The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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,