Abstract
In one strand of Christian thinking providence is conceived as essentially irregular. According to this tradition, God’s grace and will cannot be governed by rules. It would be unworthy of God’s inscrutable majesty to represent his will as anything other than arbitrary. For it would not be God’s will if it were determined by or dependent upon anything outside itself. Humans are tempted to imagine that there are eternal truths and therefore standards of goodness independent even of God’s will. But God could, were he so to choose, vary any of the eternal verities. They continue to hold only insofar as it is God’s will that they should. God did not make this world because it conformed to some eternal and autonomous standards of goodness. On the contrary, according to this view, commonly referred to as ‘theological voluntarism’1 the world is good simply because it was God’s will that it should exist.
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Notes
The word `theological’ is added to distinguish this kind of voluntarism, with which alone I am concerned here, from another commonly discussed kind of voluntarism — roughly the view that belief is, or can be in certain circumstances, subject to the will. The same philosophers may be discussed in relation to both forms of voluntarism (Descartes as tending towards both, for instance, and Leibniz opposing both) and this is a possible source of confusion, since there is no obvious or necessary connection between them.
It is perhaps no less common in the recent literature to refer to this view as `intellectualism’. But that term is no less ambiguous than ‘rationalism’ and, as it seems to me, less apt. My usage conforms, for instance, to that of William Mann in his “The Best of All Possible Worlds”, in Being and Goodness, ed. Scott MacDonald (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991).
Introductio ad Theologiam, III, quoted in Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), p.71.
Thomas Taylor, The Two Covenants of God with Mankind (London, 1704), p.158.
Benedict Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. vi, trans. by R.H.M. Elwes in Works of Spinoza: Theologico-Political Treatise (New York, 1955), p.86.
This is not the place to assess the true extent of Descartes’ voluntarism. On this topic see, for instance, Margaret Osler’s `Eternal Truths and the Laws of Nature: the Theological Foundations of Descartes’ Philosophy of Nature“,JHI 46 (1985), pp.349–362.
See Jean d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot (Paris, 1751), ed. R. Schwab (Indianopolis 1963). See also Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européene (Paris, 1935), trans. by J. Lewis May as The European Mind: 1680–1715 (Harmondsworth, 1964).
In Matthias Earbery’s dialogue, Deism examin d and confutedchrwww(133)(London, 1697), the young convert to deism throws away his Bible and puts Spinoza’s Tractatus in its place. For Spinoza’s attitude to Scripture, see Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,chs. xii-xiii.
Oevres de Desca rt es, ed. by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 12 vols (Paris 1964–76), XI, p.432; The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. by John Cottingham and others, 3 vols (London, 1985–91), II, p.291.
Principia Philosophiae III, art.47; in Oeuvres de Descartes (ed. Adam and Tannery) VIII, pp.102f.; Philosophical Writings of Descartes (trans. Cottingham et al.), I, p.257.
Matthias Earbery [Snr.], Deism examin’d and confutedchrwww(133)(London, 1697), Conference V.
Entretiens sur la Métaphysiquechrwww(133) IV x 5, in Oeuvres Complètes de Malebranche, ed. Andre Robinet, 20 vols (Paris, 1958–67) XII, p.95; Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion, trans. by Morris Ginsberg (London, 1923), p.129.
Entretiens XII, xiii fn., Oeuvres Complètes (ed. Robinet), XII, p.295 fn., Dialogues (trans. Ginsburg), p.314f.
Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, Éclaircissement I, iii; Oeuvres Complètes (ed. Robinet), V, p.148; Treatise on Nature and Grace, translated by Patrick Riley (Oxford, 1992), p.196.
Traité de morale, in Oeuvres Complètes (ed. Robinet), vol.XI, p.32.
Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce I, lix; in Oeuvres Complètes (ed. Robinet), V, p.49; Treatise (trans. Riley), p.128f.
