Anatomy of the Mass: Montaigne's “Cannibals”

Abstract

What might the Mass resemble among a people who never experienced the Fall? Montaigne's most famous essay, “Of Cannibals,” emerges as a radical response to this question when examined in the context of his time's religious polemic, a context from which the essay borrows much of its imagery. Unlike Protestant controversialists who disparaged Catholic eucharistic rites as barbarous, Montaigne suggests such religious prejudices prove little better than the cultural ones under which New World natives labored. He elects to pursue a line of religious inquiry opened up by Renaissance speculation that Amerindians might constitute a non-Adamite race in order to conduct a personal exploration of alternative practices of faith. This two-mindedness with regard to religion suggests that characterizations of Montaigne need to step beyond the categories of believer and unbeliever. Abandoning tendencies toward denominationalism and, more generally, toward affixing labels to heterodoxy allows for an investigation of the fully idiosyncratic experience of early modern belief.