teacher I am always uncomfortable when a writer of any kind quotes one of Shakespeare’s characters and assumes that the words exactly represent what Shakespeare the man believed. Whether these words of advice about integrity, given by the officious and duplicitous busybody, Polonius, to his son Laertes, are to be taken at face value in the context of the play is a question we’d better park for now. Sue Cain is using them as a clear and well-known reference point. She continues (page 210):

. . . we are only pretending to be extroverts, and yes, such inauthenticity can be morally ambiguous (not to mention exhausting), but if it’s in the service of love or a professional calling, then we’re doing just as Shakespeare advised.

She uses a friend of hers, Alex, as an example. He states (page 211):

“I could literally go years without having any friends except for my wife and kids,” he says. “Look at you and me. You’re one of my best friends, and how many times do we actually talk—when you call me! I don’t like socialising.”

Somehow, though, he also found a way to become (page 210) ‘the socially adept head of a financial services company.’

Cain looks as some of the factors that might make this possible (page 212):

How was it that some of [the] pseudo-extroverts [in a study] came so close to the scores of true extroverts? It turned out that the introverts who were especially good at acting like extroverts tended to score high for a trait that psychologists call “self-monitoring.”

She goes on to state that ‘self-monitors are highly skilled at modifying their behaviour to the demands of a situation.’ There are those who feel that this is somehow deceptive (page 214). This may be more than a touch unfair as the motivation for reading and responding smoothly to the social cues may not be to look good or to gain a personal advantage, but to avoid a faux pas and to be more effective at achieving objectives that are not self-serving but socially useful and helpful to others.

Which brings me back to perhaps the most important driver that enables introverts to transcend their natural reserve and sustain that transcendence over long periods of time. This is having a project of intense importance and value that we want to pursue. She calls it a ‘core personal project.’ It therefore becomes important to find a way of identifying what such a project might be if it’s not already obvious. She explains (pages 217-218):

I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. . . . . First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. . . . . Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. . . . . Finally, pay attention to what you envy.

This last one might seem a bit puzzling. What she means is watch out for those people whom you envy for engaging in an activity you long to do yourself.

However, it is important to bear in mind that this kind of trait transcendence is not achieved without strain. Steps have to be taken to make sure our batteries are re-charged (page 219):

. . . . . the best way to act out of character is to stay as true to yourself as you possibly can—starting by creating as many “restorative niches” as possible in your daily life.

And we also need to ensure that we deal with any close personal relationships with extraverts in the same spirit. The creator of Free Trait Theory, Professor Brian Little (page 220)

. . . . . calls, with great passion, for each of us to enter into “a Free Trait Agreement.” . . . . It’s a Free Trait Agreement when a wife who wants to go out every Saturday night and a husband who wants to relax by the fire work out a schedule: half the time we’ll go out, and half the time we’ll stay home.

The costs of failing to make those necessary arrangements can be high (page 222):

Double pneumonia and an overscheduled life can happen to anyone, of course, but for Little, it was the result of acting out of character for too long and without enough restorative niches. . . . . When your conscientiousness impels you to take on more than you can handle, you begin to lose interest, even in tasks that normally engage you.

And this brings us neatly to the point where we need to deal with introvert/extravert relationships – the topic for the next post.

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Medlar or Quince?

Quinces

I’ll graff it with you, and then I shall graff it with a medlar. Then it will be the earliest fruit i’ th’ country; for you’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that’s the right virtue of the medlar.

(As You Like It: Act III, Sc 2, lines 89-92)

Lady Capulet: Hold, take these keys and fetch more spices, nurse.

Nurse. They call for dates and quinces in the pastry.

(Romeo and Juliet: Act IV, Sc 4)

Sometimes life gives me a kick to get a point across. Most of the time I have my head so full of words and my eyes so often on the pages of a book that I miss out on the real world. I got a very pleasant wake up call the other day.

