Optimal Goodness in the Best Possible World
Leibniz, Classical Theism, and the Problem of Evil - Chapter 2 (part 1)
Greetings, subscribers. As followers of Theological Letters know, I’m working feverishly to finish my forthcoming book on Leibniz and the problem of evil, and I have promised to post fresh installments of my progress every Sunday.
To date, I have posted the Introduction and all four parts of Chapter 1. Today, I post the first installment of Chapter 2, Optimal Goodness in the Best Possible World.
If you have yet to read the Introduction and Chapter 1, I recommend you do so for context. Links to all prior sections are below. Be watching for the second installment of Chapter 2 next Sunday. Enjoy!
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Chapter 2
Optimal Goodness in the Best Possible World
To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good…. And do you now begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is not a mere story for the children. It is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing.
C.S. Lewis1
When we have understood about free will, we shall see how silly it is to ask, ... “Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?” The better stuff a creature is made of — the cleverer and stronger and freer it is — then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best — and worst — of all.
C.S. Lewis2
In Fyoder Dostoyevsky’s classic, The Brothers Karamazov, we meet Ivan Karamazov, the intellectual atheist who professes great concern over the tribulations that befall the human race, sufferings that enflesh for him the insurmountable hurdle between the honest mind and religion. Put simply, Ivan cannot accept that a God of love and mercy could permit, yet less orchestrate, the horrors that litter human history — and how much more the suffering of innocents? During a buffoonish visit to the local monastery by the motley Karamazov family, Ivan makes his case to his brother, Alyosha, a deeply religious youth who displays an otherworldly love for people and has become a member of the monastery and disciple of the revered Elder Zosimos. Ivan’s words capture as well as any the evils that tempt many to dismiss, not only optimism, but the very existence of God:
“By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow,” Ivan went on, … “told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them — all sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother's womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother's eyes. Doing it before the mother's eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion; they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say.”
“Brother, what are you driving at?” asked Alyosha.
“I think if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.3
No doubt, the scandal of Leibniz’s optimism is the parade of evils that flood the mind. The near-reflexive response is to usher forth the sorts of atrocities recounted by Ivan Karamazov. Such horrors and the blow to faith they deliver are the bitter core of the problem of evil which Leibniz seeks to answer, a fact he admits: “Even though there were no cooperation by God in evil actions, one could not help finding difficulty in the fact that He foresees them and that, being able to prevent them through his omnipotence, He yet permits them” (G 6.34/H 58).
However, to begin here is to get ahead of Leibniz’s case. Yes, one is right to ask how evil can find a place within a world that is best. But to start with evil is to begin with the blemish upon (what Leibniz supposes to be) the optimal world rather than with the good it blemishes. Thus, before delving into how Leibniz reconciles evil with the Goodness of God and the best, we must first look at the vast goodness that comprises this best of all worlds.
Optimal Goodness and the Best
Beginning with goodness, rather than evil, sheds light on a notable contrast between the two. Notice that the reflexive objection from evil calls to mind a parade of events or happenings. The content is phenomenological. But when speaking about the goodness of the world, Leibniz points us to its contents, to the beings of which it is composed. The starting point is ontological. The contrast in no way diminishes the reality of evil — certainly not. But it does highlight an important feature of Leibniz’s thought: The reality of evil is distinct in kind from the reality of goodness. So what is this difference?
To begin, Leibniz follows in the train of a long-standing Christian commitment that all being is good. This Christian outlook was only one of several positions in the ancient world on the nature of good and evil. The main alternatives were two.
The first was dismissive: The distinction between good and evil expresses only our subjective approval or disapproval of what we find pleasant (good) and unpleasant (evil). But from God’s perspective, all is good, orderly, and right — a position that dates back to Heraclitus (ca. 540-480 BC).4 The second, rather common explanation was metaphysical dualism, where good and evil are two eternal principles in conflict. In more mythic versions, such as in Empedocles (ca. 492-32 BC), this conflict is between gods;5 in Manicheistic or Gnostic manifestations, the conflict is between substances — typically spirit (good) and flesh (evil);6 and in Platonic dualisms, we find a similar but softer approach, where evil is an inevitable byproduct of the instability of matter and its inability to perfectly replicate God’s Ideas.7
Christianity makes a stark break with its pagan counterparts in its doctrine of creation out of nothing, where all things, including the material of which creation is composed, originate from a common (and Good) source, namely, God.8 All being, therefore, is originally good, reflecting the Goodness of its Maker. Yet, in the ranks of creation appear self-determining (or free) beings in whose hands rests a choice: persist in goodness or retreat from it. Such is the Christian story of the Fall of angels and of man — good beings who plummet from light into darkness by choice, twisting their original goodness. Evil, on this telling, is only ever a corruption of some original good, the way blindness is a deprivation of sight. “It” is never a substantial reality of its own but only a privative phenomenon, twisting being, never adding to it.9
Amongst Leibniz’s many Christian commitments is the metaphysical assumption that being is good while evil is a privation of good (privatio boni).10 The phenomenon of evil is strictly negative, requiring some original good to corrupt. But the same is not true of goodness. Whatever perfections we might discover amongst the hierarchy of beings — existence, life, power, intelligence — is good and might exist uncorrupted. The dependence of evil upon goodness is one-sided. This is why Leibniz, like his Christian forebears, begins his case, not with the events of our world, but with its ontology. When saying that our world is “best” or “optimal,” this statement is not, first, a statement about all stories having a happy ending. Rather, its first meaning is that our world displays an optimal variety of being and harmony amongst the plethora of being.11
