Abstract
Leibniz reports in his Theodicy that a number of Augustinian theologians, one among them dubbed the “torturer of infants,” 1 espoused the view that infants who have not actually sinned are nevertheless damned. [T 92; T 97] In rough outline, their reasoning for the view was as follows, Original sin suffices for damnation, and infants have no more nor no less a share in original sin than adults. Infants, therefore, are damnable and will be damned unless they repent, accept Christ, and merit salvation. However, infants die without having repented, accepted Christ, or accumulated merit sufficient to deserve salvation. Ergo, they are damned.
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Notes
Gregory of Rimini.
Leibniz argued that a world containing damned innocents is absurd. [Grua 300]
Melanchthon, Selections: 115
To the question of what the reason for the damnation of Judas is, Leibniz’s spokesman in his Confessio responds: “I believe that it is the state of the dying man. Namely his burning hatred of God in which state he died and in which consists the nature of despair. Moreover, this suffices for damnation. For since, at the moment of death, the soul is not open to new external sensations until its body is restored to it, it concentrates its attention only on its last thoughts, so that it does not change, but rather augments the condition it was in at death. But from this hatred of God, that is, of the most happy being, the greatest sadness follows, for to hate is to be sad concerning the happiness of the one hated…and therefore the greatest sadness arises in the case of the hatred of the greatest hapiness. The greatest sadness is misery, or damnation. Hence, the one who dies hating God damns himself.” [CP 36-37]
Augsburg Confession: p. 39.
“Original sin is the complete lack or absence of the original concreated righteousness of paradise or of the image of God according to which man was originally created…Original sin in human nature is not only a total lack of good in spiritual divine things, but at the same time it replaces the lost image of God in man with a deep, wicked, abominable, bottomless inscrutable, and inexpressible corruption of his entire nature in all its powers, especially of the highest and foremost powers of the soul in mind heart and will.” Formula of Concord: 510.
DSR 31: “The grace of God consists in the gift of will; for happiness is in the power of a person who has good will.” In the notes to his introduction to DSR Parkinson comments on this statement by Leibniz: “Leibniz does not say that God’s grace consists in endowing us with a good will He seems to mean that God endows us with a will — a will that is free.” DSR 125-126 n. 138. This is not what Leibniz seems to me to mean. In numerous texts, Leibniz states that the will naturally inclines towards good, and in the Theodicy he states that a rational creature will pursue an evil thing only if it is “masked” by good. [T 154] Furthermore, in the Theodicy he states that the essence of the will is an effort to pursue a thing in proportion to the good that it is perceived to contain. [T 22] I do not maintain here that Leibniz’s understanding of what will is in the Theodicy should be used without reservation to interpret earlier statements that he makes about the will. At any rate, a free will according to Leibniz, is a will that is determined by the good or apparent good, indeed, by the best or what appears best. In so far as a will is determined by something other than what is good it is not free.
Tp. 69.
T p. 97. Among the principal opponents of the Churches of the Augsburg Confession were the papists or “New Pelagians,” the renegade followers of Zwingli, and Calvinists of “excessive rigor” such as Bayle.
Rutherford, Leibniz: 9.
“God either wishes to take away evils and is unable; or he is able, and is unwilling, or he is neither willing nor able; or he is both willing and able. If he is willing and unable, he is feeble, which does not agree with the character of God; if he is able and unwilling, he is malicious, which is equally at odds with God; if he is neither willing nor able, he is both malicious and feeble and therefore not God; if he is both willing and able, which is alone suitable to God, from what source come evils? Or why does he not remove them?” This passage is cited from Rutherford’s Leibniz: 9. Rutherford’s source was Lactantius’s, De ira dei 13: 20-21.
Cf.: “[O]ne must return to the same conclusion that God is the final reason of faith and of election in Jesus Christ. And be the election the cause or the results of God’s design to give faith, it still remains true that he gives faith or salvation to whom he pleases, without any discernible reason for his choice, which falls upon but few men… So it is a terrible judgement that God, giving his only Son for the whole human race and being the sole author and master of the salvation of men, yet saves so few of them and abandons the rest of them to the devil his enemy, who torments them eternally and makes them curse their creator, though they have all been created to diffuse and show forth his goodness, his justice, and his other perfections. And this outcome inspires all the more horror, as the sole cause why all these men are wretched to all eternity is God’s having exposed them to a temptation that he knew they could not resist’” [T p. 126]
Leibniz propounds his understanding of the Evangelical theory of election at CD 126-121.
