Humanity, in closed heroic couplets

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) had several strikes against him. He was Roman Catholic, which meant that his family was forced to move from London when he was about twelve, due to laws which forbade Catholics from living within ten miles of London. His Catholicism also prevented him from attending a university—he was largely self-taught. He also suffered from severe physical problems—tuberculosis of the bone caused a curvature of his spine, and he seems to have spent most of his life troubled by debilitating physical pain: agonizing headaches, breathing problems, etc

Nevertheless, despite these problems, by the 1710s, Pope’s poetry was well-known throughout Europe, and he was considered one of the premier poets of the age. His writing tended to follow classical models: he wrote pastors and essays and odes and mock-epics, as well as translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

An Essay on Man is a sort of philosophical essay in verse. It consists of four epistles, letters allegedly written to Pope’s friend, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, considering various aspects of human existence. The first epistle deals with humanity’s place in the universe, the second with humanity’s relationship with itself.

The poem begins with an address to St. John, comparing the subject of the poem to a sort of nature walk (it’s a wild; it’s a garden; it’s a maze) that the two of them are going to explore together. The last line of the introduction, “But vindicate the ways of God to man,” gives us a sense of the poem’s intention. Somehow, humanity feels that there’s something wrong with the way God has situated humanity in the world, and Pope sees his job in the poem to be demonstrating how God’s ways are, in reality, right.

The line echoes the last line of the introduction to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a seventeenth century Christian epic in which Milton asks the Holy Spirit to help his poem to “justify the ways of God to man.” Like Paradise Lost, An Essay on Man is a poem with a religious purpose: God’s reputation is at stake, and the poet is trying to set the record straight.

In a sense, An Essay on Man is a sort of theodicy (defined here). A theodicy is a theological document that attempts to reconcile the authority of God with the problem of evil, bringing together three seemingly irreconcilable propositions:

- God is good;
- God is powerful;
- Evil and suffering exist in the universe.

If God is really good and powerful, how could he allow evil and suffering to exist in the world?

There are many ways to put a theodicy together; Pope begins in Section I by focusing on the limitations of humanity’s point of view. We can’t know all the reasons that Man was made the way he was. The lines

He, who through vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What varied Being peoples every star,
May tell why Heaven made us as we are.

In order to truly understand why humanity was made the way we were made, one would need to be able to see on a cosmic scale. Humanity is incapable of having that kind of vision; therefore, we’re in no position to judge whether or not God ought to have made us in a different way.

Notice in lines 33 and 34, Pope refers to “the great chain” that is “upheld by God” (Norton 512). This is an allusion to a concept that would have been familiar to most of Pope’s readers, the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain of Being gives us a picture of every item in the universe ranked in order of perfection, with God at the top, holding up this chain of being that descends from archangels to seraphim and cherubim to humanity (and the various ranks of humanity) to animals, plants, and inanimate objects somewhere at the bottom of the chain. (More expansive explanations, and pictures, here and here). It’s a view of the universe that is derived, according to a number of scholars, from Aristotle, and was quite popular during the Middle Ages. It’s easy to understand why it would have a lot of appeal for people during the Enlightenment, however: it’s so neat and organized.

Pope’s argument is based in large part on the Great Chain of Being: he relies on it for his argument in Section II as well. Lines 43-50 basically say that Man has to exist at some point on the Chain of Being, and so the question is whether God has put him at the wrong point: should God have placed humanity higher on the chain of being than he did? Pope addresses the question by stating that man’s place on the chain affects not just humanity but every position on the chain—every being in the universe is interdependent on every other being. God didn’t make humanity just to serve one end: he may have many purposes for us that aren’t apparent to us. Line 61 and following compare humanity to the ox, who is sometimes a beast of burden and other times an object of worship. Humanity is just as incapable as understanding our situations as the ox is of understanding his, and so we should recognize that God has placed us perfectly.

Section III states that ignorance of one’s fate should be considered a blessing: it gives us the unforgettable, troubling picture of the lamb about to be slaughtered who “licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.” The question Pope is raising is whether the lamb would benefit from knowing his fate—the answer, quite clearly, is no.

