Steven Nadler. Journal of the History of Philosophy. Volume 46, Issue 4. October 2008.
Forget the mind-body problem. Never mind metaphysical questions about substance. The real issue of philosophy on the Continent in the second half of the seventeenth century was theodicy, or the defense and justification of God’s ways, particularly in the face of apparent imperfections and injustices in the created world and, especially, in the distribution of divine grace. It was theodicean strategy, and its correlative picture of the nature of God and His modus operandi, that pitted rationalists against skeptics; Catholics against Protestants (and other Catholics); and, most interestingly from a philosophical perspective, Cartesians against anti-Cartesians, as well as against each other.
Looking past the finer details of one philosopher or another’s proposed resolution to the problem of evil, the deep question informing any theodicy is: How does God act? More specifically, theodicy concerns the rationality of God’s activity. does God behave as a rational agent? Is He led by practical reason, deciding upon ends to achieve or means to pursue because those ends or means are recognized, according to some objective standard, to be preferable to others? Or, on the other hand, does God’s behavior transcend practical rationality, just because the canons of rationality and the values that guide it are themselves subject to God’s will? to put the question in terms that would have been familiar to Euthyphro, does God choose to do something because it is good, or is it good just because God chooses to do it?
Some early modern philosophers are quite clear on how they conceive of the rationality or intelligibility of God’s activity. For example, Descartes, as is well-known, adopts a completely different answer to this set of questions than Malebranche or Leibniz; there is no real difficulty in deciding on which side of the Euthyphro question each thinker belongs. By contrast, the works of Arnauld-perhaps because in philosophy he was a less systematic thinker than the others, given more to polemical thrusting against the ideas of his opponents than constructing a coherent system of his own, or perhaps because of his Jansenist persuasions-offer a more ambiguous picture.
I argue that, despite recent attempts to moderate Arnauld’s conception of God and provide a somewhat rationalistic model (although certainly not quite as transparently rational as the God of Malebranche or Leibniz), Arnauld is in fact committed to a more radical conception, one approaching (and possibly even surpassing) the voluntarist, Cartesian God. It is not the case that Arnauld’s God acts for reasons, albeit reasons that are inaccessible to human understanding (despite the fact that some texts from his debate with Malebranche suggest as much). rather, Arnauld’s God must be beyond reasons, acting from sheer will alone. For Arnauld, the problem with Malebranche’s God is not simply that His wisdom is transparent to human reason (thanks to Malebranche’s doctrine of the vision in God); it is that His will is led, even governed by that wisdom. This, to Arnauld, not only constitutes a threat to God’s freedom and omnipotence, but it represents a serious anthropomorphization of God’s activity insofar as it models His behavior along the lines of (human) practical rational agency.
I
Because Arnauld the philosopher is primarily a disputative creature, responding critically to the ideas of others, the first task in understanding his conception of God is to outline the view against which he is arguing. And this, in the first instance, is the God of Malebranche.
In the Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, published in 1688 to provide the public with an accessible and entertaining overview of the multifarious parts of his system, Malebranche offers an elegant and succinct statement of the problem of evil. As Theodore, his spokesman, exclaims, “the universe is the most perfect God can create? What! So many monsters, so many disorders, the great number of impious people; does all this contribute to the perfection of the universe?” Aristes, his interlocuter, is thereby led to question either the efficacy of God’s will or the benevolence of God’s intentions:
You confuse me, Theodore. God wills to make the most perfect possible work. For the more perfect it is, the more it will honor Him. That appears evident to me. But I clearly conceive that it would be more accomplished if it were free of the thousands and thousands of defects which disfigure it. That is a contradiction that stops me short. It seems that God has not executed His plan or has not adopted the plan most worthy of His attributes.
In essence, as Theodore will explain, Aristes gets it wrong. God does not will to make the most perfect work. Or, to put it in terms that Leibniz would understand, this is not the best of all possible worlds.
The key to Malebranche’s theodicy, as this is presented in the Dialogues and especially in the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680), lies in what he sees as the generality of God’s will and in the recognition that making a world that is perfect in all of its details—without sin and evil—is, for God, secondary to acting in a way that is most worthy of His attributes. This is true for Malebranche’s solution to the problem of evil both in the realm of nature (when it comes to physical and moral evils) and in the realm of grace (where many apparently virtuous people fail to gain the ultimate felicity).
Before creating the world, Malebranche’s God, like the God of Leibniz, surveys in His eternal understanding an infinity of possible worlds. In addition to the worlds or products (ouvrages) that He may create, however, Malebranche’s God must also consider the variety of possible means of creating and sustaining a world, since presumably one and the same world might be brought about in different ways. “the wisdom of God reveals to Him an infinity of ideas of different works, and all the possible ways of executing his plans.” Part of what the occasionalist Malebranche has in mind here by ‘ways’ (voies) are, in fact, reflected in the laws that may govern a universe and which, as guides to God’s unique and ubiquitous causal activity, are partly responsible for bringing about all the phenomena of that world and keeping things running in a regular manner.
What makes the actual world more worthy of God’s choice relative to any other possible world (among all the possible worlds that contain the Incarnation) is that it is the one world that, in its character, is most consistent with, and thus most expressive of, God’s attributes. This is not because the actual world is without any imperfections. Malebranche concedes, in an opinion that inflamed many of his critics (who, like Leibniz, preferred to believe that the world’s imperfections are only apparent), that the world is full of real defects. “When I open my eyes to consider the visible world, it seems that I discover there so many defects, that I am once again led to believe something that I have nevertheless denied so many times, that the world is the work of blind nature, which acts without design.” Indeed, Malebranche insists that the actual world does not even contain fewer evils than any other possible world. Thus, what makes the actual world the most choiceworthy in God’s eyes is not mainly the phenomena of the world per se. Rather, it is the fact that the laws that govern the universe and its phenomena are of maximum simplicity.
