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Chapter 3

Malebranche and the Bel Esprit

“Error is the cause of men’s misery.” With that somber appraisal of the human condition Nicolas Malebranche opened the first chapter of The Search After Truth, a prodigious treatise written in French and published in two parts in 1674–1675.¹ The title was a bold gesture, obviously meant to evoke the search for truth Descartes had recounted in his Discourse on Method nearly forty years earlier. The treatise immediately established its author as a presence to be reckoned with in the theology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy of the final quarter of the seventeenth century. There would be ten editions in his lifetime. He would publish seven more books, all in French, and most addressed to educated audiences extending well beyond academic learning.

To judge by the multiple editions of his texts, Malebranche was a widely read author. Well before his death in 1715, he was regarded as one of the great stylists of French classicism. And yet he might be called an author who rejected authorship, and even as he developed an elegantly lucid and forceful style, he sought to resist the temptation of style. Central to this posture was his equation of French social modernity—the world of polite civility and its paragon, the bel esprit—with “effeminacy.” Malebranche did not use the term “effeminacy” simply to characterize inclinations to be observed in certain men. He made it emblematic of the form that human corruption was taking in what he saw as the social condition of seventeenth-century modernity. As one of the great system-builders of his era, he gave the concept of effeminacy a new status, as a key term of moral diagnosis set within an all-encompassing philosophical and theological framework.

Montaigne’s Sin of Style

The similarities between Malebranche’s life and Poullain de la Barre’s extend well beyond the fact that the two men were roughly of the same generation (Poullain was ten years younger) and that their first publications appeared within a year of each other. Both were born and came of age in Paris, in families that made their livings in the judicial apparatus of the French state. Both were disillusioned by their theological studies at the Sorbonne, though Malebranche, unlike Poullain, received a degree. Perhaps most striking, the two men had passed through the same crucible; for both, Descartes’s new paradigm of the human body had been the point of entry to an intellectual vocation.

And yet it is precisely in their appropriations of Cartesianism that we see their intellectual paths beginning to diverge sharply. We are reminded that in the middle decades of the century Cartesianism was a protean force in French intellectual life.² What it generated depended on what it bonded with. Poullain found in Cartesianism a new justification for his commitment to developments in French Protestantism that point directly to the relatively undogmatic and humanistic Christianity of the Enlightenment. Malebranche incorporated his Cartesianism into the most powerful change in the French religious culture of his age: the reassertion of the theological and moral rigorism of the Augustinian tradition.

The Augustinian revival found its most radical expression in Jansenism, a movement defined by its refusal to accept the papal condemnation of several doctrinal statements in Cornelius Jansenius’s Augustinus (1640). In the efforts to surround the convent at Port-Royal, the Jansenist devotional center, with theological defenses, Antoine Arnauld, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Nicole were the leading voices. Malebranche steered clear of their theological dissent from orthodoxy, though he had close ties with some Jansenists and owed a considerable intellectual debt to Pascal and Nicole. He numbered Jansenists among the people whose ostentatious “air of piety” gave them a false authority in the world.³ The publication of his Treatise on Nature and Grace in 1680 occasioned a rancorous public feud with Arnauld, the leading Jansenist theologian, that dragged on until the latter’s death in 1694. If he found much to criticize in Jansenism, however, he shared its bedrock Augustinian belief in the innate and ineradicable corruption of human nature resulting from original sin. That is why we find him at the opposite extreme from Poullain in seventeenth-century French thinking about honnêteté and the questions about gender it raised. To Poullain the honnête femme and her male counterpart marked a welcomed process of feminization, a decidedly progressive development. To Malebranche they were emblematic of “effeminacy,” a particularly pernicious display of the corruption inherent in postlapsarian man and society.

Malebranche’s perception of effeminacy acquires particularly sharp edges, and an especially pointed social specificity, in his critique of Montaigne’s Essays in Book Two of The Search After Truth. The subject of Book Two is the imagination, the faculty that imprisons the mind of postlapsarian man in error and hence is the cause of the misery of sin. Having described in considerable detail the workings of the imagination within Descartes’s mind/body paradigm, Malebranche discusses three widely read classical authors as examples of the contagious power that its chimeras exercise through the written word. Though he takes Seneca and Tertullian to task for their all too imaginative rhetorical dazzle, he concedes in his introductory remarks that their prose has “certain beauties” that merit the “universal approbation” they have enjoyed for centuries. “I do not” he continues in the same remarks, “have very much esteem for Montaigne’s books” (173). This may be the only sentence in The Search After Truth in which Malebranche, just for a moment, tries to sweeten the pill. In fact the ensuing discussion of Montaigne is a vehement and categorical indictment. Malebranche warns readers that the Essays are “criminally” seductive. They represent not the true “beauty” of a “solid mind,” but the false beauty of an unconstrained imagination, expressed in the “free” and “pleasing” air of longwinded and cunningly vivacious prose. The “pleasure” of reading Montaigne “arises principally from concupiscence, and supports and strengthens only our passions” (184). It is “criminal” in the Augustinian sense: the illicit pleasure of sin.

The critique is meant as a warning to all readers, but it is phrased above all to confront the world of honnêteté with its deep complicity in Montaigne’s criminality. Malebranche evoked that world at the very start of the critique by attributing to Montaigne “the pride of an honest man (honnête homme), if it can be put that way,” with “a certain free air,” an affected “negligence,” and “the air of the world and the cavalier with some erudition”; and again at the end by imputing to him “the beauty, the vivacity, and breadth of the imagination … that passes for bel esprit” (184, 190). He was turning his irony on the fact that in polite circles Montaigne had become a virtually iconic figure, and that his Essays were admired as a model for the kind of free-flowing conversation that adepts at politesse liked to contrast with the excessively masculine aggression of the “pedant.” Taking particular satisfaction in turning this image on its head, Malebranche charged that, in the case of Montaigne, the gentleman’s aversion to pedantry was a false pose; behind it we find a “gentlemanly pedant of quite singular species.” The gentleman’s apparent nonchalance could not hide the fact that, indulging a vanity puffed up by “false science,” Montaigne showered his readers with superfluous literary and historical references (188).

