by Paul Hazard
One day he fell in with the Cartesian philosophy. It was as though the scales had suddenly fallen from his eyes. Till then, he had had no clear idea of where he was going; the path had been uncertain before him. But from that day forth, he hesitated no longer. He would be a Cartesian and a Christian, at one and the same time. If there were discrepancies, he would adjust them. That day, the road he was to take was decided on, once and for all.
Much time he spent in prolonged and concentrated meditation, and then, at last, when he deemed that he could add no more to his ideas, he incorporated them in two big volumes on metaphysics which, on their publication, caused nothing less than a sensation. Fame now came to him as it were unbidden, and a very dazzling fame it was; so dazzling that at this distance of time it is not easy to realize its brilliance. Its rays penetrated far beyond the frontiers of his own country, and it lasted longer than his life. He had his army of readers, his devoted disciples, his fanatical admirers. A Neapolitan seminarist, one Bernardo Lama, shook the dust of Italy from his feet, and hastened with what speed he might to Paris, that he might have speech of the famous Malebranche. Essentially a man of peace, and in no wise given to quarrelling, his ideas elicited rejoinders so numerous and refutations so passionate, and he answered them with such zest and thoroughness, with such fierce conviction, that he seemed to be living in the thick of an everlasting battle. From that bare and austere cell in which he immured himself to think his thoughts, cut off from social intercourse, heedless of the charms of nature, there issued forth, with a resounding flourish, what he referred to as “This last essay towards a liberal Christian philosophy,” and this final effort, characterized as it was by all the vigour of a mind that loved to play for the highest stakes, moved the hearts of men, and became an outstanding landmark in the history of ideas.
Rational evidence: such is the perfect light whereunto Malebranche aspires, with all the fervour of a mystic, for in him mysticism went hand in hand with the cult of reason. In all piety of spirit he endeavours to fulfil his aim, namely, that individual life and cosmic life, life as one indivisible whole, should be seen as the realization of an order in which religious faith is at once included and explained.
Now, when we look out upon the world, we see there, side by side with a generally prevailing order, some disconcerting breaches of the same. There are distorted and monstrous shapes presented to the view which betoken the existence of physical evil; while the existence of sin proclaims evil in the moral order. These anomalies it is the business of the philosopher to explain.
If we suppose a world in which nothing contrary to the general order is ever to occur, in which every soul on the brink of sinning is either to resist the temptation, or, having yielded to it, is to obtain the grace necessary for its redemption, we shall have to postulate a God prepared to intervene at any given moment, prepared at any time to go out of his way to work a miracle, in other words to interfere with the very laws which he himself has declared inviolable. The countless breaches of the general order would need to be met by special divine interventions no less multitudinous than themselves.
Here it is that Malebranche, who refused to believe that the Almighty would put himself to such endless trouble as these constant interventions would involve, comes on the scene to inform us that God acts by way of general laws, and not by special ad hoc enactments to suit each individual case. God must needs follow the path of wisdom, because He is Himself Supreme Wisdom. God loves wisdom with invincible love; because it is at once natural and necessary that He should so love it. He cannot fail to adopt the course of action which exhibits the visible signs of His own attributes, a course of action which is at once rational and consistent.
The rain falls on the field which needs water in order that it may bring forth fruit; but it falls likewise on the highway, and on the river, and on the sea: whereat we marvel. But which of the two lines of action is the more closely consonant with reason; to interfere every time it rains in order to restrict the area affected by the downpour, or to suffer the general law of motion to operate without let or hindrance. If this latter mode is the more logical and the more befitting, then God cannot do other than adopt it.
True, God desires not the damnation of this unbeliever, or of that transgressor; but He cannot be perpetually intervening to instil the faith into each and every unbeliever, or righteousness into the heart of each and every sinner, for this would be a mode of action incompatible with the idea of an All-wise and Infinitely Perfect Being; whence it would follow that salvation of the world could never be accomplished.
The utmost that God can do is to establish occasional causes: ministers, that is to say, who act as His deputies, and whose functions are unalterably defined. Jesus Christ is established by His Father as the sole occasional cause of all grace of every kind, which He causes to be outpoured on all for whom He makes special supplication, all of whom will attain salvation without the Father having been called upon to intervene in each or in any particular case. And Jesus Christ must needs pray as the rule of order requires Him, according, that is to say, as the spiritual edifice which God designs to raise, has need of further living stones. God obeys this same principle of simplification, of economy of means, because it is logical, because it is the truth and the life.
