In Leibniz: On God and Religion: A Reader, Lloyd Strickland brings together the philosopher’s writing on God and religion, drawing on journal articles, book reviews, private notes, essays and personal correspondence. Praising this volume for its eclectic and illuminating selection of texts, Audrey Borowski argues that, amidst schism, pessimism and uncertainty, the rediscovery of Leibniz’s thought could not be timelier

Borowski, Audrey

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9/15/2016Book Review: Leibniz: On God and Religion: A Reader edited byLloyd Stricklandblogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/09/15/book-review-leibniz-on-god-and-religion-a-reader-edited-by-lloyd-strickland/In Leibniz: On God and Religion: A Reader , Lloyd Strickland brings together the philosopher’s writing on Godand religion, drawing on journal articles, book reviews, private notes, essays and personal correspondence. Praisingthis volume for its eclectic and illuminating selection of texts, Audrey Borowski argues that, amidst schism,pessimism and uncertainty, the rediscovery of Leibniz’s thought could not be timelier.Leibniz: On God and Religion: A Reader . Lloyd Strickland (ed.). Bloomsbury. 2016.Find this book: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German thinker and polymath whoseintellect spanned an incredibly broad array of disciplines from mathematics andcomputation to philosophy and etymological studies. In spite of this, the sheer audacityand ingenuity of his thought – Gottlob Frege once commented that he truly ‘existed in aclass of his own’ – have too often been obscured, dismissed or, worse yet, derided.Lloyd Strickland, a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, is a Leibnizspecialist who runs a useful website containing many of his translations of Leibniz’swritings. In 2011, he published the philosophical correspondence between Leibniz andhis patron, Electress Sophie of Hanover (1630-1714), and the latter’s daughter, QueenSophie Charlotte of Prussia (1668-1705), which serves as a very fine introduction toLeibniz’s thought for the uninitiated or more sceptical. As we celebrate the tercentenaryof Leibniz’s death, Strickland has compiled his writings on philosophical theology, forthe very first time bringing together articles, book reviews, private notes and essays aswell as items from Leibniz’s extensive correspondence that were hitherto unpublishedor unavailable in English. These bring to the fore some recurring themes, including the existence and nature of God,miracles and mysteries, the issue of Grace and predestination, sin, evil and theodicy as well as the afterlife.While they chart the various changes in Leibniz’s thinking over the course of his career, these texts also bring to thefore the potent didactic streak that pervades the Leibnizian corpus as a whole: far from seeking to conceal orobfuscate, Leibniz sought first and foremost to elucidate and clarify the points he wished to set across. Crucially, too,in an age of growing secularisation, Leibniz undertook a defence of Christianity by formulating a particular type of‘rational theology’. Whilst he believed in the overall correctness of their reforms, Leibniz regretted that hiscontemporaries had carried them too far by removing all final causes. Cartesianism on its side had impressed ‘anincurable error’ on the minds of many in its appeal to ‘clear and distinct’ ideas (107).1/3Image Credit: The statue of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by Ernst Hähnel (1883) in Leipzig,Germany (Ad Meskens, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY SA 3.0)For Leibniz, God had not crafted an arbitrary universe but one that was ‘free and full of purpose’ (106): ‘Everythinghas a reason which determines why it is thus rather than otherwise’ (‘An Outline of a Natural Theology’, 91). In thismanner, the universe unfolded rationally according to a predetermined and harmonious design, which yielded themost diversity combined with the greatest simplicity of laws. Its study could not fail to arouse pleasure in theperfections of God and inspire us to ‘strive to conform to this order and to what is best’ (‘Critical Remarks on WilliamPenn and the Quakers’). God stood as ‘the ultimate reason of things’ and presided over ‘the most perfectcommonwealth […] [the] City of Minds’. In it, no good action went unrewarded, no sin unpunished. Each humanbeing had been endowed with an ‘inner light’, a ‘footprint, indeed an image of the omniscience and omnipotence ofGod’, which expressed the universe from its own perspective (‘On the True Mystical Theology’). It contained innateknowledge including necessary truths that were independent of sense perception but which could nevertheless bedrawn out from the innermost parts of our mind through reasoning (‘On God and Man’). And while God hadpermitted evil, he did so ‘for a greater good’, although it lay ‘beyond the forces of human reason to show a priori andin detail in what this good consists’ (112). God and his creatures were bound by the same metaphysical and logicalprinciples and coexisted with him in a particular ‘fellowship’. Ultimately, therefore, ‘human reason, when properlygrasped, never conflicts with the revealed divine faith’, even though the latter eluded it (as Leibniz opined againstJohn Toland’s 1696 Christianity not mysterious).At the heart of much of his endeavour lay Leibniz’s lifelong preoccupation with the welfare and advancement ofmankind; for him, to contribute to the latter and to the glory of God were ‘the same thing’. His inexorable faith inmankind and its progress was wedded to a deeply pragmatic bent whereby theoretical insights should always findpractical applications. In this manner, far from dismissing imagination as inferior, for instance, Leibniz held that itcould be harnessed for the greater good by steering passions toward piety. In ‘On the Imagination of the Future Life’,Leibniz elaborated on the subject:It is well known that martyrs have endured the most excruciating tortures for no other reason thanthat they had a vivid imagination of future pleasure, for it is impossible for us to resist pain or pleasureexcept by means of their opposites. […] This imagination in the best state should, by every apparatus2/3of art, be continuously impressed upon men from infancy, and without distinction, upon the wise noless than upon the common man.As Leibniz summed up, ‘arguments alone are not sufficient to make them go back into themselves; something isneeded which stirs passions and ravishes souls’, ‘leading souls away from the vanity of the world’ (149).Crucially, in this selection of texts, Leibniz reveals his peculiar agility at juggling and dissolving opposing concepts –sin and good deed, change and immutability – as well as his unique skill for redefinition, one which he had no doubthoned during his early legal training. In this way, ‘all the passions can be attributed to God (except those whichinfluence in themselves something bad, like the envy that the ancients so foolishly attributed to their gods), if onetakes them for rational inclinations separated from the confusion of the senses.’ He deployed this particular strategyin his defence of the Trinity: far from entailing an ‘untenable contradiction’, it could be construed as one singleabsolute individual that contained three relative divine persons (‘On the Threefold God’).Rather than discard ancient sources, Leibniz adopted a conciliatory approach, co-opting various sources, modernand ancient, to suit his own agenda.  The Greeks, for instance, had ‘expressed more distinctly’ certain metaphysicalprinciples, such as incorporeal substances and the doctrine of immortality. God, after using ‘the Hebrew race’ ‘as aninstrument of his supreme providence’, had ‘later kindled a new light in the human race’: ‘He did this by infusing theGreek mind with the pursuit of wisdom, so that divine truths might be fortified with certain demonstrations against allthe doubts of men, who must go onwards to progress over generations towards a greater subtlety of thinking’ (‘Onthe Greeks as the Founders of a Sacred Philosophy’, 120).More broadly, Leibniz worked tirelessly towards the reconciliation of the Churches, especially in the wake of theThirty Years War (1618-48). During his time at the court of the Elector, he even composed a series of works inphilosophical theology, the ‘Catholic Demonstrations’, in an attempt to reconcile Protestant and Catholic religiousdoctrines. For Leibniz, ‘the schism is among the greatest evils of the world and the Church’ (238), especially since‘one can be saved through the sincere love of God above all things, whatever communion one belongs to’ (‘The TrueTheology’). This conciliatory impulse culminated in Leibniz’s attempt to flesh out his own system of universal ethics,which revolved around his concept of Justice as famously defined in terms of ‘charity in conformity with wisdom’.Love, too, was ‘nothing other than the state in which one finds one’s pleasure in the perfections of the object love’(‘The Essence of Piety’).Strickland’s volume thus presents us with a thoroughly eclectic selection of texts ranging from the curious – Leibniz’sattempt at proving that the valley of Jehoshaphat is sufficiently large to accommodate all the resurrected – to thedownright iconoclastic – he considers the case of the resurrection of a man raised solely on human flesh frominfancy. Amidst increasing schism, pessimism and uncertainty, the rediscovery of his thought could not be timelier.Audrey Borowski is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford and the author of the upcoming article,‘Leibnizian Musings on Intellectual Automation’. Read more by Audrey Borowski.Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of theLondon School of Economics.Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books3/3

Book review: Leibniz: on god and religion: a reader edited by Lloyd Strickland

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