Leibniz Book Preview - Ch. 3, Providence, the Best, and the Problem of Freedom before Leibniz
Theological Letters
Renown rationalist G. W. Leibniz (in)famously answered the problem of evil by insisting that our world is the best of all possible worlds. I’ve just finished my book on Leibniz’s “optimism” for Cambridge University Press. As shocking as his claim is, my book argues that Leibniz’s reasoning is virtually impossible for classical theists to avoid.
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Chapter 3
Providence, the Best, and the Problem of Freedom before Leibniz
For Him who is supremely excellent it neither was nor is permissible to perform any action save what is most beautiful.
— Socrates1
In 399 B.C., in a remote Peloponnesian town, Echecrates greets a traveler, Phaedo of Elis, a friend and pupil of Socrates. Word has reached Echecrates that Socrates is dead, having ingested hemlock in his cell after being sentenced to death by the state of Athens.2 Eager to hear about the philosopher’s final hours, Echecrates bids Phaedo to tell him everything. So, the loyal disciple recounts his teacher’s final dialogue with a small group of friends before the wisest of men departed the flesh.
The Phaedo dialogue explores several topics, most notably (and understandably) the immortality of the soul, which tells us Socrates’ impending fate. Yet, within this dialogue, Socrates recounts something else, easily passed over. He recalls once hearing someone reading a work by Anaxagoras, one of the earliest pagan philosophers. Socrates heard in these pages a formative claim: All things are ordered by “mind” (νοῦς). The notion pleased him, and here is how Socrates understood the implications:
“I once heard someone reading from some book — of Anaxagoras, he claimed — and asserting that it is Intelligence that organizes things and is the reason for everything. This explanation pleased me. Somehow it seemed right that Intelligence should be the reason for everything; and I reflected that if this is so, in the course of its arrangement Intelligence sets everything in order and arranges each individual thing in the way that is best [βέλτιστα] for it. Therefore if anyone wished to discover the reason why any given thing came, continued, or ceased to be, he must find out how it was best [βέλτιστον] for that thing to be, or to act or be acted upon in any way.”3
In these words, we see something quite common amongst ancient writers. Providence (πρόνοια) is the belief that the world is ordered by a divine mind. With this are two further assumptions, tacit in the earliest writers and explicit in later ones: God is Good, and God is the Highest Being. The end result is precisely what Socrates concludes. The Highest Being, bearing Mind and Goodness, must order all things in the best way.
Providence and the Best in Pagan Thought
At the dawn of pagan philosophy, several questions occupy the landscape: Is the world created or uncreated? Does anything truly come to be or pass away? Is our world governed by providence? The early outliers on such questions were the Epicureans, who held that the world is uncreated, nothing truly comes to be or passes away (the atoms merely reorganize), and the cosmic “order” is mere chance.4 What set these early atheists5 apart was not their belief that the world is eternal.6 Nor was it that generation and corruption is just a rearranging substance.7 No, what set the Epicureans apart was their denial of providence, the belief that no Intelligence governs our world.
Already mentioned was Anaxagoras, who taught that mind is not just in man but pervades all of nature, “as the cause of the cosmos and of all its order.”8 Like the atomists, Anaxagoras thought there is no true coming to be or passing away; generation and destruction is just the mingling and dissolution of enduring particles. But unlike the atomists, Anaxagoras taught that these material processes are not happenstance. They are ordered by something immaterial, by Nous, a divine intelligence that transcends matter.9
Although several names would be given to the divine orderer of nature, the view was far from novel. Aristotle tells us that Hermotimus of Clazomenae held the same before Anaxagoras.10 Heraclitus speaks about the divine “word” (λόγος), which pervades and orders the world.11 Empedocles speaks about the four elements mingling to produce the cosmos, a mingling orchestrated by divine “love” (φιλότης).12
If there is a dispute amongst these early advocates of providence (aside from what constitutes the building blocks of reality), the dispute is whether there is a start to this ordering. Anaxagoras speaks of a beginning, when Nous first moved, setting the particles in order.13 Heraclitus, by contrast, describes a cyclical cosmos, with neither beginning nor end; yet, this ever-moving order is infused by the Logos, an ever-living fire that is also ever-moving.14 Empedocles offers a third option — cosmic cycles. The four elements mingle to form our cosmos by the coaxing of Philotēs, but then retreat into dissolution, only to repeat this cycle.15
These primitive theories grow more sophisticated with Plato.16 Plato’s view of providence builds on his theory of the Forms and its distinction between being and becoming. Plato recognized that, when encountering an object, the mind reflexively tries to identify what it is — dog or cat, square or circle. Equally reflexive is the mind’s assessment of its quality, whether it is good or bad, well-formed or malformed. Plato’s theory asks, To what is the mind referring when doing this? When naming a geometric shape “circle” and saying it is a poor one, the mind is comparing the shape to something else. But what? The answer: The idea of circle — not of this circle, but of circle ideally.
