Embracing Life Through Passion And Strong Will

The Church has been a constant target of Voltaire’s satiric nouvelle Candide. As religion becomes an important aspect, we can automatically refer as the Church being one of the novel’s targets. Voltaire refers to the Church by being corrupt and hypocritical, especially its leaders. Through the story of the old woman, being Pope Urban’s X daughter, the reader depicts this religious leader as highly unethical member of an organized religion. First of all, by being a priest, it is his duty to be celibate. By having a daughter, it is more than obvious that he violated this code of ethic and morale of the Catholic Church. On the other hand, the Inquisition is also used as a way to target the Church itself. By hanging Pangloss for expressing his ideas, and by persecuting Candide for simply listening to them, we see how an institute like the Catholic Church pledges against the Natural Rights of humanity.

The Church is also criticized purely through the old woman’s story through the way she talks about life and death. Suicide, in particular, becomes a highlighted possibility for people in the world who’ve found their lives miserable: “I have worked I have met a vast number of people who detested their existence, but I have met only twelve put an end to their misery” (57). Personally, I questioned why more unfortunate people didn’t put an end to their miserable lives. But if we come into context here, in Voltaire’s epoch, the only sin that God wouldn’t pardon was suicidal. Since God’s more precious gift to humanity was life, by taking it away we are insulting God’s grace. Therefore, those who commit suicide are condemned to spend eternity in hell. Nevertheless, the old woman (being an illegitimate child of the Pope), never even considers the option of suicidal in her life full of dejection and anguish. According to her, “I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life” (57).

Through her perception of life, Voltaire targets the Church once again. She might believe that hell cannot possibly be worse than life, which in fact contradicts the religion’s doctrine of eternal punishment. As depicted in Dante’s Inferno, Hell is the realm of afterlife where humanity is punished for their sins. By believing the contrary, the old woman depicts Hell as a absolutely normal epilogue of life’s miseries. We will continue suffering, so what’s the difference between dying and remaining alive? Also, we can infer that she doesn’t believe in God or afterlife, and hence doesn’t consider suicide as being an ultimate sin or a straight journey to Hell. Even though the pessimism of the old woman is notorious through her story, “I assure you we were all at death’s door” (56), a slight hint of hope is found by referring she is still “in love with life”. They love it neither because they resign to it nor because they fear eternal punishment. Human beings embrace life, even if it is a stupid move. But it divulges zeal, strong will, and an almost heroic endurance.