Bailey's Acts of God

To, perhaps slightly, reformulate Bailey’s argument here, one may begin with the questioning of the locus of catastrophe [thus linking it up to the question of its gender that had come up]: is the concept of catastrophe not necessarily intertwined with the idea of a monotheistic [and thereby to a certain extent ‘Western’, despite its trace back to Vedic doctrines and its link to other principles such as Shiva/Vishnu, etc] cosmic order – i.e. one in which Being is transcendent to the material world, external to its ‘acts’ (or, for example, in Orthodox theology the so called ‘energies’, in Spinoza’s universe the modifications of the substance, etc)? Is it not only through the inability to live [by affirming] becoming that a culture can come to obtain the concept of disaster?

And does not Voltaire’s incapability of sustaining Leibnizian ‘tout est bon’ theodicy in the face of the Lisbon earthquake not stem precisely from this inevitable paradoxical nature of the disaster, in which the sense of Being so immediately brought forth by the surge of becoming makes for this impossible necessity of Being as being perceivable only through its emanation into or expression through the material world of becoming?