However, insofar as this defense includes the viability of Leibniz’s theodicy for Christian theology and theodicy today, constructive engagement with Leibniz’s contemporary objectors and the current literature on the problem of evil is also required. On the historical side I focus primarily on contextual and textual analysis. My method of defense is both historical and constructive. I show that his adherence to this tradition and its views of freedom has significant textual support. Hence in adhering to this tradition, Leibniz is knowingly adhering to a libertarian theology.
False optimism for free#
As for free choice, I maintain that the Augustinian tradition is not only incompatiblist, or libertarian, but was recognized as such in Leibniz’s day. Regarding the former, I argue that Leibniz’s understanding of providence has precedence in and is a recapitulation of older Augustinian views of the God-world relationship. Accompanying this central claim are a number of subordinate claims, the most significant of which center on how we read Leibniz on providence and on free choice. In short, I argue that Leibniz’s theodicy is not his own, but is the tacit claim of a longstanding theological tradition made explicit and brought to bear on the problem of evil as articulated in Leibniz’s day. At the heart of this defense is the central claim of this project, namely, that Leibniz’s philosophical theology represents a traditional brand of Augustinianism. In this project I defend both the cogency and the orthodoxy of Leibniz’s philosophical theology and, by extension, its application to the Christian task of theodicy. Leibniz professes a commitment to historical Christian theism, but the depth and orthodoxy of his commitment has been questioned throughout the past three centuries. The aim of this paper is to determine what Leibniz’s response to the Lisbon earthquake would have been, had he lived to know about the event. There certainly is this line of thinking in Leibniz’s writings, but it is far from being the whole story, as we shall see. Contemporary scholars are of the view that Leibniz explained natural disasters like earthquakes as nothing more than the unfortunate consequences of the normal workings of simple laws of nature, and that God permits such disasters to happen because it would be unworthy of him to overrule the laws he has established. Leibniz died several decades before the Lisbon earthquake struck, and so was unable to address it and the challenges thrown up by it, which would have included an account of how the event was consistent with God’s providence. It is often claimed that the catastrophe severely damaged the plausibility of Leibniz’s optimism, and even the wider project of theodicy. On 1 November 1755, the city of Lisbon in Portugal was virtually destroyed by the largest documented seismic event ever to hit Europe. As we shall see, while Leibniz’s doctrine did win a good number of adherents in the 1720s and 1730s, especially in Germany, support for it had largely dried up by the mid-1740s moreover, while opponents of Leibniz’s doctrine were few and far between in the 1710s and 1720s, they became increasing vocal in the 1730s and afterwards, between them producing an array of objections that served to make Leibnizian optimism both philosophically and theologically toxic years before the Lisbon earthquake struck. In this paper we shall examine the reception of Leibniz’s doctrine of the best world in the eighteenth century in order to get a clearer understanding of what its fate really was. Despite its long history, this story is nothing more than a commentators’ fiction that has become accepted wisdom not through sheer weight of evidence but through sheer frequency of repetition. The oft-told story of Leibniz’s doctrine of the best world, or optimism, is that it enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the eighteenth century until the massive earthquake that struck Lisbon on 1 November 1755 destroyed its support.
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