An excellent workman should proportion his action to his work; he does not accomplish by quite complex means that which he can execute by simpler ones, he does not act without an end, and never makes useless efforts. From this, one must conclude that God, discovering in the infinite treasures of his wisdom an infinity of possible worlds (as the necessary consequences of the laws of motion which he can establish), determines Himself to create that world which could have been produced and preserved by the simplest laws, and which ought to be the most perfect, with respect to the simplicity of the ways necessary to its production or to its conservation.
Because God is the sole efficient cause in nature, even after the world is first created and through a kind of ongoing creative activity, God will continue to be responsible for generating all natural phenomena. Thus, God’s primary consideration in selecting a world is that His means of acting in that world-His ordinary operation in bringing things into being and sustaining them and effecting all changes, as this is reflected in the laws of nature-does not dishonor His attributes. And this can be ensured only if things are governed by the simplest laws. These alone would be “the design most worthy of Him.” As examples of such maximally simple laws, Malebranche offers the inertial law of rectilinear motion and an impact principle inspired by Descartes’s rules for the distribution of motion during the collision of bodies.
I am persuaded that the laws of motion which are necessary to the production and the preservation of the earth, and of all the stars that are in the heavens, are reducible to these two: the first, that moved bodies tend to continue their motion in a straight line; the second, that when two bodies collide, their motion is distributed in both in proportion to their size, such that they must afterwards move at an equal speed. These two laws are the cause of all the motions which cause that variety of forms which we admire in nature.
The picture is not yet complete, however, since the most simple laws, just because of their simplicity and generality, can give rise to a wide variety of products (ouvrages). From different initial states of creation, with the same set of basic laws, different subsequent courses of events-different worlds-follow. Malebranche says that God, “from an infinity of possible combinations of causes with their effects” looks to create that one world “that most felicitously reconciles the physical and the moral.” This would be a world in which justice predominates as much as it can, given the most simple laws, and as many people as possible receive their proper deserts-where rewards and punishments (“the physical”) are closely related to deeds (“the moral”). thus, after settling upon the simplest laws, God looks for the most perfect world that could arise from such laws. He then creates an initial state of the universe, knowing that from that state, in accordance with those laws, He will get the world He wants.
This opens the way for the first step in Malebranche’s theodicy. For it is now clear why the world created by God is not the best of all possible worlds. The divine need to establish and follow the simplest laws possible represents a constraint on God’s choice of a resulting world. The actual world is not the most perfect world, absolutely speaking; rather, it is only the most perfect world possible relative to those maximally simple laws.
A work perfect to the degree of eight, or which bears the character of the divine attributes to the degree of eight, produced by means which only express those attributes to the degree of two, provides a total expression of those attributes only of ten. But a work perfect only to the degree of six, or which expresses only to the degree of six the divine attributes, but produced by means that express those attributes also to the degree of six, provides a total expression of those attributes to the degree of twelve. Thus, if God made a choice of one of these two works, He would choose the less perfect: since the less perfect [work] joined to those means would better express the character of His attributes … In a word, God is honored as much by the wisdom of His ways as by the excellence of His works.
In the actual world, not every virtuous person is rewarded or wicked person punished. Indeed, there are many other possible worlds with closer connections between “the physical and the moral,” where more of the virtuous enjoy happiness and more of the wicked suffer misery. But all of those other worlds involve more complex laws-for example, laws with built-in exception clauses that allow virtuous individuals to escape some harm that, by the ordinary course of nature, may be coming their way—and those more perfect worlds may even require God to act often in improvised ways, outside the prescriptions of any law whatsoever—for example, to save a prophet from being eaten by hungry lions into whose den he has been thrown, which (by the laws of nature) is what would ordinarily happen. In short, God wills to accomplish as much justice and goodness as He possibly can, not absolutely, but consistent with the most simple laws. “God can act only according to what He is, only in a way which bears the character of His attributes; thus He does not form His plans independently of the ways of executing them, but chooses the work and the ways which all together express the perfections, which He glories in possessing, better than any other work in any other way.”
With the laws in place and the absolute simplicity of God’s ways guaranteed, Malebranche can now explain not just the imperfection of the world at-large, but also the particular evils contained therein. The conceptual centerpiece of Malebranche’s theodicy is the claim, so frequently found in his writings, that a wise, simple, eternal, and constant God acts only by “general volitions” and (almost) never by “particular volitions.” A general volition is a will to do something that is in accordance with some law or general principle. For example, a law of physics will dictate that if a body of a certain size at rest is struck by a body of a certain size in motion, then it will be moved in a certain way. When Malebranche’s God then moves a body in the appropriate way on the occasion of its being struck by another body, He is acting by a general volition. Similarly, if God causes a feeling of pain in some person on the occasion of his being pricked by a needle, this is done through a general volition, since it is in accordance with the laws of mindbody union that He has established. A particular volition, on the other hand, does not obey any law, but is (relative to the laws) ad hoc. If God were to move a body without its having been struck by another body, or if He were to cause pain in someone without anything having happened to that person’s body, He would be acting by a particular volition. Malebranche insists that such arbitrary acts by God, just because they are not regulated by general laws, are miracles. thus, not only is it the case that Malebranche’s God institutes the most simple laws, but He also is bound by his own nature-as a wise, good, immutable, and absolutely simple being who acts with perfect constancy-to follow those laws in the causal operations through which He makes nature function and to bring events about only when the appropriate occasions occur.
Why, then, is there evil in the world? Why are deformed individuals born? Why are there floods and droughts? Why is there sin and suffering? And why do virtuous people sometimes suffer while vicious people prosper? And why, especially, are not all human beings saved by the grace of God?
