Innovation as Spiritual Exercise: Montaigne and Pascal

The rediscovery of the rhetorical tradition in the past thirty years has transformed the study of early modern authors like Montaigne and Pascal. The categories of traditional literary history, like originality, influence, predecessors, and followers, are now seen as inadequate when it comes to explaining how Montaigne and Pascal thought of themselves as authors and how they understood the process of intellectual discovery and literary production. In the same perspective looking for originality (in the modern sense of the term) in early modern authors is now seen as a misguided enterprise. In the rhetorical culture of early modern Europe every author writes in a given tradition, and every new book is to be understood within the tradition or traditions to which it belongs. Pascal borrows heavily from Montaigne, sometimes verbatim, sometimes not. Montaigne draws from Seneca, Plutarch, Cicero, and many others. Having realized this, the modern reader is tempted to conclude that authors like Montaigne and Pascal, absorbed as they are in their conversation with the great authors from the past, are not interested in saying anything new. Yet the opposite is true. Pascal famously preempts a possible objection to his Pensées by saying, “Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the