Introduction

It might seem counter-intuitive to honour Michael Moriarty, a scholar whose six major monographs add up to over 2000 pages of writing, by dedicating a series of all-too-brief essays to him. Yet, perhaps we can take inspiration from the skilful use of praeteritio used by Jean Racine, who, when faced with the task of praising Louis XIV during his first speech to the Académie française on 30 October 1678, declared: ‘Qui pouvait mieux nous aider à célébrer ce prodigieux nombre d’exploits dont la grandeur nous accable pour ainsi dire, et nous met dans l’impuissance de les exprimer ?’¹ So perhaps these short articles might indeed be the truest way of recognizing and paying respect to Moriarty’s prodigious and ground-breaking published output.

Anybody who knows Michael Moriarty would of course recognize immediately the absurdity of comparing him to a vainglorious monarch, for he is a man of modesty, kindness and decency, someone who is far more likely to look forward to reading and learning from this collection of articles than to glory in the academic equivalent of a spotlight trained upon him.

The frequency with which Moriarty’s scholarship plays a key role both in the articles that follow in this special number and in the work of so many researchers, graduates and undergraduates across the world testifies to the mark that he has left and continues to leave. From his seminal first book, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), to his latest work, the monumental study Pascal: Reasoning and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), Moriarty manages on the one hand to present his argument cogently and persuasively for readers who have yet to encounter early modern French thought and on the other to invite readers who think they have seen it all before to re-evaluate the writings of the period from exciting new angles. To take his study of Pascal as one example, he is not content simply to place Pascal’s thought within the context of the seventeenth century, but he wishes also to question and examine its validity for modern readers. As he writes in the opening pages,

I try to explain not only what Pascal said, and why he said it, but ask also whether what he says has any claim to be true. To be more precise, while attempting to construct his argument for Christian belief, I comment on how far it, or parts of it, might be relevant or convincing to a modern reader.²

The depth and breadth of Moriarty’s reading and knowledge are present upon every page of his books and many articles. Much of that erudition stems from his analysis of both ancient and early modern writers, but it also extends to the extraordinary generosity that he shows to the scholarship of his immediate predecessors and his peers. A Moriarty bibliography is always guaranteed to be as complete as one could hope for.

Although the bulk of his research has focused upon the centuries covered by this journal, he made one memorable excursion outside this time-span in his book devoted to that famously astute (and controversial) theorist and commentator upon the early modern period among many other areas, Roland Barthes.³ It is a pleasure to see it recognized by a number of contributors to this special number, including the translation of a section of Barthes’s writing that can be found in the Afterword.

But it is perhaps Michael’s work on early modern French thought, published at intervals over the last two decades, that best exemplifies what Terence Cave has called ‘Moriarty’s Method’. We are very grateful to Terence for offering the following appreciation:

Moriarty’s Method, by Terence Cave

Michael’s trilogy on the French ‘moralists’ is a monumental work.⁴ The history of moral thought in early modern France has been an active and productive field in particular since Paul Bénichou’s Morales du grand siècle, with many outstanding contributions from British scholars such as Alban Krailsheimer and Anthony Levi. Michael has surpassed these in the depth and sheer extent of his analyses: never has the claim that ‘all future scholars will be obliged to take account of this study’ been more literally true. His distinctive voice will augment and inflect those of his predecessors in the attempt to make sense of a body of writings which indefatigably revisit the key problems of moral thinking, in ‘Western’ cultures at least.

So what is his distinctive voice? What is ‘Moriarty’s Method’? Well, in the first place, he is visibly and above all methodical in his engagement with writers from Aristotle to La Rochefoucauld and beyond. No stone is left unturned, and the act of turning is of the essence. Moriarty’s alert critical intelligence illuminates each object of thought as he picks it up and sets it among the others in his enormous corpus. Honesty and modesty are the presiding values of his enquiry: no one could accuse him of going for a quick fix, or an eye-catching ‘new reading’. He confronts the issues, sorts them (his triage is exemplary), subjects them to the ancient principle of distinguo, and assigns them to a historical continuum that also emerges, carefully and cautiously, as a transhistorical continuum.

