English 212-2-50
Prof. Thomas Carlisle
28 July 2015
Religious Hypocrisy in Voltaire’s Candide Voltaire’s Candide, a satire literature, was written in 1759 during the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which cultural and intellectual forces in Western Europe emphasized reason, analysis, and individualism rather than the traditional lines of authority. Candide is the story of a young man’s adventures throughout the world, where he witnesses much evil, disaster and sufferings. Throughout his travels, he adheres to the teaching of his tutor, believing that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Candide is Voltaire’s answer to what he saw as an absurd belief proposed by the Optimists-an easy way to rationalize evil and suffering. Throughout Candide, Voltaire uses satire as a tool to reveal his controversial views on religion. Voltaire takes aim at organized religion and other organization to prove the point that all were completely corrupt in thoughts and actions. He criticized many aspects of humanity at that time. Throughout Candide religious leaders are portrayed as hypocrites who do not live up to the religious standards that they set for others. Religious leaders ought to be the epitome of goodness and morality and are supposed to live lives worthy of emulation, but in this play, the church is found to be infested with hypocrisy and its leaders, hypocritical, greedy, and immoral. There are hypocrisies of sexual promiscuity, threat, belief in superstitions, stealing, lack of charity and oppression seen in this satire. High ranking church officials are deeply involved in sexual promiscuity. Despite his vows of celibacy as a priest and leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Urban the Tenth has a mistress and a daughter. The old woman stated, “I am in fact the daughter of