Abstract
On 1 November 1755, the city of Lisbon in Portugal was virtually destroyed by the largest documented seismic event ever to hit Europe. At around 9.30 in the morning, the city was shaken by a violent earthquake that occurred in the Atlantic Ocean, around 100 miles south-west of Lisbon (current estimates put it at around 8.5 on the Richter scale). Around forty minutes later, the city was flooded by a tsunami, the first of three. In the areas that stayed dry there broke out numerous fires which raged for five days. The loss of life was huge—some estimates put the death toll at 10,000, others at many times that. It was a catastrophe almost of biblical proportions. As such, it invited speculation as to its theological significance, speculation that was heightened by the fact that, as the event occurred on a religious holiday (All Saints’ Day), many people had died in church, celebrating mass, while many others had died due to fires that had started on account of fallen altar candles.Verse
Verse How did such an event fit into God’s plan? How could such an event fit into God’s plan? Indeed, did God even have a plan?
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Notes
- 1.
For further details, see Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake; Chester, “The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake”; Shrady, The Last Day; Paice, Wrath of God: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.
- 2.
For accounts of many of these, see Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake.
- 3.
Voltaire, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”, in Candide and Related Texts, 99–100.
- 4.
Voltaire, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”, in Candide and Related Texts, 105.
- 5.
Saine, The Problem of Being Modern, Or, The German Pursuit of Enlightenment from Leibniz to the French Revolution, 103. In a similar vein, Susan Neiman claims that the Lisbon earthquake “focused the problem [about faith in providence], but it didn’t invent it”. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 37. See also Shrady, The Last Day, 118.
- 6.
See pp. 48–9. I have sometimes modified the translation cited, and in those cases I have indicated this. Where no published translation is available, the translation is my own.
- 7.
See for example R.B., The General History of Earthquakes, 6.
- 8.
H 254–5.
- 9.
See for example Malebranche, Traité de la Nature et de la Grace, 290 (Premier eclaircissement, section XV).
- 10.
H 328. See also Robinet, Malebranche et Leibniz, 202–3. In recent years scholars have done a lot of work to identify Leibniz’s philosophical debt to Malebranche, especially in the area of theodicy. See for example Wilson, “Leibnizian Optimism”; Nadler, “Choosing a Theodicy: The Leibniz–Malebranche–Arnauld Connection”, 577f. More recently, scholars have been looking to emphasize the differences between the theodicies of Malebranche and Leibniz. See Schmaltz, “Malebranche and Leibniz on the Best of All Possible Worlds”; Nadler, The Best of All Possible Worlds, 139f.; Jolley, “Is Leibniz’s Theodicy a Variation on a Theme by Malebranche?”
- 11.
See H 328.
- 12.
See for example H 254–5; H 257.
- 13.
GP I, 360. English translation: http://www.leibniz-translations.com/malebranche1712.htm
- 14.
“[God’s] goodness together with his wisdom prompts him to create the best, which includes the whole sequence, the effect and the ways.” H 269.
- 15.
H 260 [translation modified].
- 16.
Robinet, Malebranche et Leibniz, 203. See also H 276: “it is good to consider not only that it was better to admit these defects and these monsters than to violate general laws, as Reverend Father Malebranche sometimes argues, but also that these very monsters are in the rules, and are in conformity with general volitions, though we be not capable of discerning this conformity”.
- 17.
H 254 [translation modified].
- 18.
Lin, “Leibniz’s Philosophical Theology”, 204. For similar interpretations, see Antognazza, “Metaphysical Evil Revisited”, 124; Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 38; Ross, “Leibniz and the Concept of Metaphysical Perfection”, 145–6.
- 19.
Newlands, “Natural Disasters and the Wrath of God”.
- 20.
Lin, “Leibniz’s Philosophical Theology”, 206.
- 21.
Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God, 101ff.; Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 189ff.
- 22.
One might wish to extend this to include devastation to flora and fauna as well, though in what follows I shall focus only on human devastation.
- 23.
H 277–8.
- 24.
See the unpublished manuscript held by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hanover, under the shelfmark Ms 33, 1749 Bl. 60.
- 25.
See A I 5, 171.
- 26.
H 136. See also LGR 291, and GP VI, 443.
- 27.
More specifically, on account of the fact that they are disorders and irregularities in inanimate things; such disorders can only qualify as metaphysical evils. See H 277–8.
- 28.
GP III, 574.
- 29.
See LS 506.
- 30.
LGR 291. See also GP VI 443.
- 31.
Unpublished manuscript held by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hanover, under the shelfmark LH I I 3 4 Bl. 7–8.
- 32.
H 98.
- 33.
H 281. See also H 136.
- 34.
Rateau, La Question de Mal chez Leibniz, 623.
- 35.
See for example H 276ff.
- 36.
H 278.
- 37.
LTS 349.
- 38.
