Alexander Pope (1688-1744) An Essay On Man 1733
Pope was born a Roman Catholic at the close of the English
Civil War, during the so-called Glorious Revolution, which deposed the Catholic
James II and permanently established a Protestant monarchy in England. As
a Catholic in this Protestant England, Pope could not attend university, hold
public employment or office, and had to live ten miles outside of city limits.
But his Essay seems bent on making peace with
or “vindicating” the fact that as a religious minority he must accept this
prejudice and discrimination, rather than challenging it; we might
consider this poem the "Anti-Declaration of Independence”; it defends the order
of things – as divinely created and ordered – even when that order so clearly
oppresses him and those of his own faith.
For these reasons, we start our section on the
Enlightenment with Pope in part to contrast his conservative perspective
with the later Enlightenment era writers like Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas
Jefferson, and Mary Wollstonecraft, all of whom set out to tear down the
status quo and build a revolutionarily new utopia. In fact, we’ll find
Voltaire's Candide is an attack on some of the Essay’s key
arguments (Leibnitz's Philosophical
Optimism).
What Pope holds in common with these other Enlightenment
thinkers, however, is his argument that reason will unlock an
underlying order to all things, including, for Pope, God's plan. Like
other Enlightenment thinkers, he believes there is an inherent, overarching
structure or order to the universe. Like Plato, Leibniz and Pope,
and to a degree Descartes, all argue that this order can be expressed and
understood through logic/math -- or through Reason (philosophy) the ability to
apply the kinds of objective, concrete and critical thinking common to math.
See: Platonic
Idealism and
Pantheon notes. Pope's "Essay" argues that those things beyond human reason
can safely be left to faith...and in his case, faith in the accuracy of
Judeo-Christian scripture and the authority of the Church.
Voltaire begins as a massive supporter and fan of Pope, and
Voltaire was even instrumental in bringing Pope's Essay On Man to France
and, perhaps, its first translation into French. But by the time he wrote Candide (1759),
you'll see that Voltaire’s thinking – and the Enlightenment in general – has
taken a radically different turn.