Introduction

So wrote Voltaire in his ‘Poem on the Lisbon Disaster’ after the first modern catastrophe, the Lisbon earthquake, which took place on 1 November 1755. The earthquake sufficed, says Theodor Adorno, to cure Voltaire from the theodicy of Leibniz,2 which Leibniz had introduced in his Essais de théodicée (1710) to justify the omnipotent, beneficent and infinite Creator in the face of all the evils in the world. For Leibniz, God had in his infinite wisdom necessarily chosen this worldwe live in, which is the best of all possible worlds.3

Voltaire continued his criticism of Leibnitz’s – and also Alexander Pope’s – optimism and dogma of theodicy in his satirical novel Candide. It takes quite a belief to take theodicy seriously after having confronted the greatest philosopher in the world, the teacher of ‘metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology’, Dr Pangloss, a parody (unfair) of Leibniz, who goes around Europe repeating again and again after continual moral, physical and natural evils, ‘Individual misfortunes result in the general good, with the consequence that the more individual misfortune there is, the more everything is for the best.’4