The title of Malebranche's first, longest, and most important work might well have been Discourse on Method, for method is what The Search After Truth is most obviously about. Its subtitle adumbrates the centrality of method: wherein are treated the nature of man's mind and the use he must make of it to avoid error in the sciences. The importance of finding a method to avoid error is expressed in the first sentence of the Search's first book: “error is the cause of men's misery” for from it comes the evil that upsets human happiness. Each of the five major occasions of error is detailed by the first five books of the work, and the last book, on method, indicates “the paths leading to knowledge of the truth ” [Search VI.1.i, OC 2:245; LO 408). The method that Malebranche proposes is, like his vision of all things in God, a highly original result of correcting Descartes in light of the Christianized Platonism that he received from Augustine.

The seventeenth century was the belle époque of method. The prominence of scientific advance in the period was such that extreme epistemic optimism was pandemic. It seemed that among rationalists everything was knowable and would soon be known, and that even among empiricists who set limits to human knowledge, those limits would soon be achieved. A sharp break from all precedent was universally perceived; these moderns felt that they were uniquely doing something right, and somehow doing it systematically given the results being achieved, thus the preoccupation with the discovery and articulation of method. (Whether the break with the past was as sharp as the moderns thought is, of course, another question. Nor did the pandemic optimism preclude the period from also being the belle epoche of skepticism.)

INTRODUCTION

Given the radical theocentrism of Malebranche's philosophy-in which God is the only “true” good and “true” cause, in which “we see all things in God,” in which God “moves our arm” on the occasion of our willing it, in which existence is only “continual creation” by God, and in which nature is “nothing but the general laws which God has established” (TNG, Ist Illustration, iii, OC 5:148; R 196)-it is to be expected that a theodicy (“the justice of God”) will be the central and governing moral-political notion, in an almost Leibnizian way, and that this quasi-Theodicée will then shape (say) the meaning of Christian love, the Pauline notion that “the greatest of these is charity” (I Corinthians xiii). This expectation is borne out: For Malebranche a “love of union” should be reserved for God alone (the true good, the true cause) while finite creatures should receive only a “love of benevolence.” As he says in the Traité de morale,

Few periods are more important in the philosophy of mind than the seventeenth century. The new mechanical picture of the physical world confronted many philosophers with an exciting challenge,- they needed to formulate theories of the mind and its place in nature, which were not only more philosophically defensible but also better adapted to the needs of Christian theology than their traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic rivals. Although many of the theories that were advanced are widely rejected today, there is no doubt that they left a decisive mark on subsequent thinking; indeed, they helped to define the contemporary agenda in the philosophy of mind. For instance, current debates over the merits of dualism and materialism are often clearly of seventeenth-century inspiration. Other thinkers in the period may have had a more direct impact on modern philosophy of mind, but few, if any, are more interesting than Malebranche.

The main theses of Malebranche's philosophy are well-known today. The theory of vision in God of ideas, the doctrine of occasionalism, the philosophy of will, the function of intelligible extension, as well as the relationship of Malebranche's thought to Descartes' or Leibniz's have all been carefully studied. Very little work, however, in either France or the United States, has explicitly investigated the status and the function of metaphysics in the work of the Oratorian. The question of the definition and the role of a Malebranchian metaphysics gives rise to two distinct but inseparable lines of investigation.

First, is it legitimate to search for a definition and systematic use of the word métaphysique in Malebranche? This investigation requires us to determine the relation of any possible Malebranchian metaphysics to the history of metaphysics in the classical period. The other issue is whether Malebranche's metaphysics constitutes a new and original figure in the evolution of metaphysics in the seventeenth century. This essay will seek to address these two questions simultaneously.

One of the most controversial of the claims in Malebranche's first published work, The Search After Truth, is that “we see all things in God” (nous voyons toutes choses en Dieu) (III.2.vi, OC 1:437; LO 230). It is true that this text restricts that particular claim by noting that “we see in God only the things of which we have ideas” and in particular, only bodies and their properties. Yet even given this restriction the doctrine that we see all things (that is, bodies) in (that is, through ideas in) God scandalized Malebranche's most prominent critic, the Augustinian theologian and Cartesian partisan Antoine Arnauld (1612-94). Arnauld protested in particular that such a doctrine has the “bizarre” consequence that “we see God when we see bodies, the sun, a horse or a tree.”

