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 was impossible; his divinity would have been contradicted in the forms of its emanation. God could, to be sure, “unite minds to bodies,” but he could not “subjugate them to bodies.” Though the mind was “enslaved,” Malebranche’s partly figurative use of that term did not imply complete enslavement. He did not, of course, flirt with a heretical denial of the necessity of grace. But in his conception of the laws of union, the mind, uncorrupted in itself, could develop the habitual capacity of “silencing” the senses and “returning into itself,” to the “secret” recesses of reason that sense knowledge normally hid. By doing so it could prepare itself to make the reception of grace morally efficacious, as weeded soil is prepared for grain seeds. The vital link between sanctification by grace and the mind’s natural illumination was the Incarnation, the central mystery of trinitarian divinity. The grace that we receive though Christ’s divine mediation enables us to take a pure “delight” in truths that, though perfectly rational, surpass our natural understanding. The Second Person of the Trinity is the Logos, the Word as Reason assuming a corporeal form “and instructing us in a sensible fashion by His humanity,” adapting to our weakness without losing its purity.
And yet, though original sin could not be said to have left either mind or body in an essentially corrupt state, the resulting laws of their union made concupiscence a force so powerful that it came close to negating man’s aspiration to return to union with God. This power Malebranche already knew from Augustinian teaching and his applications of it in his own examinations of conscience. But it was in the study of Descartes’s mechanical paradigm that he came to understand, in scientific terms, how concupiscence exercised its power or, more precisely, how it actually worked. In his hands, Cartesianism became an epistemology and psychophysiology of sin. On the epistemological level, Descartes had demolished representational theories of cognition, including Augustine’s. The axiomatic “error” in the postlapsarian state was the illusion that objects represent themselves to our minds as they exist. It is simply false to assume that the qualities—color, coldness, heat, smell, and so on—we perceive are in the objects, and that, in the form of sensations, these are transmitted directly to the mind. In fact the objects simply occasion the body to generate illusory images and ideas of them through its own internal dynamic. In our perceptions of our own bodies, as in our perceptions of external objects, we blindly assume to be “natural” truths, and indeed indisputable matters of common sense, what are in fact mere illusions, phantoms of the “darkness” to which our senses consign us. Immersed in these illusions, the mind finds it extremely difficult to rise out of them to grasp the properties of extension and mobility that constitute objects’ real substance and explain their relations to each other.
In his awareness of the world surrounding him, man is not simply limited to perspectival knowledge; he is condemned to a pitifully myopic anthropocentrism. He makes his own body an “absolute standard against which one should measure other things” (26–27, 31). For his self-preservation, to be sure, he needs to be aware of the degree of force he faces in other bodies, and that requires that he perceive their sizes in proportion to his own body. But in the postlapsarian state that is all that his body’s eyes, as opposed to the figurative “eye” of the mind, perceive. He fails to realize that, in the larger scheme of God’s creation, the relative sizes we perceive do not indicate the relative values of objects; even a creature as tiny as the gnat represents the perfection of his work, since it has the same “infinity of parts” that far larger creatures have. The microscope gave Malebranche a glimpse into that infinity. It compensated for his corrupted human vision, so that he could admire all of creation from a position outside, as it were, the illusory world to which the overweening power of his senses confined him. While man “has only one crystalline lens in each eye,” he reported, “the fly has more than a thousand.” That men nonetheless had “disdain” for insects was one more proof that they lived in self-centered error (25–27, 31).
As dependent as it was on the body, the mind retained what Malebranche called a “freedom of indifference” (9). He made cognition and conscience, and indeed error and sin, virtually coterminous. Man was free to withhold consent until he had the “evidence” of clear and distinct ideas—ideas to which he could not refuse consent without experiencing both the painful “secret reproaches of reason” and “the remorse” of “conscience.” The reproaches became audible as he retreated into the recess of reason within himself by engaging in what Malebranche called “the labor of attention” in “meditation” (9–10). He was indebted to Descartes for this concept of disciplined intellectual and spiritual labor. Ironically, through Descartes’s mediation, he appropriated for his purposes not only elements of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, but also, despite his disapproval of pagan philosophy, the commitment to rigorous mental exercises in Stoic askesis.22
Here again, though, he folded Descartes into Augustine. In first sounding this theme in The Search After Truth, he quoted Augustine: “when man judges things only according to the mind’s pure ideas, when he carefully avoids the noisy confusion of creatures, and, when entering into himself, he listens to his sovereign Master with his senses and passions silent,