the order of the world,” which “could not violate this order without ceasing to
be God” (Fénelon, p. 342).
1.3. What is in every way decisive is the function that Malebranche gives to
Christology in providential government. He interprets the Trinitarian oikonomia
in the sense that Jesus Christ, after his sacrifice, where he acted as the meritorious cause of redemption, was constituted by the Father as the occasional cause of
grace and, as such, he executes and renders effective in its particulars the grace
that God established through his general laws. “Thus he himself applies and
distributes his gifts, as occasional cause. He disposes of everything in the house of God, like a well-loved son in the house of his father” (Malebranche 1992,
p. 201). In other words, he is an integral part of the governmental machine of
providence, and occupies the place of the determining node that articulates its
execution in every area and for all individuals. It is in this sense that, according
to Malebranche, one must understand both the affirmation in the Gospel that
states that to Christ has been given “omnis potestas in coelo et in terra” (Matthew
28:18), and that of Paul according to which Christ is the head of the Church of
which the faithful are members (Ephesians 4:6). The words of Paul
[ . . . ] do not simply say that Jesus Christ is the meritorious cause of all graces: they express even more distinctly the notion that Christians are members of the
body of which Jesus Christ is the head; that it is in him that we believe and that
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we live a wholly new life; that it is through his internal working kat’ energeian, that his Church is formed, and that he has thus been established by God as the
sole occasional cause who, by his different desires and different efforts, distributes the graces which God as true cause diffuses in men. (Malebranche 1992, p. 203)
Christ acts, in other words, as the chief of the executive of a gubernatio of which God is the supreme legislator. But, just as the oikonomia did not imply the division of the divinity, in the same way the power [ potenza] assigned to Christ
does not involve a division of sovereignty. For this reason Malebranche is able
to speak, with respect to Christ, of a “sovereign power” (“puissance souveraine
de cause occasionnelle”: Malebranche 1979, p. 148, even if this was given to him
by the father) and, at the same time, to define its function simply as “ministry”:
Jesus Christ, as a man, is the head of the Church, and it is he who distributes
among its members the grace that sanctifies. But since he only has this power as
a consequence of the general laws that God has established in him in order to
execute his great design, the eternal temple, one can truly say that it is God, and
only God, who gives inner grace, although he only gives it in truth through the
ministry of Jesus Christ, who—as a man—determines the efficacy of the divine
will through his prayers and his desires. (Malebranche 1979, p. 185)*
In this sense, Christ is compared to the angels that, in the Bible, act as “ministers
of God” (ibid., p. 183). In the same way as the angels gave the Old Law, of which
they were ministers, so Christ “is the angel of the New Law” (ibid., p. 186) and,
as “minister” of it, he has been elevated above the angels (ibid., p. 187).
א Even in Malebranche the definition of the providential role of the angels betrays
a “ministerial,” that is, genuinely governmental, preoccupation. Not only are the angels
the envoys and ministers of God, but their action—which coincides with the area tra-
ditionally assigned to miracles—provides, within the system of laws and general wills,
something like the paradigm of the state of exception, which allows Malebranche to
formulate in new terms his critique of miracles. According to Malebranche, there are
in the Old Testament many places that testify to miraculous events, but these must not
be interpreted as being caused by the particular wills of God that are contrary to his
general laws. Instead, they should be understood as the consequence of a general will
through which he has communicated his power to the angels: “I believe I can prove
with the authority of Sacred scripture that the angels have received from God a power
over the present world; that God executes their wills and, through them, his designs,
according to certain general laws, in such a way that everything that appears miraculous
in the Old Testament in no way proves that God acts in accordance with particular wills”
* The English translation of the Eclaircissements appended to Malebranche’s Treatise on Nature and Grace is only partial. This passage and the subsequent ones are unavailable. Page references refer to the French original.—Trans.
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(ibid., pp. 182–183). So-called miracles are the consequence of a general law with which
God has given to his angelic ministers the power to act in apparent violation of another
general law (for instance, that of the communication of movements). The exception is,
in other words, not a miracle (a particular will outside the system of general laws), but
the effect of a general law that confers on the angels a special power of government.
Miracles are not outside the legal system but represent a particular case in which a law
is not applied so that another law, through which God delegates his sovereign power to
the angels in view of the best possible government, can be.
Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception—which, though suspending the application
of some norms, is not situated outside the global legal order— corresponds perfectly to
the model of angelic power to be found in the Treatise.
