A post-humanist interpretation
The tsunami disaster in southeast Asia in January 2006 prompted a leading Swedish political scientist to publicly declare his return to the Christian Church. He was by no means alone –a remarkable reversal of the public reaction to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which for Voltaire and others implied that the Church no longer possessed exclusive insight into the human condition. But the man-made catastrophes of the Twentieth century undermined the enlightenments enterprise: for Adomo, “nature” could no longer be banished to the non-human.
Mattias Martinson
or: An Examination of that Axiom “All is Well,” 1755
Oh, miserable mortals! Oh wretched earth!
Oh, dreadful assembly of all mankind!
Eternal sermon of useless sufferings!
Deluded philosophers who cry, “All is well,”
Hasten, contemplate these frightful ruins,
This wreck, these shreds, these wretched ashes of the dead;
These women and children heaped on one another,
These scattered members under broken marble;
One-hundred thousand unfortunates devoured by the earth
Who, bleeding, lacerated, and still alive,
End their sad days!
In answer to the half-formed cries of their dying voices,
At the frightful sight of their smoking ashes,
Will you say: “This is result of eternal laws
Directing the acts of a free and good God!”
Will you say, in seeing this mass of victims:
“God is revenged, their death is the price for their crimes?”
What crime, what error did these children,
Crushed and bloody on their mothers’ breasts, commit?
Did Lisbon, which is no more, have more vices
Than London and Paris immersed in their pleasures?
Lisbon is destroyed, and they dance in Paris!
-Voltaire