My wife and I found ourselves in the Fold in Bransford in Worcestershire. I’d been there before to give a talk at the Wrekin Forum and was rather taken then with the feel of the place and the food in the eco-cafe there. So much so it seemed the most obvious thing in the world to turn into their drive once more as we were passing just when the urge for coffee was cranking up to fever pitch.

This time I had leisure to look round. I ought to mention at this point that my powers of observation are such that when my wife moves the furniture around at home while I am out, I generally fail to notice anything unusual until I come to sit down on a chair that is no longer where it was.  It was my wife therefore who spotted a tree with what at first looked like giant pears. Closer inspection revealed them to be rock hard: definitely not a pear then.

It was in one of the shops on site that the mystery was solved. In two glass bowls on the table were more of these massive fruits. The owner explained they were not pears but quinces. The only way you could be absolutely sure they were ripe was to cut them open to see if the pips were brown. If they were not you’d have wasted a quince.

He drew our attention also to the tree near the cafe. He said people often confuse quinces with medlars. The tree he was pointing to had medlars and they were nothing like a quince. In both cases though, you do not eat them raw but make them into pickles or fruit jellies, it seems. For a brilliant explanation of what to do with these fruits to make them edible, see the link at the bottom of the post. Tatanya Valda Belinda Hill makes clear the connection with rotting that so disgusted Shakespeare:

They are harvested in November – preferably after a good frost – and left to mature for several weeks until nearly rotten, before being used. This uncommon process is termed “bletting.”

It is only forty-five years since I began to read Shakespeare and first met references to quince and medlar, the latter giving an easy opportunity for punning about meddlers as Timon of Athens shows:

Apemantus: There’s a medlar for thee; eat it.

Timon.   On what I hate I feed not.

Apemantus.   Dost hate a medlar?

Timon.   Ay, though it look like thee.

Apemantus.   An thou hadst hated meddlers sooner, thou shouldst have loved thyself better now.

(Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene 3, lines 321-323)

It’s so easy to go drifting along for years like this, not bothering too much to relate what you read to reality. Footnotes don’t help much. Take even the beautifully produced RSC edition for instance. The footnote to the As You Like It quote reads in part: “Medlar: tree bearing applelike fruits . . .” (page 500). That’s not even an accurate description let alone one that captures the magic of the look and feel of these fruits. Hill puts it far better in the post below: ‘They remind me of huge make-believe rosehips, the type which might be in Alice’s Wonderland.’

The price of that kind of oblivion can be high though. In this case I had failed to find for years the unusual beauty that was suddenly made so obvious to me – the vibrant brown of the medlars and the lemon-yellow glow of the quinces gleaming in the autumn sunlight has to be seen to be believed: the photographs don’t do the colours justice at all. (It didn’t help that  I was brought up in a town, where conkers were for many years the full measure of my direct experience of what a tree can produce.)

Even so, this particular disconnect was not such a huge price to pay for my habitual introspection. But in other areas it can be far more costly not to test words against felt experience. This goes back to the left-brain versus right-brain tussle and the need to match reflection with action – issues I’ve dealt with before. Basically the best map in the world is no substitute for a good walk over the terrain itself.

I’m hopeful I might get the balance right before I have to move onto fresh woods and pastures new with altogether different sorts of medlars to contend with.

Medlars

Related articles

• Medlar Jelly

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Practising Compassion (2/2)

I said at the end of an earlier post that I might, in addition to quoting from Karen Armstrong, risk revealing some of my own strange ways of holding onto the few spiritual insights I’ve acquired recently, hence the rough and ready cartoonish graphic at the head of this post (more of that in a moment).

So here goes on both counts.

The roots of what I am going to describe go back a long way but it would make for a very long post indeed to go into them as well. For present purposes what is important is a play on three words that were forced on my attention in some dreamwork I did and in my study of the Bahá’í Writings: heart, earth and hearth. Removing the ‘h’ from one or the other end of ‘hearth’ creates the other two words. This word play only works in English but its effect is powerful for me.

This is for several mutually reinforcing reasons.