This is of course history of ideas in the mode of scholars such as Quentin Skinner, whom Michael Moriarty clearly admires. Yet it is in the end a great deal more than that. A single methodological thread from the introduction to Disguised Vices gives a sense of the extraordinary sleight-of-hand by which a compilation of philosophical and moral utterances becomes a living corpus: ‘the writers’ […] aim is to put forward, or to challenge, redescriptions of apparently virtuous behaviour as fundamentally vicious’.⁵ The word ‘redescription’ emerges here with apparent innocence as a common-language word for what thinkers do when they rethink something. But note that the writers don’t just put forward redescriptions, they also challenge existing ones, opening up the perspective of a perpetuum mobile of rethought materials. And the next paragraph unmasks what is going on here: Moriarty is referring to the ancient rhetorical term paradiastole, foregrounded by Quentin Skinner in various of his studies on the relation between early modern rhetoric and moral thought. The whole of Michael’s three-volume study is a redescription that continuously inflects his materials, ‘putting forward’ instances of thought or challenging them, but never leaving them fixed and essentialized.

Moriarty knows very well, of course, though he doesn’t say so, that this methodological thread has affinities with critique, or ‘hermeneutic suspicion’ (the first volume of the trilogy is called The Age of Suspicion⁶). Yet his aim is quite different from the proponents of critique, who use suspicion as an ideological weapon, uncovering nefarious thoughts and actions disguised in texts of the past. One has to wait a long time to find the end of this thread in Moriarty’s work, since it only explicitly emerges in the final sentence of the two-page ‘Conclusion’: ‘Of the theological legacy [of the Augustinian tradition], one might suggest that if anything else survives of it, confirming perhaps our own almost-intuitions, it is the notion that any satisfying ethic must be centred on love.’⁷ The delicacy of Moriarty’s autopsy continues to the very end: ‘one might suggest’, ‘perhaps’, ‘almost-intuitions’ – Moriarty is using the most supple rhetoric of his authors (Montaigne is audible here to anyone who is familiar with the Essais), but he uses it to deliver an ultimate redescription: what is left is something that surpasses moral reflection itself and its partial, worldly dilemmas. Go back and read the whole trilogy in that light and you will have a redescription indeed.

Those powers of synthesis, that command of detail, known to his readers, have also guided and inspired countless students. Michael Moriarty’s thought has not only been tested at conferences and in lecture halls, but also tuned in the smaller, more intimate settings of College supervision, as it is known in Cambridge, or in seminars when he was at Queen Mary, London. Supervisions and seminars are supposed to allow the student a voice, but they can easily turn into mini-lectures, or, if the teacher asks questions with specific answers in mind, they risk becoming a sort of sub-Socratic exercise. Moriarty, however, takes a genuine interest in his students; his small-group teaching allows these students to feel that they have reached insights through their own efforts to answer his searching questions. He is quick to appreciate the merits of even an inchoate argument, often generously seeing in that argument ramifications not fully grasped by the student making it. The talent and commitment with which he has made difficult, even austere, ideas accessible, without, however, simplifying them, are another hallmark of Michael Moriarty’s, seen, latterly, in a series of undergraduate lectures on Rousseau’s ‘Second Discourse’.

Michael Moriarty’s prodigious memory has also long been a thing of wonder to his students. When teaching La Rochefoucauld, for example, just the mention of a maxim number would result in a fully internalized, unhesitatingly delivered recitation of the relevant maxim, in all its elegant economy.

The range, both in time and in genre, spanned by the articles that follow, itself pays a small tribute to the breadth of Michael Moriarty’s learning. Even as French studies have balkanized into different schools of thought, Michael Moriarty attains what Pascal approvingly calls ‘cette qualité universelle’.⁸ Michael deserves to be called, exceptionally, a specialist in everything.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Hammond

Nicholas Hammond is Professor of Early Modern French Literature and Thought at Cambridge University. He is the author and editor of several books, including most recently The Powers of Sound and Song in early modern Paris (Pennsylvania State Press, 2019), and is the co-editor of a series of books of essays on Racine's theatre. email: [email protected]

John Leigh

John Leigh is a specialist in eighteenth-century French thought and literature. He is the author of The Search for Enlightenment (Duckworth, 1999) and Voltaire's Sense of History (Voltaire Foundation, 2004). He is also the editor of Beaumarchais, The Figaro Plays (Everyman, 1998). He is currently writing a biography of Voltaire. email: [email protected].

The address for correspondence for both Hammond and Leigh is Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, UK.

Notes

1 Jean Racine, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), ed. by Raymond Picard, vol. 2, p. 342.

2 Michael Moriarty, Pascal: Reasoning and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. vii.

3 Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

4 The trilogy consists of Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

5 Moriarty, Disguised Vices, p. 3.

6 Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion.

7 Moriarty, Disguised Vices, p. 384.

8 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Classiques de Poche, 2000), ed. by Philippe Sellier and Gérard Ferreyrolles, fragment 532.