To revert to or rederive custom?
Both condemnation and approbation will be equally welcome, equally useful, since I would loathe to be found saying anything ignorantly or inadvertently against the holy teachings of the Church Catholic, Apostolic and Roman, in which I die and in which I was born. And so, while ever submitting myself to the authority of their censure, whose power over me is limitless, I am emboldened to treat all sorts of subjects—as I do here.
I found this chapter, "On Prayer," to disorient my model of Montaigne. It reads like a Hobbesian plea but towards the church, where he submits to the holy teachings, accepts censorship, and grants them limitless power. Historical context matters though. Essais was published in 1580, and the excerpt above was inserted in 1588, after it was read at the Vatican and their censors flagged certain topics for revision ("On Fortune," "On Prayer," and "On Suicide"). So one interpretation is that submission was the required price of writing about religion at all in the 16th century.
But another angle is that Montaigne's Catholicism is under-represented in his portrait. The modern reading of him is that he's the first liberated mind to focus on himself and to beam the laser of reason on all dogma to come to his own ever-shifting conclusions. He was a Pyrrhonist after all, a suspender of judgment. But apparently Pyrrhonism does accept laws and customs for social order, in the name of stability, even if they doubt them. So Montaigne in most works goes beyond traditional Pyrrhonism, and questions torture, marriage, and imperialism in a way his predecessors wouldn't; but he doesn't cross that line with the church.
One interpretation is that Montaigne questioned everything within reason, but since he found God to be beyond that, beyond himself to know definitively, the great unknown, he defaulted the tradition he was born into. This is known as "fideism," and his comfort in it is what bothered Pascal.
In reflecting on this, there is no way to opt-out of all submission without living feral in the woods, which is always an option. I'm landing on the idea that I'd rather submit to the state than the church. In submitting some liberty to a state-backed order, we then have the freedom and time to pursue creative, social, intellectual, and spiritual matters.
I basically disagree with the conclusion that if something is beyond reason we should revert to the default. This doesn't mean to betray all tradition, but character grows when you both accept and reject and put yourself in motion, if even you re-derive the whole religion and end up in the same place. Even if the virtues and metaphysics of Christianity ring true after two thousand years, it's the (closed) epistemology—how we come to conclusions—that's caused so much trouble all this time. Of course, earlier centuries didn't have the luxury to safely question epistemology, but it feels like the Scientific Era rejected religion outright without exploring the option of an open epistemology.