Saturday, September 20, 2008

Too Jesuit?

The tremors of All Saints' Day, 1755, were felt around Europe in the most literal sense. Waters rose and fell in Scottish lochs; Morocco was pummelled; in Portugal itself, a tsunami swept away a quay and 50,000 people died, either under rubble or in fire, to say nothing of the children, whose already high mortality rate would have been increased by starvation and disease. To the pious sages of the time, God was saying something, but nobody could agree what. Was Lisbon the Age of Enlightenment's Sodom and Gomorrah? To Protestants, the city was too Roman Catholic; to the Catholics of Lisbon, the place was too Jesuit. And then there were the Optimists.

Link (here)

No comments: