Nicolas Malebranche: Religion

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) was a French philosopher and a

rationalist in the Cartesian tradition. But he was also an Oratorian priest in
the Catholic Church. Religious themes pervade his works, and in several
places he clearly affirms his intention to write philosophy as a Catholic.
These religious themes are important for understanding his philosophy. As
a rationalist, Malebranche places great emphasis on the importance of
Reason. However, because he identifies Reason with the Divine Word, that
is, with the Son or Second Person of the Trinity, his rationalism has
features that are not common among other forms of rationalism. For
example, Reason is a divine person and therefore capable of a wide range
of action. In tracing out some of the consequences of this identification of
Reason with the Divine Word, the student of Malebranche is quickly immersed in a wide range of his favorite
theological and philosophical ideas. The present article will explore three theological ideas which play a special
role in Malebranche’s philosophical thought: the Trinity, Original Sin, and the Incarnation.

Table of Contents
1.A Trinitarian Account of Reason
2.Love and Order
3.Original Sin
4.Universal Reason as External Teacher
5.Conclusion
6.References and Further Reading
1.Reference Format
2.Further Reading

1. A Trinitarian Account of Reason

The features of the doctrine of the Trinity that are of the greatest importance for understanding Malebranche’s
philosophical views are the following:

(1) There are three persons of the Godhead, usually known as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Malebranche, however, follows the opening verses of the Gospel of John, which calls the Son the Logos. The
usual translation of this into English is ‘Word,’ but it can also be translated as ‘Reason,’ and this is how
Malebranche understands it. Likewise, Malebranche preferred the Augustinian tradition of giving the name
‘Love’ to the Holy Spirit.
(2) The three persons are consubstantial and coeternal; that is, they are not three distinct Gods but one God and
are inseparable. (3) Human beings are created in some way in the image of God, so that there is a sort of
analogy, however loose, indirect, or approximate, between the human mind and the Trinity.

The influence of these ideas is recognizable in Malebranche’s account of ideas. Rather than holding ideas to be
innate, Malebranche claims that they are found in God. In fact, he identifies them with divine ideas in the
traditional theological sense. Theologians attributed ideas to God by drawing an analogy to artistic design. Just
as the artisan who makes a product knows his product independently of that product’s actual existence, since
the product’s actual existence presupposes the plan or idea by which the artisan makes it in the first place, so
God knows His creation by means of productive ideas. Since these ideas cannot be something independent of
God Himself, they are simply the divine substance itself insofar as God’s perfections
are participable or imitable by creatures: each creature in its own limited way imitates or ‘partitions’ the infinite
unlimited perfection of God. By knowing His own unlimited perfection, then, God knows all things He could
possibly make, and thus all things that could possibly come to exist. It is this conception of ideas that makes up
the primary background for Malebranche’s account of ideas and, pressed by critics, Malebranche through the
course of his career placed greater and greater emphasis on this element of his thought that derived from
tradition. Malebranche’s place in this tradition is most explicitly developed in the 1696 Preface to the Dialogues,
where he quotes a number of passages from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in order to extract a general
description of divine ideas, which he then directly applies to ideas in his account.
Malebranche goes farther than this, into territory that might well have made traditional theologians
uncomfortable. Ideas are not merely in God in the sense that they are the divine substance understood in a
certain way; they are somehow a manifestation of God’s Reason, which is “coeternal and consubstantial with
Him” (LO 614; OC 3:131). The use of the term “consubstantial,” a traditional theological term applied to the
Word or Son, that is, the second Person of the Trinity, marks out the direction in which the Oratorian wants to
take this line of reasoning. Drawing on, and modifying, the Augustinian tradition, Malebranche suggests that a
proper account of the reason to which we regularly appeal must be rooted in the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity. God’s Reason is the Word, and we are rational because the Word, the Logos, is our Interior Teacher (an
Augustinian phrase). When we attend to various ideas we are learning from the Divine Word, universal Reason;
thus Malebranche’s thesis that all things are seen in God is a way of putting the Word at the center
of epistemology. Ideas are the province of the second Person of the Trinity; to attribute ideas to ourselves is to
commit the serious mistake of attributing to ourselves what only belongs to God. It is to fail to see (to use
another Augustinian phrase that is one of the Oratorian’s favorite sayings) that we are not our own light. This
Trinitarian move is the foundation for Malebranche’s version of rationalism; Reason is infallible because
Reason is quite literally God.
In a Trinitarian account of Reason there is necessarily more to Reason than an account of our rational ideas can
cover on its own. As the Interior Teacher, Reason not only illuminates us with ideas, but also guides us in
inquiry through interior sentiments, particularly pleasures and pains. Some background explaining
Malebranche’s view of the role of freedom in inquiry will help to clarify this unusual twist in his epistemology.

The understanding is “that passive faculty of the soul by means of which it receives all the modifications of
which it is capable” (LO 3; OC 1:43). On the other hand, the will is “ the impression or natural impulse that
carries us toward general and indeterminate good” (LO 5; OC 1:46). The will is both active, although
Malebranche is careful to qualify this by the phrase “in a sense” (LO 4; OC 1:46), and free, where freedom is
“the force that the mind has of turning this impression toward objects that please us, and making it so that our
natural inclinations are directed to some particular object” (OC 1:46; cf. LO 5). When we believe something
necessary, it is because “there is in these things no further relation to be considered that the understanding has
not already perceived” (LO 9; OC 1:53). We need freedom because there are many cases in which this has not
yet occurred, requiring us to direct our attention (another act of the will) in other directions, and, more
importantly, because everything the intellect receives has some appearance of truth (we seem to perceive it,
after all), so “if the will were not free and if it were infallibly and necessarily led to everything having the
appearance of truth and goodness, it would almost always be deceived” (LO 10; OC 1:54). At first glance, this
would force us to say that God, as Author of our natures, is the source of our errors. To avoid this premise,
Malebranche concludes that God gives us freedom in order that we may under these circumstances avoid falling
into error. In particular, we are given freedom so that we may refrain from accepting the merely probable, by
continuing to investigate “until everything to be investigated is unraveled and brought to light” (LO 10; OC
1:54).
Therefore, we have an epistemic duty to use our freedom as much as we can, as long as we do not use it to avoid
yielding to “the clear and distinct perception of all the constituents and relations of the object necessary to
support a well-founded judgment” (LO 10; OC 1:55). How do we know we have reached clear and distinct
perception? Malebranche does not appeal to anything intrinsic to the clear and distinct perception itself.
Rather, he suggests that we know it through the “inward reproaches of our reason” (LO 10; OC 1:55), “the
powerful voice of the Author of Nature,” which he also calls “the reproaches of our reason and the remorse of
our conscience” (LO 11; OC 1:57). That is, we know we clearly and distinctly perceive something because when
we try to doubt the perception, Reason reproaches us with pangs of intellectual conscience. In addition to these
pangs of intellectual conscience, we are led by “a certain inward conviction” and “the impulses felt while
meditating” (LO 13; OC 1:60).

It is in the context of discussing these sentiments, in fact, that Reason first appears in the main body of his
major work, the Search after Truth, and, since similar sentiments about “the replies He gives to all those who
know how to question Him properly” arise in the conclusion to the work, these epistemic sentiments may
perhaps be said to frame the entire work. They play an important role in the Dialogues on Metaphysics and on
Religion as well. We are told by the character Theodore early in the Dialogues that Reason guides inquiry by
dispensing convictions and reproaches (JS 33; OC 12:194), and the point recurs throughout the Dialogues.
Malebranche admits that distinguishing this guidance from prejudice can be difficult, but this is perhaps the
point of the Search as a manual for avoiding error: by giving us rules and guidelines by which to avoid error, it
helps us listen to the voice of Reason (cf. LO xlii-xliii, 529; OC 1:25-26, 2:453-454).

2. Love and Order

Malebranche extends this Trinitarian rationalism in order to give his own take on the claim that human minds
are in the image of God, suggesting in the Treatise on Morals that our lives are structured by the Trinity itself:
The Father, to whom power is attributed, makes them to partake of His power, having
established them as occasional causes of all the effects that they produce. The Son
communicates His wisdom to them and discloses all truths to them through the direct union
they have with the intelligible substance that He contains as universal Reason. The Holy Spirit
animates them and sanctifies them through the invincible impression they have for the good,
and through the charity or love of Order which He infuses into all hearts (OC 11:186; W 163).

This short passage on the way we are in the image of God gives a succinct summary of a number of claims that
Malebranche regards as important; it also shows how intimately related to his Trinitarian concerns many of his
most distinctive philosophical positions are. First, there is occasionalism, the view that only God is a true cause.
Second, there is the union with universal Reason, according to which we are rational only by union with the
Divine Word. Third, there is the will understood as the “invincible impression for the good,” which is attributed
to the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is not invoked by Malebranche as often as the Father and the Son are, but there are several
passages that hint at the Spirit’s importance; for example, in Elucidation Ten: “For since God cannot act
without knowledge and in spite of Himself, He made the world according to wisdom and through the impulse of
His love—He made all things through His Son and in the Holy Spirit as Scripture teaches” (OC 3:141; cf. LO
620). Despite receiving less emphasis, this third element, the theory of love that is associated with the Spirit as
the theory of Reason is associated with the Son, plays an important role in the account of how we are related to
Reason. Recognizing this requires recognizing Reason’s role in morality; Reason is (moral) Order.

