of spirituality that had strong affinities with it. The theologian who seems to have served as his director of conscience for the last forty years of his life was the abbé Pierre Berrand, a student of mysticism with a strong ascetic bent. Berrand taught “hatred” of the natural “self” (le moi) and the practice of solitary “prayer” in a systematic ascent through stages of meditation.30
Another figure looms large in this world of pious women and priests seeking to extract themselves from worldliness: Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé, the founder of the Trappist order. The sole heir of a wealthy family that had ascended to the pinnacle of the Parisian robe nobility, Rancé came of age with the titles and incomes of no less than five ecclesiastical benefices. His extensive classical education had equipped him to be a fashionable man of letters and a dazzling habitué of the salons. His ecclesiastical dignities did not prevent him from leading the life of a dandyish libertine in Parisian high society. “I am going this morning to preach like an angel,” he wrote a friend, “and tonight to hunt like a devil.”31 In 1657, when he was twenty-nine, the sudden death of his mistress Marie de Montbazon, herself a notorious libertine, set him on the path to radical renunciation of the world. In 1686, in a letter to Mme de Lafayette, he would recall of this conversion that “agreeable conversation, worldly pleasures, plans for a career and a fortune, seemed to be such vain and hollow things that I began to look on them with disgust.”32 In 1664 his renunciation took a radical turn; he left Paris to take up his duties as abbot at Notre-Dame-de-La-Trappe, a monastery in the Perche valley that had fallen into ruin and had been reduced to six monks of dubious religious commitment. He replaced these remaining residents with a group of Cistercian monks of the strict observance. Taking the Anachronites, the hermit saints of the early Eastern church, as his models, he set about subjecting himself and his fellow monks to a life devoted entirely to penitence and expiation.33 The major exception to Rancé’s embrace of silence was his correspondence with several society women who sought his spiritual guidance, of whom Mme de la Sablière was one.
Some churchmen protested that Rancé’s excessively severe rule created a climate of sadism and encouraged suicide. But notoriety only increased the fascination with La Trappe at the royal court and in Parisan high society, as well as in the clergy; the monastery became a kind of pilgrimage site for people in these circles. For some, visits to La Trappe probably offered little more than an opportunity for spiritual tourism. Others were drawn to Rancé’s community precisely because it was so uncompromising in excluding the relentless demands of polite sociability. They felt a need for expiatory solitude, and wanted to experience it even though they could not devote their lives to it.
Malebranche was one of the latter. We have known from Lelong’s biography that he was on close terms with Rancé, and that he made periodic “retreats” at the monastery. But one of the two surviving letters from Rancé to Malebranche, largely ignored to date, tells us much more. Dated April 9, 1672, the letter is in response to Malebranche’s announcement of his “resolution” to become a member of the community at La Trappe. Not wanting to seem to have recruited Malebranche, the abbé urged him to keep secret their earlier conversations about his “plan.” Though he approved of the decision in principle, he remained concerned that a man with Malebranche’s frail health would not be able to withstand the harsh physical conditions (he notes “the horrors of the long winters”) and “the deprivation of all human contact and consolation” at La Trappe. But if Malebranche remains unphased by “all the possible consequences of so great a renunciation,” Rancé writes, he should “follow the stirrings of grace”; “a person taking so great a step must have complete trust in God and expect nothing from human help.” He advised him, though, to visit La Trappe before making a decision.34
Malebranche obviously changed his mind, probably because in the end he had to acknowledge to himself that his poor health was an insuperable obstacle. But the very fact of his resolution in the spring of 1672 points us to the complexity of his vocation. That was the year in which Rance introduced a new regimen at La Trappe, still harsher than the Cistercian strict observance. Henceforth the monks could no longer use their cells as private retreats; they could retire to them only for sleep, in complete darkness. Their entire waking lives would be spent in a collectivity of silence, without conversation of any kind. By 1672 Malebranche almost certainly had begun writing The Search After Truth, whose first volume would appear two years later. He knew from conversations with Rancé, and perhaps from visits to La Trappe, that, in sharp contrast to his own and other orders, the monastery was organized on the principle that the life of a monk was one of penitence in silent retreat, not study. Learning led to speech, and speech would transform the monk into a public spectacle.35
Malebranche was apparently willing to abandon his philosophical project, and indeed the entire world of learning, for a life in which reading would be limited to devotional material. Having turned back from a commitment to harsh asceticism, he would henceforth retire periodically to La Trappe, where he could lead a life of total silence in meditation and prayer, away from the world of conversation that he, like Rancé, found so morally “dangerous.” “There is nothing that shrivels up the heart, and that is more ruinous to piety, than conversation,” Rance wrote in one of his “spiritual letters”; “those who greatly love conversing with God keep a great silence with human beings.” His renunciation was categorical; “however regulated and innocent they can be, speech (la parole) and conversation open for us the portals for getting out of ourselves and fill us with phantoms and vain imaginings.”36
It was this animosity toward social speech, no less radical than Rancé’s, that informed Malebranche’s righteous disdain for the social aesthetic of the honnête femme and the honnête homme. In characterizing the aesthetic as effeminate, he made it the site of both weakness and tyrannical power. It not only betrayed, in a particularly pathological social form, the abject dependence of weakened reason on overweening imagination; in doing so, it provided a heightened example of the exercise of blind and arbitrary social power through speech.
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