Bahá’u’lláh reminds us of the value of the earth:

If true glory were to consist in the possession of such perishable things, then the earth on which ye walk must needs vaunt itself over you, because it supplieth you, and bestoweth upon you, these very things, by the decree of the Almighty. In its bowels are contained, according to what God hath ordained, all that ye possess. From it, as a sign of His mercy, ye derive your riches.

(Gleanings: CXVIII)

And He warns us of the dangers of taking it for granted, especially for those who profess wisdom but fail to practice it:

[Of those who profess belief but do not practice) . . . . . ye walk on My earth complacent and self-satisfied, heedless that My earth is weary of you and everything within it shunneth you.

(Persian Hidden Words: No. 20)

He refers to the earth in terms that remind us of how we should feel if we are true to our spiritual natures. He points out that acquiring the qualities of earth will make our being fertile for wisdom:

O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge.

(Gleanings: CLII)

The same quotation goes on to make reference to fire. Both fire and earth are strongly related to the human heart in Bahá’í Scripture.

Bahá’u’lláh compares our hearts to a garden which needs seeding and tending:

Sow the seeds of My divine wisdom in the pure soil of thy heart, and water them with the water of certitude, that the hyacinths of My knowledge and wisdom may spring up fresh and green in the sacred city of thy heart.

(Persian Hidden Words: No. 33)

And He gives us more guidance still as to what else to plant there:

In the garden of thy heart plant naught but the rose of love, . . . . . . . . .

(Persian Hidden Words: No: 3)

Given that Buddhism regards wisdom and compassion as two sides of the same coin, there may be no difference between them at the spiritual level.

Also in the Hidden Words are references to the fire in the heart:

The candle of thine heart is lighted by the hand of My power, quench it not with the contrary winds of self and passion.

(Persian Hidden Words: No. 32)

So for me the idea that earth and heart are one is close to the surface and a dream gave me a potent symbol of that in the hearth, which is a symbol also evoked by the presence of fire in our hearts.

When I first became aware of all these links I dwelt more on the idea of fire than flowers and the earth. That was partly because a punning connection with my first name, Pete, suggested fuel (peat to burn) in the dream I had about a hearth, rather than peat as compost to grow flowers.

There was a lot more mileage in the hearth image than that, of course. For example, it combined the 'soft' right-brain qualities of peat with the 'hard' left-brain qualities of the iron grate in a way that resonated with what Iain McGilchrist suggests is the need to give both aspects of our being their proper role and function if we are to be balanced human beings creating a balanced civilisation. But I won't dwell on that just now: I've probably said more than enough in previous posts.

Later the other associations with 'peat' came more strongly to the surface, particularly as my second name, Hulme, is so close to 'humus'. They came through so strongly, in fact, that I have come to use the heart-shaped photo of the earth (see the top of the post) as my current reminder of all this. There were no hyacinths or roses handy in the clipart gallery I used, so I made do with tulips, but the point is clear enough. The earth-heart photo also calls to mind very usefully that the 'earth,' the dwelling place of all humanity, 'is but one country.'

Because the earth has a magnetic field that helps us find our right direction it wasn't hard to see that a compass, already more than half-way to compassion in its spelling, was a good way of remembering the key value that underpins every other spiritual value in all faiths, and which in Bahá’í terms emanates from the three unities of the essential oneness of God, religion and humanity, blurred as our perception of those may sometimes be. The other meaning of the word 'compass' is also a reminder, as is the image of our world from space, to widen the embrace of my compassion to include all life and perhaps even the earth itself, an imperative need as Robert Wright describes it.

Bahá’u’lláh also has a most interesting way of linking a compass with kindness that suggests I might be on the right lines here.

A kindly tongue is the lodestone of the hearts of men. It leadeth the way and guideth.

(Gleanings: CXXXII)

Exposing this personal approach to helping myself internalise and remember what I think I have learnt did seem a bit risky, hence my earlier hesitation. I was encouraged to persist by a moving and amusing TED talk by Brené Brown that my good friend, Barney Leith, shared with me (see the YouTube at the end of this post).

