Reasoning Destruction

“What now? Feed the dead and bury the living” (Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e Melo)


In mainstream discourse doctrine as a source predates the use of reason as a tool. Citizens shifted their medium of information due to a dramatic event that illuminated the alternative of reasoning. The Lisbon Earthquake is credited with altering the status qup of human understanding. The Enlightenment or the Age of Reason is the term used to describe the type of thinking in which reason is valued over dogmatic interpretation provided by the church institution. Portugal, the capital city of Lisbon, fell victim to the destructive and transcendental force on November 1st 1755. Natural disasters are restricted by the rules of nature; this strict set of rules inccurrs patterns amongst random variables. Likewise, the effect that the earthquake had on the future was due to the coherence of random variables. This event is undoubtably influenctial.

This date was of particular importance because the earthquake struck on All Saints Day. The Roman Catholic holiday celebrates all Saints, both known and unknown. The political situation allowed for a particular individual who was a son of a countryman to assume a position of power and implement a pragmatic approach to respond to the disaster. The socio-economic situation facilitated the populace acceptance of an alternative to the Church institution. Bourgeois forces were growing in numbers and looking to rebel against feudalism. Limited technology and understanding of architecture provided a city in which the earthquake could reap the havoc that it ultimately did. The Lisbon earthquake caused enough destruction to shake the populace to the core allowing them to question the beliefs that they had previously held dearly. The earthquake instigated intellectuals to challenge the philosophy of Optimism that the church supported. Optimism is the belief that all events that occur are for the best, as this world is the best of all possible worlds. The Lisbon earthquake was the proverbial ‘straw that broke the camels back,’ it served as a catalyst that propelled humanity from aligning themselves unquestioningly behind the church to a state in which humans could depend on reason to answer to general questions such as the human’s role in the universe.

In order for the Lisbon earthquake to have the monumental effect on human understanding that it did, certain factors had to have been in place before the disaster struck. Understanding how this apparently random event affected the course of history depends on a comprehensive analysis of the socio-economic, political, and cultural status quo. In the 16th century, Lisbon, Portugal established itself as a cosmopolitan city that was highly diversified socially and economically. Traveler’s accounts describe the city as a metropolis in which all ends of the spectrum were represented, from sinful peasants to highly devout religious figures in power as members of the high class in a feudalistic sociopolitical environment. The religious nobles were being challenged by a growing number of bourgeois citizens that were dissatisfied with the corruption and power that the Church represented. Many intellectuals were beginning to challenge the doctrine of the church from a secular perspective. Many of the leaders of the Enlightenment in fact were deists who believed that the Deity had created the world as it was and allowed to unfold without being involved. This was juxtaposed to the church that believed that many events, especially those of disastrous nature, were attempts of the supernatural to communicate to the people who were behaving inappropriately. Man’s ability to reason had previously been suppressed by blind acceptance of Church doctrine as an explanation for many of the questions that arose during the course of the human experience. Immanuel Kant, an Enlightenment philosopher, described the transition towards the newfound predilection towards reason as an improvement by humanity in its understanding of the world. In fact he suggests that the Enlightenment was “Mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.” The status quo of blind acceptance was beginning to be challenged and world was primed to become disillusioned by the institution of the church.

The political environment of the 18th century in Portugal was unique. The King held his prime minister with the utmost regard and allowed him to an unprecedented ability to rule autocratically. The Prime Minister Sebastiao de Melo, known today as Marquis of Pombal, had a contentious relationship with the upper class. The aristocracy did not approve of de Melo because he was the son of a country squire. The noblemen viewed de Melo as an outsider and felt as though they were losing control over their city. The Prime Minister did not like the nobility because he viewed them as purveyors of a corrupt and self-centered powerful minority. He also viewed them as incapable of affecting any productive political action. This led to a constant internal struggle in the high levels of Portugal’s society to assume power. When the disaster struck Lisbon, de Melo miraculously survived and quickly filled the void of power assuming a role that implemented a swift practical action to help Lisbon rebound from the disaster.

At this point in the 18th century technological advances had made it possible to travel and communicate internationally with relative ease. This allowed an international European community to develop. This made it possible for intellectuals to share and develop ideas. Previous to the Lisbon earthquake, these types of natural disasters were interpreted as a means for supernatural forces to communicate its distain for the behavior of humans by the church and therefore the greater population. Though other earthquakes had occurred, the geographic location and timeliness allowed thinkers to use this event as a catalyst to discover and discuss alternatives to church doctrine.