Arnauld was objecting here not only to the placement of ideas of material objects in God, but also, and more basically, to the reification of ideas. As an alternative to Malebranche's claim that the ideas we perceive are “representative beings” distinct from our perceptions, he offered the position, which he plausibly ascribed to Descartes, that such ideas are identical to those perceptions. It is difficult not to prefer Arnauld's parsimonious account of ideas to Malebranche's more exotic doctrine of the “Vision in God” (as I call his thesis that we see bodies by means of ideas in God). Yet Malebranche did not simply overlook Arnauld's alternative to his doctrine. Indeed, he came to insist that such an alternative cannot explain how our perception of the nature of bodies can reach beyond our finite experience.

PRESENTATION

From 1683 to 1694, a long and furious polemic took place between Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld. When the debate began, Malebranche was still a “young” philosopher (The Search After Truth was published in 1674), identified by the public as one of the leading lights of the new generation of Cartesians. Antoine Arnauld (1612- 1694), on the other hand, was an “old” thinker, known mainly for his theological (rather than philosophical) writings. These can be divided into two general periods: from 1640 to 1668, Arnauld was one of the principal protagonists of the battles over efficacious grace that took place after the publication of Jansenius's Augustinus, appearing as the leader of the “Jansenist” camp. After the “Peace of the Church” in 1668, Arnauld devoted himself essentially to the campaign against the Protestants, in collaboration with Pierre Nicole. Philosophically, Arnauld had written very little: the Fourth Objections to Descartes' Meditations in 1641, and the Grammar of 1660 and the Logic of 1662 - both called de Port-Royal, the first in collaboration with Claude Lancelot, the second with Pierre Nicole. All three of these texts had earned him a well-established reputation as a Cartesian. Thus, the ideological proximity of Arnauld and Malebranche defined and delimited the domain of their confrontation. They were both Catholic priests and both referred constantly to Descartes and St. Augustine.

When the great philosopher, scientist and mathematician Rene Descartes died in 1650, some of his most vehement opponents - and there were many - must have hoped that would be the end of his philosophy as well. Little did they suspect that Cartesianism would be the dominant philosophical paradigm for the rest of the century. In France, the most important Cartesian - perhaps, in fact, the most important philosopher - of this period was a Catholic priest from a prominent and well-connected family in Paris. Nicolas Malebranche was widely recognized by his philosophical and theological contemporaries across seventeenth-century Europe as an intellectual force to be reckoned with, a bold and unorthodox synthesizer of the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes and a systematic thinker of the first rank.

Thus, it is surprising that Malebranche is only now finding his rightful place in the pantheon of early modern figures - along with Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and the others - deemed worthy of study by contemporary philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. (The French, of course, have recognized his importance all along.) While Malebranche's thought is deeply rooted in his theological agenda and, more broadly, in the particular intellectual and religious environment of early modern France, much of it is of perennial philosophical value, and plenty of his ideas and arguments continue to be of interest to philosophers today. Malebranche is most famous - or, as some would prefer to say, infamous - for his doctrine of occasionalism, an often ridiculed theory in which God is the only true and active causal agent in the universe.

Malebranche was deeply committed to the position that human beings have “freedom of indifference.” However, he was equally committed to occasionalism, according to which God, and God alone, is the true cause of everything real outside of Himself. As Malebranche put it, “It is God who does all in all things (fait tout en toutes choses)” (TNG, OC 5:148; R 196). It is hard to see how these two positions are compatible. Malebranche touched upon freedom of indifference and its relation to causality in all of his major works, and in the process worked out an unusual position on human freedom. Although there is reason to disagree with Jean Laporte's judgment that this position is “coherent in all its parts” it continues to deserve the attention of philosophers and theologians for at least two reasons.

First, it shows one way in which seventeenth-century dualism influenced discussion of freedom of will. Malebranche's dualism was more extreme than Descartes7 because Malebranche not only held that mind and body are distinct substances, but that they do not really act on one another. This extreme dualism helps to account for his identification of human freedom with freedom of will, and his narrow focus on freedom of will as opposed to freedom of overt human actions.

