For all its emphasis on human corruption, this was Augustinianism with a distinctly Cartesian confidence in the powers of reason. Malebranche’s concept of meditation as a methodical progression marked his departure from the overarching pessimism with which Jansenists like Pascal and Nicole borrowed from Cartesian rationalism. Where they saw reason groping futilely in the face of the mysteries of God and his creation, Malebranche saw it advancing deep into the same mysteries. The meditator achieved certainty about physical nature by pondering the universal laws of extension to be found in the abstractions of mathematics and geometry—the circle and the triangle were his prime examples—and the universal laws of extension that their lines represented with the least possible use of the senses. This was the propaedeutic path to reunion with God, through pure ideas that, being “in God,” were discovered in his illuminating presence in the mind.
Seen from this angle, the other implication of Malebranche’s definition of concupiscence as a hierarchical inversion, not a corruption of substances, may at first seem puzzling. The body, too, represented the majesty of God’s creation, though it did so in its configuration of mechanical forces rather than in any freedom from force. Malebranche insisted that the senses of postlapsarian human beings were no different from Adam and Eve’s, and, in providing man with the sense data he needed for self-preservation, they still functioned remarkably well. Seen in this light, the human body deserved to be approached with awe precisely for what it shared with animals. As machines with intricate and seemingly infinite relations of “parts,” all bodies exemplified the interactions of “occasional causes” through which God, the only sufficient cause, directly willed every motion in his creation. It was this “mechanical design” that enraptured Malebranche when he observed insects under a microscope; they are “so beautiful,” he observed, that “it even seems as though God has willed to bejewel them in compensation for their lack of size” (31). The same sense of awe pervades his calls for a new “science of man,” which would be “the most beautiful, the most pleasant, and the most necessary of all our knowledge” because, in addition to explaining the nature of the mind as such, it would fathom the wonders of the human body that Descartes had discovered (xxxix).
Concupiscence was man’s deluded perception of finite particularity, which the mind’s eye—its capacity to perceive the universal and immutable laws instantiated in particular things—could escape, though only with great difficulty. By itself, this epistemological explanation of a theological doctrine echoes centuries of Christian thinking about the compulsive egotism at the heart of human corruption. But in Malebranche’s reading of it, Descartes’s mechanical paradigm of psychophysiology went a momentous step farther. It made the infinity of parts of the human body comprehensible by dividing them into the fibrous substances of organs, veins, nerves, and muscles and the highly refined blood particles, the vapor-like animal spirits, that transmitted motion among them; and it interrelated these fibers and forces in a way that seemed to explain how they worked to keep the mind in error and why some minds were more enslaved to their bodies than others. The villain of the piece was the imagination, the faculty that turned sensations into images in the brain that in turn “modified” the mind. If the senses were “false witnesses,” the imagination was their deafening voice or, to switch metaphors, the instrument of their coercive force. Its power lay in the “traces” or grooves the animal spirits imprinted on the brain. The deeper the traces, the more easily the imagination turned sensations into blinding images. And that, of course, depended on the relative softness or hardness of the brain fibers. The softer or more “delicate” the fibers, the deeper the traces (87–90, 110–11).
This was the logic that underlay Malebranche’s description of women, in his indictment of the imagination in Book Two of The Search After Truth, as masters of language, manners, and taste, and as incapable of grasping anything “abstract.” Precisely because the power of their imaginations made them so prone to error, women were also, in relation to men, more prone to sin. To say that they were unable to grasp abstractions was to say they could not perform the labor of “natural prayer” in meditation, and hence could not approach (re)union with God through self-illumination. “Effeminacy” marked the ways their example and influence weakened men in their efforts to disentangle the mind from the body, or indeed precluded such efforts.
As opprobrious as his judgments were, Malebranche was not a misogynist, if we mean by that term a hater of women as such. On a key issue, in fact, we find him arguing, albeit tentatively and somewhat tortuously, against what might more fairly be called a misogynist position. In The Search After Truth he applied Descartes’s mind-body dualism to argue that the intergenerational transmission of original sin occurred in the direct communication between the mother’s brain and the brain of the fetus. “One could say,” he wrote, “that from the time we were formed in the wombs of our mothers we were in sin and infected with the corruption of our parents.” He stepped back immediately from the possible implication that women bore sole responsibility for human corruption, or indeed that in pregnancy itself they were “criminal.” If the woman is “righteous”—i.e., if she has the faith to love God—she remains righteous even as her brain’s traces, without her volition, communicate concupiscence to the fetus (120–23). In his later “elucidation” of this subject, he took another step back; a strict interpretation of scriptural passages led to the conclusion that, because it takes both a man and the woman to effect procreation, they both “must be said to be the real causes of sin, each in [his/her] own way.”25
Nor was Malebranche a biological essentialist. The relative strengths of the imagination and reason in a specific person, he explained immediately after listing women’s distinctive traits, depended on the proportion between the volume and force of her (or his) animal spirits and the degree of softness, or delicacy, of her brain fibers. The differences in the proportion from person to person were virtually limitless, and they did not always follow gender lines. Rather than positing a rigid dichotomy between male and female cognition, he conceived something more like a continuum, with exceptional men at the “weak” end and exceptional women at the “strong” end. Hence “some women are found to have stronger minds than some men” (130–31). That was a conclusion about natural fact that he took quite seriously. Indeed it explains what would otherwise be an incomprehensible detail of his life. We know from his friends’ reminiscences that Malebranche found it particularly satisfying that exceptional women of rank could understand his books without the guidance of a “master,” and that “his most