As fierce as it is, this skewing of Montaigne the pedant has a supplementary role in Malebranche’s critique. His main purpose was to mold the conventional reservations about this admired but controversial author into an unqualified indictment of the subjectivity he exemplified and its representation in prose. To defenders of the faith it mattered little that Montaigne was in the end a fideist; they feared that his apparently limitless skepticism would poison the minds of simple believers. Jansenists like Pascal could not tolerate his brazenly selfabsorbed egotism, though they conceded the lucidity of his language and the brilliance of his psychological insights. Literary critics differed on whether the natural “liberty” of his prose betrayed the “rudeness” of an earlier era or made him one of the language’s great stylists. Malebranche echoes these appraisals, but rids them of their ambiguities in an assault combining theological doctrine, philosophical reasoning, and literary judgment. He attributes Montaigne’s obsessive representation of his inner life in print to the egotism that makes us all corrupt. A reckless skepticism—the vehicle of that egotism—finds expression in the “vivid turns” of an imagination that has overpowered the author and in turn overpowers his readers (186–87). That overwhelming effect represents, in heightened form, the essential sinfulness of all authors’ efforts at “style.” It would be “useless to prove … in detail,” he writes, “that all the various styles ordinarily please us only because of the secret corruption of our heart.” But, he continues,

we shall be able to recognize to some extent that if we like the sublime style, the noble and free air of certain authors, it is because we are vain, loving grandeur and independence. We would also find that this relish we take in the delicacies of effeminate discourses has no other source than a secret inclination for softness and voluptuousness. In a word, it is a certain attraction to what affects the senses, not an awareness of the truth, that causes us to be charmed by certain authors and to be carried away by them almost in spite of ourselves. (185)

What were the female traits exhibited in effeminate discourse? At the start of Book Two Malebranche had explained that one of the principal impediments to the discovery of truth was “the delicacy of the brain fibers.” It was “usually found in women,” and gave them “great understanding of everything that strikes the senses”:

It is for women to set fashions, judge language, discern elegance and good manners, they have more knowledge, skill, and finesse than men in these matters. Everything that depends upon taste is within their area of competence, but normally they are incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover. Everything abstract is incomprehensible to them…. They consider only the surface of things, and their imagination has insufficient strength and insight to pierce to the heart … the style and not the reality suffices to occupy their minds to capacity. (130)

Several of these traits—women’s inability to think abstractly or to deal with complex questions, the sensual cast of their cognition and its limitation to the superficial, their concern with fashion—were the standard fare of female stereotypes and had an ancient pedigree. But others evoked the new cultural authority of the honnête femme. Women were not only loquacious; they were judges of language. Their “elegance” and “finesse” were not simply personal attributes; they were particular manifestations of the larger competence conceded to their sex in setting standards of taste and judging style.

Considered within the larger argument of Book Two, these concessions of authority to women implied anything but a positive assessment. If Malebranche had read On the Equality of the Two Sexes (he almost certainly had not), he would have found Poullain’s view that women’s physical “delicacy” gave them superior powers of cognition and communication thoroughly wrongheaded. Likewise he would have dismissed Poullain’s idealized image of the salons as progressive enclaves in a rigidly traditionalist and hierarchical society and culture. In contrast to Poullain, he employed Descartes’s psychophysiological model to demonstrate that, as a rule, the power of women’s imaginations made them intellectually and morally weaker than men. They were not only less able to counteract decadent social and cultural modernity; they were its chief agents.

His fellow Oratorian and friend Father Lelong tells us that Malebranche had a “lively imagination” and was well aware of its power. We hear Malebranche’s own voice behind his friend’s reverential prose: “his imagination was so fertile that he sometimes said that, had he wished to tell stories (faire des contes), he would have made them more pleasing than most that we have.”⁴ Hence there is reason to think that, when Malebranche turned to writing, Montaigne was not simply an example of what to avoid. He was so vehement in condemning Montaigne because he saw too much of himself in him. His struggle against that part of himself is evident, if only obliquely, in The Search After Truth. To readers expecting a classic example of a philosophical treatise, the text seems crowded with digressions inappropriate to the genre. Malebranche acknowledged that fault when, at several points in the text, he apologized to readers for having strayed from what should have been a straight-line philosophical argument. But the critique of Montaigne is not a case in point; it may betray Malebranche’s own imaginative powers, but it is not a digression. Rather than distracting from the purpose of a philosophical treatise, it gives a pronounced social resonance to its core vision.

The Cartesian Augustinian

A biographer who wanted to take us behind the skeletal facts of Malebranche’s youth and early adulthood, into the formative experiences of his interior life, would likely stray into historical fiction. At least in print, Malebranche saw no point in dwelling on the details of his life.⁵ He had concluded from his study of church history and biblical criticism in the Oratorian seminary that all historical facts were merely contingent and hence trivial. As a devout priest who condemned Montaigne as a culpable egotist, he could hardly be expected to have laid bare the history of his own subjective life in his published works. Nor can we expect much from the surviving correspondence. Most of it was written when he was a controversial author known throughout Europe, and is devoted largely to the issues preoccupying the learned. For the earlier years we must dig out, and sometimes infer, what we can about his formation from biographical material set down in the immediate aftermath of his death by his friends Father J. Lelong and the Jesuit Father Y. M. André. Both knew the great man well, but as disciples as well as friends. There is more than a scent of hagiography in their accounts.⁶ Fortunately, however, both men were also devotees of Cartesian science. They felt obliged—one might almost say compelled—to make the public aware of the obstacles that their friend’s bodily “machine” had posed to his work. What they tell us about Malebranche’s physical ailments and his ways of dealing with them is not irrelevant to understanding his intellectual development.

