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VoltaireThe Lisbon Earthquake
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1756A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The problem of evil
Voltaire’s “The Lisbon Earthquake” deals with many theological and philosophical problems, the most significant of which is arguably the problem of evil. The problem of evil is one of the largest philosophical problems faced by Christian thinkers, and its roots go back even farther than Christianity. Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who Voltaire references at Line 210, articulated the problem through propositional logic. The first proposition is that if an omnipotent, benevolent God exists, then evil must not exist. The second proposition is that if evil exists, then an omnipotent, benevolent God must not. The assumption underpinning the argument is that a benevolent being would not allow evil to exist if it were in their power to disallow it. The fact that evil exists in the world, to Epicurus, proves through these propositions that an omnipotent, benevolent God must not exist.
The problem of evil is the thematic and argumentative undercurrent of “The Lisbon Earthquake.” Voltaire’s argument takes this problem of evil and plugs in the real-world example of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. In the poem the event operates both as a synecdoche for evil and as proof of evil’s existence in the world. This is why in the opening argument the speaker argues that recounting the “horrors” and “lamentations” resultant from the earthquake will “Prove that philosophy is false and vain” (Lines 3, 5, 6). Without the assumed propositions that prove that a benevolent, omnipotent God cannot logically coexist with evil, the speaker’s argument would fall out from under him.
The universality of suffering
Human frailty and the universality of suffering both play major roles in the speaker’s presentation of worldly evils. These two themes are sometimes stated outright. For instance, a statement of the universality of human suffering appears in Lines 97-98: “Sons of the God supreme to suffer all / Fated alike.” This statement of human suffering is linked with one of the poem’s extended analogies. Lines 99-104 explore this extended analogy between humans and a potter’s “Vessels.” “Vessel” is a word commonly associated with Christian theology’s notion of the body as a mere container for the soul, but Voltaire makes the body primary. He does this both through the analogy between the body and the potter’s vessel in this analogy and through the poem’s continued emphasis on earthly existence. The first line of the poem, for example, states that man is “earth-fated to be cursed.” Like the potter’s vessel, the body is described as “brittle, vile, and low” (Line 100). This analogy is continued in Lines 205-06 when the body is called “This mass of fluids mixed with tempered clay” and the speaker states that it “To dissolution quickly must give way,” again underlining the body’s frailty.
The body’s frailty is intimately connected with suffering. The speaker makes this connection explicit when they conflate “Lasting disorders” and “woes that never end” (Line 189). The speaker has a bleak view of material bodies and states that “Our system weak which nerves and bone compose, / Cannot the shock of elements oppose” (Lines 203-04). And even those elements are doomed to destruction, insofar as he argues that “nature to destruction is consigned” (Line 202). This is partly due to the sinister circle of life described in Lines 121-29 which leads the speaker to the conclusion that “Men, beast, and elements know no repose / From dire contention; earth’s the seat of woes” (Lines 139-40). These woes are not only the result of physical harm, either, as the speaker later goes on to argue that “Dangers and difficulties man surround, / Doubts and perplexities his mind confound” (Lines 179-80).
Earthly existence in the poem is painted as full of misery and difficulty, both physical and intellectual. Part of this problem seems to be due to the frailty of the human frame and part of it due to the nature of misery to emotionally outweigh pleasure. As in Line 190, pleasures are “vain” while sufferings are “real.” By the end of the poem, the speaker himself succumbs to the pain of life, saying “Humbly I sigh, submissive suffer pain” (Line 247).
The power of reason
The emphasis that Voltaire’s poem places on propositional reasoning and the material world are arguably artifacts of the poem’s place in the Age of Enlightenment. Above all, the Age of Enlightenment saw the intellectual shift away from any truth that cannot be proven either through logic or through the five senses. Logic and scientific reasoning became the primary modes of knowing, and this left alternative systems of knowing (such as religion) vulnerable to attack.
The poem’s essayistic mode of progression from making initial claim, providing evidence and counterarguments for that claim, and finally presenting a modified form of the claim, resembles that of a scientific inquiry. The evidence the speaker provides, too, is based on sense experience and claims that can be extrapolated from it—that is why the speaker spends time to evoke the sensory imagery of Lisbon’s destruction.
One of the great tensions of the poem is reason’s inability to communicate with theological ways of knowing. The evidence of sensory experience and that of faith or revelation are incompatible. The poem shows a fleeting awareness of this disconnection in Lines 181-84.
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.
The speaker, here, states that the truth he is searching for cannot be grasped by the natural sciences. Instead, the only way that the problem of evil can be resolved is through a thorough explanation of God’s will. What is perhaps most interesting, however, is the speaker’s later reaffirmation that earthly reason will eventually be able to grasp that truth. At Line 253 the speaker states that “The light of truth I seek in this dark state.” It can be inferred from the previous line that this “dark state,” refers to the limited understanding of the human mind. Even though the speaker acknowledges this limitation, he still seeks “The light of truth” using what capacities (such as seasons) are available to him in the “dark state.”