Section IV makes the point that humanity’s dissatisfaction with our place in the world arises from pride—we think we know better than God. If you’re going to question God’s placement of humanity in the Great Chain of Being, you’re guilty of colossal arrogance. Pope says:

Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod,
Re-judge his justice, be the God of God.

That does seem rather presumptuous, complaining to God that he got the universe wrong.

In this section, Pope again makes reference to Paradise Lost: “Aspiring to be Gods, if Angels fell,/Aspiring to be Angels, Men rebel.” Paradise Lost, as you may know, tells the story of the fall of humanity, beginning with the fall of the defeated rebel angels from heaven. Satan, one of the main figures in Paradise Lost, rebelled against God because he didn’t want God to rule over him: he thought his judgment was superior to God’s. Clearly, Pope is saying that people who complain about humanity’s place in the universe are motivated by the same forces that drove Satan and his followers.

One of the interesting differences between Paradise Lost and An Essay on Man is that when Milton wants to justify the ways of God to man, he turns to the Book of Scripture, telling the story of Adam and Eve’s fall, and basically making the case that even this tragedy is ultimately good because it allows God to redeem us through the sacrifice of his son. When Pope wants to vindicate the ways of God to man, he writes an essay that takes very little from the Book of Scripture—instead, he looks mainly at the Book of Nature, using reason and arguments that are friendly to the Enlightenment view of the world to make his case that God is not unjust.

It’s this approach that have made some students question whether or not Pope was a Deist. This isn’t the case—Pope seems to have been quite orthodox—but it does nicely illustrate the ways that our culture can shape our religious beliefs. Certainly in an Age of Reason, it makes sense to communicate theological truths in a rational way, emphasizing logic and other elements that will appeal to the people with whom we interact. It’s also a good reminder that, whether we’re aware of it or not, our theological beliefs are shaped by cultural forces, and it’s important that we try to be aware of what’s truly godly and what’s merely cultural.

Section V continues the criticism of humanity’s pride, saying that we think the universe exists only for our pleasure. It also takes the argument further by saying that we see the natural world as good, despite the existence of earthquakes and storms and other natural disasters. If we can accept that the natural world is not always sunny and balmy, then why can’t we just as easily accept that certain members of humanity will be tyrants and villains? Pope ends the section with the idea that perhaps the natural world and the human world somehow require a balance between the pleasant and the unpleasant:

Better for Us, perhaps, it might appear,
Where there all harmony, all virtue here;
That never air or ocean felt the wind;
That never passion discomposed the mind.
But ALL subsists by elemental strife;
And Passions are the elements of Life.
The general ORDER, since the whole began,
Is kept in Nature, and is kept in Man. (Norton 514)

Maybe the tension between the good and the bad is necessary for the preservation of the general order.

In Section IV, Pope broadens his case a bit, saying that if humanity wishes to head up the chain of being and take the place of the angels, we might also want to scoot down the chain of being as well, since the animals below us have all kinds of cool attributes that we don’t have. Pope counters that impulse with the lines:

The bliss of Man (could Pride that blessing find)
Is not to act or think beyond mankind;
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what his nature and his state can bear.

Pope goes on to speculate that if we had the special abilities that other species have, we might find them to be unsuitable. If we were blessed with another animal’s superior hearing or sense of touch, perhaps we would find noise and touch devastatingly, even deadly—he gives the image of a person falling dead from the smell of a rose. “Who finds,” he says, “Providence all good and wise,/Alike in what it gives, and what denies?”

Skipping on to Section VIII, we find Pope making direct reference to the Great Chain of Being, giving a lovely picture of its vastness stretching above and below humankind. If one link in the chain breaks, he says, then the whole chain is broken—the entire scheme is destroyed. The result of one break in the chain would be chaos:

Let Earth unbalanced from her orbit fly,
Planets and Suns run lawless through the sky;
Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurled,
Being on Being wrecked, and world on world;
Heaven’s whole foundations to their center nod,
And Nature tremble to the throne of God.
All this dread ORDER break—for whom? for theee?
Vile Worm!—oh Madness! Pride! Impiety!