If Lelong and André were hagiographers, they were also close to their subject. They drew on conversations with Malebranche in which he reminisced about his life, and so we hear him, behind their reverent prose, mapping its turning points. We find two decisive moments. In 1660, at twenty-two, he entered the Oratory, an order founded in 1616 by Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, a central figure in the French Counter-Reformation. Malebranche would live in the order’s Paris residence on the Rue St Honoré from his ordination in 1664 to his death in 1715. Also in 1664, shortly after he was ordained, his reading of Claude Clerselier’s edition of two of Descartes’s fragments on the human body occasioned an intellectual reorientation.⁷ This latter event might at first appear to have caused a rupture with the religious vocation that had just been sealed; in fact it gave a vital impulse to the direction he had already taken.

While devoting himself to a life of spiritual retirement Malebranche could also, under the order’s protection, construct his emphatically Catholic philosophy and defend it in the often brutally polemical theological and philosophical battles of his day. But he could not have foreseen this latter advantage as an eighteen-year-old who did not strike his elders as having a particularly scholarly bent. He entered the order because the patrimony he enjoyed as the youngest son of a well-placed judicial family allowed him to eschew a worldly career. The cornerstone of that patrimony was his father’s marriage to Catherine de Lauzon, the daughter of a family already established in the judicial corps of the parlements. Like his older brothers, Nicolas inherited a portion of the family’s landed property in its native province, along with the honorific offices and titles attached to it. But the family owed its wealth, status, and influence primarily to its involvement in the French state, whose hierarchy exhibited at once the lineaments of a modern bureaucratic structure and an intricate configuration of old-regime corporate privileges and solidarities. Entry into this state elite required both merit, demonstrated in the study and practice of law, and the wealth and social connections that enabled families to invest in heritable judicial and administrative offices of the monarchy. Malebranche’s father and several of his uncles took this path, as did most of his older brothers.⁸

In the immediate aftermath of the death of both parents in 1658, there may not have been enough family capital to sustain the last two sons in legal careers. In Nicolas’s case, however, his physical condition was probably the decisive consideration. The curiously elongated figure we see in portraits of him as an adult suggests, but also hides, his physical deformities. He had been born with what Fontenelle, in his eulogy, described as “a tortuously rounded spine” and “an extremely sunken sternum.”⁹ Lelong was more graphic; his spine had the shape of an S, and his arms hung down toward the center of his body “like a dangling pendant.”¹⁰ These deformities made him a chronically sickly boy, not deemed strong enough to attend one of the Jesuits’ grandes collèges in Paris until age sixteen. To that point he had been educated at home, under the close guidance of a devout mother.

It is not surprising that Malebranche did not become an academic theologian, despite his having studied theology at the Sorbonne for three years. He had not distinguished himself as a student, probably because, like many other students of his generation, he was aware enough of the new science to find the Sorbonne’s mix of Thomism and Aristotelianism unpalatable. Given his family’s wealth and influence, he could have secured an ecclesiastical benefice. A maternal uncle occupying the comfortable position of canon in the Cathedral of Notre Dame proposed such an arrangement, but Malebranche demurred. As strongly inclined as he may have been to monastic asceticism, however, he could not withstand its rigors. The Oratory was a happy compromise, less entangled in worldly affairs and comforts than the beneficed clergy, but far less ascetic than monastic orders following the strict observance. Its priests were devoted above all to prayer and a renewal of the clergy, but their community was not cloistered, and, thanks to their family wealth, they led fairly comfortable lives.¹¹ Nicolas entered the order with an annual pension of 500 livres, derived from a property he had inherited from his father. He furnished his rooms with pieces he had brought from home.¹² He spent a good portion of his pension on books.

For Malebranche it also proved critical that Oratorians enjoyed a measure of intellectual independence not to be found in most other branches of the Catholic clergy. The intellectually gifted among them could devote themselves to their scholarly interests, though not to the point of neglecting daily communal devotions. The rooms in which Malebranche lived and received visitors were also his library. An inventory at his death listed more than 1,150 volumes—and that number does not include the books he had bequeathed to friends. As one would expect, there were works in theology and scriptural exegesis, editions of classical authors, and lexicons for the study of Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. But the largest number of his purchases had been in mathematics, natural philosophy, anatomy, botany, and medicine. Virtually all the most important seventeenth-century progenitors of modern science were present: Bacon, Robert Boyle, Descartes, Galileo, Gassendi, Huygens, Kepler, Leibniz, Newton. Almost entirely absent were the texts—among them the essays and letters of Méré and Saint-Évremond, Scudéry’s dialogues and novels, and Fontenelle’s popularizations of science in the form of polite conversations—that the culture of honnêteté had produced.¹³

What happened in 1664? Why did the young Oratorian embrace Cartesianism? We can assume that Lelong tells us the story much as Malebranche had related it to him. Passing along the Rue St Jacques in search of new books, he came upon Merselier’s just published edition of The Human Being. “The method of reasoning and the mechanics (la mécanique) that he perceived in paging through it,” Lelong continues, “appealed to him so strongly that he bought the book and read it with so much pleasure that he found himself obliged from time to time to interrupt his reading because of the heart.” Lelong and other disciples used Malebranche’s reminiscences to fix his growing legend in print. The young man they described was destined to be the century’s great metaphysician, the philosopher the True Faith badly needed. Appropriately, the legend has Malebranche begin the final turn to this destiny with an isolated act, the solitary discovery of philosophy’s own turn, at last, to truth. No doubt Malebranche’s reading of Descartes’s Treatise did occasion an intense awakening, a Catholic’s philosophical analogue to the Protestant conversion experience. But the image of the solitary reader can obscure the fact that in embracing Cartesianism Malebranche joined a movement in French Catholicism that had found its way into the Oratory well before 1664. In the 1650s the intellectual leaders of the Jansenist movement—Antoine Arnauld, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Nicole—were already at work selectively grafting Descartes’s philosophy onto their rigorous Augustinianism. They had close ties with several Oratorian scholars. The older generation at the head of the order—men who had been with Bérulle at the founding—had good reason to maintain an official line of scholastic orthodoxy. In the eyes of orthodox critics in the upper reaches of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Cartesianism was becoming closely associated with Jansenist heresy. It posed a serious danger to an order committed to a teaching mission in strict obedience to church authority. But Clerselier’s edition of the treatise fragments marked the fact that by the early 1660s some of the bright young men of the younger generation were going their own way. Clerselier was one of several Oratorian Cartesians among Malebranche’s friends and colleagues. He certainly conferred with them after the awakening of 1664, and they had probably acquainted him with Descartes’s thought in the years leading up to it.¹⁴