Malebranche believes that it is important, above all, to bear in mind that God does not will any of these evils with a particular volition, and He does not choose them for their own sake and regardless of what else happens to be the case.
If rain falls on certain lands, and if the sun roasts others; if weather favorable for crops is followed by hail that destroys them; if a child comes into the world with a malformed and useless head growing from his breast, and makes him wretched; it is not that God has willed these things by particular wills.
These unfortunate events occur because God allows them to occur—or, rather, brings them about—as a part of the ordinary course of nature as this is regulated by its most simple laws. General laws have a wide variety of effects. As anyone whose plans have ever been disturbed by the weather knows, these laws, which on the whole make for an orderly and harmonious world, cannot take into account the convenience and wishes of particular individuals. Birth defects, earthquakes and other natural disorders are but the “necessary consequences [of] laws so simple that they serve to produce everything beautiful that we see in the world.” God, obliged as He is to following the laws of nature, “makes it rain on fallow lands as well as on those that are cultivated” because that is the meteorological result to which the laws lead. Likewise, if a person should be “dropping rocks on the heads of passers-by, the rocks will always fall at an equal speed, without discerning the piety, or the condition, or the good or bad dispositions of those who pass by.” Just as the rain falls where it must, regardless of what lies underneath, so the rocks, falling as rocks do, will land on the heads of the virtuous and the vicious alike. In these and other cases, God is simply carrying out the natural consequences of the laws-laws which are so simple that they admit of no exceptions and which specify that when certain things occur, other things must happen.
God, then, is more committed to acting in a general way and to a nature governed by the most simple laws than he is to the well-being of individuals. As the universal cause, He follows out those laws, come what may to those affected by them. For this reason, Malebranche likes to say that God “permits disorder but He does not create it, He does not will it.” But the word ‘disorder’ is an ambiguous one. An event is a disorder in one very relative sense if it frustrates the ends or ambitions of a particular agent. A rock falling on one’s head is certainly a disorder for the injured party. But from a more global perspective, such an event is perfectly ordered, since it follows from the sequence of previous events in a lawlike way. “It is no disorder for lions to eat wolves, wolves sheep, and sheep the grass that God tends so carefully that He has given it all the things necessary for its own preservation.” For Malebranche, nature is perfectly well-ordered, and that is exactly why disorders happen.
God, of course, could step in at any time and forestall these unfortunate things from occurring. He could prevent droughts, keep fruit from rotting on trees, and stop rocks from falling on the heads of virtuous people. But this would involve Him in constantly interfering with the operations of the laws of nature through particular volitions, thus violating the generality of His ways. It would, in short, be asking God to perform miracles to “correct” nature. But, Malebranche cautions us, “it is a weakness to change one’s mind, it shows a lack of enlightenment or of firmness … Thus one must be careful not to demand miracles from God, or to attribute them to Him at every moment.” Even the sometimes slow-witted Aristes, having well learned his lessons from Theodore, can wax eloquent on the inappropriateness of demanding that God “multiply his volitions” for the sake of reducing the number of evils in the world.
God could convert all people and prevent all disorders. But He must not thereby upset the simplicity and uniformity of His action. For He must be honored through the wisdom of His ways as well as through the perfection of His creatures. He does not allow monsters; it is He who makes them. But He makes them only in order to alter nothing in His action, only out of respect for the generality of His ways, only to follow exactly the laws of nature He has established and has nonetheless established not for the monstrous effects they must produce, but for those effects more worthy of His wisdom and goodness. For He wills them only indirectly, only because they are the natural consequence of His laws.
This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it is the only possible world worthy of God’s choice. It is a world full of imperfections, sins, and inequities. But the reason why bad things happen to good people and good things to bad people is not because God, through particular volitions, wants it to work out that way. That would seriously put in question God’s goodness and justice. Rather, everyone, virtuous and vicious, is subject to the vicissitudes of nature’s lawlike ways; no one, no matter what his character, can be fully immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But then again, since everyone is born a sinner, no one has a right to complain if his happiness is not complete.
II
There are many things about Malebranche’s theodicy that deeply disturb Arnauld. the notion that there are real defects or evils in God’s creation is absolutely unacceptable to him. And much of the Philosophical and Theologial Reflections on the New System of Nature and Grace (1684), Arnauld’s long critique of Malebranche’s Treatise, is devoted to showing that a proper philosophical and theological understanding of divine providence requires that God act by particular volitions, with a providential care for every particular detail of creation, and not by general volitions. Above all, as I have shown elsewhere, Arnauld sees a serious threat to God’s freedom and power in Malebranche’s picture of God’s mode of action. The notion that God has real volitions that do not get carried out—such as the will that rain fall only where it is needed, or the will to save all human beings—must, Arnauld insists, necessarily undermine God’s omnipotence. Malebranche himself admits that “[God’s] wisdom [sagesse] in a sense renders Him impotent [impuissant]; for since it obliges Him to act by the most simple ways, it is not possible for all humans to be saved, because of the simplicity of His ways … God loves His wisdom more than His work … Because His wisdom prescribes means which most bear the character of His attributes.” Statements like this only drive Arnauld to distraction.
Arnauld was, throughout his philosophical career, committed to an impassioned defense of God’s omnipotence and freedom. This is a theme early on in his writings, such as in his “Fourth Set of Objections” to Descartes’s Meditations (1641) and in the subsequent correspondence between the two. It is also a prominent feature of his treatment of Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics in their correspondence of 1686. However, there is a more fundamental and problematic characteristic of Malebranche’s system that is what, in Arnauld’s eyes, gives rise to the difficulties regarding divine power and liberty. It is Malebranche’s conception of God as a rational agent whose will is guided by His wisdom or understanding-a deity who wills what He wills because there are reasons for Him to do so, because He sees that that is what He should, even (as Arnauld views it) must, will.
Malebranche is committed to the view that God acts in a rational manner, akin to human agency guided by practical reason, and does things for an intelligible and objective purpose. A rational being is one for whom, when it comes to choice, reasons matter. Such an agent is motivated teleologically by aims; he acts for the sake of achieving something. And he strives to achieve what he does because he recognizes it as good, as desirable in its own right. Moreover, his rationality is instrumental: he selects means toward his desired goal because he justifiably believes those means to be the most efficient way to it. To pursue ends that one does not believe to be good, or to follow a path toward one’s end that one knows not to lead there, is to act irrationally.
An illuminating and well-known example of a rational God is, of course, Leibniz’s deity. Leibniz’s God contemplates an infinity of possible worlds and recognizes that one of them (the one that contains the simplest laws and the greatest amount of perfection/reality and richness of phenomena) is, in absolute terms, the best of all. His desire is to produce as much perfection as possible, and so He brings that best of all possible worlds into existence. The optimality of that world provides Him with a compelling reason to create it; and had there been no such compelling reason, Leibniz’s God would not have created a world at all. The principle of sufficient reason is binding even upon God. As Leibniz says, “[God] does nothing without acting in accordance with supreme reason.” This is true for all of God’s choices, large and small. It is beautifully reflected in Leibniz’s argument for his famous law of the identity of indiscernibles, which states that there is no such thing as two individuals indiscernible from each other. The reason why there are not and cannot be two distinct things in nature that are absolutely identical in all intrinsic respects-two leaves, or two snowflakes, without any “difference within themselves”—is because, in the complete absence of any differences between the two, God would have no compelling reason to put one of them in one place and the other in another place (since they would have to occupy different places in space and time), rather than vice versa. Consequently, God, “who never does anything without wisdom,” will not create such things. “I infer from [the principle of sufficient reason] … That there are not in nature two real, absolute beings, indiscernible from each other, because if there were, God and nature would act without reason in treating the one otherwise than the other; and that therefore God does not produce two pieces of matter perfectly equal and alike.”
On Leibniz’s view, then, God is never indeterminate, never acting without knowledge of what He is doing and therefore always motivated and (morally) determined by reasons to do what He does. “His will is always decided, and it can only be decided by the best.” God can never have what Leibniz calls a “primitive particular will”—that is, an ad hoc volition that is independent of any law or principle. “Such a thing would be unreasonable. [God] cannot determine upon Adam, Peter, Judas or any individual without the existence of a reason for this determination; and this reason leads of necessity to some general enunciation. the wise mind always acts according to principles, always according to rules, and never according to exceptions.”
There are, of course, important and substantive differences between the theodicies of Leibniz and Malebranche. They disagree about the status of evil, the optimality of the world, and the nature of God’s volitions. despite his claim that “Father Malebranche’s system … Amounts to the same as mine,” Leibniz himself was certainly conscious of the divergences. But he also recognized that, with regard to the general structure of God’s modus operandi, he and Malebranche were in basic agreement. “I agree with Father Malebranche that God does things in the way most worthy of him.”
In his early works, Malebranche often seems more interested in defending the sheer power of God’s will rather than its wisdom and rationality. “God is a being whose will is power and infinite power,” he wrote in the Christian Conversations. But even in the Search After Truth, and especially in the Treatise on Nature and Grace, it is clear that Malebranche’s God, no more than Leibniz’s God, does not act arbitrarily. This is certainly true in the ordinary course of nature (and of grace), where God’s causal activity is guided by laws. But it is the second-order fact that God must choose the most simple laws for the world He creates, and then strive to produce as just and perfect a world as possible relative to those laws, that shows that there is a higher authority than His will alone. God, Malebranche says, “cannot act against Himself, against His own wisdom and light.” God may be indifferent as to whether or not anything other than He exists, indifferent as to “what He does external to Himself,” but “He is not indifferent, although perfectly free, in the way in which He does it; He always acts in the wisest and most perfect way possible. He always follows the immutable and necessary order.”
God’s power is indeed, in itself, infinite and incomprehensible. However, once God does decide to act “external to Himself,” that power is subordinated to His wisdom, and especially to what Malebranche calls “Order.” Order consists in the eternal, immutable, uncreated verities that stand above all things—above even the laws of nature and grace. These are pure logical and mathematical truths, absolutely true with the highest necessity, but also moral and metaphysical principles about what Malebranche calls “relations of perfection.” they determine the relative value of various kinds of being, and even of God’s own attributes. Order shows that a soul is more noble than a body and a human being more worthy than a dog; and it posits that, as important as God’s mercy is, the simplicity and generality of His ways is even more important, and thus cannot be violated even to save a good person from damnation. Order is “the exemplar of all God’s works,” and “all His volitions are necessarily in conformity” with its principles. The dictates of Order serve God as universal reasons for everything He does. “God Himself cannot will otherwise than as this order prescribes … [it] has the force of law with regard to God Himself.” even if, on some rare occasion, God must act by a particular volition and violate the laws of nature or grace to perform a miracle, this will be only because Order demands it.
Thus, when God, considering the infinite possibilities in His understanding, chooses to create a world, it is Order that sets one of His attributes (simplicity) above the others, which in turn determines which laws He will establish for the world, and then how, given those laws, He can thereby accomplish as much perfection as possible in the relationship of the physical to the moral.
Assuming that God wants to act, I contend that he will always do it in the most wise manner possible, or in the manner which most bears the character of his attributes. I insist that this is never an arbitrary or indifferent matter for Him … Immutable Order, which consists in the necessary relationship that exists between the divine perfections, is the inviolable law and the rule of all His volitions.
God’s wisdom, the dwelling place of Order, stands above his will and guides it. “In Himself God has good reasons for everything He does.”