Alongside this insight, Plato makes a second observation about the distinction between the material object and the idea against which we measure it. The archetype is not only ideal but unchanging. The material instance, by contrast, is subject to time, change, improvement or dissolution. And so emerges Plato’s theory of the Forms.
Plato suggests that the archetypal ideas by which the mind knows and measures reality are themselves real in some sense. These archetypes he names “the Forms” (τῆς Μορφῆς).17 Plato’s theory is that there are two worlds, the world of the Forms and our material world. The Forms are a realm of being, of unchanging stability and perfection. Our world is a moving picture of the Forms, a place of shifting replicas and approximations, subject to generation and corruption. But how does the soul know the Forms? It evidently does, given the reflexive habits of mind. But how? Plato answers: The soul is from the world of the Forms. It beheld them before migrating into matter. So, when encountering shifting realities, the soul draws on memory, comparing the material object with the Forms to determine which archetype it approximates — and the quality of the approximation. This bifurcated reality sets the stage for Plato’s creation myth.
In the Timaeus, Plato weaves a “plausible tale” of how our world came to be. So the story goes, God’s Goodness is the starting point for creation.18 He desired all things to be good and as near to perfection as possible. Or more precisely, God “desired that all should be, so far as possible, like unto Himself,”19 for He is the most excellent (ἄριστος).20
Critical to the tale is that God is not a creator of matter. He is the Demiurge (δημιουργός), or craftsman. Alongside God sat the uncreated material void, unstructured and disorderly. In his Goodness, God wished for matter to be more. So, “finding the visible universe in a state not of rest but of inharmoniously and disorderly motion, He brought it into order out of disorder, as he judged that order was in every way better.”21
Here, the divine mind (νοῦς) comes into play. Goodness impels the Demiurge to bring order to matter; mind makes him capable of doing so.22 Thus, the Demiurge searched for the best model for his craftsmanship, and he found it in the object of his own contemplation, the Forms.23
The Forms enter the story, not as static shapes, but as a living character, what Plato calls the “absolute Living Being.”24 And here emerges an important insight into Plato’s thought. The world, according to Plato, is a living creature, and of this one creature each of us is part. The Form, human, contains within itself sub-Forms (e.g., eye), which contain further sub-Forms (e.g., animal cell), which contain further sub-Forms (e.g., golgi body). Likewise, the Form, human, is a sub-Form of animal, which is a sub-Form of living, and so on. In short, the world is one living animal.25 And so it is with the Forms, which compose the absolute Living Being.26 Therefore, the Demiurge, impelled by Goodness and equipped with reason, raised matter from disorder to order, crafting a moving picture of the absolute Living Being.27
Saturating this narrative is Plato’s conviction that our world is best. God wishes all things to be as like him as possible, and God is best (ἄριστόν).28 God wishes all things to be good and free of imperfection, as far as possible.29 The absolute Living Being is the best model for the visible world.30 When describing the Demiurge’s reasoning, Plato describes a dialectic of which is better — living or not-living, rational or irrational.31 In every instance, the Demiurge is impelled by Goodness and Mind toward the better. And to all of this Plato adds the maxim: It is impossible for the highest being to do anything but the best.32 So, the insight that Plato first gleaned from Anaxagoras proves true: We can be sure “the reason why any given thing came, continued, or ceased to be” is that it was best (βέλτιστον).33
Later Platonists continue this tradition, tracing the world back to the intersection between divine Intelligence, Goodness, and the Forms.34 And from this, they echo Plato’s connection between God’s Goodness and the best.35 But what of Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle?
