Pierre Charron 1541 – 1603

Pierre Charron was a French Catholic priest, preacher, and philosopher and the principal successor of Montaigne in the late Renaissance tradition of Christian skepticism. After many years as a celebrated preacher, he was admitted in late life to Montaigne's intimate circle and, after his friend's death, drew on the Essays in the composition of his own Of Wisdom, published in 1601. The book systematized Montaignean skepticism into a Christian Stoic ethic of self-knowledge, freedom of judgment, and natural piety, distinguishing morality from religion in ways that scandalized contemporaries and shaped the libertine erudite movement of the seventeenth century.

Pierre Charron was born at Paris in 1541, the son of a bookseller and one of twenty-five children. He took degrees in canon and civil law at Orléans, Bourges, and Montpellier, where he became doctor of laws in 1571, and after a brief career at the bar entered the church and was ordained around 1576. He became one of the most renowned preachers in France, served from 1581 as ordinary preacher to Marguerite de Valois, queen of Navarre, and held canonries and the office of theologal at Bordeaux, Cahors, and Condom; from 1589 he was the close friend of Michel de Montaigne, who designated him heir to his literary papers.

His works are Les Trois Vérités (1593), against atheism, non-Christian religions, and the Protestant Reformation; the Discours chrestiens of 1600; and the famous De la Sagesse (Of Wisdom), published in 1601 and revised for posthumous reissue in 1604. The Sorbonne and the Jesuits twice attempted to have it placed on the Index.

De la Sagesse systematised Montaigne's scattered scepticism into a moral handbook in three books on self-knowledge, the general principles of wisdom, and the particular virtues; Charron defended the autonomy of natural ethics from religion, treated 'I do not know' as the beginning of wisdom, and so fed the libertine current of seventeenth-century French moralism. He died of apoplexy in Paris in November 1603.