This scenes seem designed to devastate the enlightenment mind—the orderly, mathematical, clockwork universe transformed into screaming chaos, planets and stars rolling haplessly from one end of the galaxy to the other, wild disorder! It’s a nightmare! Better to just be content with where you are.

Section IX gives us a brief picture of the absurdity of the human body attempting to reorganize itself, and then spins a metaphor of the Universe being parallel to the body and God parallel to the soul, ending with the great lines, “To him no high, no low, no great, no small;/ He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all” (Norton 517). In God’s eyes, nothing he created is low or small.

Section IX sums up. Humanity is limited and weak—we don’t have the knowledge or the perspective to judge God’s creation. We need to have faith in God and accept the way he has ordered the universe. The last six lines of Epistle I are Pope’s statement of faith that God’s creation is good even if humanity is incapable of perceiving that goodness:

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.

You may or may not buy this as a theodicy. On a logical level, it may be possible for us to agree that humanity is too limited to see the scope of God’s plan, that what seems to us to be unjustified suffering and pain will work in the end to bring about the highest good. On the other hand, if one of my friends loses their child to a terminal illness or an automobile accident, I’m not going to try to comfort them by quoting the preceding lines of poetry. One of the criticisms we can certainly level against Pope is that he isn’t very sensitive to the pain that people who are suffering are going through.

What we have to remember, however, is that the person who wrote “WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT” wasn’t writing about pain and suffering flippantly. Pope lived his entire life with what many people believe was constant physical pain. His theodicy isn’t the callow assertion of a sheltered person who knows nothing of how difficult life can be. Instead, having lived a life that none of us would want, he is able to believe that his suffering serves some higher purpose, and to affirm that what he is going through is part of God’s grand design. I can’t help but find that impressive.

*
Epistle II turns from the consideration of humanity’s place in the universe to a meditation our individual characteristics: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,/The proper study of mankind is Man.” Again, this seems characteristic of Pope’s time: people in earlier eras would have maintained that the proper study of mankind is God. Nevertheless, I think we can see Pope as practicing humility here: what, after all, can human beings know of an infinite, omniscient God?

In Section I, Pope presents his vision of humankind as being divided between high characteristics and low characteristics: the line, “A being darkly wise and rudely great,” presents humanity as a paradox. Darkness is opposed to wisdom, and rudeness is the opposite of greatness: he’s saying that humanity is stupidly intelligent. A contradiction, a paradox. The list of paradoxes reaches its height with the line “The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!” Conventional thinking during the Enlightenment would agree with “glory,” but Pope is adding a different wrinkle with “jest” and “riddle.” We’re as foolish as we are wise, he’s saying, a mysterious, puzzling creature.

The rest of Section I is devoted to putting human scientific achievement into context. Yes, there have been a lot of advances in knowledge—notice that he brings up Newton, the Enlightenment poster boy for Reason and Science—but humanity doesn’t understand itself, undercuts its own achievements, and has achieved very little in the way of useful knowledge.

In Section II, Pope describes the anatomy of the human being, saying that we’re divided into two impulses, Reason and Self-Love, which he later divides into the various Passions. The traditional Enlightenment response to this division would be to say that Reason is the honorable trait, while Self-Love is something we should try to purge from ourselves; instead, Pope is quick to say that these two qualities complement each other, at least ideally. He connects Self-Love with movement and Reason with restraint or guidance and provides two striking images of how these two impulses need to work together: without Self-Love, Reason is like a plant, stuck in one place, never moving anywhere new, without ambition or goals; without Reason, Self-Love is like a meteor, rushing madly forward with no sense of direction, burning itself out without ever getting anywhere. Another clarifying metaphor comes in Section III:

On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but Passion is the gale.

Here, human life is compared to a sailing ship: Reason is the rudder that guides the ship’s direction, while Passion is the wind that moves the ship along. Obviously, both are necessary if we don’t want the ship sitting dead in the water or blown haplessly all over the ocean. Passion and Reason work best together to move human life forward in a sensible direction.

I’ll stop here. There’s more to say about the poem, but I’ve probably already said too much. Instead of me providing discussion questions, why don’t you read through the poem and this post and make comments based on your own questions and observations? Thank you for all your good work.