by Will Durant
CHAPTER XXI
Faith and Reason in France
1648–1715
I. THE VICISSITUDES OF CARTESIANISM
THE dictionary of the French Academy in 1694 defined philosopher as
one who devotes himself to research work in connection with the various sciences, and who seeks from their effects to trace their causes and principles. A name [also] applied to one who lives a quiet and secluded life remote from the stir and troubles of the world. It is occasionally used to denote someone of undisciplined mind who regards himself as above the responsibilities and duties of civil life. 1
From the first part of this definition it is clear that philosophy and science were not yet distinguished; science, as “natural philosophy,” would remain a branch of philosophy till the nineteenth century. From the final portion of the definition we gather that the Forty Immortals, under Louis XIV, sniffed a revolutionary odor in the philosophic air, as if the harbingers of the Enlightenment had already spoken their prologue.
Between three horns of the definition the intellectual legacy of René Descartes meandered through renown to repudiation. The legacy itself had three horns: one sounded the trumpet of doubt as the prelude to all philosophy; another announced the universal mechanism of the external world; the third played the welcome tunes of the traditional creed, and drew God, free will, and immortality out of the vortices of the world. Descartes had begun with doubt and ended with piety; and his heirs could take him at either end. The ladies of the early salons—the femmes savantes satirized by Molière in 1672—found some exciting respite from the rosary in the whirlpools of the new cosmology. Mme. de Sévigné reported the Cartesian philosophy as an after-dinner topic in her circle; she and Mmes. de Grignan, de Sablé, and de La Fayette were all cartésiennes. Fragrant women attended the lectures given in Paris by followers of Descartes. 2 Great nobles took up the philosophic mode; Cartesian discourses were pronounced each week in the château of the Duc de Luynes, and in the Paris palace of the Prince de Condé, and in “the most magnificent hôtels of the capital.” 3 Religious orders—Oratorians, Benedictines, Augustinians—taught the new philosophy in their schools. It became the fashion to praise reason in science and human affairs, while carefully subordinating it, in religion, to divine revelation as interpreted by the Catholic Church. The Jansenists and Port-Royal accepted Cartesianism as an elegant reconciliation of religion and philosophy.
But their most brilliant convert, Blaise Pascal, denounced Cartesianism as the vestibule of atheism. “I cannot pardon Descartes,” he said; “he would have been glad, in all his philosophy, to dispense with God; but he could not avoid allowing him a fillip [a snap of the finger released from the thumb] to put the world in motion; after that he had no use for God.” 4 On this point the Jesuits agreed with Pascal; after 1650 they rejected Cartesianism as a subtle, even if unintended, corrosive of religious faith. The Sorbonne wished to proscribe Descartes; Boileau defended him; Ninon de Lenclos and others persuaded Molière to write a satire on the Sorbonne; the Sorbonne deferred its censure. 5 The learned Huet, after long accepting Cartesianism, turned against it as blowing hot and cold for and against Christianity. Theologians were increasingly alarmed by the difficulty of reconciling transubstantiation with Descartes’ view of matter as pure extension. In 1665 Louis XIV forbade the teaching of the ambivalent philosophy in the Collège Royal, and in 1671 he extended the prohibition to the University of Paris. In 1687 Bossuet joined in the attack.
These condemnations revived interest in Cartesianism, and drew attention to its skeptical overture, the Discours de la méthode; the initial doubt of that essay spread subterraneanly; its orthodox appendages withered away; in the eighteenth century hardly anything remained of the once victorious system except its attempt to reduce the external world to a mechanism obeying the laws of physics and chemistry. Every new discovery of science seemed to support this Cartesian mechanism and to discredit the Cartesian theology. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob found no place in Descartes’ picture of the cosmos; nor was Christ there; all that remained was a dieu fainéant who gave the world an initial push and then retired from the scene except as a guarantor of Descartes’ intuitions. This was not the majestic and awful God of the Old Testament, nor the merciful Father of the New; he was the God of deism, impersonal, functionless, negligible, subject to invariable laws; who would think of praying to such an Epicurean futility? Already in 1669 and 1678 the books of Guillaume Lamy, professor on the medical faculty at the University of Paris, expounded a completely mechanistic psychology anticipating Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754), and a materialistic philosophy anticipating La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine (1748). And amid the fracas Cyrano de Bergerac made his scandalous voyages to the moon and the sun.
