Religion and Geology: Explaining Earthquakes in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Although many scholars regard the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 as “the first modern disaster,” this was hardly the first earthquake to have occurred in the early modern era or the first one to be discussed distinctively from previous events. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, dozens of earthquakes struck regions in Europe and the Americas, prompting written responses both religious and philosophical. Whether these events occurred in seismically active regions such as Peru (which experienced major quakes in 1609, 1687, and 1746) and the Caribbean islands (in the 1690s) or in the less frequently shaken regions of New England (1638, 1727) and the British Isles (1580, 1750), a recognizable commonality among the variety of texts about them is the seemingly comfortable coexistence between religious and geological discussions. Indeed, some of these authors are well versed in two ancient and seemingly incompatible textual traditions – the Christian Bible on the one hand and the writings of philosophers such as Aristotle, Seneca, and Pliny on the other – and they often draw on both in trying to explain earthquakes and their causes. Even in cases where writers give God ultimate credit for causing the earth to tremble, divine cause does not mean that there are not earthly processes at work, and so the authors discuss both. Further, several religious authors, like the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta (1540-1600), wrote texts about earthquakes and other geological realities that helped to lay the foundation for new understandings of these phenomena. Through comparative analysis and discussion, this paper investigates the complex relationship between religion and geology as found in multiple earthquakes texts published in Europe and the Americas in the early modern era. This paper also demonstrates how the distinctive nature of earthquakes makes them particularly useful as a source of historical study.