Still, for Malebranche one of the texts in question had singular appeal. In On the Human Being, Descartes had intended to describe “the body on its own, then the soul on its own,” and to end by showing “how these two natures would have to be joined and united.” But the fragment was limited to the first subject. It presented what Poullain heard, in less detail, in the lecture he attended while still at the Sorbonne. Descartes describes the body as a hydraulic force field powered by the heart, which he conceived as a kind of furnace, transforming the blood into vaporous “animal spirits” that passed along or through fibrous substances to and from the fibers of the brain. Conceived in this way, Descartes argued, the body was a machine; it had the same mechanical self-sufficiency that counterweights and wheels gave to a clock.

On the face of it, all this was too technical to inspire an inner awakening in a devout young man. It is easier to imagine Malebranche being mesmerized by the personal search for truth Descartes recounted so masterfully in A Discourse on Method, or by his Meditations on the First Philosophy. But we have to imagine how powerfully new and efficacious this mechanical model seemed to a man with Malebranche’s physical ailments. His crooked spine and sunken sternum often made it difficult to breathe. The daily saying of mass exhausted him. He suffered from kidney stones and long fevers. He had, in the words of a colleague, “a violent stomach acid,” a condition clearly not helped by his habitual coffee-drinking and tobacco-chewing. Over time the frequent vomiting of his meals damaged his throat.¹⁵ The Aristotelian explanation of the body’s vital physical and psychological actions by appeal to the immaterial forms of a “vegetative” soul and a “sensitive” soul did not help him come to terms, intellectually or spiritually, with this wretched state of physical being, and did not offer effective ways of ameliorating it.¹⁶ What he learned from Descartes was that the body was a “form” in a quite different sense: a mechanical configuration of hydraulic forces and vibration-like effects, transmitting motion among its parts like any other machine. As a mechanical system, the body could be understood simply as the field of efficient causes constituted by parts in motion. This paradigm would later be framed within the theological doctrine of “occasionalism” that made Malebranche so controversial. If, as he insisted, all the body’s occasional causes—its seeming infinity of transmitted motions—were caused directly by God, there was no need for the teleological mediation of “occult” forms. His own body was simply defective as such; he was neither responsible for its odd configuration nor ruled by it. He could observe it, and even wonder at it, with a certain scientific detachment, as he observed insects and plants. And, if he could not rebuild the machine, or even repair it, he could at least lessen the distractions its malfunctioning caused him. He consulted medical expertise, but in the end devised his own simple treatments. The main one was the daily drinking of a great quantity of water, apparently in an effort to keep the hydraulic system running as smoothly as possible.¹⁷

But Malebranche did not seize on Descartes’s psychophysiological paradigm with the fervor of a convert simply, or even primarily, because it served his medical needs. The paradigm became the point of intersection between his experience of his own body and his aspiration to grasp universal truths. His determination to hold himself in a state of spiritual detachment from an especially tyrannical body marked, in heightened form, the conviction of so many of his contemporaries that Descartes’s dualism—the radical ontological difference he posited between body and soul—opened a new prospect. It seemed possible at last to complement Augustine’s theological and ethical teaching with an understanding of the nature and workings of the material world. Indeed, Augustinian rigorism and Cartesian dualism could be fused into an integral whole, with the soul at once imprisoned in the body and capable of defying it in the realization of its own pure spirituality. This was the vision that Clerselier evoked in appealing to the authority of Augustine in his preface to the edition, and that Malebranche’s reading of the treatise fragments impelled him to realize. If we imagine him, over the next several years, simply reading Descartes’s texts as one would read any other texts, we fail to appreciate their spiritual import to him. He used Descartes’s writings to grasp clear and distinct ideas by “meditating with” the philosopher, in an intense struggle waged against the body to return the soul to its prelapsarian union with God (13). Likewise with Augustine; having known his thought largely through his order’s teaching and the compendium published in 1667 by André Martin, a fellow Oratorian, he now applied the same powers of meditation to the original texts.¹⁸

If we are to understand how Augustine and Descartes combined to shape Malebranche’s concept of effeminacy, we have to trace the fit among three dimensions of his thought: the psychophysiological paradigm he adapted from Descartes, his corollary theory of social power, and the place of language in that theory. We can expect little help from recent vexed and tangled disputes about the relationship between Augustine’s thought and Descartes’s. The disputes have been a touchstone for a much larger quarrel, and have operated on an ideological level that is more metahistorical than historical. At issue is how the ascendancy of a secular “modernity” since the seventeenth century is to be judged; what responsibility, if any, Christianity has to assume for this development; and how Christianity ought to react to the challenge of secularism.¹⁹ The battle positions would not have made sense to Malebranche. He was, of course, aware that his own Catholic orthodoxy, and indeed the fundaments of any species of Christian faith, were under threat from more secular impulses, particularly in the “libertine” forms of radical skepticism, neo-Stoicism, and neo-Epicureanism. But Descartes’s thought was not one of those threats. Malebranche found it perfectly consistent to be at once an Augustinian and a Cartesian, using each thinker as his lens for reading the other. In his view Descartes’s philosophy provided the compelling philosophical complement to revealed truth that Aristotelianism had signally failed to provide. His Cartesian lens did modernize Augustine’s thought significantly by drawing a sharp line between the material and the spiritual, body and mind; by defining man’s intellectual and moral freedom primarily in terms of his capacity to withhold consent from anything but clear and distinct ideas; by relating man to his world and to God through mechanistic causality; and by denying any immediate relationship between objects and the sensations they seem to produce. But in these Cartesian readings a thoroughly Augustinian economy of sin, trinitarian redemption, conversion, and prayer remained intact.²⁰ The result was The Search After Truth.