Such was Malebranche’s line of argument. Wherever a divergence threatens between philosophy and religion, whether it has to do with transubstantiation or with some disputed passage in the Scriptures, he hastens away to set things right, to explain: allow, he would say, an ampler scope to reason; cultivate a better appreciation of the value and power of order, and all will become as clear as daylight; harmony will be restored. His dexterity is boundless; his tours de force partake of the miraculous; one upon another, he poises his airy castles of ideas, and, since by a miracle, they do not topple down, he takes that unstable equilibrium as proof that they are founded on a rock. The only thing is, he does not see that, by making God subservient to that all-powerful Order of his, that all-conquering Reason, that remorselessly logical Wisdom, he despoils Him at a stroke of His prerogatives and of His raison d’être; either God is merely an agent, or He is the universe taking shape in accordance with ineluctable law. Therefore involuntarily, and despite his declared intention, despite his miracles of dialectical acrobatics, the most Christian Malebranche lays himself open to the charge of preaching an anti-Christian doctrine. “You did not see”, said Fénelon in his Réfutation, “that what you were really doing was subordinating religion to philosophy, and aiding and abetting the Socinians in their attacks on our mysteries”. Nay, one of his admirers even, Pierre Bayle himself, who calls Père Malebranche and M. Arnauld the two greatest philosophers in the world (a somewhat ominous compliment) and who sees in the Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce “a work of soaring genius and one of the noblest examples of human intellectual endeavour”, even Bayle is under no illusion as to where these metaphysical theories will ultimately lead. “What it really amounts to is this; Malebranche takes it that God’s goodness and power are confined within more or less restricted limits, that God has no freedom of action, that His own wisdom compels Him, first, to create, then to create this and not that, and finally to create it in this particular way, and in no other. Here, then, we have three inescapable conditions which together make up a fatum, a Fate, more relentless than any the Stoics ever conceived. . . .” Whereupon Bayle enunciates two syllogisms, telling us that the minor premises of the first, and the major of the second give an accurate definition of the doctrine of Père Malebranche:
Here, then, is syllogism No. 1.
God cannot will anything repugnant to the love He must necessarily have for His own wisdom;
Now, the salvation of all mankind is repugnant to the love which God must have for His own wisdom;
Therefore God cannot will the salvation of all mankind.
And here is syllogism No. 2.
The worthiest work of God’s wisdom includes among other things the sinful nature o
f mankind and the eternal damnation of the greater number of them;
Now, God must necessarily will what is most worthy of His wisdom;
Therefore, He must necessarily will that which includes among other things the sinful nature of mankind and the eternal damnation of the greater number of them.[18]
What an ironic turn of fortune! Here is a man, not only pious and devout but profoundly Catholic, Catholic in all the multifarious manifestations of his active life, Catholic to the inmost core of his being, yet here is this same man assigning to Reason such a transcendent rôle that she would appear to draw everything, even God Himself, into her bosom.
We had our contemporaries as far back as Louis XIV’s time, remarked Diderot, referring to himself and his brother philosophers. And he was quite right; he had contemporaries under Louis XIV, not only in the later years of the Grand Monarque when, as we know, the social and political fabric was beginning to totter, but long before that, when we are commonly wont to see Orthodoxy enthroned in solitary state, and the splendours, as yet undimmed, of regal majesty. The truth is, however, that it was just when the power of Church and State appeared unshakable that their foundations were showing signs of giving way. If we only look at the literature, and particularly the French literature, that appeared between 1670 and 1677, we shall come away with an unclouded impression of sovereign might, and peace, and grandeur. Les Femmes savantes goes back to 1672, and Le Malade Imaginaire to 1673. Racine gave us Bajazet in 1672, Mithridate in 1673, Iphigénie in 1674, Phèdre in 1677. It was in 1670 that Bossuet pronounced his funeral oration over Henrietta Maria, and was appointed tutor to the Dauphin, for whose edification he was in due time to compose his Traité de la connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même, his Politique tirée de l’Ecriture sainte, his Discours sur l’Histoire universelle. Boileau’s Art poétique belongs to the year 1674. This array of literary works was not merely dazzling, it was compact, it was firm, and it was evenly balanced. But let us turn from literature for a moment, from a literature which is so fascinating that, often much to our loss, it prevents us from perceiving influences at work even more potent than itself, influences to which it will itself become subservient later on. Let us now take a glance at the main currents of philosophical speculation. There we shall discern movements, already fully under way, which are tending to disintegrate the established order even before it has reached the stage of final development. One is reminded of a tree that still goes on blooming and bearing fruit, after its roots have begun to wither.
We must not lose sight of the fact that the Tractatus theologico-politicus appeared as far back as 1670, and that, of new and startling ideas, it contained quite enough to cause a terrible commotion in the social order on which it descended. Spinoza, in his Latin, blandly declared that a clean sweep would have to be effected of all traditional beliefs, and a fresh start made from the very beginning. Things, he said, had come to such a pass now that you couldn’t tell a Christian from a Jew, or a Turk or a Heathen. Religious belief, he declared, no longer had the slightest effect on conduct; the soul had begun to fester. The trouble, according to him, was all attributable to the fact that religion was no longer an inward thing, something deeply pondered on and then spontaneously embraced, but purely and simply a matter of external observance, of mechanical practices and of blind obedience to the priesthood. Ambitious men had wormed their way into the sacerdotal office and substituted sordid greed for brotherly love, and the result was envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. Of the Christian religion, all that remained was a soulless formalism and a blind credulity which turned men into brute beasts by denying them the exercise of their own judgment, and extinguishing the light of human reason. Reason must be the starting-point of the new quest. In the name of Reason, a clearance would have to be made of two cities, one the City Celestial, the other the City Royal, both illogical, both fraught with disaster.
