Is a World without Sin Possible?
Leibniz, Classical Theism, and the Problem of Evil - Chapter 7 (3 of 3)
Greetings, subscribers. As followers of Theological Letters know, I spent much of this last year writing a forthcoming book on Leibniz and the problem of evil, and I have been posting fresh installments from that work every Sunday.
To date, I have posted the Introduction and all of Part I — Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and parts 1 and 2 of Chapter 7. Today, I post the third and final installment of Chapter 7, Leibniz’s Theodicy Redux.
If you have yet to read all that comes before, I recommend you do so for context. Links to all prior sections are below. Be watching for the first installment of Chapter 7 next Sunday. Enjoy!
To all my subscribers, thank you for subscribing. To my paid subscribers, thank you for your support. And to any visitors, please consider subscribing and supporting my work. Enjoy!
Is a World without Sin Possible?
One of the more intuitive objections to Leibniz is also the most simple. Wouldn’t a world without sin be better? The question is not lost on Leibniz. He addresses the matter in several places, offering several replies.
Leibniz’s first reply is the most natural, given his general approach to evil. The inference is straightforward:
The world God creates is the best possible world.
Our world is the world God creates.
Therefore, our world is the best possible world. (1-2)
If evil exists in our world, then evil exists in the best possible world.
Evil exists in our world.
Therefore, evil exists in the best possible world. (3, 4, & 5)
The case, of course, presumes the soundness of the theory of the best. That is, what we know of God provides a priori certainty that God exists and he always does the best. The a posteriori fact of evil cannot negate this a priori certainty. Hence, our so-called prime facie judgment that a world without evil is better must be rejected as false. Leibniz believes such judgments only prove the futility of our limited understanding of the world. As noted in Part I, Leibniz believes our grasp of the world is vanishingly small. How much less do we understand about the alternative worlds God forewent when choosing our own? A more sober judgment is an inference from the First Cause a conclusion about the effect (ab effectu) (G 6:108). That is to say, trusting in the Wisdom, Goodness, and Justice of God, we should infer that our world is best. The procedure should never be inverted.
Leibniz’s second and third replies to the objection attempt some rationale for why the prime facie claim is false. The first is rather simple, but is worthy of consideration. Leibniz notes several instances in which the negative enhances the positive. Men relish health more after having experienced sickness, for example. Shadows enhance the brightness of contrasting colors. A little bitterness to the taste is more pleasurable than pure sugar, and so on (G 6:109). — We might add that certain complex goods, such as charity or compassion are not even possible with the evils that occasion them. — In this light, Leibniz thinks it less than obvious that a world with no evil is better than a world with some evil. If some goods can be enhanced by evils, struggle, and suffering, and other goods are impossible with evils, then is it really so obvious that a world of only goodness is greater for it?
To this point Leibniz adds a theological backdrop, which dates back to Augustine (et al.), namely, that the evils of a Fallen world greatly enhance the happiness of the blessed who find their way back to paradise, while also occasioning one of the greatest goods in history: The Incarnation.1 Specifically, Leibniz appeals to the Roman rite sung at Easter: O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est! O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem! (“O truly necessary sin of Adam, which the death of Christ has blotted out! O happy fault, which merited such and so great a redemption!”)
To be sure, Leibniz does not endorse that we praise evil, or that we commit evil so that God might bring good out of it. As discussed at length in chapter 3, Leibniz is no utilitarian. And to warn against such folly, he reminds his readers that St. Paul condemns this very way of thinking (Rom 3:8) (G 6:108-9). God does not favor our world because of the evils that attach to it, but because of its goods. He recoils from its evils, and though the good of the whole is the object of God’s consequent will, this fact in no way changes God’s antecedent disposition toward evil. We must, therefore, disapprove of the evils that men commit, just as God does. But we rightly approve and praise God who, in the face of evil, causes grace to abound all the more, bringing even greater goods out of the evils of men (Rom 5:20) (G 6:109).
In short, Leibniz’s first two replies aim at casting doubt on the presumption that a world void of evil is obviously best. In Leibniz’s third reply, however, he raises the question of whether a world without evil is so easily created as we might think.
In Leibniz’s pre-Theodicy work, such Examen Religionis (An Examination of Religion) (1686), he states quite plainly that a sinless world is within God’s power to create. Leibniz reiterates the point that all creatures are finite, which is the very thing that makes us corruptible, but he submits that God could have created creatures who are capable of sinning but never do. He does not develop the claim, except to point out that God chose to permit evil because he saw how to convert evil into good — goods superior to those of a sinless word (A 6.4:2358-9). However, Leibniz spends more time on the objection in Theodicy. On the one hand, we find that Leibniz repeats that God could create a sinless world, but it would be inferior to our own (e.g., H 128-30). However, Leibniz heavily qualifies his claim that a sinless world is available to God. His caveats are three.