Recall that in Leibniz’s talk of God’s perfection, there was a quantitative dimension: God is infinite perfection (G 6:383). This quantitative notion carries into his understanding of the goodness of the world. Because every being has some measure of perfection (Grua 126), God creates as much being as possible (G 7.303). Such is part of what it means to say our world is optimal, comprising a maximal set of perfections. But bear in mind that “being” does not mean mere “stuff,” such that God might produce an endless span of amorphous goo and thereby succeed in maximizing being. In keeping with his Platonic leanings, Leibniz believes that being is intelligible.12 Plato does not name matter “being”; rather, because matter is structureless, Plato (et al.) names it “non-being.”13 The Forms or Ideas are the realm of being. Number, shape, genera, species, properties, these intelligible traits are the mark of being. And such intelligible traits are what manifest in matter, raising it up from non-being into being.14 Leibniz thinks in very similar terms. To maximize the perfection of our world is not simply to maximize the quantity of “stuff” that exists. Instead, to maximize the perfections of our world through the maximization of being is to maximize the intelligible structures of reality — genera and species, common properties and difference — weaving them into the greatest possible variety, comprising the richest whole.15
Again, the suggestion is not unique to Leibniz. Such is the basis for the Great Chain of Being doctrine of antiquity, mentioned in the prior chapter.16 In both pagan and Christian thinking, the belief was that God, whose nature is boundless and above the finite structures of our world, gives articulation to his infinite nature through the production of creatures. Much like a composer who has within himself a well-spring of creativity that takes on concrete expression in a musical composition, so the well-spring of the divine nature pours forth into a world, where the super-nature (ὑπέρούσιος) of God takes on concrete expression in the composition of finite beings.17 Amongst the pagans, this refraction of divinity into an array of entities is involuntary, produced by an overflow of God’s super-abundance.18 In Judaism and Christianity, God freely chooses to express himself in the creation of beings.19 But in either case, the cast of intelligible natures that permeate our world are an expression of God.
Now, this is not to suggest that every creature expresses God equally. Certainly not. An angel is more Godlike than a rock, having a greater share in perfection. But each being bears perfections suitable to its station within the Chain, what we might call a “relative perfection.” To quote Morton Bloomfield,
The qualitative distinction between each level [of the chain of being] is its degree of perfection…. Creation is a great flowing out from God and a movement back to Him in a series of ontic steps. This flow and ebb, may be termed a vertical rather than horizontal [chain] … All creatures, insofar as they are creatures in a hierarchical universe, are perfect, but the degrees of perfection vary. The relativity here involved is that of position leading up to God ….20
Perhaps an analogy may help. Let’s return to my above illustration of a composer who expresses his creativity in a musical composition. Specifically, let’s say this composition is for an orchestra. Every orchestral instrument and player has a part in the composer’s creative expression. But not all contributions are equal. A cello has a far greater capacity to herald the composer’s voice than a timpani, which has a greater capacity than a triangle. The limitations of the latter two are innate to the nature of the instrument. But this is not an indictment of either. They can be perfect for what they are, and each one plays a unique and indispensable role in the composer’s creative expression. Yet, their degree of perfection is relative to the nature they bear.
In the same way, each link in the Chain of Being has a share in perfection, from the most humble to the most sublime, and each being conveys something of the perfection of God, filling up the concept with its own unique contribution. Yet, the fact remains that not every being within the Chain has an equal share of perfection. Hence, the Chain is a cascade of relative perfections, from the highest, most godlike beings to the lowest brink of non-being, where intelligibility ceases (G 6.443).21 As Leibniz puts it,
There are in [God] three primacies, power, knowledge and will; and from these there results the operation or creature, which is varied according to the different combinations of unity and zero, or rather of the positive with the privative, for the privative is nothing but the limit and there are everywhere limits in creatures…. However, the creature is something more than limits, for it has received some perfection or power from God. (Grua 126)
Such a vision of varied perfections cascading down from God is precisely (though not exhaustively) what Leibniz has in mind when speaking about the optimal goodness of our world: God creates a world “through which the most essence or possibility is brought into existence” (G 7.303/L 487; also G 6.443). Or to quote Nicholas Jolley, “By virtue of the Principle of Plenitude, then, God is committed to creating inferior substances such as bare monads in addition to higher substances such as minds or rational monads.”22
The profundity of the point is easily lost to abstract, philosophical jargon, placing goodness at a severe disadvantage relative to the evils cataloged by an objector, like Ivan Karamazov. After all, the objector recounts stories of infant murder or raping or pillaging, calling to mind unspeakable horrors with visceral impact. Against such a stark backdrop, how can the claim of boundless goodness hope to stand? Surely it cannot — at least, not in purely abstract terms. To fortify the point, we would do well to call to mind the equally visceral examples of goodness. To tangibly grasp Leibniz’s point, a reader should close his eyes and call to mind the beauty of his infant child asleep in his arms, to recall his lover laughing in a field while her hair blows in the wind and glows with the light of the sun, to remember a sublime landscape he saw when reaching the summit of a mountain or the endless cool waters that washed over his feet when standing upon the beach, or to call to mind a song so full of beauty that it fills him up until tears pour forth from his eyes. Such palpable beauty — the sort that razes men to the ground — is the beauty of being, which fills up every corner of our world, even in those all-too-common moments when we are blind to it. This is the substance of goodness about which Leibniz and his Christian predecessors speak.