II. CYRANO DE BERGERAC: 1619–55
For most of us he is the lover travestied by Rostand, and losing every race to Venus by a nose. The real Cyrano was not quite frustrated; he played vivaciously with life and love, and frittered away his time to the top of his bent. To the usual education of a wellborn lad he added (with Molière) eager attendance on the lectures of Pierre Gassendi, the amiable priest who liked Epicurus the materialist and Lucretius the atheist. Cyrano became an esprit especially fort, a libertin in both senses, as freethinker and loose liver. He joined in Paris a company of sacrilegious roisterers, earned repute as a duelist, served in the army, was for a while incapacitated by his wounds, and retired from active venery to philosophy. He wrote the first French philosophical play, and opened the road to Swift by making fun of mankind via travels to unfrequented parts of the cosmos. He laughed at the venerable St. Augustine, “that grand personage who assures us, though his mind was illuminated by the Holy Ghost, that in his time the earth was as flat as an oven, and that it floated on the water like half an orange.” 6
Cyrano tried his pen in almost every literary form, seldom seriously, but usually finding the nerve. His comedy, Le Pédant joué, seemed to Molière good enough for poaching a scene or two. His tragedy, La Mort d’Agrippine, was acted once in 1640, was immediately proscribed by the authorities, and had to wait till 1960 to reach the boards again. But it was published in 1654, and soon the wild young men of Paris were shouting the atheistic lines of its Séjan:
Que sont-ils donc ces dieux? Des enfants de l’effroi;
Des beaux riens qu’on adore et sans savoir pourquoi. . .;
Des dieux que Vhomme fait, et qui n’ont pas fait l’homrne
—“What, then, are these gods? The offspring of our fears; pretty nothings that we adore without knowing why. . .; Gods whom man has made, and who never made man.” And on immortality:
Une heure après la mort notre âme évanouie
Sera ce qu’elle était une heure avant la vie
—“One hour after death our vanished soul will be that which it was an hour before life.”
Soon after this play was printed, Cyrano was struck on the head by a falling beam, and died of the blow, aged thirty-six. He left a manuscript which was published in two parts: Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune, (1657), and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1662). They were a comic kind of science fiction, based upon the Cartesian cosmology, and deriving the planets from vortices formed by the revolutionary agitation of primeval matter. Cyrano suggested that the planets had once blazed like the sun, but,
in the compass of time, suffered so great a loss of light and heat by the continual emission of the corpuscles causing such phenomena, that they have become cold, dark, and almost powerless pulps. We find even that sun spots . . . increase in size from day to day. Now who knows if these are not a crust forming on the sun’s surface from its mass that cools in proportion as light is lost, and if the sun will not become . . . an opaque globe like the earth? 7
Propelled by rockets, Cyrano leaves the earth, and swiftly reaches the moon. He notes that through three quarters of the way he feels the earth drawing him backward, then, through the final quarter, he fee
ls the attraction of the moon. “This, I told myself, was because the mass of the moon was less than that of the earth; hence the sphere of its action was correspondingly less in space.” 8 Landing dazed, he finds himself in a Garden of Eden. He falls into an argument with Elijah about original sin, and is expelled from the garden into the primitive wastelands of the satellite. There he encounters a tribe of animals twelve cubits long, fashioned like men but walking on all fours. One of these, having served in Athens as the daemon of Socrates, speaks philosophic Greek. He informs Cyrano that walking on all fours is the natural and healthy way; that these lunar gentlemen have a hundred senses, not five or six, and perceive countless realities hidden from mankind. (Fontenelle, Voltaire, and Diderot will play with this speculation.) Cyrano’s fancy runs wild: the lunars feed only on vapors pressed from foods, not on foods themselves; hence they are saved the nuisance and noises of digestion, the indignities and anachronisms of elimination. The lunar laws are made by the young, who are revered by the old; celibacy and chastity are condemned; suicide, cremation, and large noses are praised. The aforesaid daemon of Socrates explains that the world was not created, but is eternal; that creation out of nothing (taught by the Scholastics) is inconceivable; that the eternity of the universe is no more difficult to accept than the eternity of God; indeed, the hypothesis of a God is quite unnecessary, since the world is a self-propelled and self-perpetuating machine. Cyrano argues that there must be a God, for he has with his own eyes seen miraculous cures; the daemon laughs these away as due to suggestion or imagination. Orthodoxy is revenged by a powerful Ethiopian, who grasps Cyrano in one arm, the daemon in the other, carries the daemon to hell, and, en route, deposits Cyrano in Italy, where all the neighborhood dogs howl at him because he smells of the moon. Jonathan Swift was attracted, too.