First, Leibniz asks whether God could create souls that only ever have good thoughts. Leibniz thinks such a thing may be possible. Perhaps God could make a creature that only thinks God-pleasing thoughts. However, Leibniz doubts that this could be done for every type of rational being. In other words, each creature’s nature has natural limits. A being of the kind just described would no doubt be more godlike than man. So, while we may find in the realm of the possibles a being capable of such innate goodness, man is not that being (G 6:173). In saying this, Leibniz admits that God may not be able to prevent sin in a world that includes humanity. For our nature is incapable with such godlike traits.
His second caveat is this. A sinless world would likely require God to intervene with frequent miracles (G 6:166; 172-4; 178-9; 202). While this sounds like an admission that a sinless world is possible, Leibniz is tentative about whether this is in fact an option. Why? Because Leibniz insists that God has obligations to every being, not just man: “Thus God has more than one purpose in his projects. The felicity of all rational creatures is one of the aims he has in view; but it is not his whole aim, nor even his final aim” (G 6:169-70).
The case is a matter of justice, which renders to each its due (justitiae). Because God is the God of the cosmos, his duties extend to every creature he has made. No doubt, the felicity of man is of great concern to God, and it may well deserve priority over a host of lower goods. But as noted in Chapter 3, simply because God prefers man to lion, it does not follow that he would destroy all of lion-kind for the sake of one man (G 6:169). Tinkering with the cosmos by miracle has ramifications. After all, Leibniz understands the parts of our world to be intimately entangled with one another by concomitance. Such tinkering may well diffuse disorder through an infinite number of creatures. Hence, Leibniz is unconvinced that God could justly tinker with our world to prevent every sin while also fulfilling his obligations to the whole. And if God cannot, then a sinless world by frequent miracle would not in fact be possible. For it would violate God’s very nature, which is Just. Even within this hypothetical, then, Leibniz places a sinless world by perpetual miracle in the conditional — “perhaps [peutêtre] neither sin nor unhappiness would ever occur” (G 6:172).
Now, maybe we could alleviate the problem by suggesting that God create only rational spirits. In this case, their happiness would be his soul duty. Might this get us a sinless world? The most immediate difficulty, of course, is that such a world is plainly suboptimal. For the infinite proliferation of being described by Leibniz has reduced to one type of being. But setting aside this glaring deficiency, Leibniz entertains the suggestion in order to draw out other notable observations.
In considering the proposal, he presses whether such a world is truly possible. He notes that creaturely spirits require the order of time and place, and time and place require matter, body, motion, and physical laws (G 6:172-3). Leibniz fleshes out this point as follows:
What would an intelligent creature do if there were no unintelligent things? What would it think of, if there were neither movement, nor matter, nor sense? If it had only distinct thoughts it would be a God, its wisdom would be without bounds…. As soon as there is a mixture of confused thoughts, there is sense, there is matter. For these confused thoughts come from the relation of all things one to the other by way of duration and extent. Thus it is that in my philosophy there is no rational creature without some organic body, and there is no created spirit entirely detached from matter. (G 6:179)2
The passage is reminiscent of our thought experiments on concomitance in Part I. When considering the existence of just one man, for example, we found that this simple possibility unfurrows into an entire world suitable for him. And here, Leibniz argues something quite similar. If we consider what sort of world is most conducive to rational spirits, we arrive at our own system of matter, time, and space, along with its governing laws. And if rational spirits require such a world, then God’s duties to that world go beyond those spirits, encompassing every creature within the world that these spirits require. Hence, we are thrust back to the very difficulty we sought to alleviate: God’s duty to the whole likely demands that he not tinker by perpetual miracle, even in the interest of preventing sin.