She speaks amongst other things about how our way of dealing with our vulnerability affects our relationships with others, even our whole attitude to life. Those who embrace their vulnerability, her research demonstrates, are more empathic, more authentic and better connected to others. Vulnerability is indispensable to a 'whole-hearted' life. So how could I continue to cop out in the light of that? ('I can think of a few ways,' said my craven part but I managed to ignore it.)

Well, I've left very little room for Karen Armstrong after all. I'll need to come back to some of the things she says in a later post. Just one quick thought for now.

In her discussion of mindfulness Karen Armstrong, in her book on the twelve steps to a compassionate life, is strongly implying a link between compassion, mindfulness and creativity (page 97):

When you are engrossed in thoughts of anger, hatred, envy, resentment or disgust, notice the way your horizons shrink and your creativity diminishes. I find it impossible to write well when I am churning with resentment.

It would be easy to leap in and say, 'But what about satire?' The response there might well be, 'What is fuelling the anger that drives the satire?' If it is petty spite arising from wounded vanity, for example, I doubt we would be talking about great satire and this, I think, is what lets down some of Alexander Pope's less effective moments. If it is outrage at some monstrous injustice or malpractice, such as led to the writing of 'Animal Farm', '1984' and  Swift's 'Modest Proposal,' then there's every chance the satire, rooted as it will be in a deep compassion for and identification with our fellow human beings, will be great satire, standing the test of changing times and changing tastes. Such works all have the capacity to demonstrate a control over difficult material which would be impossible in a state of intemperate rage.

This link she hints at between compassion and creativity has helped me make conscious an inner process that has determined which works of art I keep going back to, such as the plays of Shakespeare, and those I leave behind unrevisited. It is Shakespeare's compassion that is the flame that brings my moth-mind back to him over and over again.

Take these lines from 'Measure for Measure' (Act 1, Scene 3, lines 85-88):

The sense of death is most in apprehension,
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.

This surely is the spirit that should permeate our entire lives.

My simple unskilled diagram is just the beginnings of my latest attempt to bring that about and realise its full potential in my life as a Bahá’í. It works for me but I can quite see that it might not do the trick for anyone else. I have put it as the home screen in my mobile phone, so every time I open it I'm reminded of how I wish to be. Preparing my mind in this way seems to attract opportunities to be helpful in small ways. Or maybe it just makes me more able to spot them and respond when they happen. Whatever the reason it has made my few small kindnesses that bit more likely.

Enjoy the talk on vulnerability.

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The Business of Bees

It has been sad to see the number of bees dwindling over recent years with no widely accepted explanation that would provide a clear remedy. Honeybees have not only become essential to our food chain but have also been an inspiration to poets over centuries from Virgil’s Georgics to the present day with Sylvia Plath‘s witty ambivalence about the arrival of the bee box.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can’t keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

Herbert predictably looks at them from spiritual angle.

Bees work for man, and yet they never bruise
Their Master’s flower, but leave it having done,
As fair as ever and as fit to use;
So both the flower doth stay and honey run.

George Herbert, Providence, lines 65-68

So, it’s not surprising I’m glad to say that our garden boasts far more bees this year than last so I’m posting these pictures and the various poems to celebrate.

There’s no better place to pick up the thread of poetry again than with the contagious admiration of Dickinson.

The Pedigree of Honey

Does not concern the Bee -

A Clover, any time, to him

Is Aristocracy -

(Emily Dickinson- 1650: R. W. Franklin Edition 1999)

His Labor is a Chant -
His Idleness – a Tune -
Oh, for a Bee’s experience
Of Clovers and of Noon!

(Emily Dickinson, 979 Franklin Edition)

As you would expect Shakespeare had a fair bit to say about bees and spelt out some possible implications for the way we see ourselves and our society.

