Use Of Irony In David Bentley Hart's 'The Doors Of The Sea'

Voltaire’s Ironic Argument Against an Active God David Bentley Hart’s “The Doors of the Sea” outlines Voltaire’s poetic reaction, Poeme sur le disastre de Lisbonne, to the earthquake and tsunami that struck Portugal in 1755. Voltaire uses his poem to present an argument against a just, loving God who acts with providence. Voltaire uses irony throughout the excerpt of the poem presented by Hart to ossify his case against the probability of a caring intervening deity, such as the God of Abraham. The manner by which Voltaire strays away from traditional beliefs and uses logic to come to a conclusion about religion, particularly Deism, signals that he indeed was an Enlightenment-style thinker, or as Hart says, “prey to the superstitions of the Enlightenment” (36) …show more content…
One passage from Voltaire’s poem that Hart chooses to evaluate involves the harm that fell upon the innocent: “What crime and what sin have they committed, these infants crushed and bleeding on their mother’s breasts?” (Hart 19, excerpt from Poeme sur le disastre de Lisbonne). In other words, Voltaire uses a method of questioning to ironically ask the reader what babies had done to deserve this tragedy. The obvious answer is that babies are innocent. They are unable to commit crimes, and are unable to sin. The punishment without crime raises the reader to question why God would allow such horror to occur. Voltaire holds that if an omnipotent God who acts upon the Earth through providence exists, he would not have let those who are innocent suffer and perish. Instead, the active God would perform some miracle, or change the tectonic plates in some way in order to spare the innocent and only punish the