Nicolas Malebranche 1638 – 1715

Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian priest and one of the most original Cartesian philosophers of the seventeenth century. His Search After Truth combined Descartes' rationalism with Augustinian theology in a system whose two central doctrines are occasionalism, the view that God is the only true cause, and the vision in God, the claim that we perceive the essences of things by seeing them in the divine intellect. He carried on a long debate with Antoine Arnauld over grace and ideas and corresponded with Leibniz. His work shaped Berkeley, Hume, and the development of empiricism.

Nicolas Malebranche was born at Paris in August 1638, the youngest of fifteen children of the secretary of Louis XIII. A sickly child, he was tutored at home, studied at the Collège de la Marche and theology at the Sorbonne, and in 1660 entered the Oratory, where he was ordained priest in 1664. The same year he came across a copy of Descartes's Treatise on Man on a Paris bookstall and, in his own account, read it with such enthusiasm that he had to lay it down for fits of palpitation; he spent the next decade studying Cartesian science and metaphysics. He lived the rest of his life as a member of the Oratorian community on the rue Saint-Honoré.

His major works are De la recherche de la vérité (Search after Truth, 1674–1675), Conversations chrétiennes (1677), Traité de la nature et de la grâce (1680), Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques (1683), Traité de morale (1684), and the late Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la religion (1688). His long controversies with Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Régis, Bossuet, and Leibniz fill several further volumes.

Malebranche combined Cartesian dualism with an Augustinian theology to produce three signature doctrines: the 'vision in God', on which we know things by perceiving their archetypes in the divine intellect; occasionalism, on which God is the only true cause and finite things are merely the occasions of his action; and a theodicy of simplicity, on which God permits evils because his wisdom requires that he act by the simplest possible general laws. He died at the Oratory in October 1715.