. . . [S]o work the honey-bees;
Creatures, by a rule in nature teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad,
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds;
Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home,
To the tent royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in,
The sad-ey’d justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.

(Shakespeare, Henry V, Act I, Scene 2, lines 190-207, RSC Edition.)

The line about ‘singing masons building roofs of gold’ is particularly resonant for Bahá’ís, I think, because of the distinctive golden dome above the Shrine of the Báb in Haifa. It is even more relevant because work is currently being done to refurbish the roof of the dome.

Perhaps one of the most famous poems to include a reference to bees is John Keats‘ Ode to Autumn.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

(John Keats: Ode to Autumn.)

Their greater audibility as well as visibility this year offsets the more gloomy feelings I was experiencing before, which the poem below perhaps manages to capture.

An unsteady bee poisoned with autumn
settles on a pink leaf. The cold wind swings
the hanging stem. I move. The bee is gone.
Still my pen continues its black scribblings.

I just hope the more positive feelings are based in reality and that the current bee population is on the road to recovery. If not, perhaps the native black honeybee will prove the best answer.

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Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Last week I would not have had a clue that several very different things were in any way connected. I would have looked  at the Church of Humanity, a Comtean religion of the 19th Century, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Homer, the Old Testament, and the Higher Criticism which sent shock waves through the Christian worlds of Europe and America, as occupying totally separate spheres of inquiry.

Just to pick up on one unlikely pairing, Twain, the Mississippi river pilot and irreverent humourist, and Freud, the humourless founder of psychoanalysis, do not at first sight seem to have anything in common except the writing of books.

The thread that connects them all, the argument over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, is unravelled and displayed in the witty and fascinating book, Contested Will, by James Shapiro.

He places Delia Bacon and her advocacy of Francis Bacon (no relative) as the writer of Shakespeare’s plays in their full context. Firstly he unpacks their links with some unsettling deconstructions. There was the work that suggested that ‘Homer‘ might not be a real historical figure and the sole author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then came the doubts about the core of the Bible: it just might not be the unmixed work of Moses. Lastly the gospels were demonstrated to be a less than coherent account of Christ’s life.

He goes on then to explain the way this context interacted with her deeply disappointing personal life to shift her thinking about Shakespeare in the direction it finally took.

Mark Twain

To explain here how Mark Twain got involved might be a bit of a spoiler for those who don’t already know, but it makes fascinating reading, not least because Helen Keller, the immensely popular writer who had overcome the double handicap of being blind and deaf from the age of 19 months, played a key part in the process.

John Thomas Looney (and, before the cheap shots come flying in, this was pronounced to rhyme with ‘bony’) had other reasons which Shapiro explores for needing to prick the balloon of Shakespeare’s status as an icon of the Comtean ‘Church of Humanity.’

Shapiro disentangles very clearly why Looney’s case for the Earl of Oxford as the author of the plays solved some awkward problems for Freud, while at the same time creating others that were equally uncomfortable.

To simplify the situation slightly, Freud had made Hamlet a key plank in proving his Oedipal theory. This ‘evidence’ was somewhat devalued by the later discovery that Shakespeare’s father didn’t die until after the play was written. Oxford’s father, on the other hand, not only died before the play was written but his mother had also conveniently remarried by that stage.The shift to Oxford’s authorship neatly solved this first problem.

The fact that Oxford died before all the plays hit the public gaze could be explained away to Freud’s satisfaction, but Looney’s somewhat reactionary ideology, and possibly his less than sympathetic attitude towards the position of Jews in society, posed problems that Freud, as a Jew who had fled Nazi Germany, could not face up to let alone resolve. So, his allegiance to the Oxford theory came at an inconvenient price.

Shapiro is clearly in no doubt about Shakespeare’s being the true author of his plays. None the less he manages to convey, in a thoroughly engaging fashion, a sympathetic view of why it seemed so plausible to some otherwise intelligent and well-informed people that he could not have written them.

