ABSTRACT
As an analogy for thinking about the transcendent, the image and motif of the sun has wide currency in the Renaissance and covers a variety of spheres: erotic and religious are two of the most common, sometimes in combination, and hardly need extensive illustration, either individually or collectively. Michel de Montaigne's Essais contain their own fair share of sun worshippers, from the topos of heliotropic elephants to an Indian tribe. In each case, Montaigne rejects any intrinsic link between contingent events and divine favour or disfavour and his thinking about the absolute takes on typically extreme, absolute forms, arguing for a total dissociation between event and meaning. While Montaigne maintains at the first stage of the argument that sensibles are given for intelligibles, at its final stage he takes away even that support and supplies an implicit rejoinder to writers who use the senses as correlative to experience or even to its attempted conceptualization.
