On October 31, 1755, Lisbon was a crown jewel of the Christian world.
For more than two centuries the Portuguese had been carving out an overseas empire that spanned from Brazil to India. Lisbon was a port of entry for fabulous wealth into Europe, and had become itself beautiful and prosperous.
With the Reformation well established in large parts of Europe, Lisbon was also a key ally of Rome.
“Religion was everywhere. There were processions every week. King John V was trying to establish Lisbon as a second Vatican and he had successfully petitioned for the Royal Chaplain to receive the title of Patriarch,” Cardinal Manuel Clemente, Patriarch emeritus of Lisbon and Church historian, told The Pillar.
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But on November 1, 1755, disaster struck.
As the day began, the city’s Catholic fervor was on display, and a large portion of the population was attending Mass.
Then the earth began to shake.
“It lasted six or seven minutes, which seemed like an eternity, and it was incredibly powerful,” Cardinal Clemente explained.
“Churches collapsed on top of worshipers; houses collapsed on top of their residents. The city was immediately engulfed in a horrific fire and many of the victims were burned alive. Those who could, ran from the flames to the riverside, and that was when a tsunami struck and swept everything in its path.”
The 1755 quake is regarded as one of the most devastating in modern history, estimated at a magnitude of 8.5 or 9. Almost 60,000 people were killed in Lisbon, with an estimated 200,000 killed across the Iberian peninsula and in North Africa.
The earthquake leveled most of Lisbon. But it also shook the very foundations of the era’s theological and philosophical thought, in a way that would affect the course of European history and, arguably, contribute to the foundational principles of the United States.
“The first half of the 18th century was marked by a very positive outlook in Europe. People knew more about the world than ever before, science was advancing rapidly, we were learning more about botany, the different continents, the globe, different races of people. Of course, there were also plagues and wars, but those had always existed. There was a very optimistic outlook on life. In fact, the very word ‘optimism’ was coined at this time, appearing in the dictionary for the first time in Germany,” Clemente explained.
In religious terms, that optimism was reflected in Gottfried Leibniz’s “Theodicy,” on the problem of the compatibility between the goodness of God and the problem of evil.
“Leibniz posited that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that the insecurity, uncertainty and imperfections are the price humanity has to pay for existing, and for free will,” the cardinal added.
Leibniz’s theories had had some influence on Voltaire, but when the French philosopher heard about the Lisbon disaster he was horrified and set about writing one of his most famous works, “Candide” — meant as a refutation of Leibniz’s “Theodicy.”
“Voltaire marks a break with the traditional view. He concludes that there is no point in looking to divinity to try and understand natural phenomena,” said Cardinal Clemente.
Voltaire famously said that the existence of evil — such as the Lisbon earthquake — did not cause him to doubt God’s existence, but it did make him doubt God’s goodness. He went on to reject Christianity and organized religion.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau would take a less drastic path, saying that much of the evil that exists in the world is actually man made. To address the Lisbon earthquake, he suggested that proper urban planning would have greatly diminished the death-toll in Lisbon.
But he also defended the need for rational, rather than divine explanations for the problems of evil, saying that societies should organize around reason, rather than faith, setting the stage for his idea of the social contract as a foundation for politics and society.
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Kant wrote three essays on the Lisbon earthquake, but rather than philosophize about it, he researched the scientific reasons for tremors, setting the path for the modern study of seismology.
In that sense, Cardinal Manuel Clemente explained, the Lisbon earthquake would become the touchstone for secularism, which would be influential for the French Revolution and indirectly, 20 years after the ground shook, play an important role in the foundation of the United States.
The earthquake can also be considered one of the main contributors to atheism as an outlook on life.
In 2021, Swiss Cardinal Kurt Koch, then prefect of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said that the Lisbon earthquake “radically called into question many certainties that had previously existed; from a religious point of view, doubts arose about the goodness of God and his omnipotence.”
“The terrible suffering and death of so many people began a much greater questioning of the existence of God than all enlightened philosophical theories and epistemological treatises. The famous expression of suffering as the ‘rock of atheism’ remains inextricably linked to Lisbon,” the cardinal argued.
Historians often say those philosophical reactions emerged as a counterclaims to a prevailing belief that the earthquake must have been some kind of divine punishment. The problem? The idea that the quake was an expression of God’s wrath did not actually have much traction in Portugal itself, nor in the wider Catholic world at the time.
“The future Marquis of Pombal, who was instrumental in rebuilding the city, ordered all priests in the region to provide a detailed account of how their parishes had been affected. These accounts have all been preserved, and are a treasure trove of information for historians. I have read a good deal of them, and in none of them did I find any portrayal of the earthquake as divine retribution,” Cardinal Clemente told The Pillar.
One notable exception was Fr. Gabriel Malagrida, an Italian Jesuit who had been an influential missionary in Portuguese overseas territories and was in Lisbon at the time. He preached that God had punished Portugal through the earthquake, but in doing so he stood in stark contrast to his brother Jesuits, who ran the most advanced learning institutions in the country and were at the cutting edge of science.
“He was somewhat influential, because he was well-connected and had been an important missionary. But by that time, he was also considered to be suffering from dementia,” Clemente said.
Malagrida’s antics and positions got him on the wrong side of the Marquis of Pombal, who was effectively running the country on behalf of the king. Eventually, the priest became the last person to be executed by the Portuguese Inquisition.
There have always been natural disasters in the world, so why was the 1755 earthquake so influential? Cardinal Clemente believes that the easiest way to understand that is to think of September 11, 2001.
For Catholics, he said, “the last decades of the twentieth century were lived in expectation of the 2000 Jubilee; we were galvanized by the great Saint John Paul II; we had revisited the foundations of our faith, and he had famously apologized for the Church’s past mistakes. A new millennium had opened up before us, and we were enthused.”
“And then all that came crashing down with the Twin Towers. It just seemed too awful. And as we watched on television, bewildered, amidst the smoke and the wreckage, someone who had managed to make it out cried: ‘Where is God? Where is God?’”
“I don’t believe that we have overcome the trauma of 9/11 yet, culturally, as a society. We don’t see the world now as we did at the turn of the century. It takes time. That disappointment is comparable to the effects of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755,” the cardinal said.
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