Evil Part 4-to the Enlightenment and Beyond.

One could hardly have imagined a more pious and godly place as Lisbon in the 18th century. She sent evangelists and missionaries carrying the gospels around the world, and made great investments in the church. If any place, it seemed at the time, should incur god's favor and protection it should have been Lisbon. On the morning of November 1st, All Saints Day, 1755 disaster struck that would shock European consciousness as fundamentally as revelations about Auschwitz and the Holocaust assailed 20th century souls.

A powerful earthquake emptied churches and opened huge fissures in the city center. Buildings toppled and collapsed. Fires swept the ravaged city destroying most churches. At the city hospital hundreds of trapped patients burned to death. Survivors fled in panic to the harbor, only to watch as the ocean receded, swamping ships and revealing long lost wrecks. Within minutes a monstrous tsunami inundated the city. When the waters receded some 90,000 were dead, more than a third of the city's population. 85% of the city had been destroyed, and with it priceless works by Titian and Caravaggio, along with the records of Vaso de Gama and other explorers.

What had provoked God's wrath? The disaster began a furious debate about concepts of evil, god, nature and religion. Voltaire wrote a poem dedicated to the disaster and bickered with Rousseau over the issue.. The young Immanuel Kant became obsessed with the calamity. His later ideas about underground gases as the cause is seen as the beginnings of modern seismology. Kant was first to believe that the disaster was natural and not supernatural.

Rational minds don't believe today that natural disasters are god's wrath for the collective sins of mankind-except perhaps evangelical opportunists like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson who were quick to blame 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina on homosexuality, feminism and abortion. For 18th century Europe that was quite another matter. Not that questions about evil and god and the natural world were not already hot topics for debate. Alfonso X, king of Castile during the remarked 2 centuries before that if he "had been in God's council at the creation, many things would have been ordered better." It was a direct assault against God's infallibility, and was met with a storm of protest.

Indeed, the idea was nothing new. The Greek philosopher Aristotle had offered the same views 2,000 before. Lucretius, 99-55 BCE, said "Fear is the mother of all gods. Nature does all things without their meddling." The rise of Islam and Christianity would set human thought back and retarded progressive understandings of evil and nature. Centuries of persistent scientific research, the works of Kepler and Galileo and others, forced through the narrow prisms of the church began to reverse harm the church had done to progressive thought. It took two millenia to undo the damage caused by Christianity during the dark ages, when schools of Greek thought were closed in Athens, the works of Greek and Roman thinkers and artists was destroyed over accusations of idolatry and paganism. The so-called enlightenment was merely a re-introduction of much earlier thought.

Before the Enlightenment scientific discovery and innovation was "viewed not as a rival but as a servant of faith," Susan Neiman writes in EVIL IN MODERN THOUGHT. That any "advance of science was proof of more order in the universe," and hence proof of the inviolability of god. Thinkers like Thomas Hobbes had assailed that notion before Lisbon, but the disaster brought the issue into mainstream discourse. It began wider debate over the concept of natural evil and moral evil.

Rousseau held that, despite acknowledging the difference between the 2 that man was still responsible for both. Like Augustine before him man bore the weight of eternal sin from the Garden of Eden, when we created sin by calling into question god's benevolence. We had been punished, and continued to be punished for abusing god's gift of free will. That set up a problem, in that how is it possible to abuse FREE will? It is either free or it isn't. These gaps in logic began to erode long unquestioned concepts of evil, which had served merely as forms of control by the church over populations.

The evolution of thoughts about evil, religion and god proved these things were not monolithic and unassailable concepts. If they were no amount of reason could degrade them. Glimpses of the true origins of evil could even be glimpsed in Rousseau's religiously humbled works. "Only self-knowledge can save us," Neiman says of Rousseau, "but it is just as hard to get as it is crucial...Self knowledge is rare because we're masters of self deception...Knowledge of ourselves as individuals teaches us to distinguish our own true needs from the false ones that clod all our efforts at virtues."

Perhaps the greatest revelation from the Lisbon disaster was the abandonment of a need for god's intervention in the world. The progression of science and critical thought revealed more and more of universe ruled by laws, leaving less and less for god to manage. He was thus alleviated of his universal responsibilities and freed to interact directly in our daily lives. But to what extent? Nearly two centuries after the Enlightenment a new calamity would shake human thought and force a revolutionary rethinking of evil in the world. This calamity was not natural but human in nature, and it began with the rise of who would come to symbolize the very nature of human evil for generations...

NEXT: Part 5- The rise of Adolf Hitler