1.4. What is at stake in the treatise is the definition of the best possible
government. The difficulty that the task runs into (the same as that with which
Jansen struggles) is the conciliation of two propositions that are in apparent
contradiction with one another: “God wants all men to be saved” and “Not all
men are saved.” It is nothing less than a contrast in God between the will, which
wishes that all men, even the wicked, will be saved, and the wisdom that cannot
but choose the most simple and general laws for this end. The best government
will therefore be that which is able to find the most economic relationship be-
tween will and wisdom or, as Malebranche writes, between the wisdom that
has order and constancy in its sights, and fecundity (which demands that the
Church be broader and more numerous):
God loves men and wants them all to be saved; he wants to sanctify them all; he
wants his work to be beautiful; that his Church be the broadest and the most
perfect. But God loves his wisdom infinitely more, because he loves it invincibly
with a natural and necessary love. He cannot therefore dispense with acting in a
manner that is most wise and worthy of himself; he must follow the behavior that
corresponds best to his attributes. But by acting in ways that are most simple and
worthy of his wisdom, his work cannot be more beautiful or greater than it is.
For if God had been able to make his Church greater and more perfect than it is,
by following other equally simple paths, it would mean that by acting as he did,
he did not intend to execute the wo
rk that was most worthy of him [ . . . ] The
wisdom of God, which prevented him from complicating his paths and carrying
out miracles at each instant, obliges him to act in a general, constant, and uniform
way. For this reason he does not save all men, although in reality he wishes them all
to be saved. Despite loving his creatures, he only does for them what his wisdom
enables him to do; and, although he wants a broad and perfect Church, he does
not make it absolutely greater and more perfect but the greatest and most perfect
in relation to the paths that are most worthy of him. For, once again, God does not
form his designs other than by comparing the means with the work that they can
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execute. And when he knew that there was a better relationship between wisdom
and fecundity, between certain means and certain works, then, to speak as humans
do, he took the decision, chose his paths, and established his decrees. (Ibid., p. 171)
Bayle had already begun to ask how such statements could be in accord with
the commonly accepted notions of the nature and omnipotence of the supreme
being. In his Réponse aux questions d’un provincial, which Leibniz cites in his
Theodicy, he writes:
These [notions] teach us that all things not implying contradiction are possible
for him, that consequently it is possible for him to save people whom he does
not save: for what contradiction would result supposing the number of the elect
were greater than it is? They teach us [ . . . ] that [ . . . ] he has no will which he
cannot carry out. How, then, shall we understand that he wills to save all men
and that he cannot do so? (Leibniz, §223, pp. 266–267)
In reality, Malebranche’s theses become fully comprehensible only if one places
them on their true terrain, which is that of the government of the world. In
question is not the abstract point regarding the omnipotence or impotence of
God, but the possibility of the government of the world, that is, of an ordered
relation between general laws and particular occasional causes. If God, as the possessor of sovereignty, acted from start to finish according to particular wills,
infinitely multiplying his miraculous interventions, there would be neither gov-
ernment nor order but only chaos and what one might call a pandemonium of
miracles. For this reason, as sovereign, he must reign and not govern; he must fix the laws and the general wills and allow the contingent play of occasional causes
and particular wills their most economical execution:
A God that knows everything must not disturb the simplicity of his paths. An
immutable being must always maintain uniform behavior. A general cause must
not act through particular wills. The government of God must bear the signs of
his attributes, unless the immutable and necessary order does not force him to
change it; because, with respect to God, order is an inviolable law; he loves it
invincibly and will always prefer it to the arbitrary laws with which he executes
his designs. (Malebranche 1979, p. 188)
But what results from the relationship between general will and occasional
causes, between Kingdom and Government, God and Christ is an oikonomia
in which what is at stake is not so much whether men are good or evil, but in
what way the damnation of many can be reconciled in an ordered way with the
salvation of few, and the evil nature of some people is nothing but the collateral
effect of the goodness of others.