Bayle states that there are ideas implanted in us by “a general providence or nature” that are contrary to religion, that is, opposed to God. [Selections: 18] Leibniz held, against Bayle, that reason can never deceive us since it is nothing other than a “linking together of truths.” [T p. 110; T p. 109] Leibniz distinguished between this “right reason” and “corrupt reason” which is “mixed with prejudices and passions.” [T p. 107] Right reason cannot lodge irrefutable objections against faith, [T p. 101] is at the service of faith, [T 1] and is the ground of all revealed faith [N 497] or Christianity. [T p. 102] Bayle was skeptical regarding all of this, holding that it is difficult to grant faith and reason their respective rights, [Selections: 29] and that one cannot prove that faith conforms to reason. [Selections: 31]
T 367: “Indeed, confusion springs, more often than not, from ambiguity in terms, and from one’s failure to take trouble over gaining clear ideas about them. That gives rise to these eternal, and usually mistaken, contentions on necessity and contingency, on the possible and the impossible. But provided that it is understood that necessity and possibility, taken metaphysically and strictly, depend only upon this question, whether the object in itself or that which is opposed to it implies contradiction or not; and that one takes into account that contingency is consistent with the inclinations…“
Among the dangerous consequences of this view is that God is unloveable and despotic. But by far the most dangerous consequence is that, in so far as it involves a rejection of the principle of sufficient reason, it takes away the possibility of proving God’s existence. [T 44] However, if that were to happen, according to Leibniz, the principle of contradiction would go with it since he states that the principle of sufficient reason is a consequence of the principle of contradiction. [See Leibniz’s ‘On the Unitarian Metaphysics of Christoph Stegmann,’ in the Appendix to Jolly, Leibniz & Locke: 196]
This view is obviously self-serving. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination, as Bayle interpreted it, requires that God be indifferent to anything other than his will or essence.
Leibniz associated this doctrine of freedom with Descartes. [Tp. 111-112; T 365]
According to Leibniz, a despot is a person who does not intend the good by his actions. [T 166] 20 Leibniz focuses in the Theodicy on Spinoza and Hobbes as examples of absolute necessitarians: “I have not neglected to examine the most rigorous authors, who have extended furthest the doctrine of the necessity of things, as for instance Hobbes and Spinoza, of whom the former advocated this absolute necessity not only in his Physical Elements and elsewhere, but also in a special book against Bishop Bramhall. And Spinoza insists more or less (like an ancient Peripatetic philosopher named Strato) that all has come from the first cause or from primitive Nature by a blind and geometrical necessity, with a complete absence for capacity for choice, for goodness and for understanding in the first source of things.” [T p. 67] In the order I have mentioned them, he says of their views: “It is therefore the doctrine of blind power (Spinoza) or arbitrary power that destroys piety. The one destroys the intelligent principle of the providence of God; the other attributes to him characteristics that are appropriate to the evil principle.” [T 403]
T p. 427: “Even though an active substance is determined only by itself, it does not follow that it is not moved by objects: for it is the representation of the object within it which contributes towards the determination. Now the representation does not come from without, and consequently there is complete spontanaiety.” [Cf. T 428]
C 498: “Deliberation is a consideration of contrary arguments concerning practical good and evil.”
Leibniz cites as reasons that God would have for creating nothing that it would be simpler and easier than creating something. [L 639; L 487]
Leibniz maintained that only God’s essence involves his existence. [Grua 386; Grua 539]
Book of Concord: 471. Leibniz suggests in the Theodicy that Bayle was intent upon reviving Manichaeism. [T 136]
Leibniz says of Luther’s book On the Servitude of the Will that it is an “excellent work.” [Grua 369]
The punishments and rewards are for worldly deeds.
According to Leibniz, God is “perfectly and entirely just.” [L 563] Parkinson points out [Leibniz on Human Freedom: 64] that Leibniz admitted that “even if there were an absolute necessity about our actions, rewards and punishments would still be just and reasonable.” However, Parkinson goes on to add that there is a moral and punitive element to punishment for Leibniz. [Leibniz and Human Freedom: 66]. It is this moral element that prevents God, according to Leibniz, from punishing innocent infants. [L 563]
Of course, a fundamental moral principle is that one ought to deliberate before acting, that is, one ought to consider alternative ways of acting and their likely consequences. If a creature cannot meet this moral requirement he cannot behave morally since moral actions are free and: “When we act freely we are not being forced, as would happen if we were pushed on to a precipice and thrown from top to bottom; and we are not prevented from having the mind free when we deliberate, as would happen if we were given a draught to deprive us of discernment. There is contingency in a thousand actions of nature; but when there is no judgment in him who acts there is no freedom. ” [T 34]
According to Leibniz, men are not accountable for consequences of their actions which they do not foresee when they do their duty. [T 120] It is, he says, the intention behind the action that counts “For as to the future, we do not have to be quietists and wait ridicu;ously with folded arms for what God will do…but we must act according to the presumptive will of God, as far as we can judge of it, trying with all our power to contribute to the general good…For if the event may perhaps show that God did not in this instance wish our good will to have its effect, it does not follow from this that he did not wish us to do what we did. On the contrary, as he is the best of all masters, all that he ever asks is a right intention, and it is for him to know the time and place for letting good designs prosper.” [DM 3]
Broad, ‘Leibniz’s Last Controversy With The Newtonians’: 61
David Blumenfeld, ‘Things Possible in Themselves’: 304.
