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 sin had degraded all human beings. He shared this bleak Augustinian vision of man’s radical alienation from his Creator with Pascal and other Jansenists. Like them, he pitted it against both Stoic conceptions of “virtue” as self-mastery and strains of Christianity that seemed to go too far in endowing human beings with a natural capacity to contribute to their sanctification, if not to achieve it through their own efforts. And yet Malebranche also sought to correct what he saw as dangerously oversimplified varieties of Augustinianism among his contemporaries. In the strongly Augustinian leanings of orthodox Lutheranism and Calvinism, man was seen to have been so thoroughly corrupted by original sin that he could do nothing to merit salvation; he was sanctified only by God’s gift of grace, to which he became receptive in a wrenching conversion experience that made him aware of his utter helplessness. Within French Catholicism Jansenists tended to lean in the same direction, particularly in their vision of the monstrosity of postlapsarian human nature, the pitiful inadequacy of natural reason, and the inscrutability of God. Even closer to home, Jean-François Sénault, the then head of the Oratory, had argued in Criminal Man; or, The Corruption of Nature by Sin, published in 1644, that the Fall had corrupted all of nature, though not completely.21
Malebranche’s Augustinian embrace of Cartesian dualism gave him a far more flexible way of thinking about original sin and its consequences for the material world and man’s corporeal and spiritual being. As a material creature, man was at once an object of disgust and an object of wonder; and as a union of body and mind, he was imprisoned in the corporeal and yet capable of going remarkably far, even without grace, in reuniting himself with God through his grasp of the universal and immutable truths of reason. The key to these paradoxes was Malebranche’s view of the Fall as a radical inversion of the relationship between body and mind, set in a Christian metanarrative but conceived in Cartesian terms. In their prelapsarian state, Adam and Eve existed in a union of pure intellection with God. Their raison d’être was to understand that union through the exercise of reason, the purely intelligible emanation of the Absolute. Their corporeal senses were essential but entirely subsidiary. By serving as the “faithful” instructors Adam and Eve needed for self-preservation in the spatial and temporal world of material particularity, the senses freed them to realize their purpose as spiritual beings participating in universal truth. In Cartesian terms, they put the body, an extended substance, in the service of the mind, a substance without extension. The senses were a kind of faucet, turned on when self-preservation required it, otherwise kept off so as not to distract from pure intellection. God’s punishment for original sin was to put man at a great distance from his perfection by shifting the preponderance of cognitive power to the senses. As a result the natural instincts of self-preservation expanded into the virtually infinite exigencies of self-love, and the mind, vastly “weakened” in relation to the body, became so “dependent” on it as to be corporeal-like in its operations (xxxiii–xliii).
Ironically it was here, in this apparently unsparing way of conceiving man’s corruption that Malebranche differed from radical Augustinians. In his view the res cogitans and the res extensa, considered in themselves, had not been changed by original sin. What had changed was the distribution of power in the immutable “laws” of their “union.” To corrupt the substances themselves, Malebranche argued, God would have had to contradict the hierarchical order of degrees of “perfection” that he, as the universal Being, contains. That
