id
Malebranche realize what he was saying when he declared that God was
"being in general," but not any particular being? At any rate we can
see that the same logic that leads him almost to deny the reality of
finite beings, leads him also to seek the divine nature in something
more abstract and general even than thought. If we must abstract from
all relation to the finite in order to know God as he is, is it not
necessary for us also to abstract from self-consciousness, for
self-consciousness has a negative element in it that is something
definite, and therefore limited? We do not wonder, therefore, when we
find Malebranche saying that reason does not tell us that God is a
spirit, but only that he is an infinitely perfect being, and that he
must be conceived rather as a spirit than as a body simply because
spirit is more perfect than body. "When we call God a spirit, it is
not so much to show positively what he is, as to signify that he is
not material." But as we ought not to give him a bodily form like
man's, so we ought not to think of his spirit as similar to our own
spirits, although we can conceive nothing more perfect. "It is
necessary rather to believe that as he contains in himself the
properties of matter without being material, so he comprehends in
himself the perfections of created spirits without being a spirit as
we alone can conceive spirits, and that his true name is 'He who is,'
i.e. Being without restriction, Being infinite and universal."[23]
Thus the essentially self-revealing God of Christianity gives way to
pure spirit, and pure spirit in its turn to the eternal and
incomprehensible substance of which we can say nothing but that it is.
The divine substance contains in it, indeed, everything that is in
creation, but it contains them _eminenter_ in some incomprehensible
form that is reconcilable with its infinitude. But we have no adequate
name by which to call it except Being. The curious metaphysic of
theology by which, in his later writings, Malebranche tried to make
room for the incarnation by supposing that the finite creation, which
_as_ finite is unworthy of God, was made worthy by union with Christ,
the divine Word, shows that Malebranche had some indistinct sense of
the necessity of reconciling his philosophy with his theology; but it
shows also the necessarily artificial nature of the combination. The
result of the unio