Imitating God ‘clothed in glory’: a voluntarist reading of Malebranche’s natural and political legislation

Building on previous research into the ‘politicization’ or ‘theological-political analogy’ of Nicolas Malebranche, this paper seeks to uncover the dimensions of voluntarism – particularly political voluntarism – within his philosophy and their compatibility with theories of absolute sovereignty in seventeenth-century Europe. These dimensions are often obscured by Malebranche’s seemingly unwavering intellectualist stance. This study challenges Frank’s Augustinian interpretation, which argues that Malebranche’s moral order precludes a self-consistent ‘Schmittian’ secularization. Instead, it demonstrates that Malebranche conceived secular sovereignty as an exclusive imitation of God’s omnipotence, employing a voluntarist framework to account for both natural and political obedience. Through comparative analysis, it is argued that, despite the eternity and immutability of moral principles, Malebranche’s rejection of the Cartesian conflation of reason and will – combined with his emphasis on the contingency of God’s choices – imbued his natural laws with a metaphysical and epistemological voluntarist structure. Moreover, regarding the monopoly over interpretation and the selective realization of moral principles, Malebranche’s political legislation mirrored a voluntarist and ‘absolutist’ framework akin to his conception of natural law. By disentangling irresistible power from an irreproachable yet essentially incomprehensible reason, Malebranche appropriated the concept of ‘sovereignty’ from his contemporary political thought and applied it to both theology and human politics.