LTS 275, cf. 146–7, 286.
- 39.
“Punishment is an evil of suffering, which is imposed because of the evil of the action.” A slight misquoting of Grotius’ De iure belli ac pacis libri tres, 359.
- 40.
“We are the cause of our evils.” Eusebius, De Evangelica praeparatione, libri XIII, 37 C.
- 41.
H 276 [translation modified]. See also H 137.
- 42.
PPL 490.
- 43.
See H 137.
- 44.
H 196–7.
- 45.
See Origen, Contra Celsum, 372 (VI.56). For Origen, evils are medicinal insofar as they serve for conversion.
- 46.
See for example Augustine, City of God, 1010–14.
- 47.
See Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 325ff.
- 48.
See Augustine,
On the Free Choice of the Will, 108.
- 49.
H 137 [translation modified].
- 50.
“punishment may be of service to him [sc. the guilty party] or others, to contribute towards determining them another time not to sin”. H 347.
- 51.
A II 1 (2nd edn.), 187. English translation: http://www.leibniz-translations.com/wedderkopf.htm
- 52.
LGR 324.
- 53.
See LGR 283.
- 54.
LGR 286.
- 55.
The example is from John Toland’s essay “Parallele entre la raison originale ou la loy de la nature” (after 1704), TI I 53–4. This text survives only because Leibniz made a copy of it.
- 56.
LGR 284.
- 57.
“The wisdom of God, not content with embracing all the possibles, penetrates them, compares them, weighs them one against the other, to estimate their degrees of perfection or imperfection, the strong and the weak, the good and the evil. It goes even beyond the finite combinations, it makes of them an infinity of infinites, that is to say, an infinity of possible sequences of the universe, each of which contains an infinity of creatures. By this means the divine Wisdom distributes all the possibles it had already contemplated separately, into so many universal systems which it further compares the one with the other. The result of all these comparisons and deliberations is the choice of the best from among all these possible systems.” H 267.
- 58.
Indeed, recall the passage quoted earlier in which Leibniz states that “Those who are punished are not the ones who impede the perfection of things, for, to put it briefly, that is impossible, but the ones who do not prevent the perfection of things from being impeded. These people by their own punishment contribute to the perfection of things.” LGR 324.
- 59.
LGR 284.
- 60.
This position has clear echoes of the theory of providence developed by the twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides, who claimed that while it may be an accident that a ship sinks or a house collapses, it is no accident that a particular man boards that ship or enters that house. See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, II: 472.
- 61.
Plurs was a small Swiss village made prosperous by its mining of talcum from the nearby mountains. On 25 August 1618, a collapse of one of these mountains (the Conto), due to the careless excavation techniques of the villagers, caused a landslide which buried almost the entire village.
- 62.
See P 117, and the unpublished manuscript held by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hanover, under the shelfmark LBr 817 Bl. 66–71.
- 63.
See Leibniz’s letter to Sophie, January 1706, published as an appendix to Strickland and Church, “Leibniz’s Observations on Hydrology”, 530–2 (original language and English translation). It is unclear how informed Leibniz was about the scale of the flood. He was almost certainly unaware of the true number of casualties (15,000), as this became clear only much later. For an analysis of Leibniz’s treatment of the flood, see Strickland and Church, “Leibniz’s Observations on Hydrology”.
- 64.
See for example LGR 112–13, and the unpublished manuscript held by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hanover, under the shelfmark LH 4, 4, 1 Bl. 8r.
- 65.
Leibniz’s position contrasts with that of Descartes, for whereas the Frenchman supposed that we cannot know God’s purposes at all, Leibniz supposed that we could know them, at least in general terms. See Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, 202 (Principles of Philosophy 1.28).
- 66.
“How many unfortunate people have perished in this disaster because of one wanting to take his clothes, another his papers, another his money?” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter from J. J. Rousseau to M. de Voltaire” (18 August 1756) in Rousseau on Philosophy, Morality, and Religion, 51.
- 67.
By Leibniz’s own admission, the greatest causes of human misery in the Europe of his day were not earthquakes and other natural disasters (which were relatively mild in terms of their human cost, at least in comparison with Lisbon), but rather wars, religious persecution and intolerance. Hence he states in the Theodicée, “One single Caligula, one Nero, has caused more evil than an earthquake.” H 138.
- 68.
Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Oxford Seminar for Early Modern Philosophy, Oxford University, 15 March 2015, and at a Scientiae workshop at the University of California, Irvine, 11 September 2015. I would like to thank the participants of those events for their helpful comments, in particular Maria Rosa Antognazza, Paul Lodge, Nicholas Jolley, Sean Greenberg and Christopher Bobier.
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Strickland, L. (2017). How Leibniz Would Have Responded to the Lisbon Earthquake. In: Strickland, L., Vynckier, E., Weckend, J. (eds) Tercentenary Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Leibniz. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38830-4_11
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