The traditional view is that Aristotle denies providence.36 His theology builds on something like the argument from contingency, where all things come to be, and this coming to be rests on something that does not come to be. Hence, God is an “Unmoved Mover,” who moves things (into being) without ever moving (into being).37 Why would this mean he is not provident? Because Aristotle recognizes that to perceive change is to undergo change. For the shifting images in the mind are themselves a change in the observer. So the traditional reading goes, Aristotle’s God thinks, not on the world — lest he change with it — but on himself, the perfect, unchanging object of thought.38
Some today argue that Aristotle’s philosophy allows for more direct divine activity than this reading admits.39 And there are notable features of his thought that support the point.40 However, one hardly needs to dispel the traditional reading to show that Aristotle presumes some form of providence and that the best is the basis for the world’s formation.
Let’s begin with how a God who does not think about the world moves it. To see how, we must look at two places where Aristotle diverges from Plato. The first is the Forms. Aristotle rejects Plato’s theory that Forms exist outside of matter as a second world. Instead, form exists inside matter as the cause of its formation and movement. Perhaps for this reason, Aristotle concludes that the soul itself is the form of the body, the soul’s movements being what drive bodily formation, structure, and activity.41 And keep in mind that every living thing bears a soul. Not all have reason, but to be alive is to be ensouled (ἔμψυχος).42
The second place where Aristotle diverges from his teacher is the immortality of the soul. Plato believes the soul is eternal.43 Aristotle believes it originates in time.44 Because there is a start to its movement, the soul requires a mover. And here we approach the answer to how God moves the world. Aristotle suggests that all psychic movement originates from desire for some good.45 Desire moves the soul, and the soul in turn moves the body, which is the material expression of the soul.46 From this Aristotle concludes that God moves the soul,47 and thus the material world, by desire. Just as a man is moved by desire in the presence of a beautiful woman, so God, the Highest (ὕπατος), moves the world as the object of its yearning love.48
The picture that emerges is one in which God thinks on himself, perfect thought thinking perfect thought. And in his shadow is the world, yearning for God, eternally generating beings that come to be and pass away.49 The start of every being is the movement of the soul, which begins with desire for the Highest and then reverberates in matter, causing a body to take shape and live as the expression of the soul within it. And so, in this way, all things are moved by God.
Now, to see the role of the best, it may help to consider a feature of Aristotle’s thought, lost in surviving texts, but known in antiquity. Clement of Alexandria tells us that Aristotle believes that God, the “Supreme One” (ὕπατος), is the soul of the world.50 Philo of Alexandria likewise reports that Aristotle says the world is “full of God” (ἔνθεος), calling the world a visible god.51 Athenagoras and Pseudo-Plutarch both report that Aristotle says the divine Mind is the soul of the world and the heavenly spheres, which are perfect, are his body.52
Perhaps this lost thread explains why, when recounting Anaxagoras’ theory that Mind pervades nature, Aristotle calls Anaxagoras “a sober man among the random chatterers who preceded him.”53 But it raises an interpretive challenge. Aristotle plainly believes that God is immaterial. So in what sense is the immaterial God the soul of the material world?
