The Lisbon Earthquake

“The Lisbon Earthquake” is a satirical poem by the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire after hearing news of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. The original French title, “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne,” literally translates to “Poem on the Lisbon disaster.” The disaster had a massive effect on European thought during the second half of the eighteenth century. Voltaire’s poem, published in 1756, was one of the first literary engagements with the event.

Voltaire’s poem uses the earthquake as an opportunity to criticize certain philosophical positions on the problem of evil. Many thinkers during Voltaire’s time, particularly Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, argued that humans live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire thought that the earthquake proved otherwise. The event, as Voltaire presents it, is one of indiscriminate death and destruction.

Voltaire’s 1759 satirical novel, Candide, is also partially set in Lisbon and deals with many of the philosophical and theological issues raised in “The Lisbon Earthquake.” Some editions of the novel include the poem as an introduction.

Poet Biography

François-Marie Arouet was born November 21, 1694 in Paris, France. He is best known by his nom de plume, or writing pseudonym, Voltaire. Voltaire attended Collège Louis-le-Grand between 1704 and 1711 and received a Jesuit education in Latin, theology, and rhetoric. Voltaire’s father encouraged him to become a lawyer, but Voltaire was set on writing by the time he left school. His father discovered that he lied about working as a notary in Paris and sent him to Normandy to study law. By this time, Voltaire was popular in aristocratic circles for his wit.

Voltaire’s satirical verses soon got him in trouble, however. He was critical of authority throughout his life, and in 1717 he was imprisoned for 11 months in the Bastille for writing accusations against the Regent. After his release, he adopted the name Voltaire, which he used for the rest of his life. According to a story passed down by his sister’s descendants, the name comes from the phrase le petit volontaire, or “determined little thing,” which is how the family described Voltaire as a child.

Under the pseudonym, Voltaire published poems, stories, and essays that were critical of those in power, both politically and philosophically. Though Voltaire is sometimes dismissed as a mere satirist, his criticisms were essential to the French Enlightenment. Voltaire engaged with ideas intelligently and had a unique ability to poke holes in commonly accepted notions.

Voltaire’s philosophical engagement hit its zenith after the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. The death and destruction caused by the natural disaster made Voltaire target thinkers like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope who argued that, since God is benevolent, humans must live in the best of all possible worlds. The earthquake, to Voltaire, was proof that the world’s suffering is unfair. Voltaire went on to write “The Lisbon Earthquake” and his most famous work, Candide, in opposition to Leibniz’s and Pope’s ideas.

Voltaire was one of the most famous and successful authors when he died in Paris in 1778. Due to his controversial ideas, the church denied Voltaire a traditional Christian burial in Paris. Many of these controversial ideas, particularly those about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state, have become essential parts of many western democracies.

Poem Text

The Lisbon Earthquake

an inquiry into the maxim, "whatever is, is right."

Oh wretched man, earth-fated to be cursed;

Abyss of plagues, and miseries the worst!

Horrors on horrors, griefs on griefs must show,

That man's the victim of unceasing woe,

And lamentations which inspire my strain,

Prove that philosophy is false and vain.

Approach in crowds, and meditate awhile

Yon shattered walls, and view each ruined pile,

Women and children heaped up mountain high,

Limbs crushed which under ponderous marble lie;

Wretches unnumbered in the pangs of death,

Who mangled, torn, and panting for their breath,

Buried beneath their sinking roofs expire,

And end their wretched lives in torments dire.

Say, when you hear their piteous, half-formed cries,

Or from their ashes see the smoke arise,

Say, will you then eternal laws maintain,

Which God to cruelties like these constrain?

Whilst you these facts replete with horror view,

Will you maintain death to their crimes was due?

And can you then impute a sinful deed

To babes who on their mothers' bosoms bleed?

Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found,

Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?

Was less debauchery to London known,

Where opulence luxurious holds her throne?

Earth Lisbon swallows; the light sons of France

Protract the feast, or lead the sprightly dance.

