The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