I realise that the most pressing duty of the moment, and the truest expression of sympathy with those afflicted and the victims of a major catastrophe such as the one Turkey and Syria are living through, is for one to offer them what one can, according to what is available. And while I deeply believe in Elia Abu Madi’s saying that all the philosophy on earth does not console the bereaved for the one they have lost, I see that there are consolations in philosophy that we may need in times of great storms.
Forty-five thousand is the number of those who have died, as of the moment of writing this article, as a result of the two major earthquakes and their aftershocks that struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of injured, affected, bereaved and grieving victims.
A violent tremor shook the earth, just as it shook, or so it should have, axioms long repeated, and still repeated, by right-wing voices that set out to interpret the phenomenon: that God intervened and sent its victims swift punishment for their sins. It is an interpretation that, despite its superficiality, expands to see all natural phenomena, even epidemics and diseases, as signs God sent us to frighten us, which satisfies the minds of some and gives them a false sense that divine power stands with them and intervenes decisively to grant them victory over their opponents. But it is a justification that cannot withstand the facts of reality, the axioms of reason and the proofs of logic.
Not only sinners went to pray in the churches that morning! Many devoted priests and nuns dedicated and faithful to religion perished!
It is said that the Muslims rejoiced that day at the catastrophe that befell Lisbon, considering it divine revenge for the Inquisition practised in Portugal, but they were surprised that the earthquake had also destroyed the great mosque bearing the name of Al-Mansour in the city of Rabat in Morocco!
This, for example, is how the Indonesian tsunami earthquake of 2004 was interpreted, and how the Covid pandemic of 2019 was interpreted in its early days, when it appeared far from us at the far end of the earth: they considered it divine revenge for what had befallen the Uyghur Muslim minority in China.
The earthquake that struck the land of Syria, already exhausted by civil war, destroying what remained of the ruins of its cities and killing thousands of the survivors of its war, had its epicentre in Kahramanmaraş in Turkey, a country ruled by a party with Islamic roots. Right-wing Islamic voices were not ashamed to repeat their previous justifications, considering it swift punishment for our sins, and this time the thread of justification was also picked up by right-wing Christian voices, which saw in it God’s revenge for what happened to the Hagia Sophia church, which was turned into a mosque under Turkish President Recep Erdoğan.
But the Turkey and Syria earthquake, in its aftershocks, physical and intellectual, resembles the Lisbon earthquake that undermined the pillars of the Church in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century.
On the morning of the first day of November 1755, the day coinciding with All Saints’ Day, the earth, in the words of Will Durant in his encyclopaedia The Story of Civilization, shrugged its shoulders in Portugal and North Africa, and with it the beliefs of Christians were violently shaken, in what later became known as the Lisbon earthquake.
In just six minutes, according to Durant, thirty churches were destroyed, a thousand houses collapsed, fifteen thousand people died and as many were seriously injured, in what resembled mass death in one of the most beautiful capitals of the world at the time.
The earthquake bewildered the theologians and troubled their minds: why did the earthquake choose this Catholic city?! Why did it choose All Saints’ Day?! And why did it choose the hour when all these righteous and pious people had gathered to attend Mass?!.. These were the questions that unleashed a barrage of doubt about theology and its men.
One Portuguese Jesuit said that the Lisbon earthquake and the devastating giant waves that followed were God’s punishment for the vice that had spread in the city. John Wesley delivered a sermon on the causes and cure of earthquakes in which he said: “Sin is the moral cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural cause may be, and the earthquake is the result of the curse that the first sin of Adam and Eve brought upon the earth.”
But this interpretation raised more questions than it provided answers: not only sinners went to pray in the churches that morning! Many devoted priests and nuns dedicated and faithful to religion perished!
It is said that the Muslims rejoiced that day at the catastrophe that befell Lisbon, considering it divine revenge for the Inquisition practised in Portugal, but they were surprised that the earthquake had also destroyed the great mosque bearing the name of Al-Mansour in the city of Rabat in Morocco!
And when some Protestant clergymen in London attributed this catastrophe to heaven’s condemnation of Catholic crimes against humanity, only nineteen days passed before an earthquake struck fifteen thousand houses in Boston, the capital of Massachusetts and the home of the Puritan pilgrims.
Here the French poet and philosopher Voltaire flew into a rage at these interpretations, but at first he too could find nothing to reconcile the painful event with his belief in a just God, and he fell into an indescribable state of anxiety and grief as he imagined the pain of the victims and the cries of the bereaved under the rubble.
Voltaire poured out his wrath on the German philosopher of optimism, Leibniz, in response to the latter’s assertion that God created the world in the best form, that whatever happened and happens, nothing better than what was is possible, and that the evils we see may be a prelude to a great good.
Voltaire directed his bewilderment and questions towards divine providence itself, and composed his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”, in which he set out all the bewilderment and the philosophical and metaphysical questions that troubled him.
Apart from the quiet, undeclared war Voltaire waged against the men of the Church, and the fire he slowly lit under their feet, we see that he ultimately answered himself. In the Philosophical Dictionary, in his article “Theist”, he wrote what strengthens faith and points to the acknowledgement of the inability to understand the complete divine wisdom, saying: “The believer in the one God is a man fully convinced of the existence of a supreme being, virtuous and powerful at once, who created all beings, who punishes sins without cruelty and rewards good deeds with gentleness and tenderness. The believer does not know how God punishes, nor how He pardons and forgives, for his boldness has not reached the point of deceiving himself that he understands how God acts; but he knows that God acts, and that God is just.”
We can understand what Voltaire said, and it helps us form a logic that helps us understand what we do not understand, without speaking falsely about God, slandering Him, or attributing to Him a revenge no one has told us of. All of this happens when we acknowledge that God’s knowledge is wider than ours, and that His justice is present however much our conception of it escapes us, so that we repeat with Voltaire, in other words and with reassurance: O Lord, we are certain of Your justice and believe in Your wisdom, even if we are unable to understand Your will.
Opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of Zawia3.
