The three philosophers who are the focus of this book are Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), and Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694). The discussion and disagreements among these men took place within a philosophical world impacted by the views of Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who had come to controversial disagreement with the Church-sanctioned views of Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Matter, mind, soul, motion, space, causality, will, reason, and the involvement of God in their connections and interaction, were fundamental concepts these philosophers sought to understand.
Nadler sketches the biographies of Leibniz, Malebranche, and Arnauld and summarizes the theological controversies of the eucharist and transsubstantiation in relation to matter and substance, and divine grace in relation to human will and action in our salvation.
"Leibniz, Arnauld, and Malebranche constitute the Great Triumvirate of Continental intellectual life in the second half of the seventeenth century, matched perhaps only by Hobbes, Locke, and Newton in England. And what they have to say to and about each other on the problem of God and evil - something on which all three have very much to say, first in person and later in writing - touches on some of the most important and disputed questions of philosophy and religion in the period, and indeed, in all time." (77)
Leibniz believed this was the best of all possible worlds. His reasoning follows the syllogism: God would not create any world unless it were the best of all possible worlds. This world is a world God created. Therefore this world is the best of all possible worlds. (Nadler doesn't present this syllogism but it is implicit in his discussion.) Because of the meaning of 'best', there can be only one best of all possible worlds. So this is the only world God created and it is the best world there could be. Aquinas, in contrast (95), argued that there was an infinity of possible worlds and so there was no world that is the best (supremum - my term) of these worlds.
We may, I suppose, presume that God could through His omnipotence create a world that is possible but not the best, but through his moral perfection does not do this. Whether this would be a choice (which would imply contingency within God's acts) or an immutable character trait is another question. Does God's perfect nature, then, limit the expression and manifestation of his inherent omnipotence? Are there possible worlds that are not creatable worlds? Are there imaginable worlds that are not possible? (See below on metaphysical evil.) The assumption, in any case, is that being the best world is being the world most in accord with God's moral perfection and purpose. (See below on metaphysical perfection.)
For Leibniz, in this best of all possible worlds, every object and relation within it is necessary to its constitution, organization, and structure. A single difference would entail a different world. So every good act and every evil act, and every moment of pleasure and every moment of suffering is essential to this world and thus to our experience of this world. To be the best of all possible worlds is not to be the most comfortable and satisfying of all possible worlds for any particular individual, but to be the best world overall (according to God's understanding) compared to any other world. God knows it to be the best of all possible worlds, even though we may not experience it as the best for us.
"Leibniz divides evil into three categories. Metaphysical evil consists in the limitation and imperfection that neccessarily characterize any finite, created being; this species of evil is an unavoidable part of the nature of things because anything God creates will, simply be virtue of being created, be less perfect than the absolutely perfect, uncreated being. Physical evil, by contrast, is suffering, and moral evil is sin. Physical and moral evil are not, by themselves, necessary elements of creation, although they are essential parts of many possbile worlds. They exist in the actual world because God, by choosing to create this world while being fully aware of everything it involves, permits them. The question is, why?" (98)
Nadler has assumed (he isn't clear if this is Leibniz' view) that metaphysical evil does not entail moral evil, nor does it entail physical evil. Note, also, that a full ontological distinction between moral and physical evil implies that sin could conceivably exist without any suffering whatsoever. What would that look like?
The concept of metaphysical evil is related to the concept of metaphysical perfection. "What makes this world the best of all is that it is metaphysically superior to all other possible worlds. The actual world contains the highest degree of perfected being or reality. ... No other world contains as much positive reality, measured in terms of both quantity and variety of essence, as this world. The best possible world is, in its own essential nature, populated by the greatest number of beings that can possibly co-occupy a world over time without contradiction, and exhibits the greatest possible variety of kinds of beings." (103)
Malebranche believed there to be an infinite number of possible worlds and that God created that world most in accord primarily with a simplicity of causal laws and secondarily with a reconciliation between the physical and the moral. (118) This is the best world possbile under these constraints of creation. The physical and moral are not in a perfectly just relation, but only in the best relation that accords with the best simplicity of causal laws. "God wills to accomplish as much justice and goodness as He possibly can, not absolutely but consistent with the simplist laws." (119)
This had consequences for Malebranche's views on God's will, and thus on how God dispenses and bestows grace. Nadler says of grace: "Through grace, God uses pleasure to counteract base desires and turn postlapsarian human beings back toward Himself." (124) It is an expression of God's wish for our salvation. Malebranche saw grace as constrained by God's laws; and just as rain falls upon both fertile and barren ground without discrimination in accordance with law, so is grace conferred by God's law upon both those who respond to it and those who do not. Likewise, just as rain might not be given to fertile ground, so might grace not be given to someone who would accept and use it. Grace is a help against the seduction of sinful pleasure (concupiscence), and Malebranche's view implies that God, because of the constraints of His laws, does not specifically help those need and want it, and who would most benefit from it. To use an analogy not in the book, it's like having a fire, wishing it to be put out, yet tossing water without regard to where the fire burns. God's foreknowledge of the consquences of His manner of dispensing His grace is not discussed here.
