“Denn Gott macht die Welt und denkt dabei, es könnte ebensogut anders sein”: In this famous passage from Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930), the Austrian writer, allegedly following Leibniz, parodies the lesser-known scholastic distinction between God’s ordained power (potentia Dei ordinata) – the sum of God’s chosen actions in creating the world – and God’s absolute power (potentia Dei absoluta) – the sum of all divine possibilities excluded from the history of salvation. In the scholastic tradition, God’s totality emerges only from the combined vision of both potentiae: It’s the organic whole of what has happened and what could have happened. After a thorough comparison of the various sources, which go back far before Leibniz and culminate in Thomas of Aquin, this paper aims to reconstruct Musil’s re-appropriation of this earlier theological Denkfigur in Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Die Schwärmer, considering the attributes of divine absolute power as the conditio sine qua non of Musil’s famous sense of possibility.