The answer is in the soul-body relationship described above. I mentioned that Aristotle understands the soul to be the form of the body. The soul gives shape to matter, moving it into being and driving it toward completion (ἐντελέχεια).54 Something analogous is afoot in the God-world relationship. Just as the soul is the immaterial “entelechy” of the body, moving it toward proper formation, so God is the immaterial “entelechy” of the world. For God is the beginning of psychic movement, which in turn drives material movement and formation, setting all in order.55 Not everything in the world is moved directly by God; secondary causes are at work.56 But Aristotle leaves room for the same in the body-soul relationship.57
Here, we reach the role of the best. For Plato, the best is the cause of things, but there is something intentional about this. God desires things to be as like him as possible and so deliberates on how to achieve this. Aristotle offers no such story. The world is a material response to divine perfection. And yet, the best is no less reason for the world. For, according to Aristotle, God is the best (ἄριστος):
… [L]ife belongs to God. For the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and the essential actuality of God is life most good and eternal. We hold, then, that God is a living being, eternal, best; and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to God; for that is what God is.58
Nothing in Aristotle indicates that a different world is possible. God does not choose to make the world thus; the world is thus because God is thus. The notion that God is the entelechy of the world only reinforces the point. The material body develops as it does because its nature is determined by the form or entelechy within it. So, there is good reason to think that the nature of our world is determined by its entelechy, God. So, our world may be the only world that could exist in response to God. But the fact remains, the cause of the world being thus is a cosmic desire for the best.59
The Stoics enter this discussion with echoes of earlier thinkers. Like Anaxagoras and other advocates of providence, the Stoics believe that Mind pervades the cosmos.60 Yet, their language is closer to Heraclitus, as they speak about the divine Logos and refer to God as creative fire.61 Like other proponents of an eternal world, the Stoics reject creation out of nothing. But rather than a linear eternal world, the Stoics also speak about cosmic cycles, echoing something we heard from Empedocles. Yet, Empedocles saw these cycles as a positive mode of generation followed by a negative mode of dissolution, which then repeats. The Stoics harbor a more peculiar idea of cosmic cycles, and here emerges their insistence that ours is the best possible world.
Let’s begin with their materialism. Unlike Aristotle or Plato, who saw God as immaterial, the Stoics believe that all things, including God, are material. So, rather than distinguishing God from the matter he shapes, as Plato does, the Stoics understand the substance of the world to be God’s own. God is a Demiurge, but rather than crafting eternal matter, God crafts the world out of his own being, the way a body produces cells.62 God is the “seminal principles” (λόγοι σπερματικοὶ), which serves as a blueprint for the cosmic order and every entity within it. This is why, as Diogenes Laertius reports, the Stoics use the word “cosmos” in three ways: of God himself, of the world order, or of both.63
For this reason, we find echoes of Plato on the completeness of the cosmos and its self-sufficiency,64 but the reason is quite different. The reason is not because the world mirrors the absolute Living Being. The reason is because the cosmos is God. Likewise, we find echoes of Plato’s World Soul, where life and reason surrounds but pervades the world. But again, the reason is because the world is God himself.65
And here we reach the Stoic notion of cosmic cycles. Each cycle begins with the divine fire — God alone. The divine fire then introduces qualities into God’s own substance, giving rise to other things66 — initially the elements, and then the world-order (διακόσμησις). Divine providence takes hold, as divine reason cares for the world, provides for its permanence, and above all cares for rational beings, gods and men.67 But keep in mind that the evolving cosmos is not only composed of the divine substance but develops as a working out of God’s nature, an organic expression of divinity itself. Once fully expressed, the cosmic cycle consummates in a conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις), where all returns back to divine fire. And from this divine fire, the cosmic development begins again.68
In this Stoic vision, we find one of the strongest affirmations of the theory of best. The Stoics are convinced that if there were a better way to order the cosmos, God would do so.69 So they arrive at a striking conclusion: Every cosmic cycle is identical. Every individual and event is repeated.70 Why? Because the unfolding cosmos is God. Were the cosmos better or worse, then God himself would be better or worse. But God, being the best, cannot be exceeded.71 So we find a stronger version of what we discovered in Aristotle. Not only is God best, but it is God’s nature that is being worked out in the cosmos. From this follows the obvious conclusion. To quote David Sedley, “Being the best possible world, it will then be succeeded by another identical world, since any variation on the formula would have to be for the worse.”72
Without question, these varied visions of the best are different from what we find in Leibniz. None of these pagan writers conceive of God looking out over a field of possible worlds to determine which is best. — The roots of this thinking is found in Christianity. — But this does not change the fact that the pagan advocates of providence agree the world is thus because of the best.
Providence, the Best, and Evil in Early Christian Thought
To no surprise, both Judaism and Christianity are amongst the ancient advocates of providence. Their testimony both echoes and diverges from pagan views in significant ways.