Parkinson, ‘Philosophy and logic’: 215–216.
Adams Leibniz: 53.
Mondadori, ‘Leibniz and the Doctrine of Inter-World Identity’: 44.
Ibid.,: 22.
Descartes in his Fifth Meditation also speaks of properties that belong to a thing essentially and necessarily as properties that are “inseparable” from it, [CSM II 46] a description that matches well Leibniz’s distinction between hypothetical and absolute necessity. An absolutely necessary proposition, for Leibniz, is true under every hypothesis. [See: Grua 386; C 405; Grua 387; Grua 273; Grua 271; Grua 362; Grua 379; Grua 373; Grua 358; T 53; G VI 504/L 550.] For very useful discussions of Leibniz’s notion of hypothetical necessity see Adam’s ‘Leibniz’s Theories of Contingency’: sec. 1.3; and David Blumenfeld’s, ‘Leibniz on Contingency and Infinite Analysis’: 495ff.]
I mean by a “complete individual” an individual whose concept is complete and by an “incomplete individual” one whose concept is not complete but which, with sufficient addition, can be upgraded to a complete concept. Leibniz’s God, in fact, would carry out necessarily such a transformation given his omniscience. Not all incomplete concepts are such that they can be upgraded to complete concepts, for example, the concept of the sphere on the grave of Archimedes cannot be. 39 Loemker inspired this analogy. See his ‘On Substance and Process in the Philosophy of Leibniz’: 54.
The idea that Leibnizian subjects have many complete concepts was first proposed, to my knowledge, by Grimm in his 1971 article ‘Individual Concepts and Contingent Truths.’ The article has had negligible influence, at best, among Leibniz scholars. In her article’ Possible Gods‘: 720, Wilson suggests that Grimm would have perhaps not made his proposal had he given “due weight to passages cited by Mates, Mondadori, and Ishiguro” in support of their contention that there is no counterfactual identity of Leibnizian individuals. My view is that the passages in question refute the contention.
Sleigh, Leibniz, p. 5: “I see almost nothing to be said in favor of Russell’s idea that Leibniz had two philosophical systems. Leibniz did employ various styles of presentation, although no useful distinction can be drawn in this regard between work that he published and work that he circulated privately or not at all.”
Adams, Leibniz: p. 52.
Ibid..
Nichomachean Ethics: 1095a30-1095bl0
Other remarks by Leibniz that might arouse suspicions are these: “As there are many people whose faith is rather small and shallow to withstand such dangerous tests, I think that one must not present them with that which might be poisonous for them.” [T p. 97] “We must certainly distinguish what it is good to say from what it is correct to believe; but since most truths can be boldly upheld, there is some presumption against an opinion that must be concealed.” [N 491]
Rutherford, Leibniz: 289.
I do not mean here that for Leibniz the ultimate truth is not a moral truth, though my sense is that for him it is not. God himself is Truth, according to scripture, and I believe that Leibniz followed scripture on this point. To the point that, for Leibniz, faith is the ultimate guide: “[I]f we were capable of understanding the universal harmony, we should see that what we are tempted to find fault with is connected with the plan most worthy of being chosen; in a word, we should see, and not believe only, that what God has done is best. I call’ seeing’ here what one knows a priori by the causes; and ‘believing’ what one one judges only by the effects, even though the one is as certainly known as the other. And one can apply here too the saying of St. Paul (2 Cor. V. 7), that we walk by faith and not by sight. ” [T p. 98-99] And also “[D]ivine faith itself, when it is kindled in the soul, is something more than an opinion, and depends not upon occasions or motives that have given it birth; it advances beyond the intellect, and takes possession of the will and of the heart, to make us act with zeal and joyfully as the law of God commands. Then we have no further need to think of reasons or to pause over the difficulties of argument which the mind may anticipate.” [T p. 91] Finally, “[R]eason cannot teach us the details of the great future, which are reserved for revelation.” [MP 202]
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Savage, R.O. (1998). Introduction. In: Real Alternatives, Leibniz’s Metaphysics of Choice. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 74. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4968-6_1
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