III
In the midst of his extensive, multifarious and often confusing critique of Malebranche, it is sometimes hard to discern what exactly Arnauld finds most objectionable about the Oratorian’s system. Thus, there are occasions when Arnauld, with his attention focused more narrowly on the issue of particular vs. General volitions-and especially the lack of providential care for all aspects of creation that must characterize Malebranche’s God, acting as He does only in law—like ways through volontés générales—speaks as if his God is no less rational an agent than the God of Malebranche (or Leibniz). Arnauld, that is, sometimes seems to describe God’s will as if it were guided by wisdom. “God does not act capriciously,” Arnauld insists in several contexts, but has His reasons for what He does. “It is not at all true that God acts without an end or design.” In a letter to Malebranche, he asks rhetorically: “How will you prove that God did not have any reason to distribute among men their prosperity or adversity by particular volitions?” In the Reflections itself, he cites approvingly the words of St. Augustine: “Who will dare to say that God has created all things without reason [irrationabiliter]?” Above all, there is Arnauld’s concern, evident throughout the Reflections and other writings, to safeguard the universal scope of God’s providential plan.
It is tempting to conclude from this kind of language that the only thing that Arnauld objects to is the transparency of God’s reasons, as this is depicted by Malebranche. With the doctrine of the vision in God, Malebranche provides human beings with a natural, ordinary, and ongoing access to divine ideas and their relationships. And this means that human beings perceive the eternal truths that constitute Order in precisely the same way that God does. We see, no less than does God-through the numerically identical ideas and with the same absolute necessity-not just the truths of mathematics, metaphysics, and physics, but also the relative values of (or “relations of perfections” between) things that, in propositional form, constitute moral truths. We also thereby see the determinate relationships among God’s attributes, allowing us to apprehend the nature of God’s justice and ascertain the reasoning behind the laws of nature and grace. In short, for Malebranche, human beings can consult divine wisdom and perceive “the immutable order that has the force of law with regard to God.”
This is what, in the first instance, is intolerable to Arnauld.
We believe that God’s providence extends to all things; this is one of the primary truths of the Christian religion. But to know how this happens and in what way everything that happens in the world is directed, regulated, and governed by the secret orders of this infinite providence is something that infinitely surpasses our intelligence.
On a superficial reading, then, what Arnauld appears to be reacting to in Malebranche’s account is not God’s rationality per se, not the structure of God’s modus operandi (with wisdom guiding will), but rather the transparency and accessibility to humans of God’s reasons. Throughout the Reflections, Arnauld is insistent on the “inscrutability” and “incomprehensibility” of God’s judgments.
What could be more bold and more presumptuous of blind human beings, full of shadows, and so little capable of discovering on their own what is hidden in God, than to try to judge for certain, solely by the idea of the perfect being, without the aid of any divine revelation, what is more or less worthy of His wisdom.
It exceeds the natural cognitive capacities of human beings to know what is more or less worthy of God’s attributes and ways of acting. This applies to God’s behavior both in the realm of nature and in the realm of grace. Why, contrary to what Malebranche claims, does not God will-even with a simple volition-to save all individual human beings? And why does God not always give to a person who receives grace an amount sufficient to overcome his concupiscence? In these and all other cases, Arnauld seems to be saying, God has His reasons, but they must remain cachées in His “impenetrable judgements.”
On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that, while Arnauld is certainly troubled by Malebranche’s account of the transparency of divine reason, there is much more to his critique of Malebranche’s conception of God. When Arnauld insists that Malebranche’s mistake is to rendre raison des jugements impénétrables de Dieu, the problem is not simply Malebranche’s claims about the transparency of God’s wisdom. Rather, Arnauld wants to defeat Malebranche’s whole way of conceiving the relationship between will and wisdom in God. God, for Arnauld, does not “consult His wisdom” (even a hidden wisdom), as Malebranche would have it. this is a completely false and inappropriate way to think of God’s attributes and the structuring of His activity.
Did he [Malebranche] really think that this was an expression perfectly conforming to the idea of the perfect being, to say of God that He consults His wisdom? One consults only when one is in doubt; and one consults about how to accomplish one’s desires only when there may be some difficulty in achieving what one desires. Neither the one nor the other can be said about the perfect being, whose knowledge is infinite and whose will is all-powerful.
Part of the problem for Arnauld, as I mentioned above, is that to distinguish wisdom from will in God—even by what Descartes calls a “distinction of reason”—and have the former guide the latter by providing compelling (if not causally determining or necessitating) reasons for its choices undermines divine freedom. Malebranche is fond of saying that “God’s wisdom renders him, in a sense, impotent.” Possibly a good compatibilist when it comes to certain aspects of divine freedom (like Leibniz), and perhaps taking comfort in the ‘in a sense’ (pour ainsi dire) qualification, as well as in God’s ultimate indifference as to whether or not to create a world in the first place, Malebranche is not particularly troubled by the implications of this for divine freedom. But such a claim is especially problematic for Arnauld, since he conceives of God’s freedom as consisting in a “liberty of indifference,” absolutely undetermined, even uninfluenced in the creation of things outside Himself by the dictates of wisdom, or of anything whatsoever external to the will itself.
By following Malebranche in the manner in which he conceives God, I do not see how He can be indifferent to creating or not creating something outside Himself, if He was not indifferent to choosing among several works and among several ways of producing them. For God … According to [Malebranche], having consulted His wisdom, is necessarily determined to produce the work that it [wisdom] has shown him to be the most perfect, and to choose the means that it has shown Him also to be the most worthy of Him.
