The Search after Truth and Elucidations of the Search after Truth. by Nicholas Malebranche

Abstract

330 BOOK REVIEWS accomplishments of major spiritual, social, and political movements in the Church. If the purpose of this volume is to describe the broad and profound changes that have swept through the Church since the Vatican Council, then the work is a major success and a needed contribution. For many who find themselves unable to keep abreast of the changes and developments associated with renewal in the Church, this book is a necessity. It is so because it describes in its articles all of the major innovations in the Church in a clear, precise, and very understandable manner. This work belongs in the library of everyone who wishes to be informed about the renewal of the Church but who finds it difficult to do so. Volume 17 is not just a source book of contemporary theoretical and academic information concerning the post-Vatican Church. Rather, the range of concerns covered makes it a measure and barometer of change, development, innovation, and renewal in the Church today. This volume may also mark the beginning of a new breed of ecclesiastical reference works which do not just report and record facts and learning already attained, but also stand as measures of that learning, and point out and give directions to new fields of learning. It is to be hoped that this volume will lead to many more of this type which will be significant contributions to the knowledge, teaching, ministry, and prayer of the Church. Dominican House of Studies Washington, D.C. ROBERT BARRY, 0.P. The Search after Truth and Elucidations of the Search after Truth. By NrcHOJ,AS MALEBRANCHE, translated by Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp, with a philosophical commentary by Thomas M. Lennon. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980. Pp. xxxi (including prefaces and foreword by Malebranche) and 861. $50.00. This book offers to the reader the most recent English translation of Nicolas Malebranche's De la recherche de la verite and Eclaircissmnents, as translated by Lennon and Olscamp, together with a philosophical commentary by Lennon. If Malebranche is being rediscovered by an English reading public once more, the good fortune is ours. If his philosophical writings come over easily into a clear and even English prose style, this is surely as much a reflection of the clarity of the original as of the skill of the translators , who could have asked for no more felicitous a work of philosophic prose than Malebranche's French writings. The translation appears to be quite accurate without being slavishly BOOK REVIEWS 881 literal; and, even where it is very literal, the transparency and grace of Malebranche's French go over into an English only slightly less graceful and slightly less transparent. The philosophical commentary is thorough and, exactly as it says, a commentary in the classical sense of the word. It sets forth the aspects of Malebranche's thought which are of acknowledged philosophical and historical importance. It details the controversies of the period in the light of carefully studied Cartesian influences. In particular, it explains lucidlyand in this reviewer's opinion correctly-the oft misunderstood doctrine of occasionalism: that, because of the identity of creation and conservation in existence, only God can be called a cause in the strict and philosophical sense-as evidenced from the contradictions inherent in the notions of real psycho-physical causality and of real physical efficient causality. The commentator correctly sees Malebranche as arguing that for God there is no more intimate or more distant a relation between mental and physical substances than between two physical substances when one is said to impart motion to the other. Every substance, being immediately united to God, affects any other substance only mediately. The result is an intensely vertical providential harmony wherein God is immediately present to all things and things are mediately present to other things. As long as causal accounts require unmediated or simply efficacious causal action among finite substances , just so long will these accounts falter in incoherence. Hence causal necessities, in Malebranche's strictly read view, are not removed by but grounded in necessities connected with the effects of God's willing as He wills. The latter are the immediate necessities...