Source:

Sämtliche schriften und briefe series VI, volume 3
Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed)
pp 150-151


Date: 1673?

Translated from the French


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LEIBNIZ: THE AUTHOR OF SIN


[A VI 3, p150]

     Coming to this great question of the Author of Sin, it is commonly believed that one can sidestep the difficulty by saying that sin, in its essence, is only a pure privation without any reality; and that God is not the author of privations. For indeed, people have introduced that famous distinction between the physical and moral aspects of sin, which they misuse a little, although it is right in itself.
     The physical or real aspect of theft, for example, is the object or prey that irritates the poverty of the thief, the visual rays that strike his eyes, and which go into the depths of his soul; the imaginings, the anxieties, and the deliberations which form there, and which ultimately terminate in the conclusion, which is to take advantage of the opportunity, and to undertake the execution of the crime.
     One would not be able to deny that all this is reality, and one would even have to acknowledge that the last determination of the will, after having balanced for a long time, and after it has examined all the circumstances, is a real act, which is in the predicament of the action, as well as the thought and the movement: and nevertheless this last determination is that which makes us criminals.
     Therefore where is the moral part of the sin of which people speak so much? One will perhaps say that it consists in the anomaly, as the Holy Scripture calls it, or in the deformity of the act with regard to the law; which is a pure privation. I remain agreed with that, but I do not see what this contributes to the clarification of our question. For to say that God can be called the author of all that there is real and positive in the sin and yet is not the author of sin, because he is not the author of a privation, is a manifest illusion; it is a remnant of the visionary philosophy of [A VI 3, p151] times past; it is an equivocation of which no reasonable man would let himself accept. I will make this clear with an example. A painter makes two paintings, one of which is large in order to serve as a model for a tapestry, the other is only a small miniature. Let us take the miniature one and say that there are two things to consider within it: firstly, its positive and real aspect, which consists of the painting, the content, the colours, the brush-strokes; and its privative aspect, which is the disproportion to the large painting, or its smallness. It would therefore be to make fun of the world to say that the painter is the author of all that is real in the two paintings, without also being the author of the privative, or of the disproportion which exists between the large one and the small one; for by the same reason, or rather for a stronger reason, one could say that a painter can be the author of a copy or of a portrait, without being the author of the disproportion between the copy and the original, or without being the author of its flaw. For in fact the privative is nothing other than a simple result or infallible consequence of the positive, without having need of a separate author. I am surprised that those people do not go any further, and do not try to persuade us that man himself is not the author of sin, because he is only the author of the physical or real, the privation being a thing of which he is not the author.
     I conclude from what I have just said that those who say that God is the author of all that is real or positive in the sin, and who admit that God is the author of the law, and who nevertheless deny that God is the author of the result of those two things, that is to say, of the deformity between the law and the positive aspect of sin, are not far from Calvin in the way they speak; and that they make God author of the sin without saying it, although they protest that they do the opposite.


© Lloyd Strickland 2003