Nicolas Malebranche

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Nicolas Malebranche was a French priest of the Oratory and one of the most ambitious philosophers of the seventeenth century, who set out to fuse the new science of René Descartes with the theology of Augustine and arrived at a system in which God is not merely the world’s maker but its sole continuing cause and the medium of all human knowing. Born in Paris in 1638, frail from childhood, he joined the Oratory of Jesus in 1660 and might have remained an unremarkable cleric had he not, the story goes, come upon Descartes’s treatise on man in a bookseller’s stall and read it with such excitement that he had to keep setting it down. The encounter redirected his life. His major work, The Search after Truth, appeared in 1674–75 and went through edition after edition, each one larger than the last.

Two doctrines hold the system together. The first is occasionalism: the claim that finite things never genuinely cause anything at all. When one ball strikes another, or a decision moves a limb, the impact and the wish are only occasions on which God, the single real agent, produces the effect. Malebranche pressed the Cartesian split between mind and body to its limit and concluded that nothing in either could act on the other, or even on its own kind; what looks like causation in nature is the regular, lawlike action of God, willing in accordance with general laws he has laid down. The second doctrine is the vision in God: the mind does not perceive external things directly, nor by ideas of its own making, but sees them in the ideas that exist eternally in the divine understanding. To know a triangle, on this account, is to behold an archetype in God. Knowledge and being alike run back, at every moment, to the one source.

The combination made Malebranche both celebrated and embattled. Antoine Arnauld, the great Jansenist theologian, opened a long and bitter dispute over the nature of ideas and over Malebranche’s account of grace, which treated even the distribution of salvation as flowing from general divine laws rather than particular acts. Leibniz admired the rigor while rejecting the occasionalist machinery; Berkeley borrowed from the vision in God while denying he was a disciple; Hume found in the denial of real causal power a precedent he could turn to his own, skeptical, ends.

For a tradition attentive to mysticism, the interest of Malebranche lies in how near his rationalism runs to contemplation. A doctrine built from geometry and Cartesian physics ends by placing the seat of all truth within the divine mind and making every act of understanding a kind of looking toward God — a philosopher’s version, austere and argued, of the older claim that the soul finds the light it knows by in something greater than itself. He thought he was proving it. Whether the resemblance to the mystics is more than a resemblance is a question his system raises and does not settle.

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