Rousseau's Letter to Voltaire Regarding the Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake

In Monday's presentation I talked about Voltaire's "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster," which is regarded as an introduction to Candide and his view on the problem of evil. Here's an excerpt:

Oh, miserable mortals! Oh wretched earth!
Oh, dreadful assembly of all mankind!
Eternal sermon of useless sufferings!
Deluded philosophers who cry, "All is well,"
Hasten, contemplate these frightful ruins,
This wreck, these shreds, these wretched ashes of the dead;
These women and children heaped on one another,
These scattered members under broken marble;
One-hundred thousand unfortunates devoured by the earth,
Who, bleeding, lacerated, and still alive,
Buried under their roofs without aid in their anguish,
End their sad days!
In answer to the half-formed cries of their dying voices,
At the frightful sight of their smoking ashes,
Will you say: "This is the result of eternal laws
Directing the acts of a free and good God!"
Will you say, in seeing this mass of victims:
"God is revenged, their death is the price for their crimes?"
What crime, what error did these children,
Crushed and bloody on their mothers' breasts, commit?
Did Lisbon, which is no more, have more vices
Than London and Paris immersed in their pleasures?
Lisbon is destroyed, and they dance in Paris!

Rousseau didn't like this poem, so he responded to Voltaire in the form of a letter. When he wrote his letter in 1755, however, Rousseau was as yet relatively unknown. His letter to Voltaire, who was already an internationally known thinker, was thus rather audacious.

In the letter, Rousseau says that optimism consoles him while Voltaire's poem shatters his hopes:

     "Have patience, man," Pope and Leibniz tell me, "your woes are a necessary effect of your nature and of the constitution of the universe. The eternal and beneficent Being who governs the universe wished to protect you. Of all the possible plans, he chose that combining the minimum evil and the maximum good. If it is necessary to say the same thing more bluntly, God has done no better for mankind because (He) can do no better."
     Now what does your poem tell me? "Suffer forever unfortunate one. If a God created you, He is doubtlessly all powerful and could have prevented all you woes. Don't every hope that your woes will end, because you would never know why you exist, if it is not to suffer and die . . ."

Rousseau writes that the misfortunes nature imposes upon us are less cruel than those which people create. For example, he believed that the earthquake's severity was due to too many people living within the close quarters of the city and also because of people trying to carry as many of their belongings out of buildings. While Voltaire emphasizes the cruelty of the victims' deaths in the earthquake, Rousseau offers another viewpoint by saying that for some people an early death can be better than having to suffer through life's agonies until a natural death.