The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