Nobody in Montaigne’s neighborhood seemed to like him. In fact, he was despised by both Protestants and Catholics during the wars of religion that ravaged France from 1562–1598. Thus observes historian Robert Zaretsky in an essay he wrote for the The New York Times a year or so ago.

Montaigne was known in his time as a politique: Someone who “for the sake of all tries to find common ground in a land savaged by zealotry.” Zealots of all stripes hate those who do the hard slow slogging work of incremental reform. And Montaigne was the sort of public intellectual who championed reform over revolution, sort of the David Brooks of his time.

We remember Montaigne today as one of the most civilized and wise voices in an age when cataclysmic events such as war and plague threatened the populations of Europe. In his own time Montaigne was not only a thinker and writer, but an active figure in the public world, a mayor in the Bordeaux region.

His wisdom is distilled in a series of “Essays,” (more accurately they might be termed “forays” into or explorations of a variety of subjects*) which he wrote at his estate outside the gates of the city he served. Montaigne is remembered for his equanimity, a quality of character which comes shining through his essays, making it hard for a contemporary reader to realize that he wrote them while the world seemed to be falling apart around him.

The lesson he learned in his own savage time, the lesson that comes through his essays, is that we can, if we will, find balance, calm, even peace within ourselves when the world is in turmoil. Or to put this theme another way: nothing external to us need affect our inner calm, our equanimity and peace of mind. Nothing.

Montaigne articulated a philosophical perspective closely aligned with the ancient Stoic philosophers: Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. He lived in an age when European intellectuals were rediscovering the treasures of classical knowledge, forging this knowledge into a powerful humanistic movement that called into question the excesses of religious zealotry and fueled the Renaissance and the coming scientific revolution.**

Why was such an ancient philosophy re-emerging in the sixteenth century?

Like today, it was an age of extremes in which people divided themselves into ever smaller, ever more insular and exclusive factions. Political powers made use of these divisions for their own gains. Families were split apart. Family members and neighbors took to spying on one another and reporting departures from religious and political and cultural orthodoxy. Violence, brutality, and torture attended the times, as Protestants opposed, excluded and killed Catholics, and Catholics did the same to Protestants, and both declared open season on the Jewish population and anyone else deemed by them heretical. It was a time of intense anxiety. A time when hope was scarce.

Into this age, Stoicism spoke a message that went to the heart of many leading thinkers. Stoicism taught that while we often can’t change external circumstances, and we are repeatedly defeated when we try to make other people behave and believe as we prefer, in all the vagaries and threats of life, we do possess a freedom that is unassailable.

Christians in virtually every age have sensed a commonality between our faith and this core conviction of Stoicism. When Paul elaborates on Jesus’ encouragement that we “be neither anxious nor afraid,” he does so reminding us that no matter what happens in this world, nothing can separate us from the love of God; God is working through all things to achieve his own loving purposes. Not even death can defeat God’s love.

There’s a wonderful song by the Avett Brothers that communicates a similar message today, “Ain’t No Man.” The first lines go like this.

“There ain’t no man can save me,
There ain’t no man can enslave me,
Ain’t no man,
A man that can change the shape my soul is in.

There ain’t nobody here
Who can cause me pain or raise my fears
Cause I got only love to share
If you’re looking for a truth I’m proof you’ll find it here.”

Recently as my wife Debbie and I were having our breakfast tea together, and I was reading through the usual political shenanigans, catastrophic injustices and worrying medical and scientific information catalogued in the morning papers, Debbie was looking at real estate listings in the Outer Hebrides.

Seriously. She was looking for someplace inconvenient to live.

Of course, we both know that Montaigne and the Avett Brothers, as well as Seneca and Epictetus, the Buddha and the Dalai Lama, not to mention our Lord Jesus himself, are right: the world has always been a mess, there never was a golden age when everything worked and dangers didn’t exist, and if your happiness, and security, and comfort, and hope depend upon the exigencies of the world around you, you’re going to experience life’s persistent unsatisfactoriness with considerable regularity.

Some few of us have the freedom, the physical and financial freedom, if you will, to try to flee society geographically, to try to find quiet places, nooks and crannies of refuge and repose. Most people in the world do not have this freedom. And it was never in the nature of Christianity, or Stoicism or, really, any sensible philosophy of life, simply to escape the world’s trials to some isolated oasis.

However, we all have something much greater, something no one can take away from us. We all have the capacity to develop inner calm and balance in the face of life’s challenges and changes.

This quality of character is rooted in the awareness that if our happiness depends upon finding the right place to live, or the company of those we agree with, or the ability to control the world around us, we shall be disappointed. This quality flourishes in the practice of quietly allowing ourselves to examine what we can change and what we cannot, to do our very best to contribute to the good, and to leave the ultimate results to the God who is greater and wiser than we are.