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Article Excerpt
Jean Delumeau begins his classic study of fear in early-modern Europe with an account, drawn from the travel journals of Montaigne, of entering the great walls of the free imperial city of Augsburg, Germany, by night. (1) Four massive gates, reinforced iron barriers and doors, sealed passageways, a drawbridge, and another bridge traversing a moat together offered a daunting prospect to outsiders while protecting the sixty thousand inhabitants of this prosperous Renaissance city from whatever might disturb their sleep. The city-dwellers had plenty to fear in 1580, the year of Montaigne's arrival. If the Catholic and Protestant soldiers who had ravaged central Europe for decades had temporally laid down their pikes-agreeing to do so in the Peace of Augsburg (1555), brokered in the city itself-Ottoman armies still loomed to the east. To the west, in Montaigne's native France, Christians continued their internecine religious wars without reprieve. Satan, too, lurked outside the city gates, along with demons on the open road, sorcerers and witches in the forests, and darkness itself. Each night wolves across Europe emerged from the black, together with thieves, vagabonds, and brigands-strangers and strange beings all-carrying the threat of violence, misery, and disease.
As the largest and richest city in sixteenth-century Germany, a commercial center and trading hub, Augsburg was in many ways unique-unsurprising then that Montaigne, who considered all men his compatriots and who delighted in foreign travel, should want to go there. Concurring with the popular estimation of the city as "the most beautiful in Germany," he remarked on the surprising tolerance of its inhabitants, Lutheran and Catholic parishioners who, he claimed, intermarried often. In such respects the city was a comparative oasis, once inside. (2) But its heavily fortified efforts to keep terror beyond the gates reveal a more general phenomenon, one that Delumeau describes as the "permanent dialogue with fear" of so many Europeans in this age-as well as so many before and since. His historical account reminds us of what anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists might illustrate in different ways: L'homme est un animal qui a peur. Fear has a natural presence in social life.
Whether this fear is ineradicable is something that witnesses to our own age's war on terror could stand to ponder. No doubt, a great many contemporary fears, like those of the inhabitants of sixteenth-century Augsburg, are figments of frenzied imaginations: devils beyond the city gates. Yet to deny in an age of global terrorism that there is more to fear than fear itself would be naive. Indeed, one of the central tensions that all defenders of open societies--all cosmopolitans-must face in the early twenty-first century is how to balance legitimate concerns, and our responses to them, with commitments to international fellowship, cooperation, hospitality, and trust.
Montaigne's entrance into Augsburg symbolizes the difficulties of achieving that balance. For Montaigne was an early cosmopolitan; he had branded the words of Terence-Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto-in the rafters above his study in the family chateau, an hour outside Bordeaux. As the word-from kosmos (universe) + polites (citizen)-implies, a cosmopolitan views the world through the prism of the city, polis, in which each of us is a member, safe within its walls. The tension between envisioning that universal city and the effort to make the world in its image is revealing. For, like Montaigne entering free imperial Augsburg, all who would dwell in the universal city must overcome the ramparts of fear. As Europeans and Americans today insist on strengthening their walls and tightening their defenses, it is worthwhile looking a little more closely at the history of the cosmopolitan venture and the concerns that it has continually raised.
"Socrates was asked," Montaigne writes, "where he came from. He replied not 'Athens,' but 'The world.' He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot." (3) Although Socrates may not have said anything of the sort, already by Roman times he was widely regarded as the first of the world's citizens. Here Montaigne draws on that legacy, most likely borrowing his words from Cicero, who tells us in the Tusculum Disputations, "When Socrates was asked which country he belonged to, he replied, 'The world'; for he regarded himself as an inhabitant and citizen of every part of it." (4) Socrates, a mundanus, one who dwells in the world, was also mundi, of the world. Epictetus shares these descriptions in Greek in the Discourses, broadening only the scope: "If what philosophers say about the kinship between god and man is true, what else is left for men than to follow the example of Socrates, and when one is asked where one is from, never to say 'I am an Athenian,' or 'I am a Corinthian,' but 'I am a citizen of the universe?'" (5) Plutarch likewise praises Socrates in De Exilio for saying that "he was no Athenian or Greek, but a 'Cosmian' (as one might say 'Rhodian' or 'Corinthian') because he did not shut himself up" within the narrow limits of Greece. (6)
What might these descriptions mean? Unlike his Sophist contemporaries, Socrates, we know, was not born a traveling man; he only ventured beyond his native Athens on several occasions during military campaigns. To describe him as a cosmopolite then may seem odd. Indeed Montaigne judges Socrates's famous refusal to choose exile over death at his trial as a "fastidious attitude for a man who considered the world his city." Would it not have been better to venture forth, Montaigne wonders, judging that for his part "I shall never, I think, be so broken or so strictly attached to my own country" as to do what Socrates did. (7)
Socrates chose instead to find the world in his city, the teeming metropolis of Athens, rather than the city in his world. He embraced there non-Athenians as students and friends. But it was less this acknowledged openness...
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