ABSTRACT
Metaphysical reasoning, specifically Leibniz’s argument for this as God’s best of all possible worlds, subverts the Christian faith it purports to defend. Leibniz, renowned as logician and mathematician, is presented here in a less known role: first, in his years-long effort to reconcile the three Western churches, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist; second, in his attempts to explain the dogma of transubstantiation; third, in his theodicy, arguing God’s omniscience and benevolence against the empirical facts of evil and suffering. He fails in all three.
The last of these finds him bested by the Job-like Calvinist skeptic Pierre Bayle. Leibniz’s own outer space musings on yet more perfect worlds unknown to us tacitly concede the force of Bayle’s unsparing analogies.
Nietzsche admires Leibniz for his colossal intellect but senses in him a duplicity or masking. That suggests that Leibniz’s failures in “rational” theology further the positivist nihilism Nietzsche assumes in arguing the dissolution of all claims on behalf of causality, origins, and free will. The moral interpretation of the world, as Leibniz knew it, faces irreversible erosion.
