SHARP COLLECTION
Conversations Chretiennes (1677)
Nicolas Malebranche
In a portrait painted two years before his death, the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche gazes out at a world whose mysteries he had spent a lifetime decoding. From his religious retreat in Paris, Malebranche, a devout Cartesian, dominated the theology of seventeenth-century France.
Born in Paris in 1638, the same year as Louis XIV, Malebranche was the youngest son of Nicolas Malebranche, a secretary to Louis XIII. His mother oversaw the education of her brilliant but sickly child until he was sixteen. At the Sorbonne Malebranche studied theology without inner conviction. When he was twenty-two he entered the Oratory, a religious order founded in 1611 that sought to strengthen the ecclesiastical structures of post-Reformation France. There Malebranche read the texts of St. Augustine and prepared for his ordination as a priest.
His discovery in 1664 of Descartes' Traité de l'homme in a Paris bookstall has been described as a turning point in his life. As Le Père André writes, the discovery "caused him such palpitations of the heart that he had to stop reading in order to recover his breath." After ten years of intensive study, Malebranche published
De la Recherche de la vérité, in which he expressed his belief that we see all things in God. In the philosophical theory called occasionalism, he redefined the interaction between mind and body. According to Malebranche, all mental and physical events in nature are "occasions" for God to exercise his power. God is the sole true cause of change in the universe. In the words of one critic, Malebranche's work was a grand synthesis of his two intellectual mentors, St. Augustine and Descartes. Malebranche was to influence Berkeley and a younger school of English thinkers.
Malebranche spent the rest of his life embroiled in one of the most bitter intellectual debates of the seventeenth century with the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld. The two men battled over the nature of grace and divine providence.
Malebranche went on to write Conversations chrétiennes, a more accessible version of his philosophy which Mme de Sévigné found delightful bedtime reading. The first edition sold out. An unscrupulous priest claimed credit for the second edition. Unwilling to embarrass the priest, Malebranche did not regain rightful authorship until the third edition.
During the four months that preceded his death in 1715, Malebranche observed his state with characteristic detachment. Fontenelle writes that his illness "adapted itself to his philosophy. The body, which he so much despised, was reduced to nothing but [his] mind, accustomed to supremacy; continued sane and sound. He remained throughout a calm spectator of his own long death, the last moment of which was such that it was believed he was merely resting."
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