Acts of God -- Part 2 -- Philosophical Debates on the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
From God and the Pandemic
With the birth of modernity, the association between angry deities as the source of natural disasters was summarily rejected, even though this perception remained embedded deep in the psyche of ministers, rabbis, imams, other religious representatives, and the masses. When a disaster, or in this case, the coronavirus pandemic began, a chorus of religious leaders immediately began citing scripture and blamed the deaths of innocents on the nations' sinfulness.
If we time-traveled to Lisbon on November 1, 1755, shortly after the famous earthquake that destroyed 30,000 people, we would have heard a similar theological discussion to the coronavirus pandemic of our time. Besides the earthquake, a tidal wave followed and caused considerably more damage to the city.
Aside from the earthquake's immediate damage, fires also broke out throughout the city and completed the work of destruction. It was a virtual trifecta disaster.
Religious pundits claimed that Lisbon's offenses were legion; it was a city that was famous for its brothels—and God punished their wanton ways with an earthquake. Yet, this explanation proved wanting. Although the earthquake destroyed the city's churches, the brothels were spared! Among Christian scholars of that era, the English cleric John Wesley (1703-1791) attributed Lisbon's destruction to Portugal's role in supporting the Spanish Inquisition that expelled the entire Jewish population. Yet, Spain and Italy were spared, despite being the primary instigators of the Inquisition![1] If Wesley were correct, one might argue that the rest of Europe should have also been punished for expelling and persecuting the Jews who lived peacefully in their lands. Wesley's answer is too theologically facile to take seriously. It is no wonder why no European intellectual took a dismissive attitude toward Wesley's theory.
Voltaire’s Thoughts on the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
Voltaire was one of France’s most celebrated intellectuals. He was a free-thinker who did not care much about institutional religion. Voltaire believed in God, but denied God had any interest in the affairs of mortals. Voltaire took an interest in a couple of famous earthquakes of world history. In 1556, Shaanxi China experienced an earthquake that killed 830,000 people. Voltaire also recalled hearing about another earthquake in China that resulted in 400,000 deaths. Historically, China has experienced more than its fair share of earthquake tragedies.
In any event, Voltaire’s letters raised serious theological questions about God’s rulership of the world; God’s management did not seem to be concerned with man’s best good, as Leibnitz argued in his Theodicy. Voltaire thought of Leibnitz as a Catholic medievalist. The French thinker would have approved of Hitchens’ earlier remarks that such speculation is utterly useless—especially as the bodies of the Lisbon dead were still yet to be buried. Voltaire’s pen proved to be a mighty weapon in challenging the theological status quo of his era.
In his poem, “An Examination of the Axiom: All is well,’” Voltaire wrote:
Oh, miserable mortals!
Oh wretched earth!
Oh, dreadful assembly of all mankind!
Eternal sermon of useless sufferings!
Deluded philosophers who cry, "All is well,"
Hasten, contemplate these frightful ruins,
This wreck, these shreds, these wretched ashes of the dead;
These women and children heaped on one another,
These scattered members under broken marble;
One-hundred thousand unfortunates devoured by the earth,
Who, bleeding, lacerated, and still alive,
Buried under their roofs without aid in their anguish,
End their sad days!
In answer to the half-formed cries of their dying voices,
At the frightful sight of their smoking ashes,
Will you say: "This is the result of eternal laws
Directing the acts of a free and good God!"
Will you say, in seeing this mass of victims:
"God is revenged, their death is the price for their crimes?"
What crime, what error did these children,
Crushed and bloody on their mothers' breasts, commit?
Did Lisbon, which is no more, have more vices
Than London and Paris immersed in their pleasures?
Lisbon is destroyed, and they dance in Paris!
Voltaire wondered, did the volcanic activity that caused the earthquake really have to be part of the Creation? Can the people of Lisbon derive any solace knowing that their city’s destruction served a positive purpose in God’s grand-scheme of things? One could almost hear the ghost of the ancient pre-Socratic thinker, Epicurus, who famously declared, "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Thoughts on The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
Voltaire was not the only lone voice of France whose words captivated the hearts and minds that read his words with enthusiasm. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was also a French philosopher, writer and composer. His political ideas helped to inspire the French and the American Revolution.
