references (188).
As fierce as it is, this skewing of Montaigne the pedant has a supplementary role in Malebranche’s critique. His main purpose was to mold the conventional reservations about this admired but controversial author into an unqualified indictment of the subjectivity he exemplified and its representation in prose. To defenders of the faith it mattered little that Montaigne was in the end a fideist; they feared that his apparently limitless skepticism would poison the minds of simple believers. Jansenists like Pascal could not tolerate his brazenly selfabsorbed egotism, though they conceded the lucidity of his language and the brilliance of his psychological insights. Literary critics differed on whether the natural “liberty” of his prose betrayed the “rudeness” of an earlier era or made him one of the language’s great stylists. Malebranche echoes these appraisals, but rids them of their ambiguities in an assault combining theological doctrine, philosophical reasoning, and literary judgment. He attributes Montaigne’s obsessive representation of his inner life in print to the egotism that makes us all corrupt. A reckless skepticism—the vehicle of that egotism—finds expression in the “vivid turns” of an imagination that has overpowered the author and in turn overpowers his readers (186–87). That overwhelming effect represents, in heightened form, the essential sinfulness of all authors’ efforts at “style.” It would be “useless to prove … in detail,” he writes, “that all the various styles ordinarily please us only because of the secret corruption of our heart.” But, he continues,
we shall be able to recognize to some extent that if we like the sublime style, the noble and free air of certain authors, it is because we are vain, loving grandeur and independence. We would also find that this relish we take in the delicacies of effeminate discourses has no other source than a secret inclination for softness and voluptuousness. In a word, it is a certain attraction to what affects the senses, not an awareness of the truth, that causes us to be charmed by certain authors and to be carried away by them almost in spite of ourselves. (185)
What were the female traits exhibited in effeminate discourse? At the start of Book Two Malebranche had explained that one of the principal impediments to the discovery of truth was “the delicacy of the brain fibers.” It was “usually found in women,” and gave them “great understanding of everything that strikes the senses”:
It is for women to set fashions, judge language, discern elegance and good manners, they have more knowledge, skill, and finesse than men in these matters. Everything that depends upon taste is within their area of competence, but normally they are incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover. Everything abstract is incomprehensible to them…. They consider only the surface of things, and their imagination has insufficient strength and insight to pierce to the heart … the style and not the reality suffices to occupy their minds to capacity. (130)
Several of these traits—women’s inability to think abstractly or to deal with complex questions, the sensual cast of their cognition and its limitation to the superficial, their concern with fashion—were the standard fare of female stereotypes and had an ancient pedigree. But others evoked the new cultural authority of the honnête femme. Women were not only loquacious; they were judges of language. Their “elegance” and “finesse” were not simply personal attributes; they were particular manifestations of the larger competence conceded to their sex in setting standards of taste and judging style.
Considered within the larger argument of Book Two, these concessions of authority to women implied anything but a positive assessment. If Malebranche had read On the Equality of the Two Sexes (he almost certainly had not), he would have found Poullain’s view that women’s physical “delicacy” gave them superior powers of cognition and communication thoroughly wrongheaded. Likewise he would have dismissed Poullain’s idealized image of the salons as progressive enclaves in a rigidly traditionalist and hierarchical society and culture. In contrast to Poullain, he employed Descartes’s psychophysiological model to demonstrate that, as a rule, the power of women’s imaginations made them intellectually and morally weaker than men. They were not only less able to counteract decadent social and cultural modernity; they were its chief agents.
His fellow Oratorian and friend Father Lelong tells us that Malebranche had a “lively imagination” and was well aware of its power. We hear Malebranche’s own voice behind his friend’s reverential prose: “his imagination was so fertile that he sometimes said that, had he wished to tell stories (faire des contes), he would have made them more pleasing than most that we have.”4 Hence there is reason to think that, when Malebranche turned to 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.
