The Banishment of Death: Leibniz's Scandalous Immortalism

Leibniz upholds immortalism in its extreme form. Nothing ever really dies, for not only the soul but also the organic body is indestructible except by God’s power. Current scholarship may often have overlooked the radical character of these views, but eighteenth-century philosophers did not. They described Leibniz’s doctrine in terms of exilium mortis or “the banishment of death”, which most of them rejected as an implausible, ridiculous, or even scandalous notion. To understand this negative reaction, I reconstruct the German debate among Leibniz’s contemporaries and immediate posterity. First, I trace the origin of the expression exilium mortis back to Leibniz himself. Second, I consider the critical interventions in the 1710s and early 1720s by philologist Pierre Des Maizeaux, theologian Christoph Matthäus Pfaff, alchemist Johann Conrad Creiling, physician Elias Camerarius, philosopher Christian Wolff and others. The questions raised by the disputants still prove engaging from both a historical and theoretical perspective: is the banishment of death a novelty or just an updated version of some traditional belief? How can the living body preserve its own identity through the dramatic transformations caused by death? On the other hand, the general hostility that surrounded the banishment-of-death doctrine suggests that the denial of natural mortality was actually perceived as a threat to Christian dogma – which invites us to revise the naive assumption that immortalist claims should always be regarded as expression of a philosopher’s pious concerns