Malebranche’s God, Arnauld claims, cannot possibly satisfy what he sees as St. Thomas’s legitimate demand that the will of God remain perfectly self-determining, never willing anything external to itself ex necessitate. To be fair, Malebranche, despite his deterministic language, strives to preserve the contingency of God’s creative act. But—and this is Arnauld’s point—Malebranche’s account fails miserably in this regard, and ends up subjecting God to “a more than stoical necessity.” Indeed, Arnauld seems to be saying, how could it be otherwise? In God, reasons—that is, (logically) antecedent reasons—must inevitably end up being determining and necessitating reasons. For Arnauld, it seems, there is, when it comes to the relationship between reasons and the will in a perfectly rational being, no space between necessitating determination and absolute indetermination, such that there can be reasons that, to use Leibniz’s phrase, “incline without necessitating.” In short, Arnauld, in the name of divine freedom, rejects the Scholastic (but non-thomistic) thesis of the priority of divine understanding over divine will. Nothing, according to Arnauld, moves or determines the will of God, not even reasons.
More fundamental than the idea that wisdom must not exercise a determining influence on will in God, however, is Arnauld’s more radical refusal to distinguish between will and wisdom in God in the first place. One must not, he warns, speak of God “consulting His wisdom” before He wills, “as if His will is not His wisdom, as if everything that He wills is not essentially wise as soon as He wills it.” Arnauld, again, cites approvingly in this context the words of St. Thomas: “God’s will is God Himself,” adding the following gloss: “note that he does not say that it is the wisdom of God that determines His will … But that it is the divine will that determines itself, freely and indifferently, toward all things to which it does not bear a necessary relation, that is, to all things that are not God.”
This talk of God’s wisdom (or understanding) being identical with His will and of the “indifference” of that will should, of course, sound familiar to anyone acquainted with Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. Descartes, famously taking Euthyphro’s side, insisted that “if anyone attends to the immeasurable greatness of God, he will find it manifestly clear that there can be nothing whatsoever which does not depend on Him. This applies not just to everything that subsists, but all order, every law, and every reason for anything’s being true or good.” God is therefore absolutely “indifferent” and undetermined not only with respect to whether or not to create a world and whether to create this world rather than any other, but also with respect to what truths and laws He establishes.
God did not will the creation of the world in time because He saw that it would be better this way than if He had created it from eternity; nor did He will that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two right angles because He recognized that it could not be otherwise, and so on. On the contrary, it is because He willed to create the world in time that it is better this way than if He had created it from eternity; and it is because He willed that the three angles of a triangle should necessarily equal two right angles that this is true and cannot be otherwise; and so on in other cases.
Descartes goes on to say that “if some reason for something’s being good had existed prior to His preordination, this would have determined God to prefer those things which it was best to do. But on the contrary, just because He resolved to prefer those things which are now to be done, for this very reason, in the words of Genesis, ‘they are very good’; in other words, the reason for their goodness depends on the fact that He exercised His will to make them so.”
The assumption behind this doctrine is that, in an absolutely simple and omnipotent being such as God, will and understanding are one and the same thing, distinguishable ne quidem ratione. “In God, willing and knowing are a single thing in such a way that by the very fact of willing something He knows it and it is only for this reason that such a thing is true.” thus, for God to know that 1+1=2 is identical to God willing that 1+1=2.
Descartes’s point is not just that God’s wisdom is hidden from us; nor is it merely that divine wisdom does not causally determine divine will. It is a much more drastic claim. The relationship between will and wisdom in God is so unlike their relationship in human beings—where will and understanding are distinct faculties of the mind, and the former cannot function unless the latter presents to it ideas for consideration—that no analogy can be drawn from the human for the purpose of understanding the divine. As Jean-luc Marion has so eloquently shown, what Descartes is rejecting is the Scholastic (Suarezian) doctrine of the univocity of understanding between God and creatures, whereby terms employed for the conception of the former’s mode of understanding are applicable in a univocal (or even analogical) sense to the conception of the latter’s mode of understanding. nothing, for Descartes, “can belong univoce to God and to creatures.” God’s activity, then, is not to be modeled on practical rational agency, lest we “conceive of God as if He were some kind of superman, who sets this or that end for himself, and strives for it by these or those means, which is certainly completely unworthy of God.”
Now, one of the highly contentious questions in Arnauld scholarship concerns the extent to which he follows his seventeenth-century philosophical mentor in accepting the divine creation of the eternal truths. Many Cartesians-including Malebranche, for whom the ideas in God are eternal and uncreated-vigorously reject the doctrine. Does Arnauld, who was certainly familiar with the texts in which Descartes lays out his views, reject it as well? Most scholars are in agreement that he does.
There is no need for me to go into this question here in any detail, since Denis Moreau, in his magnificent study of the Arnauld-Malebranche debate, has, to my mind, persuasively shown that Arnauld does, in fact-and despite his refusal explicitly to endorse (or reject) the doctrine-accept the creation of the eternal truths. Regardless of the case for or against Arnauld as a partisan of the creation of the eternal truths, however, what is clear is that Arnauld shares the fundamental and substantive assumptions about God which underlie that Cartesian doctrine: God’s will and God’s understanding are one and the same, and God wills everything outside Himself “freely and indifferently.” Moreover, as Moreau shows, what is really at stake between Arnauld and Malebranche is a deep theological disagreement over the question of univocity. Malebranche, with his doctrine of the vision in God, opts for a rather bold version of the univocity principle, while Arnauld is unequivocally on the side of equivocity. This is evident, among many texts, in Arnauld’s constant warnings not to anthropomorphize God’s ways: “[Malebranche] speaks about [God] as if he were speaking about a human, in making Him consult His wisdom on everything He would like to do … As if His will, in order to will nothing other than what is good, had need of being regulated by something other than itself.”
The problem with Moreau’s overall account, however, is that he does not go far enough along the path that Arnauld traces, and thus he fails to see how radical Arnauld’s conception of God really is. For everything points to Arnauld’s God being an ultimately arbitrary deity who does not act for reasons at all-indeed, a deity who, in His being, transcends practical rationality altogether.
