ABSTRACT
One thing that Henri de Lubac did discover in the otherwise dilapidated Theological Faculty at Lyons was its library, where he treasured finding in it ‘books through which to read the world’, and which unsettled neo-Thomist philosophical orthodoxy and Leibniz’s metaphysics, an attempt to reconcile Plato and Aristotle with Jewish and Christian theology and the ‘mechanical philosophy’ that flourished in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, Leibniz had no time for a metaphysics he found incompatible with traditional doctrines of either the Eucharist or the Incarnation. Yet no less a figure than Bertrand Russell delighted in Leibniz’s unpublished work, finding not only a useful relation between physics and perception but a profound, coherent and essentially Spinozistic system which respected extension, duration and cognito, albeit which might lead to Laplacian determinism. While Leibniz’s notions of time and space still have value, he was viciously mocked by Voltaire in Candide. Descartes, Lacoste reminds us, went as far as to write a theory of the Eucharist (as did Leibniz) while Malebranche attempted to disentangle the inextricable relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’. The ‘confession of the philosopher’, like that of Leibniz, does not replace the theologian’s confession of faith; philosophical reason can always dream of taking the form of calculative reason; as defined by Leibniz, the splendour of the world-as-it-is is only eschatologically verifiable. For Lacoste, the Leibnizian theodicy discerns a strict continuity between origin, present and fulfilment.
