Antoine Arnauld, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Nicole were the leading voices. Malebranche steered clear of their theological dissent from orthodoxy, though he had close ties with some Jansenists and owed a considerable intellectual debt to Pascal and Nicole. He numbered Jansenists among the people whose ostentatious “air of piety” gave them a false authority in the world.3 The publication of his Treatise on Nature and Grace in 1680 occasioned a rancorous public feud with Arnauld, the leading Jansenist theologian, that dragged on until the latter’s death in 1694. If he found much to criticize in Jansenism, however, he shared its bedrock Augustinian belief in the innate and ineradicable corruption of human nature resulting from original sin. That is why we find him at the opposite extreme from Poullain in seventeenth-century French thinking about honnêteté and the questions about gender it raised. To Poullain the honnête femme and her male counterpart marked a welcomed process of feminization, a decidedly progressive development. To Malebranche they were emblematic of “effeminacy,” a particularly pernicious display of the corruption inherent in postlapsarian man and society.
Malebranche’s perception of effeminacy acquires particularly sharp edges, and an especially pointed social specificity, in his critique of Montaigne’s Essays in Book Two of The Search After Truth. The subject of Book Two is the imagination, the faculty that imprisons the mind of postlapsarian man in error and hence is the cause of the misery of sin. Having described in considerable detail the workings of the imagination within Descartes’s mind/body paradigm, Malebranche discusses three widely read classical authors as examples of the contagious power that its chimeras exercise through the written word. Though he takes Seneca and Tertullian to task for their all too imaginative rhetorical dazzle, he concedes in his introductory remarks that their prose has “certain beauties” that merit the “universal approbation” they have enjoyed for centuries. “I do not” he continues in the same remarks, “have very much esteem for Montaigne’s books” (173). This may be the only sentence in The Search After Truth in which Malebranche, just for a moment, tries to sweeten the pill. In fact the ensuing discussion of Montaigne is a vehement and categorical indictment. Malebranche warns readers that the Essays are “criminally” seductive. They represent not the true “beauty” of a “solid mind,” but the false beauty of an unconstrained imagination, expressed in the “free” and “pleasing” air of longwinded and cunningly vivacious prose. The “pleasure” of reading Montaigne “arises principally from concupiscence, and supports and strengthens only our passions” (184). It is “criminal” in the Augustinian sense: the illicit pleasure of sin.
The critique is meant as a warning to all readers, but it is phrased above all to confront the world of honnêteté with its deep complicity in Montaigne’s criminality. Malebranche evoked that world at the very start of the critique by attributing to Montaigne “the pride of an honest man (honnête homme), if it can be put that way,” with “a certain free air,” an affected “negligence,” and “the air of the world and the cavalier with some erudition”; and again at the end by imputing to him “the beauty, the vivacity, and breadth of the imagination … that passes for bel esprit” (184, 190). He was turning his irony on the fact that in polite circles Montaigne had become a virtually iconic figure, and that his Essays were admired as a model for the kind of free-flowing conversation that adepts at politesse liked to contrast with the excessively masculine aggression of the “pedant.” Taking particular satisfaction in turning this image on its head, Malebranche charged that, in the case of Montaigne, the gentleman’s aversion to pedantry was a false pose; behind it we find a “gentlemanly pedant of quite singular species.” The gentleman’s apparent nonchalance could not hide the fact that, indulging a vanity puffed up by “false science,” Montaigne showered his readers with superfluous literary and historical 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