Traité de la nature et de la Grâce, I xliii; Oeuvres Complètes (ed. Robinet), V, p.63; Treatise (trans. Riley), p.137.
Oeuvres de Desca rt es (ed. Adam and Tannery), XI, p.201; Philosophical Writings of Descartes (trans. Cottingham et al), I, p.108.
Ferdinand Alquié, Le cartésianisme de Malebranche (Paris, 1974), p.270f.
Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth, ed. and trans. by Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus, Ohio), p.448.
See Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1986).
Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, I, xxxvii; Oeuvres Complètes (ed Robinet), V., p.46.
Entretiens sur la Metaphysique, IX., 11, in Oeuvres Complètes (ed. Robinet), XII, p.215; Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (trans. Ginsburg), p.242.
Entretiens IX, II, in Oeuvres Complètes (ed. Robinet), XII, p.215; Dialogues (trans. Ginsburg), p.242.
Entretiens IX, II, in Oeuvres Complètes (ed. Robinet), XII, p.216; Dialogues (trans. Ginsburg), p.243.
Entretiens XII, 12; Oeuvres Complètes, (ed Robinet), XII, p.216; Dialogues (trans. Ginsburg), p.243.
Entretiens XII, 12; Oeuvres Complètes, (ed Robinet), XII, p.216; Dialogues (trans. Ginsburg), p.243.
Letter dated 2 July, 1679, in G.W. Leibniz: Die Philosophischen Schrii ten, edited by C.I. Gerhardt, 7 vols (Berlin 1875–90), I, p.331; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. by Leroy E Loemker (2nd ed, Dordrecht, 1969), p. 210f.
Discours de Métaphysique, Sect. 5, G W Leibniz Discourse on Metaphysics and Related Writings, ed. and trans. by R Niall, D Martin and Stuart Brown (Manchester: Manchester UP 1988), p.43.
Theodicée, sect 206, Philosophische Schriften (ed. Gerhardt), VI, p.241; Theodicy,ed. Austin Farrer, trans. E.M. Huggard (London, 1951), p.256.
Paul Hazard, The European Mind (trans. May) p.165.
Discours, Sect. 7; Discourse on Metaphysics (ed. and trans. Martin and Brown), p.44.
Discours, Sect. 2; Discourse on Metaphysics (ed. and trans. Martin and Brown), p.40. Descartes was named only in earlier drafts.
Discours, Sect. 36; Discourse on Metaphysics (ed. and trans. Martin and Brown) p.82.
Discours, Sect 37; Discourse on Metaphysics (ed. and trans. Martin & Brown), p.83.
See, for instance, his discussion of faith and reason in New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Ch. Xviii.
The demonstrations of natural immortality based on the simplicity of the soul are frequent in Leibniz’s writings. See for instance, his Preface to the New Essays Concerning Human Understanding. The possibility of the resurrection of the same body is a topic of several early writings which is revisited in his Examination of the Christian Religion of the mid 1680s. The topic is rarely discussed explicitly in his later writings, though it seems to be implicit, for instance, in the way he rejects separated souls and transmigration of souls. In his paper ‘On a Single Universal Spirit’, he defends as not unreasonable the view that the soul retains a subtle body after death which is how the same body is resurrected. He relates this to his hypothesis that animals never strictly die but are transformed and to his view that all souls were created at the beginning, a view he claims accords with Biblical teaching about creation. For a fuller account, see my “Soul, Body and Natural Immortality” in the Re-Thinking Leibniz issue of The Monist, 84.1 (1998), pp.573–590.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: OUP, 1975) IV, xi, 14, p. 638 f.
See Patrick Riley’s introduction to Malebranche’s Treatise on Nature and Grace, pp. 91102. See also his The General Will before Rousseau.
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Brown, S. (2001). The Regularization of Providence in Post-Cartesian Philosophy. In: Crocker, R. (eds) Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. Archives Internationales d’histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 180. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9777-7_1
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