By way of echoes, both Jewish and Christian writers set their view in contrast with the Epicurean atheists, who deny providence.73 Like their pagan counterparts, the Jews and Christians insist that the world and its order is brought about and upheld by divine Reason (Λόγος) or Wisdom (Σοφία), the former (for Christians) referring to the prologue of the Gospel of John and the latter harkening to the wisdom literature of sacred Scripture.74 Thus, divine Reason or Wisdom is the source of all creation,75 and by this same Wisdom, all things are held together, ordered, and moved. Also like the pagan advocates of providence, Jews and Christians insist that God is Good, and his Goodness is no less important than his Wisdom to why the world is created, ordered, and cared for as it is.76
When speaking about divine governance of the world, Jewish and Christian literature uses some of the same metaphors found in pagan thought, such as God as the head of a household or as the governor of a city.77 Like in pagan thought, there is an accompanying notion that this governance is not always direct but includes delegation or indirect providence. In Plato, for example, we find several spheres of rational beings (from the gods to the soul) to whom God entrusts the care of the world.78 We find something similar in Judaism and Christianity, where God establishes man and the hierarchy of angels.79 Though God is provident over the whole cosmos, he nonetheless delegates to men and to angels care for specific parts of creation.
A more surprising commonality is the Jewish and Christian echoes of the theory of the Forms and even of Plato’s absolute Living Being. Regarding the former, both Jews and Christians see in Genesis confirmation that God has archetypal Ideas, since he refers to these Ideas before calling creatures into being.80 Philo suggests that just as an architect sketches in his mind a city before he builds it, so does God construct an “intelligible cosmos” in his mind as a model for the visible world.81 The same concept appears in the early Christians. Origen makes the same point using the analogy of a ship or a house.82
In both Philo and Origen, the intelligible cosmos exists within God’s Logos. For Philo, the Logos is the divine Mind,83 while Origen understands the Logos to be the second person of the Trinity.84 And in keeping with Genesis, Origen refers to the divine Ideas as “words” (λόγοι).85 Thus, the archetypal logoi exist within the Logos, the second person of the Trinity.
The notion that God has archetypal ideas was commonplace amongst the Christian Church fathers.86 Augustine argues the same in his Genesis commentary, and like Origen, he places the divine Ideas in the second person of the Trinity.87 Yet, Origen’s account moves much closer to Plato’s absolute Living Being. Origen speaks as if the Logos is composed of the logoi, as if he were composed of the archetypal Ideas.88 In short, Origen seems to make the second person of the Trinity the absolute Living Being after whom our world is modeled.
Origen’s suggestion would not be fully rejected by later Eastern Church fathers, though it would be corrected. The difficulty with the Origenist view is that it creates a dilemma. Either the Logos, being God, is immutable and the archetypes of which he is composed are equally immutable. Or these archetypes are freely generated and could be otherwise, in which case the Logos could be otherwise — and therefore is not God.
Both options were anathema to the Christians. The Logos is the second person of the Trinity and of the same nature as God the Father, which means he is immutable.89 Yet, God freely creates our world, which means his designs for it are contingent and could be otherwise. The solution that originates in the Cappadocians and echoes in later fathers draws a distinction between God’s nature (ουσία) and his energies (ἐνέργειαι).90 The former is immutable, while the latter are free expressions of the divine nature. Hence, while the nature of the Logos is immutable, the archetypes within him are freely generated and could be otherwise.91
Here, we begin to see the Judeo-Christian divergence from the pagan views. The Christians insist that God freely creates and freely upholds the world.92 Few pagans ascribe free choice to God in making the world. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover does not choose to move the world but does so by his supreme desirability. The Stoics insist that the world cycles are necessarily identical and indicate no divine choice in their generation. Perhaps the only pagan touchstone is Plato, who describes God as deliberating about making the world.93 But Plato’s Demiurge looks to the absolute Living Being, the model for the visible world, and there is no indication that the Demiurge creates the absolute Living Being. Hence, there is something truly novel about the Judeo-Christian view that God freely generates designs for the world and freely creates, orders, and cares for it.