by Chris Alexion, Copyright October 10, 2006, all rights reserved. 378 views
When Frederick the Great described Voltaire's Candide as "Job in modern dress," he placed the work in a conversation that has been carried on for ages. Job confronts the origins of pain and suffering head-on, and asks whether virtue will be rewarded and vice punished. Through satire, Candide attacks the same questions.
The young man Candide begins, like Job, in prosperity, though Candide's happiness in some measure results from ignorance. "[Candide] decided that after the happiness of being born Baron of Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, the second order of happiness was to be Miss Cunegonde; the third was seeing her every day, and the fourth was listening to Master Pangloss, the greatest philosopher in the province and consequently in the entire world."
Like Job, Candide falls from favor. While Candide's fall is comic and Job's tragic, Candide nevertheless experiences true suffering. He's cast out of his home, impressed into the army, and forced to endure horrors in the war. Job, of course, lost all his possessions, his children, and his health.
From this perspective of suffering, Job and Candide ask, Why? And at first, they both turn to faulty sources for their explanations. Job turns to his three friends Bildad, Zophar, and Eliphaz, whose failure at consolation earned them the satiric moniker "Job's counselors." These friends failed to explain Job's circumstances because they stopped offering silent support and decided to open their mouths. Motivated by a desire to sound wise, they accused Job of secret sin and were eventually rebuked by the Lord.
Similarly, Candide turns in his misfortune to the inept Pangloss, who has become a hideous beggar stricken with syphilis. When Candide remarks that man must have fallen, for he is not what he was created to be, Pangloss replies that "private misfortunes make for public welfare, and therefore the more private misfortunes there are, the better everything is."
Both Pangloss and Job's counselors are unable to account for the evil around them because they are blinded by their philosophical precommitments. Job's friends can only account for misfortune as a result of sin, and end up charging Job unfairly. Pangloss's fatalism requires him to believe that everything is the best it could be, which closes his eyes to the nature of evil.
Up to this point, Job and Candide have shown remarkable similarities. They involve similar stories and ask the same question: Why do bad things happen to good people, and what is God's relation to all this? Yet the solutions pursued by the two accounts couldn't be more divergent.
Voltaire, heavily influenced by the European Enlightenment, sought the answer to this question in reason and human experience. Voltaire saw these elements as the only ingredients out of which to form a satisfactory answer. As a deist, Voltaire hinted that the Creator probably does not care for nor involve himself in His creation any more than the sultan worries about the condition of the mice on board his ships. Voltaire's conclusion–"That is very well put, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden"–is a philosophical shrug of the shoulders. Voltaire really doesn't know how to explain evil, but he does know that unfruitful speculation often produces more evils than it cures.
Job also makes use of human experience, but ultimately turns outward for its solution. When God speaks to Job and his friends through the whirlwind, He acknowledges Job's circumstances and assures Job that justice will ultimately prevail. But God's statements also put man, not God, in the dock, and turn the questioners' perspective upside-down.
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