Malebranche: Theological Figure, Being 2

Father Malebranche clearly belongs to the second half of the seventeenth century. Not to the generation of Descartes, but to the second generation, the first post-Cartesian generation. He was born in 1638. He came, and this is a difference with Descartes and a number of others, from the margins of the court. His father was secretary to the King, a man of the high administration. Like many sons from this type of family, the young man was destined for a career in the Church and entered the Order of the Oratory. The Order of the Oratory was a relatively intellectual order, and rather centralized. As with the Jesuits, there was a general of the Oratory—we will see moreover that Malebranche had some problems with this general—and it was an order dominated at the time, in intellectual terms, by Saint Augustine. Malebranche was a vigorous, combative man. He died in 1715, at 77, which was pretty good for that day and age. He died the same year as Louis XIV; hence, we might say, in the century of Louis XIV.

As proof of his vitality, in late 1714, right before he died, he was still writing very significant “interventions” (this is the word he actually used), notably the Lettres à Dortous de Mairan. The history of these letters is instructive. Dortous de Mairan was a relatively young man at the time—he was thirty-five—and a very committed Christian. And then in 1714 he read Spinoza’s Ethics. The reading of Spinoza’s Ethics and the reference to Spinoza furnish an analytical framework for both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. It was a breathtaking text that circulated quasi-clandestinely and that no one boasted that they’d read. Dortous de Mairan was therefore absolutely overwhelmed: the power of conviction and the argumentative power of Spinoza’s Ethics took hold of him. He could find no objections to it, and his Christian faith was deeply shaken. He immediately wrote to Malebranche, because Malebranche had been his former mathematics tutor, to tell him about his confusion and ask him for support in this spiritual struggle. We owe to this episode a letter from Malebranche to Dortous de Mairan, in which this seventy-six-year-old man offered a well-organized and reasoned assessment of Spinoza, a judgment and arguments about the differences between his own doctrine and Spinoza’s.

So you can see that, late in life, Malebranche was still fighting the good fight alongside the generation that came after him, which was already grappling with all sorts of internal problems and various forms of overt criticism of Christianity that would flourish throughout the entire eighteenth century. This incident also echoes what might be called Malebranche’s own conversion. Just as Dortous de Mairan was suddenly seized and shaken up by reading the Ethics, so, too, it was truly through a chance encounter that Malebranche became what he became. He had been brought up in a completely traditional, essentially Thomist, philosophical framework. But in 1664, at age 26, he happened upon, truly by chance, Descartes’ Treatise on Man. Much later on we will see that it is highly significant that Malebranche’s way into Descartes was not through the front door, that is, through the Meditations or the great philosophical treatises, but rather through the Treatise on Man, that is to say, the part of Descartes’s work that deals with physiology, anatomy, and physics, too; and this is clearly, in our eyes, the weakest, least tenable part of the Cartesian discourse. Yet it was this part that completely overwhelmed Malebranche. Reading it persuaded him that his system of philosophical references and conceptions was totally archaic, insofar as a new system of reference points and figures of rationality had been developed and put into practice. It made him decide, in his own words, to “start his education anew” and to base himself on what, in his opinion, was the truth. This time around, he read for the most part Descartes—who would actually become his master, his true master—and he began to write his first work, The Search After Truth, the first edition of which would take him close to ten years to complete.1

In The Search After Truth, an enormous, extremely convoluted book, the first thing we find, in an as-yet not fully developed state, is Malebranche’s key concept, the one from which he would never vary, and which could be called the “neophyte’s declaration,” i.e., his founding intuition. Then there’s also a sort of incredible patchwork of reflections on a host of weird things, everything from the wings of birds to the soul of the fetus, seashells, the movements of the planets, physics, light, etc., all of it in conspicuous disorder. In Malebranche, starting with this period—that is, in the editions of 1670–1680—there was an anticipation of the eighteenth-century man, the man who is intellectually curious about everything. There was an Encyclopedist avant la lettre side to him. First of all, we are no longer dealing with Descartes’s rigid and highly organized ways of doing things. Something much more freewheeling was evident, something that prepared the ground for the books that would follow in the eighteenth century. These took the form of somewhat capricious explorations of the discoveries of science, travel narratives, amusing experiences, juicy anecdotes, etc., of the “grab bag” variety that can be found in a whole slew of works, and in particular—Malebranche was clearly the precursor of this—in apologetic works. Indeed, the eighteenth century left us a large number of such apologetic works, i.e. works that defend the good cause, that of religion as such, but which do so precisely by glorifying and using the most recent discoveries and the tableau of the natural world. The classic of this kind of work is Abbé Noël-Antoine Pluche’s The Spectacle of Nature (1732), an apologetic for the wonders of nature that sought to enlist the nascent empirical sciences (botany and so on) in the service of glorifying the Lord. A considerable tradition, and one that would continue in France all the way up to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

There was a bit of that in Malebranche, a side that, because it was, so to speak, ahead of its time, hurt him. It hurt him in one respect in particular, namely his inclusion in the serious and established body of seventeenth-century philosophers, such as we see them today. This hybrid side of him, at the boundary between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its blend of very great systematicity and freewheeling exploration, makes it quite difficult to assess his work in terms of the image we might have of the differences between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But in what might be called Malebranche’s “anecdotalism” there is something, in my opinion, more important. Unlike Spinoza, Leibniz, or Descartes, Malebranche was a priest and for that reason he was someone who brought to bear the fact that he was responsible for souls right into his conception of philosophy. In his own eyes, his responsibility wasn’t exclusively the responsibility for a singular adventure of thought; it was that of someone who, being responsible for souls, had to maintain a certain connection with the masses in his philosophical message. In Malebranche there is neither Descartes’s haughtiness, ultimately based on an intellectual aristocratism—which was moreover the intellectual aristocratism of the mathematician Descartes also was—nor the absolute solitude of Spinoza, a thinker who was acutely aware of not being responsible for anyone. But nor was he the exemplary man of the world that Leibniz was. Leibniz represented diplomacy, the small German courts, the comings and goings of Europeans, cosmopolitanism, plus an extraordinary art of intellectual compromise: never get too angry with anyone, especially if he or she holds an important position. And since I was talking about Spinoza, let me mention that Leibniz was someone who, first, went to see Spinoza and, second, always denied having done so.

Malebranche corresponded to none of these three figures. He was someone who was in the position of a militant and had to remain so, someone who was dealing with a mass doctrine, even if he was providing it with a new intellectuality. As a result, he was extremely attentive to what could and should be done—to how, for example, the little anecdotes of popular consciousness, broadly speaking, or those that might be going around at the court or elsewhere, should be dealt with. And so he was someone who was interested in, and discussed in his books, all the little anecdotes making the rounds. Imagine someone today who would be led, for institutional reasons, to consider it necessary for philosophy to give its view on and deal explicitly with issues like flying saucers, horoscopes, treating cancer with herbal tea, etc. Not necessarily in order to say all that stuff is true, but because he would feel responsible for dealing with the issue, since that’s what some people believe—a large number of people; and number, for the militant of a large apparatus, matters. Malebranche was of course prepared to make a selection among them, but his instinctive tendency was to deal with all problems. And he usually went about it by starting from the idea that you should trust what has been said and see how it might be rationalized, rather than adopt an attitude of rationalist hostility. So The Search After Truth is full of things like this, such attempts at rationalization, the direct rationalization, if possible, of things that were important in his eyes, not so much because they agreed with his doctrine but because they were widespread forms of consciousness or well-known anecdotes.

There are sometimes pages and pages like that! This obviously poses a problem. I will come back to this later, when I describe the general scope of Malebranche’s work.

What then is for Malebranche the heart of the matter? What was the overriding motivation of his thought? His problem was the examination of an intrinsic compatibility between the Christian religion and modern philosophy. Modern philosophy meant Descartes, up to and including the state of the mathematical and physical sciences at the most advanced level at the time. Malebranche took pains to show that Cartesianism, as transformed or deployed by him, was actually the true Christian philosophy, i.e., the philosophy that was truly compatible with Christianity. By the way, this is a bit like the revolutionary militant Karl Marx, who proved that the Hegelian dialectic, as transformed by Marx himself, was the true communist philosophy. Hegel was to Marx what Descartes was to Malebranche. As such, Malebranche occupied a very unique position in the treatment of the crisis opened up in Christian philosophy by Cartesian and post-Cartesian, including scientific, modernity. There was a distinct awareness of this crisis, but in a certain sense Malebranche made the remarkable decision to invert its terms. The crisis was ordinarily represented as the problem of adapting Christian dogma to the constructions of the rationalism of the time. The best proof of this is that for a long time the Church itself adopted a conservative position, in the strictest sense, on these matters, that is to say, a position of suspicion and mistrust with regard to this rationalism that it could not see how to integrate into the system of ideas that it had responsibility for. In that regard, there were big problems in Descartes’s work. For example, one of the more typical problems Descartes discussed at great length with Father Mesland, without making too much headway, was what a Cartesian doctrine of the Eucharist might be. Because, if matter is only extension, which is sound Cartesian doctrine, then the host is only extension. So how God could be lodged within it was an extremely thorny issue. There is no doubt that, on a wide array of dogmatic points that are crucial for Christians, modern philosophy, with its geometrization of physical space, introduced considerable problems. Malebranche, for his part, decided to invert the terms ultimately by saying that, far from being an obstacle or an antagonistic term, modern philosophy finally brought forth a philosophy worthy of Christianity, and that, conversely, Thomism and the medieval constructions were merely philosophical artifices. Thus, Malebranche came down on the side of the philosophical modernity of Christianity itself.

On this point, the most striking comparison is with Pascal. There are two key comparisons when it comes to Malebranche: the comparison with Pascal and that with Spinoza. Malebranche was torn between them. Why Pascal? Because Pascal seemingly had the same intention: what was essentially at stake in his thought was to save Christianity under the conditions of modernity. It could be said that, with regard to this problem—attempting to save Christianity beyond the crisis, given the philosophical and scientific ideas symbolized by Descartes, Galileo, et al.—Pascal and Malebranche mapped out two completely different paths. For Pascal, saving Christianity required a radical change of terrain, and it was inconceivable that this could be achieved through the mediation of a philosophical system. There could be no modern philosophical salvation of Christianity. The crux of the problem had to be transformed, the center of gravity had to be different: the problematic of the Christian subject had to be fully inhabited. Pascal’s question was: what is a modern Christian subject, that is, what is a Christian subject in an infinite world devoid of sense? That’s what is radical about his question. At a given moment in the history of philosophy, modernity revealed quite clearly that the philosophical apparatus was not homogeneous with Christianity, and could not be. So, as far as the phenomenology of the Christian subject was concerned, an extreme position, which courageously took on the world’s lack of meaning, had to be accepted. And as a consequence, analytical reason, the Cartesian order of reasons, or even the demonstrative order of Thomism, had to be replaced with a completely new type of dialectical reason. For Pascal, this new reason had to take account of discontinuity, obstacles, interpretations. Discontinuity, obstacles, interpretation: these dialectical reference points were not in the logic of the proof. We might say that Pascal intended to save Christianity through the twin themes of the subject and of a non-analytical reason. In this way, he was the founder of things that modernity has not yet exhausted. One of the consequences of this Pascalian path was anti-Cartesianism. There was no question of linking this enterprise to Descartes in any way. Descartes, said Pascal, was “useless and uncertain.”3 He was fundamentally useless because he did not propose an ethics. He proposed neither a doctrine of salvation nor an ethics. Since the question of salvation was the only question that mattered, Descartes, who proposed nothing new in this regard, was of no interest. And what’s more, he seemed uncertain because his analytical rationality was really limited and was irrelevant to what mattered. Therefore, radical anti-Cartesianism and a complete change of terrain were called for, in order to preserve the chances for a Christianity on the scale of the century, i.e., on the scale of the intellectual revolutions in the century to come.

Malebranche would define a different path, a completely different one from Pascal’s, even though its stakes were the same. A different wager, truly a different approach, which involved interweaving Christianity directly into the Cartesian axiomatic. It was a matter of showing not only that Christianity was compatible with Cartesianism, but that it was its truth, and that Cartesianism without Christianity was an incomplete and inessential Cartesianism. Malebranche endeavored to produce, under the conditions of modernity, a Christian philosophy that was a complete philosophy. This required—and it was to be extraordinarily difficult task—the categories of religion and theology to be changed into concepts of modern philosophy. Thus, he did away with the problem of the compatibility between philosophy and Christianity and replaced it with the thesis of a homogeneity between them. At the heart of this homogeneity was the transformation into concepts of four religious categories that in his opinion were crucial, namely: 1) God the Father, the actual Father, the God of the Bible; 2) the Creation of the world; 3) Christ the Son, Redemption; and, finally, 4) the Church, God, Creation, Christ, and the Church—all can be regarded as concepts of thought in general, not just as particular designations of a belief. We will see that this meant that Malebranche aimed, in his own way, to disrupt the Christian narrative as a story, that is to say as an effect of belief, and to change its central concepts—God, Creation, Christ, and Church—purely and simply into effects of thought. And, on that basis, as we’ll see, to change many other concepts as well: Grace, and then, within Grace, sufficient grace, efficacious grace, predestination, and so on. All of the most sophisticated concepts of theology would be incorporated into the Cartesian axiomatic and, through this strange chemistry, treated from then on as concepts of thought in general. That was Malebranche’s way and that was his challenge. Something very striking resulted from this, namely that the list of his works, beyond The Search After Truth, gives the impression of being a list of works of a theologian in the traditional sense of the term, not that of a philosopher in the modern sense. Let me just mention a few of them: Christian Conversations, Treatise on Nature and Grace (the one we will study), Treatise on the Love of God, Meditations on Humility, and the magnificent Dialogue Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher. China, too, was a concept for Malebranche! Just by looking at these titles you get the sense of a body of Christian theology rather than of a philosophical architecture. But we shouldn’t be taken in by appearances: those may be the titles of the books, but the concepts contained within them are concepts of thought, i.e., concepts of philosophy. The Church, Christ, and so on are not the concepts of a philosophy that would support religion from outside, as it were. They are concepts of thought as such. Whether you are a believer or not is irrelevant in this regard. When Malebranche speaks about Christ, he is speaking about a concept of thought, which, as we shall see, he deduces literally. Christ is deducible. Without Christ, there is no meaning, and not just for Christians: there is no meaning, period, no meaning for thought.

Obviously, this aspect of things, including the aspect reflected in the titles of Malebranche’s works, led to his falling out of favor in the eighteenth century, which, truth be told, has continued to some extent up to today. Because, before long, in the atmosphere of militant anticlericalism of the eighteenth century, Father Malebranche came to be seen as a priest. And as such he was marginalized when it came to being included on the future roster of great philosophers. Even today Malebranche is very much the object of academic study. Several important studies have been devoted to him, and he features regularly on the curriculum for the French competitive exams. But he is, as it were, not really incorporated into philosophy in terms of its attempts at innovation, that is, in terms of its creative dimension properly speaking. Malebranche exists as an object of academic study but he is very rarely a reference in the development of a work, in other philosophers’ constructions. This is not at all the case with Spinoza. Spinoza, even in the most recent modernity, is a fundamental reference for people as different from each other as Althusser and Deleuze. Where and for whom is Malebranche really and centrally a reference? Little wonder that he’s not, since, apparently at least, a minimal allegiance to the categories of Christianity is required to understand that this philosophy is indeed a philosophy. And it would seem that, without this minimal allegiance, his philosophy becomes a theology, or can be represented as a theology. We will deal in greater detail with this problem when the seminar really gets underway. The fall from grace was to come very quickly, beginning in the eighteenth century. But what needs to be understood is that in the seventeenth century Malebranche had a resounding success, and the path he staked out, which I summarized a moment ago, was of great interest to many people. It seemed less steep than Pascal’s path in every respect. Moreover, Malebranche is a fluid writer, too much so at times, but his prose is often elegant, supple, quite charming, with metaphors, some fine turns of phrase, and some very beautiful passages. He was a public philosopher, the reason moreover being that, as the militant of a great cause under threat, he wanted to be a public philosopher. Furthermore, in the seventeenth century, the issue he was dealing with was of the utmost importance: Christianity was still both institutionally and overwhelmingly powerful enough for the question of its compatibility with the profound intellectual transformations taking place at the time to be considered a key question. Even questions like grace and predestination were questions hotly debated in the salons; they weren’t reserved for a specialized elite of theologians.

Reading Malebranche is sometimes hampered by the fact that, where the final editions are concerned, the process becomes convoluted for three distinct reasons. The first is that, between one edition and another, he had to respond to the arguments and objections that came from influential people. As you’ll see, the Treatise on Nature and Grace raised a hue and cry. There were some very powerful adversaries: Arnauld, Bossuet, Fénelon et al.—the big guns, to whom he had to respond. He couldn’t bring out a new edition as if these very influential men hadn’t said a thing. The second reason is that he also had to respond to the common sense objections, that is, the objections that came from ordinary people’s consciousness, about which, as I said, Malebranche cared a great deal insofar as he was a man who was interested in the forms of consciousness of his readers, and of people in general. Even when it took him pretty far afield of the subject—as we saw with the bizarre passages that I read you as an introduction—he had to respond. The third and no less important reason is that he had to be very attentive to the disputes about orthodoxy. It’s clear that when you are dealing with a philosophy that involves Christian categories, it can no longer be a joking matter. It is all very well to treat Christ, the Church, and so on as concepts; but these all correspond to powerful and long-established institutions, and being denounced and put on trial for heresy are very unpleasant things. They are sometimes even a matter of grave concern. Malebranche, moreover, could see quite clearly how this played out, particularly with regard to the Jansenist affair. When a combination of theological dispute and affairs of state occurred, it could lead to harsh punishment. So he also had to toe the line on questions of orthodoxy. He had to prove that he was orthodox, and do so within a philosophical apparatus that included the Christian concepts.

So a new system of justification of orthodoxy had to be found, or well-nigh invented. It was not sufficient to treat the matter schematically, since it was not classical theology. As it was a Christian philosophy, the question of orthodoxy was itself a philosophically new question. Thus, there can be found a whole new approach to the question of orthodoxy in Malebranche, practically a new concept and discourse, which is very interesting to examine closely. So responding to the disputes and exercising caution when it came to the question of orthodoxy was what most often justified the increase in arguments from one edition to the next. However, throughout all of these editions, Malebranche’s great public success was confirmed, maintained, and amplified. His books were widely disseminated and discussed. Malebranche also met with a properly philosophical success, in that his great fellow philosophers were interested in his work. He was quickly acknowledged as one of the significant and influential thinkers of his time, even above and beyond his strictly public success, which, on other occasions, concerned books that weren’t recognized by the philosophical elite of the time. He combined considerable public success with a well-regarded, highly esteemed, critical success among his colleagues as well. But among these colleagues, his illustrious colleagues, this esteem was usually shown by polemics, rarely by declaring that they were wholeheartedly rallying to the other person’s proposition. So Malebranche encountered that mode of recognition represented by great polemics with influential people, as well as by great shows of support on one or another issue. Thus, people like Antoine Arnauld, who helped launch his career, Leibniz, Bossuet, Fénelon, and Bayle took an interest in Malebranche and studied his work with great seriousness. The debate with him was liable to deal with so many different issues that one of Malebranche’s volumes is entirely devoted to his responses to Arnauld, the same for Leibniz, and these exchanges prove that he was classed among the great.

These polemics are characterized by a constant theme: Malebranche’s desire to separate or distinguish himself from Spinozism, which effectively included him in the philosophical configuration. As I told you, from this perspective, the two great differences to be considered are the difference between Malebranche and Pascal on the one hand, and the Malebranche-Spinoza difference on the other. It is safe to assume that any opponent of Malebranche, and especially any Christian opponent, would at one moment or another attempt to prove that Malebranche was really a Spinozist. This is because, at the time, being a Spinozist was in and of itself quite bad. All you had to do was prove that something was Spinozist and the case was closed, because Spinoza was regarded as a latent devil of sorts in the philosophy of the seventeenth century and the first years of the eighteenth century. That is why, all throughout his career, Malebranche had to work hard to distance himself from Spinoza. This fact structured a great many of the polemics I was speaking of, in particular Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher: beneath this Chinese philosopher the Dutch Jew could be glimpsed.

Malebranche did not enter the heart of the conflict right away; he took a diagonal position, so to speak. Not a “centrist” one, properly speaking, because “centrist” would mean that he tried to avoid the blows coming from both sides, which was not exactly the case. He always faced up to the conflict when he had to, and ultimately antagonized everyone. So it wasn’t an opportunist centrism, which is why I prefer to speak of a “diagonal” position. Malebranche opposed the Jansenists on the question of grace, and his merit in this regard is all the greater insofar as it was they who had given him his start. Arnauld in particular had publicized The Search After Truth, with the ulterior motive—as Father Yves André, Malebranche’s great biographer, rightly says4—that it would be good to win someone as brilliant as he was over to the Jansenist party. He gave his full support to the book because he thought it was good for his own cause. Yet, even though Arnauld went out of his way for him, Malebranche opposed him on the question of grace, in circumstances that I will tell you about—they are important for understanding the work—which showed a certain courage on his part. Arnauld was an intellectually impressive figure, though constantly threatened politically on account of the monarchy’s and the State’s position on Jansenism. But the fact is, Malebranche ended up opposing the Jesuits as well, especially on the very important issue of the Chinese. The Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher was very badly regarded by the Jesuits, and they devoted exceptionally hostile reviews to it in their quasi-official journal, the Journal de Trévoux. Indeed, it had hit a nerve. The whole affair had to do with what, exactly, evangelizing the Chinese meant. The Jesuits had a totally opportunistic conception of this. A host of traditional Chinese rituals were left intact and, save for an intermediary intellectual construction reserved for initiates, they converted the Chinese to Christianity without much trouble. It’s worth recalling that the Jesuits’ missionary expansion was always characterized by this tendency to respect local customs as long as formal conversions could be obtained. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit apparatus was really the great apparatus of colonial expansion, so to speak. But this opportunism was by no means Malebranche’s position. For him it was important to know whether they were Christians, and to be a Christian a number of criteria had to be met. This idea didn’t sit well with the Jesuits. That was the situation in the seventeenth century.

On the other hand, with the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, and after these successes, this high society life, this inclusion on the roster of the greats, Malebranche disappeared from view; he fell through the trap door. This does not mean that his influence wasn’t secretly maintained by a number of thinkers, such as Rousseau, for example, without a doubt. But as a publicly recognized author he disappeared, and the eighteenth-century Malebranchists were really a tiny sect, without any clout or significant influence, including in Church matters. The fate of the Treatise on Nature and Grace bears witness to this: after seven different editions, the last of which dates from 1712, there would be no other edition until 1837, and after 1837 none until the one we will be studying: the brave Vrin publishing house picked up a torch that had burned out a long time ago.⁵

Clearly, the main reason for Malebranche’s relative disappearance from the scene was his explicit Christianity. And in addition, it is impossible to make cuts in his work. It’s not like when you’re dealing with what might be called theological mathemes, from which the Christian reference can be abstracted. In Malebranche, the Christian categories themselves are the operational concepts, hence impossible to cut or abstract. But I also believe there is another reason, virtually independent of the first one, and which has to do with the very form of his thought. Malebranche’s thought seems torn between a core of paradoxical-seeming theses, a small core to which he is usually reduced, and whose titles are moreover extremely subversive. There’s that, on the one hand, and, on the other, a host of referents, anecdotes, specific questions, citations, a sort of scattered profusion of the subject under consideration. You get the impression of an extremely fraught relationship between a small number of very strange axioms, and an excessive and overabundant, overflowing subject matter. That’s the impression you get when you read him, and it is ultimately quite difficult to know where the true center of gravity is located. What is Malebranche’s thought? If you take the theses—what I call the matrical core—of his philosophy, you can identify two of them above all, the ones that are in fact always mentioned whenever anyone talks about him…which is rarely the case. These two theses are the “vision in God” and occasionalism. It can be said that Malebranche is the vision in God plus occasionalism, in the same way you’d say, about Nietzsche’s philosophy, for example, that it’s the eternal return plus the will to power.

These are two extremely bizarre theses. The thesis on vision in God holds that our mind does not see, nor does it hear, real bodies. When we see a table, we do not see a table, even though it is right before our eyes; we see its idea in God, even in the act of seeing. Seeing, for a Cartesian, is an intellectual operation, an operation of thought. It is in fact only the radical consequence of one of Descartes’s theses, the solution to a difficult problem that is specific to him. As you know, one of Descartes’s fundamental theses is that thought and extension are radically different substances. They are two unrelated modes of being. But, if you say that seeing a real body is an actual operation, you reintroduce the relationship between them. Indeed, if thought qua thought and extension qua extension are substantially different from each other, you have to go right to the end of the argument. You shouldn’t say: I can “see” or “think” a real body, because that would mean that in reality there is a relationship. So Malebranche confronted a very real problem of Cartesianism, and he went straight to the point by saying: thought can only be concerned with thought; it can only be related to what is homogeneous with it, and therefore when it believes it is seeing a real body, what it is seeing is the idea of this body as it is in God, for in God there are ideas of everything. Everything I’m saying here is very crude, but I’m doing so precisely in order to introduce crude Malebranchism to you. So “vision in God” is, in a way, only a radicalization of Cartesian dualism. Incidentally, this is not idealism, because for Malebranche the body is really there, it is absolutely there, since it was created by God. The problem is that if the essence of thought is different from the body, it makes no sense to say that I see it. It does make sense to say that I see its idea. Not its idea in me, for reasons peculiar to Malebranche—this is not Berkeley, it is not “there are only my ideas”—but its idea in God. The real body is simply the occasion for me to see its idea in God. Which introduces Malebranche’s second great theme, occasionalism.

Occasionalism, too, is the radicalization of one of Descartes’ theses, which consists in saying that God alone acts. This should be taken literally: God alone has any efficacity. For example, if you see one billiard ball hit another one, and this other ball moves, of course you’ll think that it’s the impact with the first ball that makes the second one move. However, this is altogether impossible, since there is nothing but geometricality in extension. The substance of bodies is extension: that is the Cartesian thesis. If all you have is extension, that is, geometry, there can be nothing efficacious. Where, indeed, can it be lodged? You’d have to introduce obscure forces, incomprehensible things. If all you have is Euclidean space, only figures and movements, how can you have energy, and therefore efficacity? There is no such thing as intranatural energy, or natural action. According to Malebranche, it can therefore only be God who makes the second billiard ball move. That’s the only reasonable solution compatible with the Cartesian axiomatics. It is the only one that offers a solution to what for Descartes was an impasse, because he was in fact very much in a quandary about the problem of impact. So, when the billiard ball strikes the other billiard bill, it is an occasion for God to act. And this requires that God act, without for all that limiting his freedom. Just as, when the table enters my field of vision, it is the occasion to see its idea in God, so too, when there is a causal movement, an apparent causal relation, this seeming causal relation is the occasion for divine action. This obviously assumes that divine action in reality obeys laws. They are the laws for these occasions, and they do not shrink from the occasion. For you’ve got to trust; you’ve got to know that, when one billiard ball hits another, it will not remain in place, it will move, every time. God won’t desert us when it comes to causality. He responds to occasions. Why does he do so? This is a problem Malebranche made a point of addressing, and we will see later on how he does so.

In terms of what is, on the contrary, overabundant, the infinite number of specific cases dealt with, we clearly have what I’d call a baroque style. I think that Malebranche represents our great, baroque philosophical construction. This experimental Baroque, which is contemporary with the baroque style of some Jesuit churches, lies in the relationship—typical of his work—between, on the one hand, the ontological theses, the theses on being, which make God the sole operator of both knowledge and action and which therefore pull everything toward infinite simplicity, and, on the other hand, something that pulls everything toward the infinite, intricate and strange investigation of realities. What is properly baroque about this philosophical construction is that there’s a sort of Malebranchian monumentality—quite impoverished, to be sure: vision in God and occasionalism come back over and over—that, with very simple, stark lines of force, represents the structure of the entire building; and at the same time a sort of overelaborate ornamentation represents its style. The whole formed by this very powerful, somewhat peculiar, bizarre framework, a bit lopsided perhaps but in any case amazing, and then by this profuse, extremely strange, florid ornamentation, is what produces the effect particular to Malebranche, which I call the baroque effect, and therefore a great baroque philosophy.

But once you have said as much, you are still only at the vestibule of the building. How do you go about “capturing” this philosophy? For the moment, we are only visiting it, we are only describing it. I, for one, am convinced that the ultimate meaning of Malebranche lies in the mediation of this baroque tension between impoverished monumentality and luxuriant ornamentation, and not in one or the other of these two terms. It is true that you can always say that there are details in Malebranche that are excessive and unnecessary and that the principle of the whole is quite impoverished. But his genius, the way in which his genius should be “captured,” is this extraordinary sense of the relationship between the way the details are balanced out and the overall framework. His is an artistic genius, that of the conceptual artist, of the Baroque conceptual artist. To put it another way: Malebranche is one of the rare philosophers who is truly a philosopher of singular multiplicities. He is an anti-Parmenidean, someone who endeavors to think the proliferation of being under ontological laws. His thought is organized not in terms of One and multiple, but in terms of law and proliferation, or law and dissemination, of regularity and absolute singularity. He confronts something extremely rare in classical philosophy, namely, proliferation as such—that is, the multiple as absolutely singular—and he attempts to show how it can nonetheless be subsumed under a law. We are dealing with what I would call an absolutely unprecedented ontological legalism. Malebranche thought of being in the network of its laws, being as such, i.e., as proliferation. He had the rare audacity to measure his hypothesis against any particular proposition of the world, and, as might be expected, this sometimes made him lapse into absurdity. But what we should think and honor is his audacity. Most of the time philosophers strictly limit the space of proliferation with regard to which they test their hypothesis—that is to say, they more or less set up a precoded worldly testing ground—whereas with Malebranche there is something at once naïve, baroque, and audacious, which is that every proposition of the world is an occasion for him to test his hypothesis. He shrinks before nothing, whether it be the latest publication by a Jesuit, what happens in the fetus, or the Chinese: it’s all grist for his mill. But careful: it’s all grist for his mill not in the sense that all he does is collect things, not even in the sense that he has to deal with everyone’s form of consciousness, including superstitions, but because, in the idea he has of ontological legalism, it’s necessary to establish whether any given proposition is subsumable or not. You do not have the right to cop out; anything can be a challenge by the world to the Malebranchian doctrine of being. His genius lies in treating anything and everything, and his weakness is that he does not always have the means to do so. Malebranche sometimes has his shortcomings, but his audacity is truly remarkable, and it is well-nigh unique.

We should add that what allows him this audacity, this pure audacity of confronting the chaos of the world, is the fact that he is deeply convinced that the world is organized. When I say “organized,” I mean it in the strictest sense of the term, namely, organized by an organization. It is not mechanical clockwork: the world is organized by the Church. We will come back to this fundamental Malebranchian theme: the world is the site of the Church. This is the meaning of the first sentence of the Treatise on Nature and Grace: “God, being able to act only for his own glory, and being able to find it only in himself, cannot have had any other plan in the creation of the world than the establishment of his Church.”6 “Church” is a complex term signifying that “Church,” as concept, should be thought as the organization of the world and that, of course, the world, the anything and everything of the world, corresponds to a hypothesis, to hypotheses. So if we can confront the anything and everything of the world, it is ultimately because the world is organized, because it is the world of an organization, even for those who are not organized. Thus, just as I was speaking about a legalistic ontology with regard to Malebranche, I think we should add that his is the sole case of a political ontology. Not an ontology of politics, but directly a political ontology, in that what sutures the law of being to the infinity of situations or to the “anything and everything” is the Church as organization. Everything obviously depends on what is meant by “organization”: it has a double meaning, for everyone, and for Malebranche as well. Therefore, to think being, you have to think the Church.

In this regard, it is interesting to point out the difference with Pascal, in whose work there is seemingly something similar. Roughly speaking, Pascal claims that the history of truth is the history of the Church, and we clearly find this connection between the truth of being and the Church once again in Malebranche. With Pascal, we are dealing with an historico-temporal interpretation that validates things—relationships between the Old and the New Testaments, retroactions and anticipations—and it is in the warp and weave of time that this consubstantiality of the history of truth and the history of the Church is established; whereas for Malebranche, it is not historical but structural, insofar as the Church is a given of being itself. In particular, the big difference is that in Pascal there is a doctrine of the event, while, as we shall see, there is no doctrine of the event in Malebranche, for whom the event is even properly impossible. His conception of the role of Christ bears witness to this. Indeed, for Malebranche, the Repairer of the World, the Redeemer, Christ, was created before everyone else. His anteriority is not just a matter of his singularity, which makes him identical to God (if Christ is God he is necessarily prior to man), but also of his creaturely dimension: Christ as man, Christ in the finite becoming of God. This goes to show the extent to which it is not the evental dimension of the Fall and of redemption that is at stake in Malebranche, but an absolutely prior structural framework, of which the world is merely the effectuation. This idea that in order to think being you have to think the Church is an idea concerning the very structure of the world, which is not something displayed or set out in the dialectic of time, as it is in Pascal.

The first is that Malebranche proposes mediations with concepts that are absolutely his alone. I call them “balancing” concepts and I will attempt to detect them, as with a seismograph. In Martial Gueroult’s enormous and fundamental book devoted to Malebranche’s philosophy, the metaphor that ultimately came to mind for him with regard to Malebranche’s system—not to the vision he had of the world but to the system itself—is that of the clock.7 An old-style clock, that is to say, a construction in which everything is done with weights and counterweights. Each time Malebranche introduces an additional term into his system, it throws it completely out of balance. And his way of thinking is to introduce yet another term, so as to restore the balance of the whole. These are what I call “balancing concepts.” We are dealing with a mode of thought, a procedure that, in order to apprehend an increasingly proliferating multiple, does not merely subsume it brutally under the One, that does not short-circuit the multiple in a doctrine of the One or of essence, which would quickly reduce it to an essential idea. No: for Malebranche, to confront the multiple is to accept that one more term, an additional singularity, an objection, something that happens in the world, is effectively introduced, and to accept the risk that this may effectively throw the whole out of balance. Nothing can ever be integrated a priori; so he will have to carefully add a part, a weight, a comment, and something will tip over. Resolving the problem consists in finding what else should be introduced into the system, and where to introduce it, to succeed in restoring a balance. This is an absolutely remarkable schema of thought. And it is, in my opinion, the first center of interest provided by Malebranche’s method and ontology. His thought process is not analytical, in the sense of Descartes’s order of reasons; he does not go from one proposition to another by a strictly rational chain of thought. Nor is it dialectical in Pascal’s sense. It is not a tragic thought, full of obstacles, and discontinuous; it is basically an architectonic thought, that is to say, one that integrates increasing numbers of multiplicities by restorations of balances. Incidentally, this gives it a remarkable conceptual inventiveness, despite the extreme poverty of its initial theses, because the true genius of Malebranche is revealed whenever he has to restore the balances. That is where he is truly creative, and can be captured in all his vitality.