The notion of Order is the core of Malebranche’s ethical theory, since “what makes a man righteous is that he
loves order and that he conforms his will to it in all things; likewise the sinner is such only because order does
not please him in everything and because he would rather have order conform to his own wishes” (OC 3:137; cf.
LO 618). Order, in turn, is explained in Augustinian fashion in terms of the divine ideas. Having argued that
ideas do not represent things equally noble or perfect, Malebranche goes on to explain the importance of this
inequality:

If it is true, then, that God, who is the universal Being, contains all beings within Himself in an
intelligible fashion, and that all these intelligible beings that have a necessary existence in God
are not in every sense equally perfect, it is clear that there will be a necessary and immutable
order among them, and that just as there are necessary and eternal truths because there are
relations of magnitude among intelligible beings, there must also be a necessary and
immutable order because of the relations of perfection among these same beings. An
immutable order has it, then, that minds are more noble than bodies, as it is a necessary truth
that twice two is four, or that twice two is not five (LO 618; OC 3:137-138).

We know ideas are not all equal because we judge the perfections of things by means of their ideas, and it is
certain that things themselves are not all equal in perfection; some things are distinguished from others in that
they have “more intelligence or mark of wisdom” (LO 618; OC 3:137). Because of this inequality, which is
effectively an inequality in the moral salience of the things we know by way of ideas, the eternal, immutable
intelligible world of ideas is also an eternal, immutable order. This order, however, is not a merely descriptive
order. Were there nothing more to divine Order than the theory of ideas, it would be “more of a speculative
truth than a necessary law” (LO 618; OC 3:138). Malebranche wants to go farther. This ordering of perfections
among the divine ideas has a necessity that constrains even God. To take this system of divine ideas and make it
“necessary law,” the Oratorian introduces his theory of love.

This theory, like the theory of ideas, is rooted in an understanding of the divine nature. Just as the theory of
ideas is rooted in God as being in general, so the theory of love is rooted in God as good in general. God’s
goodness is a universal or sovereign goodness; God is “a good that contains all other goods within itself” (LO
269; OC 2:16). As such, God is the only perfect or completely adequate object for love, and, accordingly, God
loves Himself perfectly. In loving Himself, He necessarily loves what in Himself represents Himself perfectly,
namely, His own self-image, divine Wisdom or universal Reason, which contains the order of all things; and
because of this, God always acts according to divine Order. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are
inseparable, and therefore God necessarily has a Love for Order. Malebranche goes so far as to say that “it is a
contradiction that God should not love and will order” (LO 594; OC 3:97). It is because of this necessary love
that order has a normative aspect; because of this love, order has “the force of law” for all minds (LO 620; OC
3:140), both created and uncreated.
Since God loves Himself, and in so doing operates according to Order, God creates us with an impulse to the
most perfect good, namely Himself. This is our will. As Malebranche states,

Only because God loves Himself do we love anything, and if God did not love Himself, or if He
did not continuously impress upon man’s soul a love like His own, i.e., the impulse of love that
we feel toward the good in general, we would love nothing, we would will nothing, and as a
result, we would be without a will, since the will is only the impression of nature that leads us
toward the good in general… (LO 337; OC 2:126-127)

Because order has the force of law, God makes us according to Order; part of this involves making us to love
God alone as our sovereign good. This leaves us with the question of other goods besides God. Malebranche
sometimes says that God loves only Himself (for example, LO 364; OC 2:169). However, this is never taken to
mean that God does not love other things; in fact, “He loves all His works” (LO 330, 666; OC 2:113, 3:220). The
reason is that, as sovereign good, God loves other things in loving Himself. As he notes, “God loves only Himself
—He loves His creations only because they are related to His perfections, and He loves them to the extent to
which they have this relation—in the final analysis God loves Himself and the things He has created with the
same love” (LO 364; OC 2:169-170). On the other hand, not all things bear the same type of relation to Himself;
there are, as we noted above, different relations of perfection in Order. Mind is more perfect than body; and,
being more perfect, it is more closely related to God, and therefore more lovable. Because of this
God cannot will that the mind be subordinated to the body. This is not a metaphysical or logical necessity, but
an ethical necessity (an obligation) that presupposes the metaphysical necessity of divine self-love. Given that
He loves Order, He ought to will the right ordering of perfections among creatures; this ‘ought’ is an obligation
grounded in love.
God, in loving himself, loves sovereign Reason or Order and, because of this love, Order has normative force.
When we see in Reason that the soul is more perfect than the body, for instance, we can recognize this principle
as not merely a truth, but a law: “the living law of the Father” (JS 238; OC 12:302). Because it is according to
Order that Order be loved, and since God always acts out of love of Order, and therefore always in conformity
with it, God directs our own love toward Order. Moreover, the law of Order is sanctioned by divine omnipotence
itself. Conformity with Order will, in the long run, be rewarded, while divergence from Order will be punished.
In one key respect, however, Order is not like other laws. In a case of human law, we can evaluate a law, and
perhaps reject it, by considering higher principles than those embodied in the law itself. Because it is the highest
law, this can never be the case with Order; when we evaluate the goodness or rationality of any law, we can only
do so by comparing it to Order. As divine, Order is the good in general; as Reason, Order is what makes
anything rational. Order, in short, is authoritative in every significant way. This authority is essential to
Malebranche’s discussion of human nature in its natural, ‘prelapsarian’ state, that is, its state prior to the Fall.