Original Sin and the Labor of Attention

Within the vaulting system of Cartesian Augustinianism Malebranche gave the concept of effeminacy a new philosophical and theological scaffolding, unprecedented in its theoretical justification of a moral indictment with quite specific social resonances. The connection between the overarching structure of his thought and his perception of effeminacy as a social phenomenon may at first seem suspiciously attenuated, but it becomes tighter when we trace the logic leading from one to the other.

For Malebranche, as for other Augustinians, the point of departure for understanding the human condition was “concupiscence,” the natural and ineradicable corruption to which Adam and Eve’s original sin had degraded all human beings. He shared this bleak Augustinian vision of man’s radical alienation from his Creator with Pascal and other Jansenists. Like them, he pitted it against both Stoic conceptions of “virtue” as self-mastery and strains of Christianity that seemed to go too far in endowing human beings with a natural capacity to contribute to their sanctification, if not to achieve it through their own efforts. And yet Malebranche also sought to correct what he saw as dangerously oversimplified varieties of Augustinianism among his contemporaries. In the strongly Augustinian leanings of orthodox Lutheranism and Calvinism, man was seen to have been so thoroughly corrupted by original sin that he could do nothing to merit salvation; he was sanctified only by God’s gift of grace, to which he became receptive in a wrenching conversion experience that made him aware of his utter helplessness. Within French Catholicism Jansenists tended to lean in the same direction, particularly in their vision of the monstrosity of postlapsarian human nature, the pitiful inadequacy of natural reason, and the inscrutability of God. Even closer to home, Jean-François Sénault, the then head of the Oratory, had argued in Criminal Man; or, The Corruption of Nature by Sin, published in 1644, that the Fall had corrupted all of nature, though not completely.²¹

Malebranche’s Augustinian embrace of Cartesian dualism gave him a far more flexible way of thinking about original sin and its consequences for the material world and man’s corporeal and spiritual being. As a material creature, man was at once an object of disgust and an object of wonder; and as a union of body and mind, he was imprisoned in the corporeal and yet capable of going remarkably far, even without grace, in reuniting himself with God through his grasp of the universal and immutable truths of reason. The key to these paradoxes was Malebranche’s view of the Fall as a radical inversion of the relationship between body and mind, set in a Christian metanarrative but conceived in Cartesian terms. In their prelapsarian state, Adam and Eve existed in a union of pure intellection with God. Their raison d’être was to understand that union through the exercise of reason, the purely intelligible emanation of the Absolute. Their corporeal senses were essential but entirely subsidiary. By serving as the “faithful” instructors Adam and Eve needed for self-preservation in the spatial and temporal world of material particularity, the senses freed them to realize their purpose as spiritual beings participating in universal truth. In Cartesian terms, they put the body, an extended substance, in the service of the mind, a substance without extension. The senses were a kind of faucet, turned on when self-preservation required it, otherwise kept off so as not to distract from pure intellection. God’s punishment for original sin was to put man at a great distance from his perfection by shifting the preponderance of cognitive power to the senses. As a result the natural instincts of self-preservation expanded into the virtually infinite exigencies of self-love, and the mind, vastly “weakened” in relation to the body, became so “dependent” on it as to be corporeal-like in its operations (xxxiii–xliii).

Ironically it was here, in this apparently unsparing way of conceiving man’s corruption that Malebranche differed from radical Augustinians. In his view the res cogitans and the res extensa, considered in themselves, had not been changed by original sin. What had changed was the distribution of power in the immutable “laws” of their “union.” To corrupt the substances themselves, Malebranche argued, God would have had to contradict the hierarchical order of degrees of “perfection” that he, as the universal Being, contains. That was impossible; his divinity would have been contradicted in the forms of its emanation. God could, to be sure, “unite minds to bodies,” but he could not “subjugate them to bodies.” Though the mind was “enslaved,” Malebranche’s partly figurative use of that term did not imply complete enslavement. He did not, of course, flirt with a heretical denial of the necessity of grace. But in his conception of the laws of union, the mind, uncorrupted in itself, could develop the habitual capacity of “silencing” the senses and “returning into itself,” to the “secret” recesses of reason that sense knowledge normally hid. By doing so it could prepare itself to make the reception of grace morally efficacious, as weeded soil is prepared for grain seeds. The vital link between sanctification by grace and the mind’s natural illumination was the Incarnation, the central mystery of trinitarian divinity. The grace that we receive though Christ’s divine mediation enables us to take a pure “delight” in truths that, though perfectly rational, surpass our natural understanding. The Second Person of the Trinity is the Logos, the Word as Reason assuming a corporeal form “and instructing us in a sensible fashion by His humanity,” adapting to our weakness without losing its purity.

And yet, though original sin could not be said to have left either mind or body in an essentially corrupt state, the resulting laws of their union made concupiscence a force so powerful that it came close to negating man’s aspiration to return to union with God. This power Malebranche already knew from Augustinian teaching and his applications of it in his own examinations of conscience. But it was in the study of Descartes’s mechanical paradigm that he came to understand, in scientific terms, how concupiscence exercised its power or, more precisely, how it actually worked. In his hands, Cartesianism became an epistemology and psychophysiology of sin. On the epistemological level, Descartes had demolished representational theories of cognition, including Augustine’s. The axiomatic “error” in the postlapsarian state was the illusion that objects represent themselves to our minds as they exist. It is simply false to assume that the qualities—color, coldness, heat, smell, and so on—we perceive are in the objects, and that, in the form of sensations, these are transmitted directly to the mind. In fact the objects simply occasion the body to generate illusory images and ideas of them through its own internal dynamic. In our perceptions of our own bodies, as in our perceptions of external objects, we blindly assume to be “natural” truths, and indeed indisputable matters of common sense, what are in fact mere illusions, phantoms of the “darkness” to which our senses consign us. Immersed in these illusions, the mind finds it extremely difficult to rise out of them to grasp the properties of extension and mobility that constitute objects’ real substance and explain their relations to each other.