The carnage that resulted from the Lisbon earthquake was demoralizing. The earthquake’s epicenter was somewhere at sea, however the magnitude of the quake (which modern day estimates put a level 9 on the Richter scale) resounded in Lisbon, destroying all churches and the royal palace. Much of the population packed the churches as the quake struck on All Saints Day. This led to mass fatalities and some estimates put the death toll at about a third of the city’s population. The city was in ruins and fires sprang up destroying everything in its wake. Many church manuscripts as well as much art and literature was destroyed. Voltaire describes the scene with gory details, describing the streets as running with the blood of the inhabitants of the city – the deceased included everyone from the highest aristocracy to the children of the peasants. This posed a moral conundrum for the thinkers of the time. The church responded by zealously trolling the streets looking for heretics to hang. The Church interpreted the earthquake as a supernatural act of God meant to punish the city’s inhabitants for their sins. The initial response was understandably fanatical. One such account attributes the flames to the bowels of the earth, insinuating that hell was rising. The Prime Minister’s response was very pragmatic. He sent a survey to all the parishes around the city requesting that the clergy take stock of the damage. Currently historians view the quake as the first modern natural disaster largely because of the response that was implemented by those in power. The Prime Minister polled the parishes asking questions about the direction of the quake, the time the quake struck, the levels of rivers and springs, the amount of damage, and asking if there was any indication of any plagues breaking out. Furthermore the government provided tents and sustenance for the survivors and quickly rounded up the escaped criminals and looters and executed them. This swift practical response indicates that despite the church’s attempt to instill fear in the populace and initiate a religious response, there was an understanding that this was a natural disaster. The government institution chose a path of pragmatism as opposed to appealing to religious leaders for guidance. Prime Minister de Melo quickly instigated a rebuilding process. He looked to contractors to rebuild the city so that it was less susceptible to natural disasters in the future. This would be foolish if the cause of the disaster was a punishment from a supernatural force.

The intellectual zeitgeist of the time gave rise to intellectuals responding to the earthquake in similar fashion. These thinkers referred to reason as the appropriate way to interpret events in the world as opposed to depending on church doctrine. This thinking spread across Europe and became what is now known as the Enlightenment Period of Reason. In his work Candide Voltaire wrote about the earthquake and its implications to modern though in his poem entitled “Poem on the Lisbon disaster.” Voltaire attacks the thinking prescribed by the church known as Optimism. This is the belief that all that occurs is for the best, and that this world is the best of all possible worlds. This thinking he viewed as self-serving and delusional. He was a proponent of reason and rational thinking, which he believed, could lead you to conclude that nature is a rational and potentially evil reality. Most in the Enlightenment were, essentially, deists. While rejecting much of traditional Christianity, especially the power of the Church, they believed in a God who had created the world with certain rules and then withdrew from involvement in occurrences. Voltaire believed that consequently, it was the task of humans to use reason to understand natural. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an influential philosopher credited with being one of the thinkers at the forefront of the Enlightenment. He noted that had the city been planned differently the death and destruction would not have been so disastrous. He suggested that Lisbon and humanity should blame the disaster not on the existence of an earthquake but on their poor city planning. He notes that had the earthquake occurred in a desert and not affected anyone then the Church would not espouse any supernatural implications. This made clear to him that better design of the city would mean that the city could deal with a natural disaster of the sort and therefore such a large amount of deaths would not have occurred. This would have eliminated the opportunity for the dogmatists of the church to capitalize on the opportunity to instill fear by blaming the people and their sins as the motivation for a supernatural being to unleash his wrath. Kant, credited with being a major force in Enlightenment theory, published three separate works responding to the earthquake. The first of which deals with a scientific approach to understanding the cause of earthquakes. This was in direct response to the Lisbon earthquake. He collected as much information as he could get his hands on in an attempt to piece together the cause of the earthquake. He supposed that there was a shifting of the caverns below the earth’s crust that were filled with hot gases. Though his conclusion was later proven false, it represented one of the first systematic modern attempts to explain the cause of earthquake as a natural occurrence as opposed to a supernatural mode of communication from supernatural beings to humans.

The culmination of the intellectual’s responses to the Lisbon earthquake became aptly known as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The thinkers promoted science and reason as an alternative to explain the occurrences in the world. The thinkers opposed what they interpreted as abuses of power by the institution of the church as well as the stymie of human understanding. The events in Portugal led to thinkers in Europe contributing to the French publication of the Encyclopedie. Denis Diderot gathered the works of many of the leading thinkers of the time such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and others. This publication spread rapidly and affected the thinking of even leaders across the Atlantic Ocean. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among others, credit the book as playing a major role in the American Revolution. The ideals of the Enlightenment could be found in the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, as well as French political documents such as a the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The disaster that struck Portugal and the subsequent reaction by the populace against the Roman-Catholic institution’s dogma, initiated a movement towards reason that was crystallized in a coherent worldview after the destruction due to the Lisbon earthquake.

The effects of the Lisbon earthquake should not be measured primarily on the amount of people that perished, nor should the cost of the destruction be used as the main barometer, rather the implications for the course of human thinking should be considered. Though events in nature follow the course of the rules of nature, a natural disaster is innately random as understood by considering its role in human thinking. The Lisbon earthquake is arguably one of the most important events in human history and should be understood as a catalyst that initiated modern rational thinking. The emergency response evoked by Marquis de Pombal was of such a practical nature that it represented a forward thinking approach to responding to events in the human experience. This is in juxtaposition with the initial church response; which was to be expected as the church had throughout history served as the interpreter for the masses using religious dogma. It is especially important to include the circumstances prior to the quake that facilitated the response, which gave way to the Enlightenment. Prior to the Lisbon incident, earthquakes traditionally had been interpreted as a dramatic means of communication between Gods and humans. In particular the timing of the quake motivated a fierce dispute and contention of the intellectuals who were not satisfied with the interpretations that the church postulated. The earthquake gave the leading thinkers grounds for which to dispute the doctrine of Optimism. Voltaire, among others vehemently supported a rational interpretation of what he describes as a potentially evil world ruled by reason. The Lisbon earthquake incident exposed to humans their responsibility to utilize their powers of reason.