While properly stressing the deep divide between Arnauld and Malebranche on the relationship between will and wisdom in God-he focuses on what he calls a combat de Dieux between the two thinkers-and aligning Arnauld with Descartes on the coincidence of the two divine attributes, Moreau still seems committed to seeing in Arnauld’s thought a rational God, one whose will is guided by reasons, albeit reasons that do not have their source in a sagesse external to volonté and that remain impénétrable to human beings. He is, above all, concerned to show that Arnauld’s God is not an arbitrary or capricious God.
Arnauld in effect never wrote “God acts without reason.” He wanted to highlight an epistemological incapacity [in us] by insisting that we can never “give a reason” for what God has done … [the lutherans say] that God is an agent without reason, whose sole law is sit pro ratione voluntas [“let the will be its own reason”]. Arnauld opposes this and seems to develop a theology of divine motivation: the action of God is reasonable and reasoned, it is that of a wisdom.
In Moreau’s conception of Arnauld’s God, the attributes of will and wisdom “interpenetrate,” whereby “the will wills and reasons, and reason reasons and wills [la volonté veut et raisonne et la raison raisonne et veut].” Moreau speaks of “a conjunction of the indifferent and the necessary in God.” The indifference lies in the fact that the divine will is undetermined by anything outside itself. The necessity, however, consists in the fact that God could not have willed anything other than what He did in fact will, just because of those (determining) reasons that lie within the will itself.
Moreau acknowledges that one can find such a reading of Descartes’s creation of the eternal truths doctrine in the recent literature, and uses this fact to bolster his case (since he sees Arnauld as simply adopting the Cartesian account). Hélène Bouchilloux, for example, insists that Descartes, while certainly not falling into any kind of Spinozistic necessitarianism, nonetheless “defends a freedom of the divine will that excludes any contingency in its action.” Nothing outside God’s will determines it to will what it does. But there is nonetheless a certain necessity in its willing what it wills, a necessity that comes from the depths of the divine will itself just because of the identity of wisdom and will in God. “The omnipotence of God does not consist in being able to doing something other than what has been done … The activity of God’s will conjoins freedom and necessity.”
According to Moreau, Arnauld’s seemingly strong—and, to my mind, definitive— declaration that “[we] cannot provide any reason [for what God has done] other than the will He had to do what He has done” is, in fact, only a relative epistemological claim (we cannot find any such reason), one that is primarily a polemical device to provide as strong a counter as possible to Malebranche’s belief that the reasons for God’s volitions can be rendered transparent. Arnauld, Moreau is saying, is “transformed into a defender of theological voluntarism” merely as a defensive maneuver, and not as a substantive position. Moreau’s Arnauld is still a partisan of theological rationalism, and his God is still bound by the principle of sufficient reason, although operating by reasons that, to us, are inscrutable. “Arnauld opens the way for a theology governed by what one might call ‘the principle of reason incapable of being rendered’ [le principe de raison ne pouvant être rendue].” essentially, on Moreau’s reading, the substance of Arnauld’s objection to Malebranche on this particular matter is limited to two issues: the priority of wisdom over will in God and the transparency of God’s reasons. It does not, however, extend to the way those reasons operate within the divine will, to the idea that the divine will is informed by wisdom. Apparently, it is acceptable for the will to be determined by reasons as long as those reasons are inscrutable (to creatures) and not outside the will/wisdom compound.
Moreau, then, would object to my interpretation by arguing that it leaves Arnauld with an arbitrary and capricious God, and that Arnauld clearly did not intend his God to be arbitrary and capricious-after all, Arnauld so often stresses the contrary (Dieu n’agit pas par caprice). Jean laporte adopts a similar interpretive stance with respect to Descartes’s doctrine, arguing, like Bouchilloux, that “indifference” must not be confused with “arbitrariness” or “caprice.” this, he says, would be to put puissance before other attributes, which is just as serious a mistake as putting any other attribute before puissance.
But it is not entirely clear what Arnauld means to deny when he says that “God is not capricious.” An act of will can be capricious if it is not moved by (logically) antecedent reasons. I do not see how, given everything Arnauld says about the relationship between wisdom and will in God and given the kinds of criticisms he levels at Malebranche, he can avoid the conclusion that God is capricious or arbitrary in this sense. Indeed, the very same arguments premised on divine freedom that Arnauld uses against Malebranche’s God (for whom reasons lie outside the will, in His wisdom) would also undermine the reason- or wisdom-infused will of Arnauld’s God as He is portrayed by Moreau. As I have argued, Arnauld rejects a divine will determined or even inclined by reasons, since in his eyes any such reasons-even if they are (as Moreau suggests) “coincident” with the will (whatever that might mean)-must collapse into reasons that determine or necessitate, and therefore compromise God’s freedom of indifference.
Thus, I am unable to accept Moreau’s reading, whereby the will of Arnauld’s God, while coincident with His wisdom, remains determined, even (to use Moreau’s own term) necessitated, by reasons. Making those reasons internal to the will by stressing the identification of will and wisdom in God does not, I believe, make such a reading any more palatable. Perhaps it may work as an interpretation of Descartes on the eternal truths, as Moreau, Laporte, and Bouchilloux insist; I cannot address that issue here. But if that is the case, then Arnauld, in fact, must be seen as going further than Descartes, recognizing the truly radical potential of the Cartesian doctrine and embracing it. There seems to be no getting around the fact that Arnauld’s God is an arbitrary God, a God for whose will there are no (determining) reasons-certainly not outside the will, but neither, I argue, within it.
