How did Michel de Montaigne’s Roman Catholic faith relate to his skepticism?

Michel de Montaigne remained a loyal, if not fervent, Roman Catholic throughout his life, yet his religious faith was deeply intertwined with his philosophical skepticism. Rather than using his skepticism to challenge his faith, Montaigne employed it to reject the human tendency to make presumptuous or reductive claims about spiritual matters that fall beyond human understanding.1

His approach is often characterized as a form of fideism, where he advocated for accepting what God reveals while maintaining a profound distrust of human intellectual pretenses to absolute knowledge. By questioning the capacity of the human mind to grasp divine truths through reason alone, Montaigne sought to protect religion from being located in false, unexamined, or externally imposed notions. He believed in God but refused to speculate on transcendence, preferring to focus on the concrete realities of human existence. Consequently, his skepticism served as a defense against dogmatism, allowing him to remain within the Roman Catholic tradition while acknowledging the inherent limitations and fragmentation of the human condition.213