In his awareness of the world surrounding him, man is not simply limited to perspectival knowledge; he is condemned to a pitifully myopic anthropocentrism. He makes his own body an “absolute standard against which one should measure other things” (26–27, 31). For his self-preservation, to be sure, he needs to be aware of the degree of force he faces in other bodies, and that requires that he perceive their sizes in proportion to his own body. But in the postlapsarian state that is all that his body’s eyes, as opposed to the figurative “eye” of the mind, perceive. He fails to realize that, in the larger scheme of God’s creation, the relative sizes we perceive do not indicate the relative values of objects; even a creature as tiny as the gnat represents the perfection of his work, since it has the same “infinity of parts” that far larger creatures have. The microscope gave Malebranche a glimpse into that infinity. It compensated for his corrupted human vision, so that he could admire all of creation from a position outside, as it were, the illusory world to which the overweening power of his senses confined him. While man “has only one crystalline lens in each eye,” he reported, “the fly has more than a thousand.” That men nonetheless had “disdain” for insects was one more proof that they lived in self-centered error (25–27, 31).

As dependent as it was on the body, the mind retained what Malebranche called a “freedom of indifference” (9). He made cognition and conscience, and indeed error and sin, virtually coterminous. Man was free to withhold consent until he had the “evidence” of clear and distinct ideas—ideas to which he could not refuse consent without experiencing both the painful “secret reproaches of reason” and “the remorse” of “conscience.” The reproaches became audible as he retreated into the recess of reason within himself by engaging in what Malebranche called “the labor of attention” in “meditation” (9–10). He was indebted to Descartes for this concept of disciplined intellectual and spiritual labor. Ironically, through Descartes’s mediation, he appropriated for his purposes not only elements of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, but also, despite his disapproval of pagan philosophy, the commitment to rigorous mental exercises in Stoic askesis.²²

Here again, though, he folded Descartes into Augustine. In first sounding this theme in The Search After Truth, he quoted Augustine: “when man judges things only according to the mind’s pure ideas, when he carefully avoids the noisy confusion of creatures, and, when entering into himself, he listens to his sovereign Master with his senses and passions silent, it is impossible for him to fall into error.” The intellectual labor of meditation was, as Malebranche would put it in Christian Conversations, “the natural prayer that we make to the interior truth, so that it will reveal itself to us.” Like any other kind of labor, “the attention of the mind” was man’s punishment for original sin; but it was also a liberation from its effect, the tyranny of the senses (xxxiii–xliii). In his later, more didactic writings Malebranche would urge his readers again and again to traverse this route to a decorporealized awareness of God’s illuminating presence within the mind.²³ Even as he assured readers that meditation would lead them from error to truth, he warned them that it was “painful” and “fatiguing” labor, and that the corporeal self would resist such effort with all its might. In a methodical, step-by-step progression, one scales a cliff of abstract universals, from rational certainty about the laws of God’s creation to some understanding of God’s perfection and man’s participation in it. This is labor in which the mind has to claw its way out of illusions so deeply rooted as to be virtually beyond questioning. The qualities that the mind attributes to objects, and that it seems to experience so vividly, are its own physically generated projections onto particular being, distortions reflecting the corporeal self’s incapacity to perceive things in any way other than in their relation to itself. Such projections are possible only because the archetypal ideas of the objects as beings with extension are directly present in us, as the universal and immutable ideas that are “in” the “substance of God” and that our pure intellection “sees immediately” as it turns to God. To think in God requires that we strip away layer upon layer of sense distortion that has hidden our immediate participation in God’s intellection in the deep recesses of our minds. The mind must effect a wrenching inversion of the hierarchy of ontological value to which the senses work to confine it. It has to struggle to realize that abstractions are not, as we are so strongly inclined to assume, less real than the objects that, in our senses’ representations, seem to act on us from outside. They are more real, the higher reality of our interior agency.²⁴

For all its emphasis on human corruption, this was Augustinianism with a distinctly Cartesian confidence in the powers of reason. Malebranche’s concept of meditation as a methodical progression marked his departure from the overarching pessimism with which Jansenists like Pascal and Nicole borrowed from Cartesian rationalism. Where they saw reason groping futilely in the face of the mysteries of God and his creation, Malebranche saw it advancing deep into the same mysteries. The meditator achieved certainty about physical nature by pondering the universal laws of extension to be found in the abstractions of mathematics and geometry—the circle and the triangle were his prime examples—and the universal laws of extension that their lines represented with the least possible use of the senses. This was the propaedeutic path to reunion with God, through pure ideas that, being “in God,” were discovered in his illuminating presence in the mind.

Seen from this angle, the other implication of Malebranche’s definition of concupiscence as a hierarchical inversion, not a corruption of substances, may at first seem puzzling. The body, too, represented the majesty of God’s creation, though it did so in its configuration of mechanical forces rather than in any freedom from force. Malebranche insisted that the senses of postlapsarian human beings were no different from Adam and Eve’s, and, in providing man with the sense data he needed for self-preservation, they still functioned remarkably well. Seen in this light, the human body deserved to be approached with awe precisely for what it shared with animals. As machines with intricate and seemingly infinite relations of “parts,” all bodies exemplified the interactions of “occasional causes” through which God, the only sufficient cause, directly willed every motion in his creation. It was this “mechanical design” that enraptured Malebranche when he observed insects under a microscope; they are “so beautiful,” he observed, that “it even seems as though God has willed to bejewel them in compensation for their lack of size” (31). The same sense of awe pervades his calls for a new “science of man,” which would be “the most beautiful, the most pleasant, and the most necessary of all our knowledge” because, in addition to explaining the nature of the mind as such, it would fathom the wonders of the human body that Descartes had discovered (xxxix).