If we are asked why God has created the world, we should reply only that it is because He wanted to; and … If we are asked again why He wanted to, we should not say, as [Malebranche] does, that “He wanted to obtain an honor worthy of Himself.” The idea of God does not allow us to accept Malebranche’s proposition. We ought rather to say that He wanted to because He wanted to, that is, that we ought not to seek a cause of that which cannot have one.
To say, as Moreau does, that Arnauld’s God “has His reasons that our reason cannot know” might allow Arnauld to avoid the transparency of Malebranche’s God that he finds so offensive, but I fail to see how it will allow him to avoid the problems for divine freedom that he raises against the Oratorian. On Moreau’s reading, it is hard to see how God’s will does not have a cause, even if that cause is a wisdom that “interpenetrates” the will itself.
But what, then, does Arnauld mean when he denies that God acts capriciously or arbitrarily? let me suggest that what he means by ‘capricious’ is “unrelated to any reasons whatsoever.” He can then argue that his God is not capricious in this very broad sense. While the will of Arnauld’s God is not moved by antecedent (or, as Moreau-concerned about the suggestion of priority-might prefer to say, necessitating) reasons, there are reasons related to the actions of Arnauld’s God that are consequences of God’s will, just because they are created by it. God’s will, that is, is a rule or reason unto itself. As Arnauld says, in a passage quoted above, what God wills “is wise as soon as He wills it.” the implication is that God’s willing x is what makes x wise. Or, God’s doing x is what makes x a reasonable thing to do. These ex post facto reasons, created by the act of willing itself, are what allow Arnauld to continue to speak of God’s will and God’s actions as raisonnables. God’s volitions and actions are reasonable not because they are guided by reasons, internal or otherwise, but because they make reasons.
Take, for example, the matter of the distribution of grace. Arnauld the Jansenist must (and does) hold that God’s grace is not given to an individual because of anything he or she may have done to deserve it. It must be an entirely gratuitious gift, unearned and unrelated to merit. Why, then, does God give grace to a person? there is no legitimate response to this question other than referring to God’s will here, acting with unmotivated mercy. But God having so provided a person with grace, it can now be said that, ipso facto, it was rightly and reasonably done, although we cannot possibly see any reasons for the gift, and Jansenist theology tells us that, prior to God’s willing it, there were no reasons.
This point can be further illuminated by considering an objection that might be raised against my reading of Arnauld. In his critique of Malebranche’s understanding of God’s general volitions, Arnauld insists that Malebranche fails to understand the difference between God acting by general laws (which he takes to be Malebranche’s view) and God acting according to general laws but by particular volitions (which he insists is the proper way to understand God’s activity: Dieu [agit] selon les lois générales de la nature). But, the objection runs, does this not imply that Arnauld’s God does indeed act for reasons, in accordance with certain normative standards (albeit ones that He has created)? Unlike His work in the realm of grace, Arnauld’s God might seem to act in the realm of nature in purposive, law-governed, and thus rationally determined ways. (Indeed, one of Arnauld’s complaints about Malebranche is that he makes God’s ways with respect to grace too much like His ways in the ordinary course of nature.)
In fact, the central point of Arnauld’s criticism of Malebranche here is to stress the particularity of God’s volitions, not their lawlikeness. Arnauld’s reference to His acting in accordance with (selon) general laws serves mainly to set up an alternative to His acting by (par) general laws, thus highlighting his claim that such laws cannot be, as Malebranche would have it, identical with God’s volitions. However, assuming that the reference to the lawlikeness of God’s volitions is to be taken seriously and not just as a rhetorical point, Arnauld can be read as saying that even in the realm of nature, the rationality or reasonableness of God’s ways is a consequence of what He wills to do, not an antecedent. Arnauld’s point, as I understand it, is that while God is ultimately an arbitrary being whose will is not determined by any reasons, He does not therefore act in unpredictable and inconsistent ways. Rather, there is a regularity in God’s actions in nature that is expressed by the ordinary course of events in the world and captured (but not dictated) by the laws of nature. God, Arnauld says, operates “under the appearance of inferior [i.e., natural] causes and through the ordinary course of things in the world.” Put another way, for Arnauld, the laws of nature are descriptive of God’s actions, not prescriptive upon them. There is no order or set of laws that serve normatively for God’s will and that explain why God wants and causes nature to proceed in the way it does.
Of course, if God’s will is the source of reasons in the way I have described, then what Arnauld is really saying is that God is beyond rationality. This is true not only because all the norms of rationality (logical, mathematical, moral, and metaphysical) and all reasons for the events of nature and grace have their source in God’s will alone, but especially because God’s being and activity, considered in their most absolute form, independent of any particular choices God may have made, essentially lack the structure that makes practical rational agency possible.
IV
It is certainly possible that Arnauld did not see the radical consequences of his conception of God. After all, there are, as Moreau stresses, Arnauld’s continued references to God’s reasons, hidden as those reasons may be. And Arnauld was a great defender of what he saw as the proper conception of divine providence. Perhaps Arnauld was not aware of the difficulties raised for divine rational agency by his identification of will and wisdom in God. In that case, there is a tremendous tension at the heart of his philosophical theology.
And yet, it is very hard to believe that the usually razor-sharp and logically rigorous Arnauld did not know exactly what he was doing. Indeed, I would say that Arnauld was the one who saw the radical consequences of the Cartesian conception of God and used it for his own devices. If Arnauld really is in the same camp as Descartes on the creation of the eternal truths-and I think that Moreau has answered that question-then he (perhaps like Descartes, perhaps not) recognized that ultimately God’s will is an arbitrary will, absolutely unbound by any canons of rationality or value. Arnauld may appear, prima facie, to want to have a Dieu raisonnable (although one who is also a Dieu caché). But for Arnauld, given his identification of will and wisdom in God and other theological commitments, God does not just transcend human rationality; He transcends practical rational agency altogether.