Spectators who undaunted courage show,

While you behold your dying brethren's woe;

With stoical tranquillity of mind

You seek the causes of these ills to find;

But when like us Fate's rigors you have felt,

Become humane, like us you'll learn to melt.

When the earth gapes my body to entomb,

I justly may complain of such a doom.

Hemmed round on every side by cruel fate,

The snares of death, the wicked's furious hate,

Preyed on by pain and by corroding grief

Suffer me from complaint to find relief.

'Tis pride, you cry, seditious pride that still

Asserts mankind should be exempt from ill.

The awful truth on Tagus' banks explore,

Rummage the ruins on that bloody shore,

Wretches interred alive in direful grave

Ask if pride cries, "Good Heaven thy creatures save."

If 'tis presumption that makes mortals cry,

"Heaven on our sufferings cast a pitying eye."

All's right, you answer, the eternal cause

Rules not by partial, but by general laws.

Say what advantage can result to all,

From wretched Lisbon's lamentable fall?

Are you then sure, the power which could create

The universe and fix the laws of fate,

Could not have found for man a proper place,

But earthquakes must destroy the human race?

Will you thus limit the eternal mind?

Should not our God to mercy be inclined?

Cannot then God direct all nature's course?

Can power almighty be without resource?

Humbly the great Creator I entreat,

This gulf with sulphur and with fire replete,

Might on the deserts spend its raging flame,

God my respect, my love weak mortals claim;

When man groans under such a load of woe,

He is not proud, he only feels the blow.

Would words like these to peace of mind restore

The natives sad of that disastrous shore?

Grieve not, that others' bliss may overflow,

Your sumptuous palaces are laid thus low;

Your toppled towers shall other hands rebuild;

With multitudes your walls one day be filled;

Your ruin on the North shall wealth bestow,

For general good from partial ills must flow;

You seem as abject to the sovereign power,

As worms which shall your carcasses devour.

No comfort could such shocking words impart,

But deeper wound the sad, afflicted heart.

When I lament my present wretched state,

Allege not the unchanging laws of fate;

Urge not the links of the eternal chain,

'Tis false philosophy and wisdom vain.

The God who holds the chain can't be enchained;

By His blest will are all events ordained:

He's just, nor easily to wrath gives way,

Why suffer we beneath so mild a sway:

This is the fatal knot you should untie,

Our evils do you cure when you deny?

Men ever strove into the source to pry,

Of evil, whose existence you deny.

If he whose hand the elements can wield,

To the winds' force makes rocky mountains yield;

If thunder lays oaks level with the plain,

From the bolts' strokes they never suffer pain.

But I can feel, my heart oppressed demands

Aid of that God who formed me with His hands.

Sons of the God supreme to suffer all

Fated alike; we on our Father call.

No vessel of the potter asks, we know,

Why it was made so brittle, vile, and low?

Vessels of speech as well as thought are void;

The urn this moment formed and that destroyed,

The potter never could with sense inspire,

Devoid of thought it nothing can desire.

The moralist still obstinate replies,

Others' enjoyments from your woes arise,

To numerous insects shall my corpse give birth,

When once it mixes with its mother earth:

Small comfort 'tis that when Death's ruthless power

Closes my life, worms shall my flesh devour.

Remembrances of misery refrain

From consolation, you increase my pain:

Complaint, I see, you have with care repressed,

And proudly hid your sorrows in your breast.

But a small part I no importance claim

In this vast universe, this general frame;

All other beings in this world below

Condemned like me to lead a life of woe,

Subject to laws as rigorous as I,

Like me in anguish live and like me die.

The vulture urged by an insatiate maw,

Its trembling prey tears with relentless claw:

This it finds right, endowed with greater powers

The bird of Jove the vulture's self devours.

Man lifts his tube, he aims the fatal ball

And makes to earth the towering eagle fall;

Man in the field with wounds all covered o'er,

Midst heaps of dead lies weltering in his gore,

While birds of prey the mangled limbs devour,

Of Nature's Lord who boasts his mighty power.

