Alexander Pope, Essay on Man

Alexander Pope: Essay on Man (1733-744)

Though it was written during the Enlightenment, Alexander Pope’s attempt to address the imperfect state of the world is in its essence not an Enlightenment work.

The Enlightenment is a period which runs (broadly speaking) from somewhere around 1650 to somewhere around 1800 in Europe, England, and America. It is characterized by writers, philosophers, and political activists (such as – for instance – Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin) who reject traditional ways of thinking about knowledge, authority, religion, literature, and the social order.  Voltaire is one of the main figures in the Enlightenment, and everyone recognized his influence even at the time.

A famous Enlightenment story is the anecdote of Galileo what said after he had been forced by the Inquisition to recant his statement that the Earth rotates around the sun. 

Galileo, supposedly, after swearing before the agents of the Inquistion that yes, the Earth was the immovable center of all creation, as he was getting up off his knees, muttered under his breath, “Eppur si muove.”  (“And yet it moves.”)

This becomes the central metaphor of the Enlightenment for a number of reasons.

First, for its literal meaning: it doesn’t matter what people believe to be true.  The facts are what they are.  Science doesn’t care whether people believe in gravity, or the laws of physics, or what they think about evolution.  Facts are facts. 

Second, for Enlightenment thinkers, reason and facts – rather than, for instance, a king, or a religious doctrine, or loyalty to some political theory – should be put the center of the world.

Third, because of the Enlightenment faith in learning and science. The Enlightenment believes that with data, with facts, we can find the truth. 

This is to say: the truth is something that humans can learn on their own, by using their powers of observation (gathering empirical data) and then reasoning about it. The Enlightenment believes that we learn truth not by having it revealed to us by God, or by some other mystical being, but by this use of observation and reason.

Even more essentially, the Enlightenment ethos teaches that once we have learned the truth, we can use it, like a tool, to change the world for the better.

*** *** ***

For Enlightenment thinkers, reason is the only path to just authority.

No longer should humanity be concerned with tradition, or with received wisdom, or with what we have been told is right.  Now we should use reason and evidence to discover what is right, and to perfect the world according to facts and reason show us is right.

Thus we get that Enlightenment document, the Declaration of Independence, with its wholly unheard of statement that all men are created equal, and that they all have inalienable rights – a thing that was not only obviously not the case in the world of 1776, but a thing that had never been true anywhere in the world. 

Where did these guys come up with this crazy idea?

Reason.  It follows, from logic, that if God created all men, then all men must be created equal, and therefore all men must have equal rights. 

(Note that Alexander Pope explicitly argues against this point.)

(Note also that all men did not have these rights in 1776.  We don’t all have them now, in America 2016.  But it’s the Utopia we were working towards in 1776, and it’s the one we’re working towards now.)

The Enlightenment ethos sees that the world is imperfect. It locates the source of that imperfection not in God, but in the world. (Humans are part of the world.) The Enlightenment is not very interested in Religion or Heaven as a source for mending the world – and they do believe that the world needs mending.  The Enlightenment believes that the world can be mended through reason and science.

Figure out what’s wrong.  Figure out how to fix it.  Have a hypothesis, put it into action, see if it works.

Alexander Pope in his “Essay on Man” rejects Enlightenment thinking. 

He rejects, among other notions, the idea of egalitarianism – the notion that people are created equal, or that they should be equal.  He rejects the notion that humans either can or should use their power of reason to mend the world. In Essay on Man, Pope makes the argument that nothing is wrong with the World – how could there be anything wrong with the World, after all, if God created it, and if God is running it? (This is the point of view Voltaire will attack in Candide.)

Further, Pope argues that even asking such questions is a terrible idea.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan

The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much…

The basic metaphor that Pope is working with here is “The Great Chain of Being.”

The Great Chain of being is a concept that dates, in its earliest form, back to Plato. This is the belief that all creation exists in a strict and connected hierarchy, from the rocks of Earth up to God Himself:

And that to even *want* to disrupt this chain was wrong – if you broke this chain, after all (as when you break a link in any chain) you would destroy it. And, since this is the chain of being, the chain that *is* all creation, that holds all existence together, you (by breaking that chain) would be destroying the entire universe.

Thus, for a field worker, say, or a footman to wish to be other than what he was, or a woman to wish to be equal to a man – these are innately wrong.  God created the Chain of Being, he put everyone and everything in their proper place. To want to move out of that place is to rebel – and we know what happens to rebels in God’s Universe.

In Alexander Pope’s universe, as well, to rebel against God’s planned universe is to be a fool.  You can’t (obviously) know more than God, and to think that you can use your tiny human intellect to reason about God’s world, and fix God’s world is “reasoning but to err.”

How should we use our intellect, in that case? This is the question Pope’s Essay on Man attempts to answer.

Essay on Man is a theodicy, which is to say a justification (dike/δίκη) of God (Theo/θεός) – an essay, or in this case a poem, which attempts to defend God’s essential goodness in a world which seems so obviously flawed and filled with evil.

Thus we see Pope here at line 15 saying he will, in this poem, “vindicate the ways of God to man.”

Pope’s essential thesis here is the same one we see in the book of Job, in the Bible, if you know that work – that God is the creator, and man the creation, and therefore mankind should not expect to be able to understand the ways of God; further mankind has no right to judge God.

He adds that because we know God is omnibenevolent* -- which is to say, 

all-good -- we know that God’s plan for the universe is all-good.  Therefore, even though it may seem to us that the world is full of evil, that is only our perception.  In fact, what is happening is happening because of God’s plan, which must be good – WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT, as Pope puts it.

He adds the details about the Great Chain of Being to answer the question about why man can’t know more than he does.

Why, that is, can’t God let us know more of the plan? Why are we so ignorant and limited?

Because of the Great Chain of Being, basically.  There’s this Great Chain of Being, created by God, with every aspect of His Creation being somewhere along that chain.  Various rocks first, and then various plants, and then bugs, and then animals, and then… all the way up to different sorts of angels, and then God.

You, you particular man, you have to be somewhere on that chain. God had to make something like you, or the chain would be incomplete.

So… slaves, serfs, workers, women, Alexander Pope, nobles, the King, the Bishops, angels (various sorts), God… someone has to be at each link along the way. To ask why you’re at the link you are is to misunderstand the act of creation.  God had to put someone (some creature) where you are.  Why not you?

And to question that – to say, why should I be a slave? Why can’t I run this country, just as good as the King? – that’s rebellious.  That’s blasphemy.  To even wish that, as Pope says at lines 129/130, is to Sin against God.

And who but wishes to invert the laws

Of ORDER, sins against the Eternal Cause.

[*How do we know God is all benevolent?  This is a logic problem.  Think of it like this: If some being is God, he must be perfect – otherwise he’s not God. (If he’s not perfect, he’s not a God, he’s only a creature, flawed, like us.)