God Let It Happen
The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755by Paul Grant
What a game of chance human life is! … 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. – Voltaire, November 24, 1755
As
the Middle East and Africa still smolder from fights and riots over European
cartoons, Europeans have begun to catch their breath and scratch their heads. “What
was that all about,” people are asking themselves. “How did it come to shootings
and worse – over simple satire?”
How did it come to this? It might be worthwhile to look farther back than last week, because just as the roots of Muslim anger predate the cartoons in question, so do the roots of Europe’s fierce determination to publish them. This clash has roots 250 years old, in the greatest natural disaster in European history.
What started as a stunt experiment on the freedom of speech is now far bigger than speech. Although in the English-speaking world, the cartoon debate continues to be thought of as a freedom of speech issue, on the continent the matter has grown to the level of religion and civilization itself. In justifying their decision to reproduce cartoons deemed offensive at best to the Muslim world, and blasphemous at worst, the editors of Germany’s Die Welt wrote:
The right to mock the holy is a traditional cornerstone of our culture.
Leave it to the Germans to elevate an issue to the realm of philosophy! The editors did not see this as an issue of sensitivities, or even of the freedom of the press. No, the editors reasoned, European culture itself is imperiled by this latest clash with Islam.
A French newspaper appealed to the patron saint of secularism: “Help us, Voltaire, they have gone mad!” But who exactly has gone mad? In condescending fashion, public intellectuals across Europe are asking themselves: “What is the matter with the Muslim world, with people rioting over cartoons?”
What few people are asking is: What is the matter when a culture deems the “right to mock the holy” a cornerstone to its identity? When did mockery become a rock on which to build one’s house?
Two hundred fifty years ago, on a high holy day, the sparkling city of Lisbon in Portugal was leveled in an unholy trinity of disaster: first an earthquake, then a tsunami, then a fire that raged for days. All told, somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 people died in Lisbon alone.
The November 1, 1755 earthquake brought churches and cathedrals down on top of crowds celebrating All Saints Day. The tsunami, triggered by the earthquake, came shortly thereafter, killing crowds of people attempting to swim to safety across the Tajo River. Fire swept through the city, killing thousands trapped in the rubble.
The Lisbon earthquake was a natural disaster, but its social fallout was even greater. In one moment, a Europe at the center of the Christian world began to lose its faith. The calamity was too great to be explained away with theological sleights of hand or cosmic calculus. Children had died by the thousands. Many people looked at the ruins of a great city and came to the conclusion that God was either evil, or absent altogether.
Susan Bassnett of the University of Warwick writes:
The Lisbon earthquake was, arguably, one of the most significant events in the eighteenth century, for it polarised opinions and starkly exposed the debates about the relative power of God and mankind, foregrounding differences between peoples, faiths and nations. [1]
In evangelical and skeptical circles alike, we look at the history of philosophy in tracing the roots of the secular state. But it was not philosophy alone that moved a generation of philosophers to reject God. It was not relativism or pluralism. It was suffering and pain. As in most areas of human life, our emotional faculties motivate our deepest decisions. Voltaire, ever the caustic wit, wrote:
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 … where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbors, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath debris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants … 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.
Lisbon set in motion a deep soul-searching process that continues to this day. World Wars One and Two have also played a role, but the church’s power to monopolize truth was buried, along with tens of thousands of pious worshippers, in the ruins of Lisbon’s cathedrals. Where Lisbon shattered many European thinkers’ faith in a good God, the twentieth century broke the back of faith in the goodness of humanity.
Sheltered as we are in North America from devastating wars, famines and genocide, we have rarely had our faith shaken to the core. Even the trauma of September 11 can be filed as murder – as the sinful acts of human beings. Freedom of the press does not lie at the center of the continent’s cartoon debate in 2006, at least since papers in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and other countries began reprinting the graphical anti-Islamic blasphemy from Denmark. The Germans were right: faith, and the freedom to reject it, lies at the center. As long as our American, Canadian and British newspapers continue to treat the protests as a discussion of the press, we won’t understand the deeper motivations in Europe.
During the worst of Hurricane Katrina's fallout in New Orleans, when people around the world watched with astonished eyes the world's superpower fail to stop the surging floods, one spectator in the developing world told a reporter: "The hurricane showed us that you Americans are just like the rest of us." There is something about suffering that clears away the rubble of education, class difference, and wealth, and thrusts us into the universe. Why did God let this happen? Why is God silent? Does God have any relevance to us at all? These are the real questions, and we shouldn't be scared by them. God is not scared. He invites us to challenge him. The Bible is full of stories of heartbroken people asking "why".
1 Susan Bassnett, Making Sense of the Global Village, in Warwick The Magazine, Spring 2005
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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