Thus the world's members equal ills sustain,

And perish by each other born to pain:

Yet in this direful chaos you'd compose

A general bliss from individuals' woes?

Oh worthless bliss! in injured reason's sight,

With faltering voice you cry, "What is, is right"?

The universe confutes your boasting vain,

Your heart retracts the error you maintain.

Men, beasts, and elements know no repose

From dire contention; earth's the seat of woes:

We strive in vain its secret source to find.

Is ill the gift of our Creator kind?

Do then fell Typhon's cursed laws ordain

Our ill, or Arimanius doom to pain?

Shocked at such dire chimeras, I reject

Monsters which fear could into gods erect.

But how conceive a God, the source of love,

Who on man lavished blessings from above,

Then would the race with various plagues confound,

Can mortals penetrate His views profound?

Ill could not from a perfect being spring,

Nor from another, since God's sovereign king;

And yet, sad truth! in this our world 'tis found,

What contradictions here my soul confound!

A God once dwelt on earth amongst mankind,

Yet vices still lay waste the human mind;

He could not do it, this proud sophist cries,

He could, but he declined it, that replies;

He surely will, ere these disputes have end,

Lisbon's foundations hidden thunders rend,

And thirty cities' shattered remnants fly,

With ruin and combustion through the sky,

From dismal Tagus' ensanguined shore,

To where of Cadiz' sea the billows roar.

Or man's a sinful creature from his birth,

And God to woe condemns the sons of earth;

Or else the God who being rules and space,

Untouched with pity for the human race,

Indifferent, both from love and anger free,

Still acts consistent to His first decree:

Or matter has defects which still oppose

God's will, and thence all human evil flows;

Or else this transient world by mortals trod,

Is but a passage that conducts to God.

Our transient sufferings here shall soon be o'er,

And death will land us on a happier shore.

But when we rise from this accursed abyss,

Who by his merit can lay claim to bliss?

Dangers and difficulties man surround,

Doubts and perplexities his mind confound.

To nature we apply for truth in vain,

God should His will to human kind explain.

He only can illume the human soul,

Instruct the wise man, and the weak console.

Without Him man of error still the sport,

Thinks from each broken reed to find support.

Leibnitz can't tell me from what secret cause

In a world governed by the wisest laws,

Lasting disorders, woes that never end

With our vain pleasures real sufferings blend;

Why ill the virtuous with the vicious shares?

Why neither good nor bad misfortunes spares?

I can't conceive that "what is, ought to be,"

In this each doctor knows as much as me.

We're told by Plato, that man, in times of yore,

Wings gorgeous to his glorious body wore,

That all attacks he could unhurt sustain,

By death ne'er conquered, ne'er approached by pain.

Alas, how changed from such a brilliant state!

He crawls 'twixt heaven and earth, then yields to fate.

Look round this sublunary world, you'll find

That nature to destruction is consigned.

Our system weak which nerves and bone compose,

Cannot the shock of elements oppose;

This mass of fluids mixed with tempered clay,

To dissolution quickly must give way.

Their quick sensations can't unhurt sustain

The attacks of death and of tormenting pain,

This is the nature of the human frame,

Plato and Epicurus I disclaim.

Nature was more to Bayle than either known:

What do I learn from Bayle, to doubt alone?

Bayle, great and wise, all systems overthrows,

Then his own tenets labors to oppose.

Like the blind slave to Delilah's commands,

Crushed by the pile demolished by his hands.

Mysteries like these can no man penetrate,

Hid from his view remains the book of fate.

Man his own nature never yet could sound,

He knows not whence he is, nor whither bound.

Atoms tormented on this earthly ball,

The sport of fate, by death soon swallowed all,

But thinking atoms, who with piercing eyes

Have measured the whole circuit of the skies;

We rise in thought up to the heavenly throne,

But our own nature still remains unknown.