Arnauld vehemently disagreed with Malebranche's position on grace. Malebranche believed that God's will is subordinate to his wisdom, and thus He created a world in which simplicity of law has priority over His will to bestow grace. Arnauld believed that will and wisdom are not distinguishable within God. "Arnauld sees God as a being in whom will and wisdom are one and the same, and thus in whom the will is a law unto itself. This God indifferently creates reasons through its [sic] volitions. He does not, like Malebranche's God, have a will that takes its lead from wisdom's antecedent reasons." (163)
God, we must say according to Arnauld, did not create the world for a reason, because that gives priority to wisdom over will, but rather that God's act of creation occurred intrinsically warranted in itself, without reason. God's acts are not reasonable or purposeful in the human sense of acting in accordance with reason, but they are also not unreasonable or contrary to purpose, in the human sense of acting in discord with reason. (This is my language, not Arnauld's or Nadler's.)
God's grace, then, in Arnauld's view, is bestowed without the contraint of law and without the counsel of wisdom. "Why, then, does God give grace to a person? There is no response to this question by Arnauld's logic other than that God acts with infinite and unmotivated mercy." Arnauld was a Jansenist, a controversial sect within Catholicism. "To Arnauld's many Catholic opponents, it seemed as if he had [with his view of grace] broken completely with the Church and crossed the line into Calvinism." (162)
This is a theological controversy that has implications for theodicy: the problem of reconciling God's perfection and the imperfection of evil in the world God created. Nadler doesn't connect the dots on this, however, but instead discusses Descartes' views on God's relation to eternal truths: God created them, this includes mathematical truths and moral truths, and He could have made them other than they are. "The Cartesian God is bound by no objective canons of rationality or morality. At the basis of creation lies a completely indifferent will." (195) God "does not do what He does for objective reasons, because all such reasons - moral, metaphysical, and logical - are the effect of His will." (196)
Leibniz believed that this separation of eternal truths from metaphysical necessity, making them arbitrary and contingent upon the morally indifferent impulse of God's will, diminishes God's moral standing. In fact, it makes God no better than a tyrant. (199) Quoting Leibniz: "If justice was established arbitrarily and without any cause, if God came upon it by a kind of hazard, as when one draws lots, His goodness and His wisdom are not manifested in it, and there is nothing at all to attach Him to it." (200)
Malebranche agreed with Leibniz against Descartes. Quoting Malabranche: "Everything is inverted if we claim that God is above Reason and has no rule in His plans other than His mere will. This false principle spreads such blanket darkness that it confounds the good with the evil, the true with the false, and creates out of everything a chaos in which the mind no longer knows anything." (201)
"The eternal truths" writes Nadler in discussing Malebranche, "depend upon the divine understanding in that they are just the necessary relations found within and among the ideas in God's wisdom. They are coeternal with God; ... God does not invent the truths of logic, mathematics, metaphysics, morality, or theology; He discovers them in His wisdom. And what He finds there is an objective body of knowledge that is resistant to, even binding upon, His volitions." (203)
Arnauld does not give priority to reason in God's acts (see above) and so "what Arnauld is saying - contrary to Malebranche and Leibniz - is that our formal concepts of justice and goodness and reasonableness have no application whatsoever when it comes to God's actions." (212) For Malabranche, "God acts through sheer will alone, and thus transcends all rational and moral canons." (213)
