After the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port-Au-Prince last week, the situation in Haiti remains horrific. The death toll is unknown but is certainly in the tens of thousands and may surpass 100,000. Amidst the devastation everywhere, countless victims remained trapped, while famine and disease threaten survivors. The earthquake is merely the latest catastrophe in Haiti, a country of abject poverty, victimized historically by hurricanes, floods, devastating epidemics and murderous dictators.

Commenting on this, evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson made his now well-publicized remarks about the link between human misery in Haiti and a pact with the devil. In fairness to Robertson, most commentators neglected to mention he never directly stated the earthquake was God’s wrath and did issue a call for compassion and aid for the victims. Still, Dr. Robertson’s quasi-theological comments made people from the White House on down take notice.

Dr. Robertson would undoubtedly be familiar with the observation from The Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, “There is no new thing under the sun.” For thousands of years, religious authorities and secular philosophers associated perceived human wickedness with the wrath of the Lord. In the case of the Haitian earthquake, there is an apt and instructive precedent for this ideology.

On November 1, 1755, an earthquake struck one of Europe’s leading cities, Lisbon, Portugal. Coincidentally, it was All Saints Day. Many of the city’s 250,000 inhabitants were attending church when buildings collapsed and fires broke out. A massive tsunami drowned thousands who sought refuge at the waterfront. In all 70,000 people, one quarter of the Lisbon population, was killed by the quake. The U.S. Geologic Survey has estimated the earthquake’s magnitude at 8.7, one of the largest, and deadliest, ever to strike Europe.

Back then, news of such an unimaginable disaster in one of Europe’s main cities reached the rest of the continent gradually over days. It focused world attention on Lisbon. The shocking news had a devastating effect on European scientific and philosophic thinking. In the eyes of many intellectuals and religious scholars, Lisbon had been singled out for misfortune by the Almighty because of its affluence, as a prosperous trading center between Europe and the New World (unlike Haiti today, perhaps the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere).

With the Lisbon earthquake in mind, the Anglican cleric John Wesley wrote sometime later, “There is no divine visitation which is likely to have so general an influence upon sinners as an earthquake.”

After a brief period of introspection, London, Paris and other European capitals returned to their quotidian existence, confident that Lisbon was alone in its decadence and deserving of such punishment. A popular school of thought of the time, advanced by the German philosopher Leibniz, was that we lived in the best of all possible worlds and that everything happens for a reason.

It took one person, the brilliant French Enlightenment writer, Voltaire, to disabuse the world of that notion. After the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire wrote a long poem asserting the Lisbon earthquake represented a natural disaster for which no reasonable justification could be found and that looking for religious significance was futile.

Then he wrote Candide, one of the most important books of Western thought, a devastating satire, which attacked the conventions and attitudes of European society, in part by using the Lisbon earthquake as his example. As Candide, his naive hero, narrowly escaped death amidst the rubble of Lisbon, Voltaire savaged the idea this catastrophe had any type of religious justification and that it was all for the best. He mocked religious zealots who advanced the notion sinners were responsible for their fates. One plot device he employed in Candide was having city authorities burn survivors at the stake to prevent further earthquakes. It worked; after the executions, the earthquakes stopped.

An offshoot of the Lisbon earthquake and Voltaire’s iconoclasm was the birth of the modern era of seismology. Prior to the 18th century, scholars basically referred to Aristotle and other ancient classical sources to explain earthquakes. In 1750, England was rocked by a series of minor earthquakes prompting scientists to reconsider this natural phenomenon. After the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, they began to employ modern observation to study the effects, locations, and timing of earthquakes.

The Enlightenment was dawning; the American and French Revolutions were rapidly approaching. The Lisbon earthquake and Voltaire played no small role in capturing the world’s attention and forcing a reexamination of its values.

Voltaire could be dogmatic and intolerant in his views on religion. Yet he was not strictly anti-religion. He consistently battled hypocrisy, whether it came from Church or State. Candide launched a revolution in thought and was instrumental in undermining the mindless justification and vacuous moralizing that accompanied misfortune in the 18th Century.

Unfortunately, the current tragedy in Haiti suggests those ideas never completely disappear. Pat Robertson meet Voltaire.

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