Malebranche came to represent this position in the public eye as he was
caught up in a swirl of controversies with his most famous opponents: in 1683
Arnauld polemicized with him over the implication that humans have no ideas
of their own if they see all things in God; later Leibniz criticized Malebranche
for obscuring the scientific status of the laws of motion. On the other side he
was attacked by Fénelon and Bossuet. To make God the sole cause in the
universe appears to eliminate free will, and Malebranche’s theological unor-
thodoxy landed him on the Index in 1690. This was hardly fatal to one’s
intellectual reputation; but there was a deeper problem in reconciling the party
of religious orthodoxy with Cartesianism while solving the philosophical puz-
zle of how to relate two dissimilar substances. The intermediation of God in
effect provides a third substance. If one wishes to emphasize the spiritual side,
Berkeley’s idealism is a cleaner route to that goal. If one is impressed with
Mallebranche’s conceptual tools, Leibniz provides a superseding version. Male-
branche sharpened the problem not just of mind-body interaction but of how
anything can act causally on anything. If we stick to observables, we find only
a succession, never a causal force; Malebranche gives the very image of billiard
balls moving on a table that one later associates with Hume (quoted in Brown,
1984: 84; also Lévi-Bruhl, 1899: 63–64). In the same way, it is unintelligible
how a spirit can communicate with another spirit, except, Malebranche says,
via God; and God’s intervention is necessary also to uphold the order of the
physical world. Malebranche left a heritage of puzzles that would be exploited
by others.
The monistic path out of Descartes’s two-substance problem was taken by
Spinoza, then given a distinctive twist by Leibniz. Both men encountered the
Cartesian network and its puzzles, each with ties to the international scientific
community, and each with strong motivations to transcend religious disputes.
Jewish Millennialism and Spinoza’s Religion of Reason
Spinoza was formed in the midst of controversies at Amsterdam, when the
opportunism of religious politics in Europe was at its height. The Jews had
become an important element in the larger intellectual scene. This was a role
they had played in Muslim Spain during the 1100s, but never before in
Christian Europe. Now the actors were mostly Portuguese Jews newly arrived
in exile, fleeing persecution by the Spanish Inquisition, which had been ex-
tended to Portugal when that kingdom was incorporated into Spain in 1580.
But Spanish Jews had been under pressure to convert or flee ever since the
reconquest; the philosophical results had been particularistic Kabbalah, not
universalistic doctrine. In the mid-1600s there was an additional factor from
the Christian side: a growing interest in a universal religion pruned of dogmatic
elements. Judaism was attractive on this score; leaving aside dietary and other
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