Conway and Leibniz present sophisticated attempts to reconceptualize the relationship between God and creation in the wake of the Cartesian revolution. In this paper, I will describe Conway’s position on God’s active will in creation, then explain the extent to which Leibniz would agree with Conway’s position.

Conway’s Position: God as Perpetual Actor

Conway’s God is not an omniscient clockmaker who winds creation and abandons it to the ticking of necessity, but an unrelenting eternal artist forever perfecting his masterpiece! For Conway, divine will pulses through existence as an unbroken current, sustaining and transforming all for eternity. As she proclaims this: ‘God’s goodness towards his creatures always remains the same, and his keeping them in existence is a constant act of creation’ (Conway, Principles, VI).

This vision of continuous divine action manifests through Conway’s three pronged metaphysical architecture. Between God and creation stands a ‘Middle Substance’—simultaneously a divine plan and its implementation. This Middle Substance embodies the ‘logos ousios (‘the essential word of the Father’)… Like a plan or musical score’ which unfolds in time as the ‘logos proforikos (‘the word which is expressed and revealed’)… The plan unfolding in time, the playing of a symphony’ (Conway, Principles, IV.2). Through this structure, God’s will operates both as transcendent design and immanent execution—a true auteur who not only composes but conducts and plays every instrument in our cosmic orchestra.

The active nature of God’s will enables the miraculous transmutation of substances. Unlike the rigid categories of Cartesian thought, Conway envisions a fluid creation where ‘all creatures, or the whole of creation, are also a single species in substance or essence, although it includes many individuals gathered into subordinate species and distinguished from each other modally and gradually, but not substantially or essentially’ (Conway, Principles, VI.4). God’s ceaseless creative action enables transformation along this spectrum of being, guiding all creatures toward their ultimate perfection as ‘all creatures will eventually become conscious moral beings and attain the excellent attributes of ‘spirit and light” (Conway, Principles, IX).

While Spinoza’s God is stripped of will and purpose, Conway’s divinity actively intervenes to guide creation’s development. Her system permits creatures to temporarily deviation of divine plan—like musicians who ‘may not be attending to the score as they play or may not have practised enough, so they may mess up’ (Conway, Principles, IV.2)—but God’s persistent action marches toward the teleological end of harmonisation with divine intention. This intimate, responsive deity reflects Conway’s conviction that creation is, at its heart, a moral enterprise guided by divine goodness.

Leibniz’s Points of Agreement: The Priority of Goodness

Leibniz would resonate with Conway’s rejection of mechanical necessity and her insistence on divine purpose. Like Conway, he steadfastly opposes Spinoza’s amoral necessitarianism, affirming instead that God creates with intelligence and for the good. Both philosophers maintain that God acts purposefully, with Leibniz stating that ‘God decrees that a rational agent will do what appears best’ (Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, 13).

This shared commitment to piety extends to their metaphysical systems. Both reject the Spinozistic consequence of univocity, maintaining the ontological distinction between Creator and created, preserving divine transcendence while affirming God’s involvement in the world.

The Great Divergence: God’s Mode of Action

While Conway envisions God’s will operating through direct, Leibniz believes that idea to be both inelegant and potentially demeaning to divine wisdom. For Leibniz, God’s true magnificence lies not in constant tinkering with creation but in the perfection of creation from Genesis and ‘saw that it was good’ (Genesis KJV, I)

This vision crystallises in his doctrine of pre-established harmony, where ‘God originally created the soul [substance] in such a way that everything must arise from it from its own depths, through a perfect spontaneity relative to itself, and yet with a perfect conformity relative to external things’ (Leibniz, New System). Conway’s God plays every note of the cosmic symphony in real time; Leibniz’s God composes a score of such mathematical perfection that it unfolds with flawless precision without further intervention.

The difference becomes starker when we consider their views on substance. Conway’s fluid metaphysics permits actual transmutation—the transformation of one kind of being into another through divine action. Leibniz finds this metaphysically impossible. In his system, each substance possesses a complete concept that determines its entire history, a concept so precisely defined that no actual individual would have existed if the slightest thing had gone differently from the way things go in the actual world. Where Conway sees God enabling fluidity between creatures, Leibniz insists on the immutability of substantial identity established by divine decree.

This fundamental disagreement extends to divine causation. For Conway, God actively intervenes to transform substances according to the divine plan. Leibniz would replace this with his elegant pre-established harmony, where God establishes perfect coordination at creation, allowing substances to develop according to their internal principles while maintaining perfect synchronisation with all others. As he writes, ‘There will be a perfect agreement among all substances, producing the same effect that would be noticed if they communicated through the transmission of species or qualities, as the common philosophers imagine they do’ (Leibniz, New System).

Leibniz’s objection stems from a profound conviction of divine perfection. On the acting God, Libenz critiques the idea as making God’s relationship to creation equivalent to ‘a series of perpetual miracles.’ He argues that ‘In solving problems it is not sufficient to make use of the general cause and to invoke what is called a Deus ex machina. For when one does that without giving any other explanation derived from the order of secondary causes, it is, properly speaking, having recourse to a miracle’ (Leibniz, New System).

This philosophical elegance extends to Leibniz’s account of divine choice. While Conway presents a relatively straightforward voluntarism, Leibniz offers a sophisticated account governed by the principle of sufficient reason: ‘all contingent propositions have reasons to be one way rather than another… based on what is or appears to be best from among several equally possible things’ (Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, 13). By distinguishing between absolute and hypothetical necessity, Leibniz argues that God’s choice is ‘morally necessary’ but not absolutely necessary.

Conclusion: Two Visions of Divine Artistry

In summary, Both philosophers depart from the mechanical universe of Descartes, the amoral necessity of Spinoza, and the materialism of Hobbes. Both affirm that divine goodness governs creation. Yet their different conceptions of how divine will operates manifests itself as a transcendental dichotomy, that of the acting god or the perfect god.

Bibliography

Conway, Anne. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Trans. Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discourse on Metaphysics. In Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. New System of Nature and of the Communication of Substances, as well as of the Union Between the Soul and the Body. In Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Primary Truths. In Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989.