The Scriptures: the Scriptures were constantly being quoted by those who wanted to exact obedience. From the Scriptures were derived all dogmas, all superstitious beliefs and practices. And what precisely were the Scriptures? Prophets! Never had they existed, those mouthpieces of God, writing the words which He dictated to them. What were they, these so-called prophets, but a few fallible mortals who, beneath a vivid imagination and a gift for glowing metaphor, concealed the poverty of their own ideas? There was never any chosen race specially set apart to be the perpetual trustees of God’s law; only a people which, like all other peoples, had its day and perished. Miracles there had never been. Inasmuch as Nature followed uninterruptedly an immutable order, any violation of that order would prove, not that God was mighty, but that He did not exist. If we divest the Scriptures of all the glosses which have been superimposed upon them so as to make them appear something different from what they really are, if we interpret them by the rules of criticism which we apply to all other writings, their real nature will be apparent; we shall see them as the work of human hands, full of doubts, contradictions and errors. Moses could not have been the author of the Pentateuch, nor can the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel and Kings be regarded as authentic; and so on. Thus Spinoza, making sure of every step he took, pausing whenever it seemed necessary to see whether his followers were duly coming along behind, arrived at length at his initial conclusion, which was, that the Christian religion was nothing but an historical phenomenon, whose striking character was to be accounted for by the peculiar nature of the times which witnessed its birth, and by the circumstances which prolonged its influence. Nevertheless, it was essentially transitory, not eternal; relative, not absolute.
So much for Christianity. Spinoza next trained his guns upon the kings, and proceeded to show that they had always made a great fuss about religion because it was in their own interest to do so. The monarchical form of government made an art of deceit by investing with the glamour of religion the awe on which the powerful rely to keep the masses in permanent subjection. What the people call loyalty to the throne means, in plain language, playing into the hands of the king. They imagine they are fighting for themselves, when the truth of the matter is, they are merely forging fetters for themselves. They shed their life’s blood in order to buttress the power and exalt the pride of a single individual, who uses them as tools to secure his own ends, and, by robbing them of their freedom, robs them of all that makes life worth living. If they wish to escape from these servile conditions, they have but one course open to them, and that is to apply to the nature and aim of political institutions the same spirit of free and independent enquiry which enabled them to give the deathblow to superstition; and to achieve that end, let them begin by thinking freely for themselves. If they do, they will see that the State is not made for the despot, that political power rightly understood is the delegation of authority carried out with the free consent of the people, that democracy is the form of government which is most closely consonant with natural law, and that, whatever may be said about the matter, the primary object of political institutions is to guarantee to the individual freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and freedom of action.
If we bear in mind what must have been the explosive potentialities of this sort of doctrine in the year 1670, it will not be surprising to learn that Spinoza was regarded by his contemporaries as the Arch-iconoclast, the Destroyer par excellence, the Accursed One. This Jew, this spawn of a hated race by whom he himself was reviled and spat upon, this abnormal creature who lived like a hermit, caring not a jot for pleasure, or money, or public esteem, who did nothing all day but polish his lenses and think, think, think, was an object of mingled curiosity, amazement and repulsion. His name was Benedictus, but Maledictus would have been nearer the mark. He was the Thorn, even one of those thorns which spring up in the field that has fallen under the curse of God. It was the Italian Renaissance which had given birth to Atheism, the Italian Renaissance which had called back Paganism from the grave. Machiavelli had helped to spread it abroad; so, likewise, had Aretino, and Vanini. Lord
Herbert of Cherbury and Hobbes had been its champions, and now here, to join them, was the most unholy of them all—Spinoza![19]
Nowadays, it is among the builders, far rather than among the destroyers, that he would be assigned a place, and among the very busiest of those builders. Against the allegation that he pulled down without building up, he himself most vehemently protested; and it is a fact that the Tractatus cannot be properly understood unless we realize the positive vein that runs right through it. More striking still, the Ethic, which appeared posthumously in 1677, introduces us to a sort of palace, a palace wrought of concepts so aspiring they seem like a vaulted roof soaring up as though to mingle with the heavens. Geometrical, no doubt, but tremulous throughout with the breath of life itself, the Ethic is woven of tissues both human and divine, making of the two a single category, and over its portals are engraven the words, God is All and All is God. The supreme daring of the author lay in the structural design of the building which those who are lacking in the metaphysical sense will always find some difficulty in following. Spinoza displays his plans, his theorems, his deductions; he explains them as follows: I understand by the cause of a thing, something whose essence envelops its existence, or something whose nature cannot be conceived as non-existent. By substance I mean something that exists in itself and is conceived through itself, that is to say something of which the concept can be formed without there being any need of the concept of anything else. By attribute I mean that which reason conceives in the substance as constituting its essence. There exists a unique substance constituted by an infinite number of attributes of which each expresses an eternal and infinite essence: God. All that is, is in God, and nothing can be, or be conceived, apart from God. God is thought; God is extension, and man, body and soul, is a mode of Being. As such, he tends to persevere in his being by an effort which, when it applies to the soul is called will; when it applies to the body, appetite; and when the soul takes cognizance of the effort, desire, so that desire becomes the fundamental element in the moral life.
