It isn’t only priests who struggle with hard questions about human suffering: 18th-century philosophers were exercised about the subject too. And one of them, Voltaire, made it the basis for his novella Candide which, perhaps surprisingly, turned out to be a comic romp: a satire on the argument that everything in life is for the best.
Still more surprising, though, is that two centuries later Candide was adapted as a (somewhat intellectual) Broadway operetta, with a score by Leonard Bernstein and words by successive librettists who came and went without ever quite cracking the problem of turning philosophy into entertainment.
