Passage analysis of Candide by Voltaire
             "The faculty of the University of Coimbra had concluded that the spectacle of roasting several persons over a slow fire in a ceremonious fashion is an infallible secret for preventing the earth from quaking." This quote is one of many examples of religious satire in this particular passage of the novel Candide, by Voltaire. In this passage, Voltaire pokes fun at the Inquisition and Catholicism but in a very subtle manner. He does this in conjunction with Candide's theory of optimism (every effect has a cause or rational explanation).
             To provide some history, Candide and Pangloss get shipwrecked off the coast of Portugal after a powerful storm and come ashore at the port city of Lisbon. They arrive amongst the aftermath of an earthquake and start helping people out of the rubble. Pangloss is waxing philosophically, when a 'little dark man', who is coincidentally a spy for the Inquisition, interrupts him. The spy arrests Pangloss for not believing in 'free will' and arrests Candide as well for 'listening with an air of approval'. This shows how the Inquisition would arrest people for extremely trivial reasons. Voltaire then continues his mockery of the Inquisition by showing that they aggrandize small matters i.e. make a mountain out of a molehill, when 3 other men are arrested for even more insignificant matters; two men had been caught removing the un-kosher parts of their meal, which showed that they practiced Judaism in secret, and another man was arrested for marrying the godmother of his godchild (not genetically related, just religiously). These men are all sentenced to an auto-da-fe, which is Portuguese for act of faith. Auto-da-fe consists of the burning of heretics. The ironic element in this is that the prisoners are not doing an act of faith, just a forced confession. Voltaire also ridicules Catholicism and the Inquisitio
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