Questions about the nature of causality occupy a rather central place in early modern philosophy. There had been, of course, a concern with causality in ancient philosophy (especially Aristotle) and in medieval thought (particularly in the sacramental context). However, the topic took on even greater urgency in the seventeenth century. In large measure, this was due to a problem specific to the period: how to reconcile an emerging scientific view of the natural world - mechanistic physics - with traditional and still-compelling beliefs about the relationship between God and his creation. On the one hand, natural philosophers of the period saw their task as one of identifying the underlying causal structures of observed phenomena and of framing explanations in terms of matter and motion alone. On the other hand, it was generally recognized that an omnipotent God is responsible not just for creating the world and its contents, but also for sustaining them in existence. Against this background, in which philosophy, physics, and theology merge, the problem of causation arises in several contexts: (1) in the realm of purely physical inquiry (How does one body produce changes in another body?); (2) in regard to relations between the mind and the body (Are mental events true causes of physical states of affairs, and do bodily states cause effects in the mind?); and (3) in philosophical inquiry into the mind alone (Are there real causal relations among thoughts and other mental activities? Does the mind cause its own states of being?) In all three contexts, the answers to these specific questions hang upon the answer to the more general question as to how God's omnipotence and role in sustaining things in being can be reconciled with granting creatures true causal efficacy.

This essay examines aspects of the manuscript transmission of Old French and Middle High German romance. Though space does not permit a comprehensive pan-European survey, the comparative examination of two literary traditions allows for a broader consideration of the medieval literary manuscript in its varied forms. Anyone who has studied romances in their original manuscripts knows that the experience is markedly different from that of reading them in modern printed editions. On the one hand, there are no line numbers, no glossary or index of proper names, no explanatory introduction or critical apparatus; there may be no indication of the author’s name, and possibly not even a title. Punctuation is sparse, and not always consistent. On the other hand, there may be features that enhance the reading experience, such as illustrations - sometimes quite prolific - and explanatory rubrics that chart the narrative or thematic subdivisions of the text. A scribe might embellish the text with flourishes and doodles that call attention to key words, passages, or motifs; scribes and readers alike often marked lines that they considered important with the marginal indication “Nota.” The medieval manuscript shapes our encounter with the text in a way quite different from that of a modern edition; and it often bears the personal reactions of generations of past readers, a material reminder of the communal nature of literary reception (Fig. 4.1).

THE FIRST JOURNEYS OF ROMANCE

As a literary tradition, medieval German romance arose in the middle of the twelfth century and in different literary guises retained its popularity until and beyond the fifteenth century. The German tradition is rich and diverse: it encompasses some fifty to eighty texts; it includes verse narrative and, beginning in the middle of the thirteenth century, prose translations as well; it sustains a wide variety of genres, the most important of which are Arthurian romances and love adventure stories; and it makes the transition from manuscript culture to print, that is to say, it continues beyond the Middle Ages into the Early Modern period. Nor is the northern European, Germanic-language romance tradition confined to those regions in northern and central Europe that correspond roughly to the modern nation states of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, although these regions will be the focus of this essay. There are rich medieval romance traditions in other Germanic languages such as Dutch, Flemish, and Old Norse. For our purposes, this essay embarks upon a selective overview of medieval German romance in order to provide a sense of its richness and diversity.

The purpose of this essay is to look at Middle English romances from the perspective of private life. It sets them in the context of late medieval patterns of family and marriage, and presents them as part of a literate but unlearned lay culture centered on the home, where many of them seem to belong. It does not provide a survey, because that has already been done several times, but rather, by looking at around half-a-dozen, suggests a new approach.

The late medieval family can be thought of in two ways. First, as a group of people living together in the “nuclear family household” formation consisting of wife, husband and dependent children, whose home would also include servants and apprentices. The nuclear family, then as now, is always in process, because it comes into being with a marriage and is reshaped by the children’s departure. Another way of thinking about the family, though, is as a lineage that is the route for the transmission of property and privilege. In late medieval England wealth and ownership of land provided access to social prestige and political power; the family, especially the male line, was the means whereby these were passed on from one generation to the next. From the point of view of the lineage the son’s role was crucial because his marriage ensured its continuity; the marriage of the daughter who inherited took the property to another family. All this is the stuff of Middle English romance; many of its plots are derived from the crises and hiatuses of the nuclear family and the lineage, as I shall show.