III. MALEBRANCHE: 1638–1715
Against the infidel progeny of Gassendi and Descartes the faith found powerful defenders not only in Pascal, Bossuet, and Fénelon, but in one of the subtlest metaphysicians of modern times.
Nicolas de Malebranche was an almost exact contemporary of Louis XIV: born a month before him, dying a month after him. There was no further resemblance. Nicolas was gentle of spirit and pure of life. As his father was secretary to Louis XIII, and his uncle was viceroy of Canada, he had every advantage of birth and rearing except health; his body was feeble and deformed, and only a frugal regimen in the routine and peace of monastic life can explain his seventy-seven years. At twenty-two he joined the Congregation of the Oratory, a religious order dedicated to meditation and preaching. At twenty-six he was ordained priest.
In that same year he came upon Descartes’ Traité de p’homrne. He was transported by both its argument and its style. He became a Cartesian with a sublime faith in reason; and he at once resolved to prove by reason the Catholic creed in which he had rooted his life and his hopes. This was a brave move away from Pascal back to St. Thomas Aquinas; it showed the splendid confidence of youth, but it exposed the citadel of faith to the inroads of reason. After ten years of study and writing, Malebranche issued in four volumes (1674) one of the classics of French philosophy, De la Recherche de la vérité (The Search for Truth). Here, as by all the philosophers of France, the moral obligation to be intelligible was accepted, and philosophy became literature.
Descartes had not only begun his lucubrations with the self, but had set such a gulf between the body physical and mechanical and the mind spiritual and free, that no interaction between them could be conceived. And yet that interaction seemed indisputable: an idea could move an arm or an army, and a drug could muddle the mind. Half the puzzling of Descartes’ successors was devoted to bridging the gap between flesh and thought.
A Flemish philosopher, Arnold Geulincx, prepared for Malebranche—and for Spinoza and Leibniz—by denying the interaction. The material body does not act upon the immaterial mind or vice versa; when either seems to act upon the other it is only because God has created reality in two distinct streams of events, the one physical, the other mental; their synchronism is like that of two clocks, set to the same second and speed and striking the same hours simultaneously, but operating quite independently of each other except that both have one source—the intelligence that set and started them. So God is the sole source of both the physical and mental series of causes and effects; the mental state is the occasion, not the cause, of the apparently resultant physical motion; and the physical motion—event or sensation—is merely the occasion of the mental state that it seems to cause; in each case God alone is the cause.* At this point Geulincx, fearful of determinism, broke into his system by allowing that in conscious actions the human will, co-operating with God, can be a real cause of physical results.
Malebranche made this hesitant “occasionalism” complete. God is always the cause of both the physical act and the mental state; their interaction is illusory; neither ever acts upon the other.† “God alone drives back the air which He Himself has made me breathe. . . . It is not I who breathe; I breathe despite myself. It is not I who speak to you; I merely wish to speak to you.” 9 God [the total energy of the universe] is the only power. Whatever moves or thinks does so because the divine power acts through the physical and mental processes. Motion is God acting in material forms; thought is God thinking in us.
