Virtue

Abstract

“The verb to love is equivocal. It signifies two things amongst others, to unite ourselves, by willing, to some object as to our good or the cause of our happiness, and [2nd] to wish for someone the good of which he has a need. We can love God in the first sense, and our neighbor in the second.... It would be idolatry to love our neighbor in the first sense, for it is in God alone that the power is found to act in minds and make them happy” (1/3/2). The second sense in which we may understand love is enriched when Malebranche comes to describe it broadly as a “love as-friendliness,” and the “first sense” comes to be called a “love as-union.” “We love persons of merit with a love as-friendliness for we love them even when they are in no position to do something good for us; we love them because they have more perfection and virtue than others. Thus, the power to do good to us, or that type of perfection which relates to our happiness — in a word, goodness — excites in us the love as-union while the other perfections excite the love as-esteem and as-friendliness. For God alone is good He alone has power to act in us. He does not really communicate this perfection to creatures; He only establishes them as occasional causes in order to produce certain effects, for the true power is incommunicable” (1/3/18). The love which animates us flows from God, and as God is the true power behind it, so its only full perfection and reward is to become re-united to God through our determinations. This truth of human being and its direction is constantly reiterated by Malebranche, and should be kept in mind. Any text using the word “love” must be examined to discern in what sense it is being used, for in this total and Divine sense, such phrases as “self-love” can only refer to a form of idolatry. Our love is a motion, it moves us, we are moved to the good and toward a condition of happiness which in its perfection can only be with God. But Malebranche does not stop there. He does not stop at an understanding of love which would allow no “ethics” except that of asceticism and a yearning for the eternal. Such an ethics distorts not only our experience, but the very Order by which God creates and structures all that is. God, too, is able to love. Ultimately His love can and must be for Himself. But He has chosen to create. He is creating according to His Order. And within that Order He loves things in proportion as they are lovable. Those proportions are equivalent to what has been identified earlier as the “relations of perfection,” and it is because those relations proportion God’s love for various sorts and stages of beings that they are able to proportion our secondary or derivative love also. For, speaking now not of love in its timeless orientation, but in its plural and finite orientation, men, similarly to God, “... ought only to esteem and to love perfection. Thus, esteem and love ought to be conformed to Order. I mean that there must even be a relation between two loves [ours and God’s], just as there is between the perfection or [i.e.,] the reality of the objects which excite those loves; for if the proportion is not there, they are not conformed to Order” (1/3/7). If the proportion is there, they are conformed to Order, and insofar as we love the way God loves, we direct our love with His, and become in that much like Him, i.e., we are in that much perfected. We shall see that Malebranche later takes up the matter of proportioning this finite, temporarily-oriented aspect of love under the heading of “duties,” to which he devotes the entire second part of his Treatise on Morality. Briefly, this can be accomplished as part of a science of ethics because the relations of perfection whose intelligibility we may discern as we develop “virtue,” govern conduct as well as worth. “It is certain that love as-esteem or friendliness ought to regulate Duties. [But] there are perfections of many sorts — personal or absolute perfections [such as merit or a talent], and relative perfections [such as that of a prince, whose perfection is relative to God who alone is the power the prince is to represent]” (1/3/12). The possibility of determining our love in proportion as a person or object is estimable or lovable in God’s Order hinges upon that love’s being free. We do not begin life with such a governed, reasoned love as that which Malebranche calls “free” but with what he calls “natural” love. The workings of that initial condition of love are characterized by instinct, aroused by the senses, the imagination and the passions. Those natural motivations which are instinctual have a purpose to fulfill in our lives, they are not to be squelched. But that of our love which is not instinctual and need not be so must be gradually freed, brought under the government and direction of practical reason. “All pleasure produces, without fail, a natural motion of love in the soul, i.e., it makes us love naturally, necessarily, purely voluntarily,¹ the object which causes or seems to cause the pleasure. But, not all pleasure produces free love, for free love does not always conform to natural love. It does not depend completely on pleasure — it depends rather on Reason, on freedom, on the soul’s strength to resist a motion pushing upon it. It is the consent of the will which makes the essential difference with this type of love. For these two types of love form our habits, each after its own way” (1/3/18).²