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СКАЧАТЬ 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, at last, to truth. No doubt Malebranche’s reading of Descartes’s Treatise did occasion an intense awakening, a Catholic’s philosophical analogue to the Protestant conversion experience. But the image of the solitary reader can obscure the fact that in embracing Cartesianism Malebranche joined a movement in French Catholicism that had found its way into the Oratory well before 1664. In the 1650s the intellectual leaders of the Jansenist movement—Antoine Arnauld, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Nicole—were already at work selectively grafting Descartes’s philosophy onto their rigorous Augustinianism. They had close ties with several Oratorian scholars. The older generation at the head of the order—men who had been with Bérulle at the founding—had good reason to maintain an official line of scholastic orthodoxy. In the eyes of orthodox critics in the upper reaches of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Cartesianism was becoming closely associated with Jansenist heresy. It posed a serious danger to an order committed to a teaching mission in strict obedience to church authority. But Clerselier’s edition of the treatise fragments marked the fact that by the early 1660s some of the bright young men of the younger generation were going their own way. Clerselier was one of several Oratorian Cartesians among Malebranche’s friends and colleagues. He certainly conferred with them after the awakening of 1664, and they had probably acquainted him with Descartes’s thought in the years leading up to it.¹⁴

      Still, for Malebranche one of the texts in question had singular appeal. In On the Human Being, Descartes had intended to describe “the body on its own, then the soul on its own,” and to end by showing “how these two natures would have to be joined and united.” But the fragment was limited to the first subject. It presented what Poullain heard, in less detail, in the lecture he attended while still at the Sorbonne. Descartes describes the body as a hydraulic force field powered by the heart, which he conceived as a kind of furnace, transforming the blood into vaporous “animal spirits” that passed along or through fibrous substances to and from the fibers of the brain. Conceived in this way, Descartes argued, the body was a machine; it had the same mechanical self-sufficiency that counterweights and wheels gave to a clock.

      On the face of it, all this was too technical to inspire an inner awakening in a devout young man. It is easier to imagine Malebranche being mesmerized by the personal search for truth Descartes recounted so masterfully in A Discourse on Method, or by his Meditations on the First Philosophy. But we have to imagine how powerfully new and efficacious this mechanical model seemed to a man with Malebranche’s physical ailments. His crooked spine and sunken sternum often made it difficult to breathe. The daily saying of mass exhausted him. He suffered from kidney stones and long fevers. He had, in the words of a colleague, “a violent stomach acid,” a condition clearly not helped by his habitual coffee-drinking and tobacco-chewing. Over time the frequent vomiting of his meals damaged his throat.¹⁵ The Aristotelian explanation of the body’s vital physical and psychological actions by appeal to the immaterial forms of a “vegetative” soul and a “sensitive” soul did not help him come to terms, intellectually or spiritually, with this wretched state of physical being, and did not offer effective ways of ameliorating it.¹⁶ What he learned from Descartes was that the body was a “form” in a quite different sense: a mechanical configuration of hydraulic forces and vibration-like effects, transmitting motion among its parts like any other machine. As a mechanical system, the body could be understood simply as the field of efficient causes constituted by parts in motion. This paradigm would later be framed within the theological doctrine of “occasionalism” that made Malebranche so controversial. СКАЧАТЬ