Malebranche and Quietism

Abstract Nicolas Malebranche’s 1697 work, Traité de L’Amour de Dieu (Treatise on the Love of God) remains untranslated and relatively untouched in recent English scholarship. The work offers Malebranche’s defense against claims that he held quietist beliefs. Although Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and Archbishop Francois de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon’s fight over the quietist conception of “pure” disinterested love is better known, priest-philosophers Nicolas Malebranche and François Lamy’s de