Concupiscence was man’s deluded perception of finite particularity, which the mind’s eye—its capacity to perceive the universal and immutable laws instantiated in particular things—could escape, though only with great difficulty. By itself, this epistemological explanation of a theological doctrine echoes centuries of Christian thinking about the compulsive egotism at the heart of human corruption. But in Malebranche’s reading of it, Descartes’s mechanical paradigm of psychophysiology went a momentous step farther. It made the infinity of parts of the human body comprehensible by dividing them into the fibrous substances of organs, veins, nerves, and muscles and the highly refined blood particles, the vapor-like animal spirits, that transmitted motion among them; and it interrelated these fibers and forces in a way that seemed to explain how they worked to keep the mind in error and why some minds were more enslaved to their bodies than others. The villain of the piece was the imagination, the faculty that turned sensations into images in the brain that in turn “modified” the mind. If the senses were “false witnesses,” the imagination was their deafening voice or, to switch metaphors, the instrument of their coercive force. Its power lay in the “traces” or grooves the animal spirits imprinted on the brain. The deeper the traces, the more easily the imagination turned sensations into blinding images. And that, of course, depended on the relative softness or hardness of the brain fibers. The softer or more “delicate” the fibers, the deeper the traces (87–90, 110–11).

This was the logic that underlay Malebranche’s description of women, in his indictment of the imagination in Book Two of The Search After Truth, as masters of language, manners, and taste, and as incapable of grasping anything “abstract.” Precisely because the power of their imaginations made them so prone to error, women were also, in relation to men, more prone to sin. To say that they were unable to grasp abstractions was to say they could not perform the labor of “natural prayer” in meditation, and hence could not approach (re)union with God through self-illumination. “Effeminacy” marked the ways their example and influence weakened men in their efforts to disentangle the mind from the body, or indeed precluded such efforts.

As opprobrious as his judgments were, Malebranche was not a misogynist, if we mean by that term a hater of women as such. On a key issue, in fact, we find him arguing, albeit tentatively and somewhat tortuously, against what might more fairly be called a misogynist position. In The Search After Truth he applied Descartes’s mind-body dualism to argue that the intergenerational transmission of original sin occurred in the direct communication between the mother’s brain and the brain of the fetus. “One could say,” he wrote, “that from the time we were formed in the wombs of our mothers we were in sin and infected with the corruption of our parents.” He stepped back immediately from the possible implication that women bore sole responsibility for human corruption, or indeed that in pregnancy itself they were “criminal.” If the woman is “righteous”—i.e., if she has the faith to love God—she remains righteous even as her brain’s traces, without her volition, communicate concupiscence to the fetus (120–23). In his later “elucidation” of this subject, he took another step back; a strict interpretation of scriptural passages led to the conclusion that, because it takes both a man and the woman to effect procreation, they both “must be said to be the real causes of sin, each in [his/her] own way.”²⁵

Nor was Malebranche a biological essentialist. The relative strengths of the imagination and reason in a specific person, he explained immediately after listing women’s distinctive traits, depended on the proportion between the volume and force of her (or his) animal spirits and the degree of softness, or delicacy, of her brain fibers. The differences in the proportion from person to person were virtually limitless, and they did not always follow gender lines. Rather than positing a rigid dichotomy between male and female cognition, he conceived something more like a continuum, with exceptional men at the “weak” end and exceptional women at the “strong” end. Hence “some women are found to have stronger minds than some men” (130–31). That was a conclusion about natural fact that he took quite seriously. Indeed it explains what would otherwise be an incomprehensible detail of his life. We know from his friends’ reminiscences that Malebranche found it particularly satisfying that exceptional women of rank could understand his books without the guidance of a “master,” and that “his most illustrious disciples” included women “distinguished as much by their merit as by their birth.” Like Poullain and other admirers of the honnête femme, he found women to be especially promising pupils precisely because they were, by academic standards, ignorant; they had not been corrupted by the “blind prejudice” of “the schools.”²⁶ But he did not see the delicacy of their imaginations as a source of intellectual clarity; unusually “strong, constant women” were distinguished by the fact that their imaginations were relatively lacking in delicacy and hence more easily disempowered.

The Bel Esprit

To extend our reach deeper into the meanings Malebranche attached to “effeminacy,” we have to follow the social line of his thought, particularly as it focuses on language as the instrument of human intersubjectivity. Malebranche “ordinarily got bored in conversations,” his friends recalled, but “he said an infinity of times that he never got bored when he was alone.”²⁷ If he could not live a cloistered life, he could at least avoid unwanted contacts with the world outside the Oratorian residence, and with some of his neighbors within it, by withdrawing into himself. Explaining this inclination simply as a matter of temperament would leave us with an all-too-obvious half-truth. Malebranche’s preference for solitude was grounded in the sharp dichotomy he drew between the silence of meditation and the noise of social communication, and that in turn marked a cultural tension in the worlds he inhabited and observed.

The upper reaches of seventeenth-century French society harbored a felt need for the state of silence in solitude. It stood in counterpoint to the aesthetic ideal of conversation, promising to some an occasional respite, and to others a permanent refuge, from the hyper-relational self that polite sociability required. We would seriously underestimate the tension between speech and silence if we conceived it simply as a line dividing worldly honnêtes gens, devoted to the art of conversation, from people with more devout sensibilities. The line also runs through the milieus of polite sociability, registering a strain internal to it. The life of Mme Madeleine de Sablé literally straddled the line. A habitué of the Blue Room, she experienced a conversion under Jansenist influence in 1652, at fifty-four, and built an apartment abutting the convent at Port Royal. Her new residence positioned her to alternate between participating in the nuns’ monastic life and presiding over an elegant salon peopled by cultivated aristocrats of both sexes and Jesuit men of letters as well as Jansenist luminaries.²⁸ In the case of Mme Marguerite Hessein Rambouillet de la Sablière, a grande dame of le monde who had had strong interests in worldly literature, philosophy, and science (she had been a convinced Cartesian) and had been the patroness of Jean de la Fontaine, renunciation took the form of a far more radical break, in reaction to a humiliating marriage and a broken love affair. Following her conversion from Calvinism to Catholicism in the late 1670s, she entered a life of penitence. “I am in complete solitude … with God,” she wrote joyfully in 1692 to her spiritual guide the abbé de Rancé. “Having talked too much,” she informed the spiritual director Rancé had chosen for her, “I must remain silent.”²⁹