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א In Leibniz’s polemic with Bayle, from which resulted his Essais de Théodicée sur
la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal, he evokes the name of Malebranche on more than one occasion and declares himself in agreement with his theory
of the general wills, which he claims— rightly or wrongly—to have fathered. He writes:
The excellent author of The Search for Truth, having passed from philosophy to
theology, published finally an admirable treatise on Nature and Grace. Here he
showed in his way [ . . . ] that the events which spring from the enforcement
of general laws are not the object of a particular will of God [ . . . ] I agree with
Father Malebranche that God does things in the way most worthy of him. But I
go a little further than he, with regard to “general and particular acts of will.” As
God can do nothing without reasons, even when he acts miraculously, it follows
that he has no will about individual events but what results from some general
will. (Leibniz, §204–206, pp. 254–256)
The proximity of his theory of preestablished harmony and of the best of possible worlds
to Malebranche’s system seemed to Leibniz so great that it led him to remind his readers
that he had been the first to elaborate it:
While I was in France I showed to M. Arnauld a dialogue I had composed in
Latin on the cause of evil and the justice of God [the Confessio philosophi ]; it was not only before his disputes with Father Malebranche, but even before the book
on The Search for Truth appeared. (Ibid., §211, p. 260)
The very idea of “theodicy” is, in fact, already present in Malebranche: “It is not enough,”
he writes, “to have it understood that God is powerful and that he makes his creatures
do what he wishes. It is necessary, if possible, to justify his wisdom and his goodness”
(Malebranche 1979, p. 174). Like Malebranche, Leibniz also affirms that God always
chooses the most simple and general paths,
[ . . . ] which it is easiest to explain, and which also are of greatest service for the
explanation of other things [ . . . ] And even though the system of Pre- established
Harmony were not necessary otherwise, because it banishes superfluous mira-
cles, God would have chosen it as being the most harmonious [ . . . ] It is as if
one said that a certain house was the best that could have been constructed at
a certain cost. One may, indeed, reduce these two conditions, simplicity and
productivity, to a single advantage, which is to produce as much perfection as
possible: thus Father Malebranche’s system in this point amounts to the same
as mine. (Leibniz, §208, p. 257)
The consequences that Leibniz drew from his system with regard to the problem of the
origin and necessity of evil are well known. Divine wisdom embraces all possible worlds,
compares them, and weighs them up in order to penetrate the major or minor degree of
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perfection. It sets them out and distributes them in an infinity of possible universes, each of which contains an infinity of creatures:
The result of all these comparisons and deliberations is the choice of the best
from among all the possible systems, which wisdom makes in order to satisfy
goodness completely; and such is precisely the plan of the universe as it is. (Ibid.,
§225, pp. 267–268)
But the choice of the best possible world has a price, which is the quantity of evil, of
suffering, and damnation that is contained within it as the necessary attendant effect.
Once again Malebranche is called upon to justify the providential choice in the name
of general laws:
But one must believe that even sufferings and monstrosities are part of order; and
it
is well to bear in mind not only that it was better to admit these defects and
these monstrosities than to violate general laws, as Father Malebranche some-
times argues, but also that these very monstrosities are in the rules, and are in
conformity with general acts of will, though we are not capable of discerning
this conformity. It is just as sometimes there are appearances of irregularity in
mathematics which issue finally in a great order when one has finally got to the
bottom of them: that is why I have already in this work observed that according
to my principles all individual events, without exception, are consequences of
general acts of will. (Ibid., §241, pp. 276–277)
Even the most beautiful minds have zones of opacity in which they get lost to the point
that a much weaker mind can ridicule them. This is what occurred to Leibniz with
Voltaire’s caricature of his position in Candide. In the case of Leibniz this defeat has two reasons. The first is juridical-moral, and concerns the justificatory intent that is expressed in the very title, Theodicy. The world as it is does not require justification but saving; and, if it does not require saving, it needs justifying even less. But to want to justify God for the way in which the world is amounts to the worst misunderstanding of Christianity that
one can imagine. The second and more important reason has a political character, and
concerns his blind faith in the necessity of the law (of the general will) as the instrument of the government of the world. According to this aberrant idea, if the general law requires as a necessary consequence that Auschwitz takes place, then also “monstrosities are within the rules,” and the rule does not become monstrous for this reason.
1.5. The influence of Malebranche on Rousseau’s political theory has been
widely documented (Bréhier, Riley, Postigliola). However, scholars have merely
reconstructed the considerable terminological debts and the remarkable influences
that run between them, but they have rarely investigated the structural analogies
that accompanied and made possible the shift from the theological context to
the political one. In particular, the monograph by Patrick Riley, The General Will
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Before Rousseau, has traced a broad genealogy of the notions of volonté générale and volonté particulière, which leads from the theology of the eighteenth century
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