In this apparently deterministic philosophy there are countless difficulties, which in later treatises Malebranche tried to resolve. He struggled to harmonize some degree of free will in man with the universal agency of God, and to reconcile evil and suffering and multitudinous deviltry with the sole and omnipresent causality of an omnipotent and omniscient benevolence; we shall not follow him into these labyrinths. But in the course of his wandering he leaves a helpful thread of psychology. Sensations, he thinks, are in the body, not in the mind; the mind has ideas, and knows objects only as bundles of ideas—of structure, size, color, odor, solidity, sound, temperature, taste. These idea complexes are built up not merely from the object; most of the qualities here named are not in the object; and many of our judgments about the object—that it is large, small, bright, dim, heavy, light, hot, cold, quickly moving or slow—describe the position, condition, and attitude of the observer rather than the attributes of the thing observed. We do not know things; we know only our prejudiced and transformed perceptions and ideas. (All this a generation before Locke and Berkeley.)
Despite his spiritualistic background, Malebranche, after Descartes and Hobbes, gives physiological explanations of habit, memory, and association of ideas. Habit is a readiness with which the animal spirits, as the result of similar experiences or actions often repeated, flow in certain grooves or channels of the body. Memory is the reactivation of associations created in experience. Ideas tend to be associated according to their past sequence or contiguity. Strength of character, power of will, are the force of animal spirits flowing along the fibers of the brain, deepening the grooves of association and the vividness of imagination.
Pious though Malebranche was, there were many elements in his philosophy that disturbed that alert watchman of orthodoxy, Bénigne Bossuet. In a clever move to divert the passionate pen of Antoine Arnauld from the logic of Jansenism to the succor of the proper faith, he persuaded him to comb Malebranche for hidden heresies. The philosopher defended himself in a series of treatises as eloquent and incredible as the first; and the controversy continued from 1683 to 1697. Bossuet brought Fénelon’s light artillery to the attack. Mme. de Sévigné, seeing that mice were devouring her crops and caterpillars her trees, complained that she found little consolation in Malebranche’s view of evil as a necessary element in the best of all possible worlds. 10
To offset these critics Malebranche had many fervent friends. Young men and old women found in his doctrine of God as the only agent in all actions a mystic pleasure of surrender and divine union. Frenchmen and foreigners wore a path to his cell; one Englishman said that he came to France to see only two celebrities, Louis XIV and Malebranche. 11 Berkeley came,
all reverence, and engaged the old priest in a long discussion. Soon afterward Malebranche, seventy-seven, weakened; he grew thinner every day, until his mind had hardly any body left to serve as occasion for his thought. On October 13, 1715, he passed away in his sleep.
His fame faded rapidly after his death, for his religious philosophy was not in tune with the skepticism and revelry of the Regency, and still less with the ensuing tendency of the philosophes to replace divine Providence with a world machine. But his influence appeared in Leibniz’ attempt to show that the actual was the best possible world; in Berkeley’s view that things exist only in our perception or in God’s; in Hume’s destructive analysis of cause as an occult quality; in Kant’s emphasis on the subjective elements in the formation of knowledge; even in the determinism of the Enlightenment. For to say that God is the only cause of all motions, volitions, and ideas is not far different from saying that every change in matter or mind is the inevitable result of the total forces operating in the universe at that moment. In Malebranche’s ecstasy he had approached—though he denied it—a determinism that made man an automaton.
Above all, the system of occasionalism served as a halfway house between Descartes and Spinoza. Descartes saw mechanism in matter, but liberty in mind; Malebranche saw God as sole cause in every action of every mind; Spinoza, quite as “God-intoxicated” as the monk, agreed with him that the mental and physical series were parallel products of one creative force. Unwittingly the pious Oratorian, seeing God everywhere, had taught, even to the faithful, a pantheism that needed only the phrase Deus sive natura—God or nature—to become the philosophy of Spinoza, and of the Enlightenment.
