Of Repentance: The Person Who Will Not Stay Still
By Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
Montaigne's moving self-portrait complicates the wish for a final, tidy account of character.
Montaigne begins Of Repentance by presenting a self that cannot be fixed in place. He is describing a person in motion, whose thoughts and circumstances alter as the writing proceeds. The essay unsettles the expectation that honest self-examination must end with one stable verdict about who the writer really is.
This movement does not make the project trivial. Recording inconsistency carefully may demand more honesty than smoothing it into a story of steady improvement. A polished autobiography can explain every error as preparation for the wisdom of its final page. Montaigne allows the subject to remain less cooperative than that.
Repentance becomes difficult within this account because regret can contain several different things. A person may dislike the consequences of a choice, wish for greater strength or judge an action wrong. These are related experiences, but one does not guarantee another. Disappointment with what happened to me is not yet an adequate account of what I did to somebody else.
The essay's attention to character also challenges the theatre of conversion. A dramatic declaration can receive more admiration than a quiet adjustment in conduct. Yet the declaration is easier to make than the change is to sustain. If the self moves, moral judgement must attend to its movement over time, rather than accept a single eloquent moment as completion.
There is danger on the other side. An endlessly changing person might invoke complexity whenever responsibility becomes uncomfortable. Self-description can become an elaborate shelter: I am inconsistent, circumstances are intricate, no final judgement is possible. The harmed person may reasonably ask whether this sophistication leaves anything clear enough to answer.
Editor's critique
I find Montaigne most valuable when his candour interrupts vanity, including the vanity of appearing magnificently self-critical. He makes room for a less theatrical account of being human: partial understanding, mixed motives and work that remains unfinished. That permission can make examination more truthful.
But I would place a firm demand beside it. Change does not cancel continuity of responsibility. The person who has become different can still owe an apology, restitution or a corrected record. An honest self-portrait should make those obligations easier to recognise, not harder to locate. We need neither a frozen character nor an endlessly dissolving one. We need enough continuity to answer for our actions, and enough openness to become someone who acts differently the next time the same temptation returns.