Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne

[2] The polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the poet Alexander Pope were famous for developing a system of thought known as philosophical optimism in an attempt to reconcile a loving Christian God with the seeming indifference of nature in disasters such as Lisbon.

The phrase what is, is right coined by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man, and Leibniz' affirmation we live in the best of all possible worlds, provoked Voltaire's scorn.

The prevalence of evil, he argued, prevented the possible existence of a benevolent loving deity who intervened in human affairs to reward the virtuous and punish the guilty.

Unlike the lighthearted satire of Candide, the Lisbonne poem strikes a pitying, dark, and solemn tone.

In his footnotes, Voltaire argues the self-evidence of humankind's epistemological shortcomings, since the human mind derives all knowledge from experience, which cannot give us insight into what preceded it, nor what follows it, nor what presently supports it.

In the poem itself, grieving for the misery created by the earthquake and questioning whether a just and compassionate God would seek to punish sins through such cruelty, Voltaire argued that the all-powerful God Leibniz and Pope hypothesized could have prevented the innocent suffering of the sinners, reduced the scale of destruction, or announced his purpose of purifying mankind.

[1] No matter the complexity, depth, or sophistication of philosophical and theological systems, Voltaire contended that our human origins remain unknown.

Through his work, Voltaire criticized religious figures and philosophers such as the optimists Pope and Leibniz but endorsed the views of the skeptic Pierre Bayle and the empiricist John Locke.