Malebranche saw this need for solitude in the women who sought his spiritual guidance. In his own order, the same need had found expression in the founders’ strong attraction to the mysticism of, among others, Bernard de Clairvaux and Saint Theresa of Avila. Though he was wary of the theological implications of the mystical tradition, Malebranche advocated and practiced a form of spirituality that had strong affinities with it. The theologian who seems to have served as his director of conscience for the last forty years of his life was the abbé Pierre Berrand, a student of mysticism with a strong ascetic bent. Berrand taught “hatred” of the natural “self” (le moi) and the practice of solitary “prayer” in a systematic ascent through stages of meditation.³⁰

Another figure looms large in this world of pious women and priests seeking to extract themselves from worldliness: Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé, the founder of the Trappist order. The sole heir of a wealthy family that had ascended to the pinnacle of the Parisian robe nobility, Rancé came of age with the titles and incomes of no less than five ecclesiastical benefices. His extensive classical education had equipped him to be a fashionable man of letters and a dazzling habitué of the salons. His ecclesiastical dignities did not prevent him from leading the life of a dandyish libertine in Parisian high society. “I am going this morning to preach like an angel,” he wrote a friend, “and tonight to hunt like a devil.”³¹ In 1657, when he was twenty-nine, the sudden death of his mistress Marie de Montbazon, herself a notorious libertine, set him on the path to radical renunciation of the world. In 1686, in a letter to Mme de Lafayette, he would recall of this conversion that “agreeable conversation, worldly pleasures, plans for a career and a fortune, seemed to be such vain and hollow things that I began to look on them with disgust.”³² In 1664 his renunciation took a radical turn; he left Paris to take up his duties as abbot at Notre-Dame-de-La-Trappe, a monastery in the Perche valley that had fallen into ruin and had been reduced to six monks of dubious religious commitment. He replaced these remaining residents with a group of Cistercian monks of the strict observance. Taking the Anachronites, the hermit saints of the early Eastern church, as his models, he set about subjecting himself and his fellow monks to a life devoted entirely to penitence and expiation.³³ The major exception to Rancé’s embrace of silence was his correspondence with several society women who sought his spiritual guidance, of whom Mme de la Sablière was one.

Some churchmen protested that Rancé’s excessively severe rule created a climate of sadism and encouraged suicide. But notoriety only increased the fascination with La Trappe at the royal court and in Parisan high society, as well as in the clergy; the monastery became a kind of pilgrimage site for people in these circles. For some, visits to La Trappe probably offered little more than an opportunity for spiritual tourism. Others were drawn to Rancé’s community precisely because it was so uncompromising in excluding the relentless demands of polite sociability. They felt a need for expiatory solitude, and wanted to experience it even though they could not devote their lives to it.

Malebranche was one of the latter. We have known from Lelong’s biography that he was on close terms with Rancé, and that he made periodic “retreats” at the monastery. But one of the two surviving letters from Rancé to Malebranche, largely ignored to date, tells us much more. Dated April 9, 1672, the letter is in response to Malebranche’s announcement of his “resolution” to become a member of the community at La Trappe. Not wanting to seem to have recruited Malebranche, the abbé urged him to keep secret their earlier conversations about his “plan.” Though he approved of the decision in principle, he remained concerned that a man with Malebranche’s frail health would not be able to withstand the harsh physical conditions (he notes “the horrors of the long winters”) and “the deprivation of all human contact and consolation” at La Trappe. But if Malebranche remains unphased by “all the possible consequences of so great a renunciation,” Rancé writes, he should “follow the stirrings of grace”; “a person taking so great a step must have complete trust in God and expect nothing from human help.” He advised him, though, to visit La Trappe before making a decision.³⁴

Malebranche obviously changed his mind, probably because in the end he had to acknowledge to himself that his poor health was an insuperable obstacle. But the very fact of his resolution in the spring of 1672 points us to the complexity of his vocation. That was the year in which Rance introduced a new regimen at La Trappe, still harsher than the Cistercian strict observance. Henceforth the monks could no longer use their cells as private retreats; they could retire to them only for sleep, in complete darkness. Their entire waking lives would be spent in a collectivity of silence, without conversation of any kind. By 1672 Malebranche almost certainly had begun writing The Search After Truth, whose first volume would appear two years later. He knew from conversations with Rancé, and perhaps from visits to La Trappe, that, in sharp contrast to his own and other orders, the monastery was organized on the principle that the life of a monk was one of penitence in silent retreat, not study. Learning led to speech, and speech would transform the monk into a public spectacle.³⁵

Malebranche was apparently willing to abandon his philosophical project, and indeed the entire world of learning, for a life in which reading would be limited to devotional material. Having turned back from a commitment to harsh asceticism, he would henceforth retire periodically to La Trappe, where he could lead a life of total silence in meditation and prayer, away from the world of conversation that he, like Rancé, found so morally “dangerous.” “There is nothing that shrivels up the heart, and that is more ruinous to piety, than conversation,” Rance wrote in one of his “spiritual letters”; “those who greatly love conversing with God keep a great silence with human beings.” His renunciation was categorical; “however regulated and innocent they can be, speech (la parole) and conversation open for us the portals for getting out of ourselves and fill us with phantoms and vain imaginings.”³⁶

It was this animosity toward social speech, no less radical than Rancé’s, that informed Malebranche’s righteous disdain for the social aesthetic of the honnête femme and the honnête homme. In characterizing the aesthetic as effeminate, he made it the site of both weakness and tyrannical power. It not only betrayed, in a particularly pathological social form, the abject dependence of weakened reason on overweening imagination; in doing so, it provided a heightened example of the exercise of blind and arbitrary social power through speech.