The term “courtly love” was coined in 1883 by Gaston Paris with reference to Le Chevalier de la Charrete (also known as the Lancelot) by Chrétien de Troyes, the earliest surviving narrative of the adulterous love between Arthur’s knight Lancelot and his Queen Guenevere. This romance, with its disquieting combination of illicit sex and quasi-mystical love, has remained ever since in the forefront of discussions of what “courtly love” might be. The resulting drawback of these discussions, in my view, has been their assumption that such love was susceptible of codification as a system of rules or doctrines. This essay will seek to locate “courtly love” more broadly as a series of questions which are debated across large numbers of texts, and which can be traced back to the tensions within medieval court life. These tensions are responded to very differently by Chrétien’s immediate precursors, the Eneas seeking to contain them within safe limits while the Tristan romances give rein to their potential disruptiveness. Within the two poles represented by these two influential stories, Chrétien himself explores various ways of negotiating the pressures of medieval court life. His Lancelot is the most famous, but by no means definitive, outcome of these explorations.

When Chauntecleer, a cocky cock, but clearly no Latinist, woos Dame Pertelote with this paltry pick-up line, the only connection he is making between women and romance involves what he hopes will happen once he gets her off her perch. The Nun’s Priest, however, makes this connection explicit fifty lines later when he ironically asserts the improbable veracity of his mock heroic beast fable: “This storie is also trewe, I undertake, / As is the booke of Launcelot de Lake, / That wommen holde in greet reverence” (CT, vii. 3211-13). The dense irony, humor, and ambiguity of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale make it hard to tell where the narrator (let alone Chaucer) stands on women and/or romance (or on anything else, for that matter). One thing, however, is clear: women have been a confusion to men since the beginning (“In principio”), but, as Chauntecleer’s mistranslation indicates, they have also been a significant source of men’s joy, a confusing state of affairs, to say the least. One way to handle the confusio, however, is to trivialize women or to try to dismiss them.

This strategy appears in the romances of the three best-known writers in Middle English: the Gawain-poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Sir Thomas Malory. That students of medieval English literature have most likely read these authors’ romances is reason enough to examine them together. What is more, their writings span the hundred or so years that ranged from the mid-fourteenth through the mid-fifteenth century: the period roughly coincident with England’s Hundred Years War with France as well as with a flourishing of English literature often attributed to the rise in nationalism and the growing interest in English as an official language inspired by that war.

The earliest texts that preserve stories of Gawain present him not as a popular hero, but as a traditional champion. Tales in the Welsh Mabinogion, and scattered allusions from other Celtic works, suggest that Gawain was well-established in oral narratives as the nephew, companion, and defender of the great king. Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain confirm this match of Walwanus (Gawain) and Gwalchmai mab Gwyar, a man of action around whom adventures swirled, a renowned figure about whom audiences wished to hear more. Behind these earliest surviving stories there may lurk traces of divinity or superhuman stature, linking Gawain to solar heroes whose strength surges before noon, and wanes with the setting sun. Despite his stature and centrality in Celtic tradition, Gawain was scarcely “popular” in the sense of being available to diverse constituencies or multiple genres. Nonetheless, by the early twelfth century his fame seems to have spread far beyond the audiences for traditional oral narratives, making him a familiar figure in European ecclesiastical and learned culture. The cosmopolitan appeal of Arthurian story emerges early in a sculpture (dated before 1109) at the Cathedral in Modena, Italy; this depicts Gawain undertaking a siege, together with Arthur and two other knights.

What did medieval people mean when they used the word “chivalry” (Latin, militia, French, chevalerie)? The simplest sense was hardy deeds in a fight with edged weapons. A second meaning was social, the body of knights in one place or even all knights, thought of as a distinct group. The third meaning, more abstract, referred to their ideas and ideals, to chivalry as the ethos of the knights. All three senses of the word appear (often intertwined) in romance literature, one of our best (if least used) sources on medieval society.

Yet the historian reading romance in order to understand chivalry faces difficult questions. Historians still believe that by careful use of evidence a “real” medieval world can be partially recovered; yet how can romance, which seems so totally “unreal,” form a part of this evidence? Some scholars have thought that since it is imaginative literature, romance must be discounted as merely escapist storytelling. Some have considered the chivalry portrayed in its pages dreamlike, a thin veil pulled over the realities of a harsh world, and completely divorced from grinding social tensions or violence. An audience limited by gender would further reduce the importance of romance as historical evidence by cutting readership in half – picturing men reading (or listening in hall to) chansons de geste with their endless war and tenurial disputes; women in chamber reading the more psychological romances with love interest.