Leibniz’s third remark on the matter is the most straightforward and perhaps the most notable. Leibniz praises the suggestion of Reformed theologian, Isaac Jacquelot, that God may not be able to prevent evil without destroying freedom. If correct, “it will be agreed that since his [God’s] wisdom and his glory determined him to form free creatures this powerful reason must have prevailed over the grievous consequences which their freedom might have.”3 Leibniz admits he is open to this suggestion. Leibniz’s description of freedom is one of godlike sovereignty over the self. He writes,
God, in giving him intelligence, has presented him with an image of the Divinity. He leaves him to himself, in a sense, in his small department…. He enters there only in a secret way, for he supplies being, force, life, reason, without showing himself. It is there that free will plays its game: …. Thus man is there like a little god in his own world or Microcosm, which he governs after his own fashion…. But he also commits great errors, because he abandons himself to the passions, and because God abandons him to his own way. (G 6:197/H 215)
The passage is vaguely reminiscent of the words of Epictetus, “like a good prince and a true father, [God] has placed [the] exercise [of freedom] above restraint, compulsion, or hindrance, and wholly within our own control; nor has he reserved a power even to himself, of hindering or restraining them.”4 Or to use a Christian analogue, not even God can make a determined will, for will is essentially self-determining, as Augustine argues.5
All three caveats are notable because they demonstrate two points. The first is that Leibniz does not presume that every logical possible is actualizable. For if every logical possibility were available to God, then a sinless world that includes man would be possible without need of a miraculous intervention. Likewise, God could prevent every evil, contrary to Jacquelot’s proposal, by simply creating a world in which free creatures never sin. But Leibniz does not move from the logical possibility to its actualizability. And with this rather surprising fact, we find that Leibniz entertains a form of transworld depravity. I do not mean, of course, that Leibniz believes God cannot make a world of only rocks and thereby avoid sin. But I do mean that his remarks tacitly admit that, perhaps, every possible world containing man contains sin.
Such implications are notable because they run entirely contrary to what many would expect from a theory of possible worlds. If Adam, for example, has free choice concerning whether to sin in Eden, should we not expect at least two possible worlds, one in which Adam sins and one in which Adam does not sin? Such is the thinking in contemporary modal logic, which treats every logical possibility as a “possible world.” Now, what precisely is meant by possible worlds is unclear. Modal logic, as developed by Gottlob Frege, was thought to be linguistic, not metaphysical.6
However, as we have seen, Leibniz’s possible worlds are most certainly metaphysical — regardless of whether one accepts the above reading or not. Leibniz understands all truth to require grounding in the divine Mind. But does this metaphysical commitment suffice to explain why Leibniz might entertain something like transworld depravity? For the traditional reading of Leibniz, the answer is not obvious. On the one hand, Leibniz repeatedly asserts that contingent truths, such as “Adam ate of the tree in Eden,” are contingent because they can be negated without contradiction. In other words, their opposite is logically possible. And yet, Leibniz offers other claims that problematize this solution. For example, Adam would not be our Adam if he did not sin in Eden. Such claims appear to negate the possibility of transword identity and admit superessentialism. But if Adam’s sin is contingent, and its opposite is logically possible, then shouldn’t there be a possible world in which Adam does not eat of the tree?
Such tensions are the very thing that led John O’Leary-Hawthorne and J. A. Cover to theorize that Leibniz favors haecceitism and thus admits the possibility of transworld identity, but because he is a determinist, he believes that all transworld identity claims are false.7 Something along these lines is certainly one way of resolving the tension. That is, Leibniz distinguishes logical possibilities from the ontological possibilities in the Mind of God. Every creaturely act admits the logical alternative, but there is no ontological basis for that alternative because the creature lacks libertarian powers of choice.
In light of the above rereading of Leibniz, however, we may have an alternative means of making sense of Leibniz’s claims. I think we are right to begin with the distinction, identifiable in Scotus, between logical possibles (potentia logica) and real possibles (potentia realis).8 The former are merely semantic constructions free of contradiction, while the latter have some sort of grounding in reality. We saw that Scotus understands this grounding to begin with the divine volition, and we have seen reason to think Leibniz is of this same mind. As also noted, the more ontologically robust conception of possibility also looked to form and matter — the nature and potentialities of things.9 The view echoes in the theory of concurrence that Leibniz adopts, where divine concourse and predetermination is meant to facilitate the natural powers of the creature. Keeping this robust view of possibility in mind and pairing it with the theory of possible worlds discussed above, let’s consider how we might make sense of Leibniz’s seemingly superessentialist claims from a libertarian perspective.
According to Leibniz, our Adam would not be our Adam if he did not sin in Eden. Rather than examining this statement from the perspective of possible worlds, let’s begin with the actual world — that is, with the one possible world to which we have direct access. Within our world, Adam exists. And rather than entertaining O’Leary-Hawthorne and Cover’s theory that Leibniz harbors a tacit haecceitism, let’s accept the common wisdom that Leibniz’s theory of identity means that our Adam does not exist in any other possible world. There is no sharable “Adamness” to yield transworld identity. Our Adam belongs to our world and our world alone, intimately woven into the web of concomitance that comprises our world.
From this starting point, how might we think about freedom? In contemporary modal logic, contrary choice requires parallel worlds. The possibility of Adam choosing to not sin is grounded by a second world in which Adam does not eat of the tree in Eden. But Leibniz doesn’t believe that Adam exists in any other world. So, how can we ground this contrary possibility? Being unable to look outside our world for alternative possibilities, where might we ground them within our world?