Dr Pangloss reporting
Voltaire wrote this letter shortly after the Lisbon earthquake. This “Act of God” killed an estimated 70,000 out of a population of 185,000, many of whom were attending the mass. It occurred on All Saints Day 1755.
Les Délices, November 24, 1755
This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds-- where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath débris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants -- Swiss, like yourself -- swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a game of chance human life is! What will the preachers say -- especially if the Palace of the Inquisition is left standing! I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike. I believe it is our mountains which save us from earthquakes.
This is a extract from his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster; Or an examination of the Axiom, All is well.”
But how conceive a God supremely good,
Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,
Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?
From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
And came it from no other, for he ’s lord:
Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!
O wondrous mingling of diversities!
A God came down to lift our stricken race:
He visited the earth, and changed it not!
One sophist says he had not power to change;
“He had,” another cries, “but willed it not:
In time he will, no doubt.” And, while they prate,
The hidden thunders, belched from underground,
Fling wide the ruins of a hundred towns
Across the smiling face of Portugal.
God either smites the inborn guilt of man,
Or, arbitrary lord of space and time,
Devoid alike of pity and of wrath,
Pursues the cold designs he has conceived.
Or else this formless stuff, recalcitrant,
Bears in itself inalienable faults;
Or else God tries us, and this mortal life
Is but the passage to eternal spheres.
’T is transitory pain we suffer here,
And death its merciful deliverance.
Yet, when this dreadful passage has been made,
Who will contend he has deserved the crown?
Whatever side we take we needs must groan;
We nothing know, and everything must fear.
Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it;
The human race demands a word of God.
’T is his alone to illustrate his work,
Console the weary, and illume the wise.
Without him man, to doubt and error doomed,
Finds not a reed that he may lean upon.
t
posted by Tony @ Sunday, January 02, 2005
4 Comments:
Is the thrust of your suggestion that a good and merciful God should not have allowed either event to happen? Certainly that is what Voltaire is proposing.
The Lisbon business like the Big Wave of Boxing Day makes me not doubt the existence of God but the common sense of those who claim to be leading thinkers.What on earth had the death of 150,000 Lisboans to do with a fundamental question like the existence of God? They were going to die anyway.You may say the existence of death has something to do with God but not its acceleration in a few particular cases
The question of whether the notion of God is compatible with the existence of evil or calamitous events in the world has been pondered by Plato, Christian philosophers such as Origen and later by Thomas Aquinas.
The Manichees got worked up about it at the time of St. Augustine.They believed that the universe was governed by good and evil.Obviously evil had the upper hand in Lisbon and on Boxing Day
They like Voltaire were however asking the wrong question.
My view is that the lesson both of these events teach us is the fragility of our existence in this world, the ease at which life can be snuffed out in a few seconds on a sunny holiday beach and the awesome power of nature. A Power which nature still wields despite the boastful claims made by science to control it.
Thanks for dropping by anonymous.
I posted the quote from Voltaire’s wonderful Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne not to breathe any new life into the arguments about omnipotence/omni benevolence, but to remind me just was a towering literary figure Voltaire was; much better than Rousseau, Pope or Leibniz, parked on the other side of the argument. And that leads us to Candide, Dr Pangloss and the best of all possible worlds.
“After the earthquake which destroyed three-quarters of Lisbon, the wise men of that country could discover no more efficacious way of preventing a total ruin than by giving the people a splendid auto-da-fe. It was decided by the university of Coimbre that the sight of several persons being slowly burned in great ceremony is an infallible secret for preventing earthquakes.”
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!
Cheers
t
In 1695-97 Pierre Bayle published his Historic and Critical Dictionary which subjected common religious notions to historical and critical analysis. The book became a best seller amongst European intellectuals at the time laying the foundation for the Enlightenment. Amongst other things, he argued that dreadful happenings in the world whether natural, like earthquakes, or man made, like wars, were incompatible with an omnipotent deity committed to the triumph of virtue.
He was answered on this point by G.W.Leibnitz in an apparently grisly work "Essays for theodicy into the Goodness of God, the Liberty of
Man and the Origin of Evil.
Theodicy appears to have meant the investigation into God's justice.
He invented the phrase that this world is "the best of all possible worlds".
To justify his view he argued that evil and disasters were like shades in a painting both necessary to bring out the beauty of the composition as a whole.
His view was shaken by the Lisbon earthquake which destroyed the city and killed over 150,000 inhabitants.
No-one, least of all me, is suggesting that Voltaire would not have passed his GCSE in philosophy (whatever derisory mark he would need nowadays) but if you have bothered to compare him with Leibnitz have you not decided whose arguments you prefer?
If not you are doing both and yourself a disservice.
Thanks anonymous.
I’d have thought most of the interest has now been squeezed out of the Voltaire/Leibniz debate. Though I’m pretty sure there are a few forums out in cyberspace where you can sweep up the last knockings.
I’ve just reacquainted myself with Candide. Both Voltaire’s original and Leonard Bernstein’s equally wonderful musical romp.Both to be recommended
Cheers
t
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