Although Rousseau was also a deist, but unlike Voltaire, Rousseau’s concept of God differed considerably from Voltaire, whose view depicts a deity who acts malevolently toward His creation:
Everything seemed to cooperate, drawing me out of my sweet and foolish reverie. I was not cured of my attack when I received a copy of the Poem on the Ruin of Lisbon which I assumed had been sent to me by the author. That gave me the obligation to write to him and to speak to him about his piece. As will be said below, I did so by means of a letter that was printed a long time afterwards without my assent. Struck at seeing this poor man burdened down, so to speak, with prosperity and glory nevertheless declaiming bitterly against the miseries of this life and always finding all to be evil, I formed the senseless project of making him return into himself and of proving to him that all was good. While always appearing to believe in God, Voltaire really never believed in anything but the Devil; since his so-called God is nothing but a maleficent being who according to him takes pleasure only in harming. The absurdity of this doctrine, which leaps to the eyes, is revolting. . . [2]
Would Rousseau consider the destruction of Lisbon an “act of God” or an “act of man”? If anything, the Lisbon earthquake of illustrated the pitfalls of urban-living and poor urban-planning. Urban-living in crowded cities prove dangerous whenever a natural disaster occurs. A superiorly designed city might have suffered much less casualties and death. Rousseau writes in his correspondence with Voltaire:
I do not see how one can search for the source of moral evil anywhere but in man. . . Moreover, the majority of our physical misfortunes, are also our work. Without leaving your Lisbon subject, concede, for example, that it was hardly nature that there brought together twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories. If the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled at the first shock. But many obstinately remained . . . to expose themselves to additional earth tremors because what they would have had to leave behind was worth more than what they could carry away. How many unfortunates perished in this disaster through the desire to fetch their clothing, papers, or money? . . . [3]
Let us wonder: How would these two French philosophers have debated about coronavirus? Would Voltaire see the pandemic as an anti-proof in the existence of a just God? Undoubtedly, Voltaire condemned the faith of those who believed in a benevolent deity. He would have also scoffed at the religious leaders of today who see the coronavirus as a divine tribulation for the city’s brazen sins. As previously noted, Voltaire and Christopher Hitchens would have been in total agreement.
It is logical to presume that Rousseau would have assigned blame directly to the government of Communist China for their complete abdication of responsibility. Pandemics do not always have a divine origin; they can occur through human recklessness and moral stupidity. With greater accountability, China might have better contained the coronavirus when it made its presence known in China. Similarly, Rousseau would have blasted political leaders in our country for failing to consider how a pandemic could cripple our country and other countries of the world.
Rousseau's answer may be found in his writing to Voltaire, “I do not see that one can find the source of moral evil elsewhere than in man himself, because man is morally free.... with respect to physical evils, they are inevitable in any system of which man is a part of; and then the question is not why isn’t man perfectly happy, but, ‘Why does he exists’”[4] Perhaps anticipating the thinking of certain modern-day 21st century environmentalists, Rousseau would have preferred that people ought to live farther apart in less congested areas—a return to nature rather than congregating in the metropolitan cities. God, for Rousseau, had nothing to do with Lisbon’s destruction. The destruction unleashed by the earthquake came from man’s mismanagement of his urban resources.
In keeping with Rousseau’s earlier thought, during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, up to 90% of the destruction was the result of the subsequent fires. Over 30 fires, caused by ruptured gas mains within three days, destroyed approximately 25,000 buildings on 490 city blocks. More than 3000 people died.[5] Here too, as was the case with Lisbon 1755, much of what we consider “natural disasters” can often be attributed by the woeful and irresponsible actions taken by people who transformed a grave situation into an epic calamity.
[1] Stephen Sobriner, What really happened in San Francisco in the earthquake of 1906. 100th Anniversary 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Conference, 2006
[2] Voltaire had already articulated this point in his Candide (chapter 6) where pundits of his time thought the Lisbon earthquake was a divine punishment for human sins—the Portuguese Inquisition/
[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Christopher Kelly Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman (Editors) The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), p. 360.
[4] Voltaire’s Correspondence, vol. 30 (Geneva: Institute et Musee Voltaire, 1958), quoted in Discovering the Western Past: A Look at the Evidence: Since 1500 Merry E. Wiesner, Julius R. Ruff, and William Bruce Wheeler (Boston, Ma: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), pp. 102-115.
[5] Cited from Roger D. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton:
Princeton University Press,1968), p. 68