The Law of Non-Contradiction and French Renaissance Literature: Skepticism and Negative Theology

Abstract

writers to place a high value on their work; this evaluation proceeds from their sense of confidence and from their critical judgment. Sometimes, however, and increasingly so during the century, criticism tends to supersede confidence, writers' irony turns bitter, and the voices of textual polyphony become more and more discordant. I will investigate this negative tendency in French Renaissance literature by examining the impact of negative theology on Montaigne's skepticism. By reading some of the decisive fragments of the Apologie de Raimond Sebond in the light of the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, I will situate Montaigne within an intellectual legacy which manifests itself in the writings of French Evangelicals and which seems to provide the metaphysical framework for the essay.2 This metaphysics, characterized by a radical opposition between Nothing and the Totality of Being, reveals the profound negativity of the Apologie: Montaigne's essay can be then understood not only as a starting point of a more modem epistemology, but also as an outcome of an ontology produced by the deep gap separating man from transcendence. The law of non-contradiction will guide me in this investigation. The motto for this study will be the last verses of the Prisons by Marguerite de Navarre, the writer probably most inspired by Dionysian theology in the French Renaissance.3 The narrator addresses the Nothingness of the human soul, finally freed from the hindrance of cuider and dissolved in divine Totality: