4. Criticisms of Theodicy in the Enlightenment and
in Kant. The wide influence of the Theodicy is shown
not only in the spirit of intellectual optimism of the
Enlightenment, but also in the clarity and depth of
the criticisms which it evoked. In spite of the harsh
conflicts between Newtonians and Leibnizians, Samuel
Clarke's Boyle Lectures show a great agreement on
teleological and theological principles. Pope's Essay
on Man is widely regarded as having been influenced
by the Theodicy, perhaps through conversations with
Bolingbroke. Appearing in many editions in France,
Leibniz' work supported a popular optimism which
Voltaire, stirred by the destructive fury of the Lisbon
earthquake, satirized in Candide and helped to dispel.
It was this theological current whose logic Hume
exposed with relentless analysis in the Dialogues con-
cerning Natural Religion (1779); in it Philo states
Epicurus' old dilemma in the simplified form (it cannot
be true, both that evil exists, and that God is both
omnipotent and perfectly good) in which the problem
of theodicy has recently been revived.
Immanuel Kant criticized all previous attempts at
a theodicy in his short essay “Ueber das Misslingen
aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee” (“On
the Failure of All Philosophical Attempts at a
Theodicy”). It was written in 1791, after the three
Critiques but before his work on “Religion within the
Limits of mere Reason.” In his precritical period he
had still been intent upon settling the “distinctness of
the fundamental principles of natural theology and
morals” by placing teleology at the center of his argu-
ment. Now, having placed the problems of theology
beyond the range of theoretical reason, establishing the
primacy of the practical reason and the moral law,
defining its postulates, and, finally, reconciling the two
through teleological judgments involving feelings of
perfection, he applies these insights in a revision of
the problem of theodicy in a style reminiscent of
Leibniz' Causa Dei..., not only in its syllogistic
structure of defense and rebuttal, but in his tripartite
ordering of the divine attributes: goodness, omniscience
and omnipotence, and holiness. These, he holds, must
be challenged by the empirical fact of disteleology or
anti-purpose (Zweckwidrigkeit). Moral anti-purpose
(das Böse) refutes will as means; physical anti-purpose
(Evil) refutes will as end; and a third anti-purpose, the
disproportion of physical suffering to moral evil, refutes
the holiness of God's justice. Hence all previous
theodicies, resting upon the intellect, have failed.
Yet there is the demand for cosmic justice, with
inadequate support from experience, and Kant pro-
poses that “more effective grounds may be found,
which will absolve the wisdom which has faced
accusation, not ab instantia since we can never be
certain that our reason can arrive at the insight through
experience alone of the relationship in which the world
stands to the highest wisdom” (Academy ed., VIII, 263).
Following the insight of Job's triumph over his friends,
he finds these grounds not through speculative wisdom
nor through moral wisdom alone, though both assure
us of the possibility of a teleology, but through “truth-
fulness” (
Wahrhaftigkeit)—not truth, which is un-
available—and a sense of moral uprightness and formal
conscientiousness. This is not a simple justification
through faith, but through the cosmic demands implicit
in the moral uprightness of the individual, which are
possible but not justifiable theoretically.
