The bewilderment expressed in many newspaper articles and letters in recent weeks as people struggle to come to terms with the scale of the disaster in south-east Asia had an interesting precedent almost 250 years ago.
On the morning of November 1st, 1755 Lisbon was struck by an earthquake which lasted for several minutes and brought about the collapse of many of the city's buildings. This was quickly followed by a tsunami, which sucked more victims out to sea. Fires destroyed many of the buildings that had withstood the initial quake. Estimates of the dead vary wildly, but the toll certainly ran to well over 10,000 in the city alone, with thousands more dying in other parts of Portugal and as far away as North Africa.
News of such devastation in one of its largest and wealthiest cities had a profound effect on the intellectual climate of Enlightenment Europe. The disaster seemed to belie the post-Newtonian belief that the universe was both benign and accessible to man's understanding. And those, who, like the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, had sought to combine a scientific understanding of the natural world with a belief in God's Providence for human beings, were now reproached for their trite "optimism".
Leibniz (1646-1716) had put forward a complex argument that a good and all-powerful God must have chosen the most perfect ("optimum") universe possible out of an infinite number of universes, a theory once popularised and perverted by the English poet Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man (1733). Pope proclaimed that evil (in which he included natural phenomena hostile to mankind) is a mere illusion, a consequence of our limited understanding, and so, he triumphantly concluded, in a tone appropriate to his "enlightened" age, "One truth is clear, whatever is, is right".
In the aftermath of the great earthquake, such a view was quickly challenged by the doyen of Enlightenment letters, Voltaire. He was genuinely horrified by the devastation and the loss of life, and, within weeks of the events, expressed his anguish in the lengthy Poem on the Lisbon Disaster: "Come ye philosophers, who cry, 'All's well'/ And contemplate this ruin of a world. . ."
All established philosophies and theologies, he suggested, fall far short when faced with the broken bodies of children: only the hardest of hearts could turn from such realities and seek to justify them by reference to a greater good, a grand design which might ultimately give them meaning. He had searched the great books, from Plato to Bayle, in vain: "What is the verdict of the vastest mind?/ Silence: the book of fate is closed to us./ Man is a stranger to his own research;/ He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes./ Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,/ Devoured by death, a mockery of fate./ But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,/ Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars."
In this bleak vision, the only glimmer of hope was that of man's own intelligence, which carried him forward, as it would the hero of Voltaire's great masterpiece, Candide. This too was, in part, a response to the earthquake, which the hero actually experienced; but, at a greater distance from the events (1757-58), the problem of evil and "the system of Pope" was treated with a different tone, that of satire and black humour. The attack on any attempt to "justify the ways of God to Man" (Pope) was all the more devastating.
It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that other giant of contemporary French letters, who was to challenge Voltaire's gloomy vision. His open letter to Voltaire, dated August 1756, but published some years later, became renowned throughout Europe.
He reproached Voltaire for justifying God's power at the expense of his goodness - i.e., for implying that God could have stopped the disaster, but chose not to. "Were I to choose between the two errors, I should certainly prefer the former", he countered.
He denounced the evaluation of the operations of the universe in terms of the self-interest of the dominant group (in this case upper-class Europeans): earthquakes must happen all the time in deserts, but no-one paid any attention to them. "Will it therefore be said," he asked with some prescience, "that the order of things ought to be changed agreeably to our caprices; that nature ought to be submitted to our laws; and that we have nothing more to do than to build a city on a certain spot, to secure it forever from earthquakes?"
Turning Voltaire's despair on its head, he asserted that "untimely death is not always a real evil; notwithstanding the occasion which such a subject affords for pathetic and poetic description, it is not certain that any one individual of those unfortunate persons actually suffered more than he might have done, if, according to the ordinary course of things, he had received the stroke of death through the lingering anguish of disease". Fundamentally questioning cultural values which have come to dominate Western life, he suggested that the excessive loathing of death led us "to undervalue life", and to forget "the delightful consciousness of existence, which is independent of every other sensation". Ultimately, he concluded, belief in Providence was a matter of faith, not rationality.
Looking at the debate from today's perspective, Voltaire's lamentations are more in tune with the initial reactions felt by so many people at the disaster of December 26th, 2004. But perhaps Rousseau gives us more food for thought in the long term. Should we not live in greater harmony with the universe as it exists - by not building habitations in dangerous locations, for example? And could we not deploy such scientific knowledge as we have more equally, to protect the poor as well as the wealthy of this earth?