Sunday

Sunday is a recurring measure of time in Candide, marking both the arrival of the Grand Inquisitor of Portugal at a moment of immediate danger and the weekly sermons whose claims of human kinship clash with slavery. In these scenes, the day’s religious significance sharpens rather than settles the conflict between professed belief and human conduct.

A Calendar Marker in Portugal

The Portuguese crisis is placed just after midnight, at the beginning of Sunday, a day that belongs to the Grand Inquisitor of Portugal. He enters the room to find Candide whipped and holding a sword, Don Issachar dead on the floor, Cunegonde aghast, and the Old Woman giving counsel. Sunday gives the encounter a precise position in the night’s sequence: a new authority arrives after one killing and before Candide, fearing that the Inquisitor will call for help and have him burned, kills him too. The day’s religious association is thus joined to a scene of fear, violence, and urgent calculation.

The Weekly Sermons in Surinam

Sunday also recurs as the day on which the preachers who converted the enslaved man declare that black and white people are all children of Adam. He sets that teaching against the injuries inflicted on him under slavery: when a sugar mill seized his finger, his hand was cut off, and when he tried to escape, his leg was cut off. The sermon’s repeated weekly assertion of shared descent sits beside a system that treats him as disposable labor. His account makes Sunday a measure of repetition as well as a day on the calendar: the words are spoken every week, while the brutality they might condemn remains in force.

Religious Time and the Novel’s Critique

The two appearances give Sunday distinct but connected roles. In Portugal it identifies the day claimed by an inquisitorial authority; in Surinam it names the regular occasion for a sermon whose universal language is contradicted by the preacher’s society. The enslaved man’s appeal to kinship exposes the gap between religious profession and treatment, and Candide responds by declaring that Pangloss’s optimism can no longer be sustained. Sunday therefore marks not a resolution but a revealing contrast: religious time continues, while violence persists within it.