OF EARTHQUAKES, GOD AND MEN

            

  AI’s version of Voltaire observing the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

The earthquake that hit New York city last week did not turn the Big Apple into applesauce.  Had it hit with greater magnitude, the death toll would have been enormous.  Say goodbye to Broadway, Lincoln Center, Columbia University, the U.N building, the New York Stock Exchange, and to my fifth-floor walk-up apartment on East 81st Street, back in the day.

These destructive “acts of God” always lead to the same eternal questions, the same discussions, the same bewilderment, the same disillusionment, the same twisting and turning to make sense of it, the same attempts at, well, trying to understand.

On November 1, 1755, at 9:40 AM, an earthquake, tidal wave and fire destroyed the city of Lisbon.  Fifteen thousand people were killed in six minutes.  Another fifteen thousand died later of injuries.  God could not have chosen a more inopportune moment.  November 1^st was All Saints Day, a Holy day of obligation, and the good Catholic people of Lisbon were all in church praying to the God who watched impassively as they were crushed, burned and drowned.  Some argued that the disaster was God’s way of punishing sin.   But others pointed out that the people of Lisbon were certainly less sinful than the cosmopolitans of Paris.  Besides, nine-forty AM was prime time.  Everyone was in Church praying; it was almost as if God had planned it that way.

 Reconciling a benevolent God with the ubiquity of human suffering is a question that never goes away because explanations seemed strained, and because the world that God created continues to be surfeited with the arbitrariness of nature and the unfairness of life.

On December 26, 2004, a tsunami washed away 280,000 people in Southeast Asia.  The following year, Hurricane Katrina killed almost 2,000 Americans, displaced many more, and damaged New Orleans.  Soon after that, an earthquake crushed over 50,000 people in Pakistan.  In every case, the inevitable question surfaced. “Why did God let this happen,” asked Sergeant Tyrone Short, a Colorado National Guardsman helping in New Orleans, “or is this God’s handiwork?”

At the time of the Lisbon Earthquake, Europe was in the midst of The Enlightenment, a secular, intellectual and creative explosion that frowned on superstition and religion, and made Reason the new god.  The atmosphere in Europe was electric with original thought and towering intellects who rolled up their sleeves to explore and question everything.  The Lisbon earthquake, led to an olympian debate on God’s role in human suffering. 

The prevailing outlook at the time, “Philosophical Optimism,” explained it this way: God is infallible.  He is omnipotent.  He is perfect.  He can’t make mistakes.  If He wrote in the great book of life and death that thirty thousand people must die in the Lisbon earthquake, then not only is it not a bad thing, but it’s all for the best.  On the surface it might seem terrible, but ultimately only good can come from it because God, the Ultimate Good, would not allow it to happen or cause it to happen unless it had positive consequences.  If God could have made the world without evil and suffering, He would have.  But since He did not, and He is perfect, then this world, although not the best as perceived by us, is still the best possible that God could have made.

What seems to be disorder is really part of His Grand Design.  What seems evil will eventually lead to good.  No matter how vile, tragic, arbitrary or chaotic an incident may seem, its ultimate result will be desirable and positive.  Or to put it succinctly, human suffering can be a blessing in disguise.  Poet, Alexander Pope put it in verse in the 1730s, “Whatever is, is right.”  The world we live in, with its wars, diseases, rapes, murders, savagery and poverty is “right,” even if it doesn’t seem that way.  Human existence, that for many has been solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short, is the best possible that God could have made.

 Watching all this from his Paris home, François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, was sixty-one years old and arguably France’s most celebrated citizen.  He was a playwright, poet, and philosopher with a biting, satirical wit.  Voltaire was the leading light of the Enlightenment; to him Philosophical Optimism was a delusion.  It was a misguided attempt at explaining the inexplicable.  To the Grand Old Man of Letters, evil was evil, not some hidden good.  And he said as much in stories, books and poems.      

 Voltaire responded to the Lisbon earthquake with an epic poem in which he heaped scorn on the idea that everything works out for the best.  After explaining in verse about the brutal nature of animals and men (“the eagle tears the vulture to shreds…”) he adds:

       Thus the whole world in every member groans:

       All born for torment and for mutual death,

       And o’re this ghastly chaos you would say,

       The ills of each make up the good of all!

       What blessedness!  And as, with quaking voice,

       Mortal and pitiful, ye cry, “All’s well,”

       The universe belies you, and your heart

       Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit….

Try telling the victims of the earthquake that their suffering will ultimately have positive consequences.  “I’m lying here crushed and dying, and you’re telling me it’s all for the best?”  Or as he put it in the poem:

                       From consolation you increase my pain.  

The blessing in disguise argument has been something of a default position to explain God’s role in suffering.  In the fifth century, St. Augustine wrote, “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.”  Variations of this theme have been bandied about from Old Testament times up to the present moment.

    Kenneth H. Beesley, a Mormon professor wrote,

… if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.   (Emphasis in the original.)

Even with the jaws of hell ready to devour you, it’s all for the best.

There must be a silver lining in the cloud of pain.  If there is no meaning in suffering, then everything we are disintegrates into nothingness.  If there’s no meaning in suffering, then there is no God, or a flawed God, or a disinterested God, or merely an incomprehensible one.  

The late Christian apologist, Ravi Zacharias wrote, “The most difficult aspect of suffering and evil is what we call physical evil, when no human agency is to blame…In fact, natural disasters may (emphasis added) at some time be the only means of reminding us of our finitude.”

That is a terrible conclusion.  God uses natural disasters to tear us to shreds in order to get our attention. 

 My purpose is not to denigrate religion. (I wrote a lengthy book defending Christianity).  But even Christian apologists admit that their most difficult task is explaining human suffering.  “…the problem of [God-induced] evil is more of just a problem,” wrote Ravi Zacharias, “it is a mystery.”

 Yes. Exactly.  Stop trying to explain the inexplicable.  Admit it’s a mystery and leave it alone.

Author’s note: This is controversial stuff.  It’s existential stuff.  It’s ancient and ongoing.  Feel free to destroy these arguments like “the eagle tears the vulture to shreds…”

         Coming in four or five days. 

AI might to smarter than the rest of us, but after numerous attempts,

it still can’t spell this word.

The United States is in crisis. It’s been building for about three generations.  We now have enough perspective to explain how it happened. This isn’t the first crisis; we’ve have had many.  (The decade following the ratification of the Constitution was called the “Critical Period” because of the intense mistrust and hatred between parties.  In 1832, President Jackson threatened to send troops to South Carolina to hang his former VP, John C. Calhoun.)

This is different.   The divisions are high level and street level. The foaming anger is palpable and dangerous.

This crisis was predicted in 1991.

It arrived on schedule.