What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite?
That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions — say a different sex partner every night — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.
For thinkers of this stripe, all desire is ultimately desire for the Absolute. A desire that understood itself would understand this. But we are played for fools by our manifold desires. Our de-luded desire thinks it can find satisfaction in the finite. Therein lies the root of idolatry. The Buddha understood this very well: he saw that desire is infinite in that it desires its own ultimate quenching or extinguishing, its own nibbana, but that finite quenchings are unsatisfactory in that they only exacerbate desire by giving birth to new desires endlessly. No desire is finally sated; each is reborn in a later desire. Thus the enjoyment of sex partner A does not put an end to lust; the next night or the next morning you are hot for sex partner B, and so on, back to A or on to C, D, . . . and around and around on the wheel of Samsara. The more you dive into the flesh looking for the ultimate satisfaction, the more frustrated you become. You are looking for Love in all the wrong places. To borrow a phrase from Hegel, Buddha saw into the “bad infinity” of desire, thirst, craving, Taṇhā.
So Buddha understood the nature of desire as infinite. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.
In Buddhist terms, we could say that idolatry is the treating of something that is anatta, devoid of self-nature, as if it were atta, possessive of self-nature. Idolatry arises when some finite foreground object, a man or a woman say, is falsely ascribed the power to provide ultimate satisfaction. This sort of delusion is betrayed in practically every love song ever written. Here are some typical lyrics:
You are my world, you're every move I make
You are my world, you're every breath I take.
There are thousands more lyrics like them, and anyone who has been in love knows that they capture the peculiar madness of the lover, the delectable madness of taking the finite for infinite.
Or will you deny that this is madness, a very deep philosophical and perhaps also religious mistake? I say it is madness whether or not an absolute good exists. Whether or not it exists, reason suggests that we should love the finite as finite, that our love should be ordered to, and commensurate with, its impermanent object. Finite love for finite objects, and for all objects if there is no infinite Object.
Now what does this have to do with causation and Malebranche? Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) was an early modern occasionalist. The essence of occasionalism is the view that no natural or 'secondary' cause is a true or productive cause, and that there is only one true or productive cause, namely, God the 'primary' cause. No secondary cause produces or brings into existence its effect; its occurrence is merely the occasion on which God produces the effect. A stone hits a window and the window shatters. On an occasionalist analysis the first event does not produce the shattering; it is merely the occasion on which God produces the shattering. Although occasionalism is often discussed as an ad hoc solution to the problem of mind-body interaction 'occasioned' by Cartesian dualism, occasionalism is a general theory of causation, and there was occasionalism long before Malebranche. The doctrine can be traced back at least to al-Ghazali. Here is a good little article by William Hasker that fills in some of the details. (See also Vallicella, William (1996), “Concurrentism or Occasionalism?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70 (3): 339-359; Vallicella, William F. (1999), “God, causation and occasionalism,” Religious Studies 35 (1): 3-18.)
Bu what does this all have to do with idolatry? Malebranche's idea, as I understand it, thanks in part to a fine post by Brandon Watson, is that our belief in the efficacy of secondary causes is rooted in idolatry: we idolatrously ascribe to secondary causes productive power when sober Humean analysis reveals nothing but regular succession and neither production nor necessitation. The flame does not produce ignition in the dry paper; what is given is a spatiotemporally contiguous event-sequence that instantiates a regularity. Secondary causes are mere occasional causes, occasions of the exercise of the causality of the only true productive cause, God.
To put God to work in the theory of causation seems wildly extravagant; but it seems less crazy when one faces up to the difficulties involved in productive natural causation. And if sense can be made of occasionalism as a general theory of causation — as opposed to an ad hoc solution to the interaction problem faced by the substance dualist — then, as Brandon points out, there emerges a moral dimension to the theory of causation.
And that's a surprising result!
Related: