It takes a hard heart to be an optimist. To hold or to proclaim that, as the philosopher Leibniz put it, “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” requires a callousness of almost heroic proportions. Though such a philosophic optimism would find few defenders nowadays, we still insulate ourselves secretly with comfy presumptions. But a catastrophe of the magnitude of the recent tsunami threatens to lay bare an appalling senselessness in the very nature of things.

When such horrors occur, we are left without spiritual or intellectual defenses. The aftershocks of the massive earthquake and tidal wave continue to resound over great distances; yesterday, for instance, I learned that one of my own Indonesian students had lost his wife and two small children to the inundation of Aceh, and others whom I know are still waiting, without hope, for news of parents and missing relatives.

I don’t know what form of comfort is being offered from pulpits these days. For the sincere believer, of course, such a disaster raises agonizing questions about the mercy and justice of God. I hope we are far from the days when the learned archbishop of Dublin, William King, in 1702, could declare that “earthquakes, storms, thunder, deluges and inundations … are sometimes sent by a just and gracious God for the punishment of mankind,” but I’m not so sure. People have always looked for the solace of an explanation, however monstrous its implications.

Even the archbishop’s optimism might have been shaken, however, by a disaster that befell 53 years later. This was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 – 250 years ago this November. Like the “Christmas tsunami,” the earthquake occurred in conjunction with a religious holiday – All Saints Day, when the churches were packed – and to the sheer horror of the event was added the savage irony of the divine timing.

The Lisbon earthquake, estimated at 8.9 on the Richter Scale, struck Lisbon at 9:40 a.m. In the words of one witness, the very earth seemed to move “like a horse shaking itself.” Those who weren’t crushed in the churches were killed as they fled the successive aftershocks or in the great fires that burned everywhere out of control. Those who sought refuge in the harbor, away from the toppling buildings, were drowned by tidal waves. The total force of the quake extended over an area of a million square miles; the thousand lakes of Finland shook like cups of water, and in Morocco to the south, the royal cities of Fez and Meknes were devastated, while Casablanca had to be abandoned.

The Lisbon earthquake shattered cities and it also shattered assumptions. In a letter written a few months later, Voltaire would exclaim that “the best of all possible worlds is horribly ridiculous,” and he would add, as though exhorting himself, “one must see everything with stoic eyes. But how, when one suffers and witnesses suffering?” Voltaire was so affected by the disaster that within two months of its occurrence he had written his celebrated “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon.”

In the poem Voltaire attacked optimism in general and the English poet Alexander Pope in particular. Pope, after all, in his “Essay on Man” had been obtusely confident enough to write:

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever Is, Is Right.

Voltaire considered this passage “nothing but an insult to the sufferings of our life” and his indignation spurred him to pen not only the poem but, three years later, “Candide,” with its unsparing ridicule of Leibniz, grotesquely caricatured as the absurd Dr. Pangloss. In the poem, Voltaire avails himself of the classic weapon of the anti-optimist by opposing every grand blithe rationale with a stinging particular. The ferocity of his outrage is palpable from the opening lines:

Those savants erred who claim, “All’s for the best.”
Approach and view this carnage, broken stone,
Rags, rubble, chips of shattered wood and bone,
Women and children pinioned under beams,
Crushed under stones, piled under severed limbs;
These hundred thousands whom the earth devours,
Cut down to bleed away their final hours.

This translation is by the great American poet Anthony Hecht, who died on October 20 of the year just past. It appears in his 1977 collection “Millions of Strange Shadows,” now available in “Collected Earlier Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf, 275 pages, $16.). I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Voltaire wasn’t an especially distinguished poet – the poem on the Lisbon earthquake is perhaps the exception – but Hecht’s extraordinary translation confers a retrospective greatness on his verse. Hecht himself grappled with horrors in his own poetry; the anguish of certain poems, such as “More Light! More Light!” which deals with an especially cruel instance of Nazi atrocity, is intensified by the sheer formal perfection of the stanzas.

The Lisbon earthquake ravaged European optimism irrecoverably. Voltaire was not alone in his fierce disenchantment. Both David Hume and Immanuel Kant reversed themselves in its wake, with Kant renouncing his youthful optimism for an attitude of “pious skepticism,” in which he took his only comfort from the Book of Job: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth. Once I have spoken, but I will not answer.”

My Indonesian students, devout Muslims all, take what comfort they can from the devastation of their lives and families in the tsunami by invoking the inscrutable will of God. This is, I think, neither optimism nor fatalism on their parts but an attempt to find some ultimate meaning, however undiscoverable, in an overwhelming evil. This wouldn’t comfort most of us; the implications of such solace are terrifying. But for too many of them it’s all they have left.