His journey covers issues of identity, reality, scholarship and literature that are of concern to us all. It sheds much light on how any of us could come to entertain misguided ideas. That these ideas about Shakespeare do not directly entail patterns of action that threaten anybody’s life does not devalue this investigation of them. In fact, the Looney advocacy of Oxford’s authorship cannot be separated completely from his views about how society should be organised.

This is a very good read indeed for any one concerned about these things. It is not just for Shakespeare fans like me!

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Musings after an Encounter with Montaigne

The ideas in this post have taken a long time to reach the light of day. The fact that they are doing so now is down to reading a fascinating book about someone who was blogging before blogs were invented.

Montaigne

Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne picks up on this (page 6):

He was the most human of writers, and the most sociable. Had he lived in the era of mass networked communication, he would have been astounded at the scale on which such sociability has become possible: not dozens or hundreds in a gallery, but millions of people seeing themselves . . . . . from different angles.

She points out that his attraction is that we find ourselves reflected in his account of himself. And sure enough I did when I came to Chapters 6 & 7 in her book. She writes of his debt to philosophy, particularly the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Sceptics.

She describes stoics (page 114) as being ‘especially keen on pitiless mental rehearsals of all the things they dreaded most.’ They sought to achieve equanimity by confronting sources of discomfort head on. Epicureans were more inclined to avoid unpleasantness by turning ‘their vision away from terrible things, to concentrate on what was positive.’ The sceptics, she claims, sought to get to the same destination by a rather different route (page 124):

The key to the trick is the revelation that nothing in life need be taken seriously.

The way the trick is worked though is the really interesting bit. You deal with problems by what the Greeks termed epokhe. That triggered an immediate frisson of recognition in me because I recognised behind that unfamiliar Greek word a more familiar French one: époché. I’d seen this in books on existentialist philosophy and psychotherapy where it is used to mean ‘bracketing’ when referring to assumptions and beliefs (see Spinelli). This meant placing them in brackets to put some distance between yourself and your operating assumptions so that you could inspect them in a more detached way. Epokhe, according to Montaigne, meant suspending judgement, a very similar concept.

It’s beginning to be obvious why this latter version of scepticism meant something to me as I have always been taken by the power of suspending my identification with my ideas so that I could reflect on them and maybe change them, including my ideas of who I am. Reflection is a word also used in existentialism to convey this concept of disidentification, about which I have written at length in other posts. My encounter with Montaigne even at second hand in this way was rather uncannily mirroring me. He evinces the same kind of doubt and uncertainty about the validity of his preconceptions as has been my default position for as long as I can remember.

Interestingly Montaigne did not find this kind of scepticism at odds with his Christian Faith. This is a point to which I shall return.

Before we lose the initial thread completely I need to go back to why I resonated to Montaigne’s version of Stoicism and Epicurianism as presented by Sarah Bakewell.

The emphasis I derived from the stoic position was endurance, facing discomfort down. For me this connects with the idea in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that you need to develop the capacity to enact your values in the face of discomfort and not use discomfort as an excuse to do nothing of use or value. For me this is closely allied to the idea of duty. Epicurianism on the other hand seemed to value avoidance and distraction as a means of defusing unpleasantness. Seen this way these two philosophies capture an apparent polarity that splits my mind on many occasions.

Duty calls me to exert myself which I might do until fatigue and stress flip me into escapism: I then distract myself with something less demanding. Initially it may seem as though duties and distractions are genuinely opposite. However, whether something seems a duty or a distraction can shift depending upon my point of view and most importantly what value I detect as in reality underpinning the activity.

A duty undertaken not for its objective usefulness or moral value but as a means of making a good impression on others suddenly becomes suspect. An apparent distraction such as watching Hamlet or Lark Rise to Candleford on television may inspire a deeper understanding of people or rekindle a strong sense of community that makes me a better person capable of greater empathy and kindness: what was despised as a temptation from the path of duty becomes the means of enriching my sense of common humanity.

So what seemed initially the clear contradiction between duty and distraction turns out to be a false dichotomy. My encounter with Montaigne via Bakewell has suddenly become not just a mirror but a microscope. It has brought a subtle problem into clearer focus.

This shouldn’t really have come as such a surprise to me. Since my teens I have lived with and partly through Shakespeare, and Shakespeare and Montaigne are kindred spirits.

Shakespeare

Jonathan Bate describes this in his brilliant book on Shakespeare, Soul of the Age (page 410):

If there is a single book that . . . brings us close to the workings of the mind of Hamlet, it is Montaigne’s Essays. Scholars debate as to whether or not Shakespeare saw Florio’s translation before it was published in 1603. The balance of evidence suggests that he probably did not, but rather that his mind and Montaigne’s worked in such similar ways that Hamlet seems like a reader of Montaigne  even though he could not have been one.

And I’ve known of this connection for a long time but been too lazy or unwilling to grapple with Montaigne directly even in the most recent skilled translation of the complete essays by Screech which I bought in 2003. One of the reasons  why I have been unable to convince myself that I should invest the necessary effort in reading its 1200 pages is that I cannot make up my mind whether to do so would be enacting a duty in the face of discomfort or succumbing to a distraction that would lead me away from the path I ought to be pursuing. You see the problem? It’s also clear why I find Montaigne’s tentative scepticism so appealing. I’m like the old joke about the man who went to the psychotherapist saying: ‘I have this terrible problem. I have to qualify everything I say. Well, almost everything.’

Time to return now to the problem we mentioned earlier: how is such doubtful dithering compatible with faith? A possible key to this is touched on in Bakewell’s book (page 130). She quotes Montaigne:

We must really strain our soul to be aware of our own fallibility.

She goes on to say:

There was only one exception to his ‘question everything’ rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt.

While this went down well during his life time, it’s interesting to note that sometime after his death he ended up on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books where he remained for a hundred and eighty years.

Clearly this is not a stance without its complications. In an age of evangelical atheism and creationism how does this idea that we can doubt everything but faith hold up?

For Bahá’ís this is an interesting issue in that our scriptures give us some hints about how this apparent contradiction might be managed in our own lives. Bahá’u'lláh tells us:

All that I have revealed unto thee with the tongue of power, and have written for thee with the pen of might, hath been in accordance with thy capacity and understanding, not with My state and the melody of My voice.

(Arabic Hidden Words: Number 67)

Our understanding is therefore never going to be the same as the truths the Revelation is seeking to convey. Bahá’u'lláh also seems to distinguish between the sort of cast-iron certainty we sometimes have about our understanding and Certitude which is the highest form of faith.

When the channel of the human soul is cleansed of all worldly and impeding attachments, it will unfailingly perceive the breath of the Beloved across immeasurable distances, and will, led by its perfume, attain and enter the City of Certitude….

(Kitáb-i-Íqán: page 126 UK Edition)

And He explains what exactly the City of Certitude is:

That city is none other than the Word of God revealed in every age and dispensation.

(Op. Cit.: page 127 UK Edition)

So certitude is about our relationship with the Word of God itself, not about our relationship with what we think Revelation means. In the first section of the Íqán Bahá’u'lláh has made it very clear how wide of the mark of divine purpose the understandings of mankind can be. This maps closely onto the distinction Paul Lample makes in his book Revelation and Social Reality between religion and Revelation. There is a crucial distinction, he feels (page 21), between Revelation as the undiluted Word of God and religion as the way the Word is applied.

Therefore a deep scepticism about my own understanding can be quite compatible with an unswerving faith in the Scriptures of a religion. Such a position is in fact preferable to a cast-iron commitment to our current interpretation of our religion which will either crack under the hammer blows of the tests life smashes into us or be used as a weapon with which to crack the skulls of our so-called enemies.

How amazing that the blogs of a sixteenth century Frenchman resonate so strongly with my 20th Century mind. We still have a lot to learn from him it seems. Perhaps I should tackle Screech’s book after all.

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