The Lisbon Earthquake (Part 2).

In yesterday’s post I suggested that our mediæval ancestors’ reaction to a natural disaster would be different from ours. Yes, they would be horrified and grief-stricken but they wouldn’t have seen it as calling into question the benevolence of God. Amongst the dead the baptised infant below the age of reason would, ipso facto, be in Paradise; the decent adult in Purgatory; and the evil-doer in Hell, so saving potential  victims from his attentions.   

   But this does not mean the more thoughtful would not have wondered why such events occurred. There were two answers -  one of which, though it has its attractions, no longer holds water; the other might. The first stems from the concept of the Great Chain of Being made familiar by Tillyard to English undergrads in the sixties. Rattle any bit of the chain which links the angels and saints, humankind arranged hierarchically, animals, plants and inanimate objects, and the consequences are felt along its length. We are all too aware today how human greed and stupidity impinge on the animal kingdom and the material make-up of the planet. Unfortunately we are also aware of Darwin, so can’t really buy in to the idea that imperfections in the natural order - earthquakes and volcanoes - are a consequence of the Fall. We know that the tectonic plates began moving millions of years before the human race came into existence.

   The second concept is memorably expressed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde:

           … O, Fortune, executrice of wierdes,

          O influences of thise hevenes hye!

        Soth is, that, under god, ye ben our hierdes,

         Though to us bestes been the causes wrye.

In other words, things only seem to happen arbitrarily because we don’t have the whole picture. In reality every event is a jigsaw piece and God’s got the box with the illustration. The idea is given flesh in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, and most poignantly of all in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

  In Chaucer’s story, Dorigen, awaiting her husband’s return to Brittany from England, upbraids God for having created the dangerous rocks which could sink her husband’s ship. 

    'Eterne god, that thurgh thy purveyaunce

     Ledest the world by certein governaunce,

    In ydel, as men seyn, ye no-​thing make;

     But, lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake,

    That semen rather a foul confusioun

    Of werk than any fair creacioun

    Of swich a parfit wys god and a stable,

     Why han ye wroght this werk unresonable?

     For by this werk, south, north, ne west, ne eest,

      Ther nis y-​fostred man, ne brid, ne beest;

Pestered by an amorous squire, Aurelius, Dorigen jokingly promises to  sleep with him if he can get rid of the rocks. At vast expense, he hires a magician to create the optical illusion that the rocks have gone. Her husband, Arveragus, having returned, Dorigen reveals her rash promise. He tells her she must keep her word, otherwise she loses all integrity. When she arrives in tears to keep her promise Aurelius is moved by her distress to release her from her vow. He, in turn, begs the magician to let him pay him in instalments, or he will face financial ruin. Hearing what’s transpired, the magician waives his fee. God has answered Dorigen’s question: the rocks are the necessary cause of a chain of noble deeds.

   Unlike Shakespeare’s other tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is not an aristotelean work: events are not the consequence of a tragic flaw. On the contrary, the protagonists’ innocence is stressed. Instead it embodies the mediæval concept of tragedy as an integral part of the human condition: once we step on the wheel of fortune it will for a time carry us aloft until inevitably its revolution plunges us into the depths. But although the lovers’ deaths are tragic they are necessary to bring redemption. Their:

     … misadventur’d piteous overthrows

    Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife

    … And the continuance of their parents’ rage, 

    Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove.

Today, only the lunatic fringe of the American evangelical right sees natural disasters forming part of any over-arching divine plan. According to Pat Robertson the Haitian earthquake was a punishment for a pact with the devil. One would have thought France, which until 1947 extorted ‘reparations’ from its former colony for the losses incurred by the expelled slave owners, might have been a more suitable target. 

   So, whatever he said, John Sentamu was stuffed. If he’d replied, ‘Stuff happens. But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery, And their going from us to be utter destruction : but they are in peace,’ he’d be accused of insensitive escapism. If he dodged the issue, as he did, he’d be equally unconvincing. In an age of disbelief perhaps the only effective answer is to address the issue we can all agree on: the yahoo lurking beneath the surface in all human beings, though pretty close to it in the likes of Pat Robertson. To ask why the disaster in Port-au-Prince was so much worse than the one in L’Acquila nine months earlier. Perhaps the French being allowed to bleed dry a desperately impoverished country might supply part of the answer.