The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
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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. If, as he insisted, all the body’s occasional causes—its seeming infinity of transmitted motions—were caused directly by God, there was no need for the teleological mediation of “occult” forms. His own body was simply defective as such; he was neither responsible for its odd configuration nor ruled by it. He could observe it, and even wonder at it, with a certain scientific detachment, as he observed insects and plants. And, if he could not rebuild the machine, or even repair it, he could at least lessen the distractions its malfunctioning caused him. He consulted medical expertise, but in the end devised his own simple treatments. The main one was the daily drinking of a great quantity of water, apparently in an effort to keep the hydraulic system running as smoothly as possible.17
But Malebranche did not seize on Descartes’s psychophysiological paradigm with the fervor of a convert simply, or even primarily, because it served his medical needs. The paradigm became the point of intersection between his experience of his own body and his aspiration to grasp universal truths. His determination to hold himself in a state of spiritual detachment from an especially tyrannical body marked, in heightened form, the conviction of so many of his contemporaries that Descartes’s dualism—the radical ontological difference he posited between body and soul—opened a new prospect. It seemed possible at last to complement Augustine’s theological and ethical teaching with an understanding of the nature and workings of the material world. Indeed, Augustinian rigorism and Cartesian dualism could be fused into an integral whole, with the soul at once imprisoned in the body and capable of defying it in the realization of its own pure spirituality. This was the vision that Clerselier evoked in appealing to the authority of Augustine in his preface to the edition, and that Malebranche’s reading of the treatise fragments impelled him to realize. If we imagine him, over the next several years, simply reading Descartes’s texts as one would read any other texts, we fail to appreciate their spiritual import to him. He used Descartes’s writings to grasp clear and distinct ideas by “meditating with” the philosopher, in an intense struggle waged against the body to return the soul to its prelapsarian union with God (13). Likewise with Augustine; having known his thought largely through his order’s teaching and the compendium published in 1667 by André Martin, a fellow Oratorian, he now applied the same powers of meditation to the original texts.18
If we are to understand how Augustine and Descartes combined to shape Malebranche’s concept of effeminacy, we have to trace the fit among three dimensions of his thought: the psychophysiological paradigm he adapted from Descartes, his corollary theory of social power, and the place of language in that theory. We can expect little help from recent vexed and tangled disputes about the relationship between Augustine’s thought and Descartes’s. The disputes have been a touchstone for a much larger quarrel, and have operated on an ideological level that is more metahistorical than historical. At issue is how the ascendancy of a secular “modernity” since the seventeenth century is to be judged; what responsibility, if any, Christianity has to assume for this development; and how Christianity ought to react to the challenge of secularism.19 The battle positions would not have made sense to Malebranche. He was, of course, aware that his own Catholic orthodoxy, and indeed the fundaments of any species of Christian faith, were under threat from more secular impulses, particularly in the “libertine” forms of radical skepticism, neo-Stoicism, and neo-Epicureanism. But Descartes’s thought was not one of those threats. Malebranche found it perfectly consistent to be at once an Augustinian and a Cartesian, using each thinker as his lens for reading the other. In his view Descartes’s philosophy provided the compelling philosophical complement to revealed truth that Aristotelianism had signally failed to provide. His Cartesian lens did modernize Augustine’s thought significantly by drawing a sharp line between the material and the spiritual, body and mind; by defining man’s intellectual and moral freedom primarily in terms of his capacity to withhold consent from anything but clear and distinct ideas; by relating man to his world and to God through mechanistic causality; and by denying any immediate relationship between objects and the sensations they seem to produce. But in these Cartesian readings a thoroughly Augustinian economy of sin, trinitarian redemption, conversion, and prayer remained intact.20 The result was The Search After Truth.
Original Sin and the Labor of Attention
Within the vaulting system of Cartesian Augustinianism Malebranche gave the concept of effeminacy a new philosophical and theological scaffolding, unprecedented in its theoretical justification of a moral indictment with quite specific social resonances. The connection between the overarching structure of his thought and his perception of effeminacy as a social phenomenon may at first seem suspiciously attenuated, but it becomes tighter when we trace the logic leading from one to the other.
For Malebranche, as for other Augustinians, the point of departure for understanding the human condition was “concupiscence,” the natural and ineradicable corruption to which Adam and Eve’s original