Título breve del escenario de exposición: (Ref.: 13) Se utiliza en aplicaciones para textiles

Malebranche rejects the idea that certain people would be predestined for salvation. God wants to save everyone. The Word does not choose which people will be saved but only builds his spiritual temple in its general out- lines. "It makes no difference whether it is Peter or John who creates a given effect in my temple."23 The Word does not choose this or that stone: it is my

will which will determine which place I will occupy. The Word opens for competition a place in his spiritual temple. "I constantly act in this way so as to encourage the most people I can to enter the church."24 "The people,"

and not all the people. If everyone were saved, this would, says the Word, "make my temple deformed by making it big and rambling."25 The Word

therefore, which wants to save all people, cannot in fact save them all. Is this only for esthetic reasons, for reasons of harmony, as, for example, the use of the word deformed indicates? Malebranche alleges another, more interesting reason: if the Word were to give everyone a feeling grace "granting certain victory,"26 the human person would no longer exist.

"Feeling grace diminishes worthiness. . . . Bliss is virtue's reward; it is not its principle. When we sacrifice everything to it, we do not slaughter any victim."27 In order to save everyone, everyone would have to be trans-

formed into objects. Here Malebranche disavows the morality of happiness: as a Christian, he must have remembered that "he who wants to save his life will lose it." In this perspective, hell is the condition which demands that all those who save themselves possess freedom and sacrifice, and that the temple be a human temple. The glory of God thus takes three forms, which are as so many distinct glories:

1. The "glory of the Architect," in the order of finality. This glory would not have been, however, a sufficient reason for creation;28

2. "The Architect also receives a second glory from the spectators and admirers of his building "29 Their homage restores the world to God;

3. Supreme glory: not satisfied with "recognizing" this world, we accomplish its divinization ourselves through sacrifice:

But it is only Christians, only those believing in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, who truly count their own being and this vast universe we admire as nothing,... the annihilation to which their faith reduces them gives true reality before God.30

Here Malebranche introduces the distinction between the profane and the sacred: this world itself reduces itself to nothing in order to honor God:

Our actions indeed derive their morality in the relationship they have with immutable order . . . but they do not derive their supernatural dignity and as it were, their infinity and their divinity except through Jesus Christ.31

Theology and the Union of the Soul and the Body 59

In the order of perfections, there exists no relationship between humankind and the infinite, but Jesus Christ's act of sacrifice creates a relationship between humanity and God. His incarnation, his sacrifice, his priesthood, "clearly proclaiming that there is no relationship between creator and crea- ture also establishes thereby so great a relationship between them that God delights and takes perfect pride in his work."32 Therefore this sacrifice must

appear as a reciprocal recognition of God by the human person and of the human person by God. We are irreplaceable in this act of self-denial. Sacri- fice is an absolute initiative while being at the same time finality; therefore the difficulty is overcome. The love of Christ is the love of someone for someone and in this way transcends the alternative of finality versus initia- tive. Malebranche thus establishes a theory of religious experience in which practical love resolves theoretical difficulties.

Malebranche himself speaks of "experience" in regards to religion: "the facts of religion or the established dogmas are my experiences in matters of theology."33 Henceforth the myth is no longer a simple expedient:

It might be said .. . that the objections raised against the main articles of our faith, especially against the mystery of the Trinity, are so strong that they cannot be given solutions that are clear and convincing and that they do not in any way shock our feeble reason, for these mysteries are indeed incomprehensible.34

We no longer evoke the possibility of an intelligence of faith.

When my disciples reflect and consult with all the respect and all the required application, I reveal to their mind in a purely intelligible way several truths which they knew with certainty only because of the infallibility of my word. However, because religion contains mysteries completely incomprehensible to the human mind...; the shortest and surest way to learn religion and morality is to read the Scriptures and to listen to the Church.35

In the Dialogues on Metaphysics, Malebranche quotes Saint Paul (Eph. 2:3,12): before Christ, "We are in this world asAtheists, without God, without a benefactor."36 God can be completely understood by nothing other than

Christ's love which, destroying our finite being, causes God to be in the world. Our relationship to Christ is not a relationship based on reason. In this new perspective, God is not of the order of being, and we can no longer conceive of human nature as a naturally oriented movement toward God.

Moreover, the relations of the soul to the body appear as exemplary: these are the same categories which make the union of the soul and the body and the union of Christ with the church thinkable. "I give life to my church as the soul gives life to the body," says the Word in the Meditations