This world which error and o'erweening pride,

Rulers accursed between them still divide,

Where wretches overwhelmed with lasting woe,

Talk of a happiness they never know,

Is with complaining filled, all are forlorn

In seeking bliss ; none would again be born.

If in a life midst sorrows past and fears,

With pleasure's hand we wipe away our tears,

Pleasure his light wings spreads, and quickly flies,

Losses on losses, griefs on griefs arise.

The mind from sad remembrance of the past,

Is with black melancholy overcast;

Sad is the present if no future state,

No blissful retribution mortals wait,

If fate's decrees the thinking being doom

To lose existence in the silent tomb.

All may be well; that hope can man sustain,

All now is well; 'tis an illusion vain.

The sages held me forth delusive light,

Divine instructions only can be right.

Humbly I sigh, submissive suffer pain,

Nor more the ways of Providence arraign.

In youthful prime I sung in strains more gay,

Soft pleasure's laws which lead mankind astray.

But times change manners; taught by age and care

Whilst I mistaken mortals' weakness share,

The light of truth I seek in this dark state,

And without murmuring submit to fate.

A caliph once when his last hour drew nigh,

Prayed in such terms as these to the most high:

"Being supreme, whose greatness knows no bound,

I bring thee all that can't in Thee be found;

Defects and sorrows, ignorance and woe."

Hope he omitted, man's sole bliss below.

Voltaire, “The Lisbon Earthquake,” 1756, translated by William F. Fleming,

Wikisource.

Summary

Voltaire’s “The Lisbon Earthquake” is best understood as an essay or dialogue. Like many contemporary works, Voltaire’s poem gives voice to both sides of the argument it attempts to make. This can make the work difficult to follow as there are, in a sense, two speakers—one that voices the argument of the poem, and one that voices a counterargument. For the sake of clarity, the speaker that presents the poem’s argument will be referred to as the pessimist, and the speaker that presents the counterargument is the optimist.

The pessimist’s opening argument runs from the first line to Line 66 of Fleming’s translation. He argues first that the “horrors on horrors” on display after the Lisbon earthquake demonstrate that “man’s the victim of unceasing woe” and disprove the optimists’ philosophy as “false and vain” (Lines 3-5). He then presents a number of images from the disaster itself and asks the optimist (and the reader) whether they will “maintain death to their crimes was due” (Line 20). This leads the pessimist into a series of rhetorical questions of desert and justice surrounding the event, ending with the question of whether an all-powerful could have done otherwise.

The optimist begins his response on Line 67 by asking a rhetorical question of his own: whether the pessimist’s words help the earthquake’s victims. He then proceeds to argue that the disaster was part of a larger, divine plan, “For general good from partial ills must flow” (Line 74). The optimist then reaffirms in Lines 77 and 78 that the pessimist’s words are wasted and only deepen the sorrow of the event.

The pessimist speaks again at Line 79 and claims that if there is a divine plan, God should have the power to change it, or “who holds the chains can’t be enchained” (Line 83). The optimist cannot pretend, in other words, that God’s hands were tied. The pessimist then accuses the optimist of denying the existence of evil (Lines 88, 90), and gives, in Lines 106-7, a comic restatement of the optimist’s earlier argument that from the pain a greater pleasure will arise like “numerous insects shall my corpse give birth.” The optimist retorts for two lines (151-52) before being interrupted by the pessimist, who starts presenting the optimist’s potential arguments. Then the pessimist states that the least God could do would reveal the divine will, if there was truly no other way for it to be executed (Lines 182-84). The pessimist then evokes the ideas of Plato and Pierre Bayle before repeating the claim that if the divine plan were revealed, it would lessen human suffering.

The pessimist continues for the rest of the poem, but his tone changes around Line 245 from angry and accusatory to exhausted. The pessimist explains that he once “sung in strains more gay,” but that with age he has become embittered. The poem ends with the pessimist telling the story of a caliph, or Islamic spiritual leader, by way of stating that “hope” is “man’s sole bliss below” (Line 265).