Tuesday, March 26, 2019

What the specific passages in Candide that illustrate the behavior of religious figures and institutions?

In Candide, the title character comes into contact—and often conflict—with religious figures and institutions on several occasions. Voltaire overall is critical of both; while he tends to emphasize the individuals’ faults in deviating from or misinterpreting the principles of the institutions, he also implicitly questions the reasons for that religions go to extremes such as the Inquisition.
One set of notable interactions are those that Candide and his former tutor, Pangloss, have with the Inquisition while they are in Lisbon, Portugal. After they survive a serious earthquake and as Pangloss pronounces his philosophical tenets, they encounter a man who challenges them on theological grounds. He turns out to work with the Inquisition and has them both imprisoned. They then must don humiliating garments and march in a procession, after which Candide is flogged and Pangloss is hung. Candide also interacts with the Grand Inquisitor, a high-ranking Catholic Church official. While charged with weeding out heretics, this official exhibits hypocrisy through his lust for Cunégonde, Candide’s beloved. Outraged that the Grand Inquisitor and another man, Issacar, are both keeping her as their mistress—although she claims not to have succumbed to their advances—Candide kills both men, then flees to Spain.
After Candide leaves Europe for the New World, Voltaire considers religion through the youth’s adventures with his valet, Cacambo. Arriving in Paraguay, he first meets, then disagrees with and kills Cunégonde’s brother, who is a Jesuit Reverend Father, because he demeans Candide as unworthy of his sister. Fleeing into the countryside, Candide becomes the hero of the Orejones, who hate the Jesuits. Leaving their territory, the two men decide to take a canoe and end up in a miraculous landscape. In this apparent paradise of El Dorado, jewels are so abundant that children play with them. It is populated by pious individuals who live in harmony. The perplexed Candide questions the 172-year-old man they meet about the absence of religious leaders, emphasizing the conflicts among the different orders that constantly “preach, argue, govern, plot, and have people burned.” Rejecting such doings as madness, the old men emphasizes their singular devotion to God.

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