It is essential, while trying to understand Pope's meaning
in An Essay on Man, to understand what Pope is not talking about as
much as it is to understand what he is talking about. First, using the one issue of war
as an illustration of what he is not talking about, if you do a quick document search of
Epistle 1 of An Essay on Man, you'll find that not once does Pope
mention war. In other words, Pope is not addressing the atrocities of man's injustice to
man or man's brutality to man, nor is he discussing a philosophical perspective on
nature's horrific modes of robbing life from vital people. Pope is talking about a
philosophical perspective on being a human being alive in a relationship with God and
with nature; in other word, a philosophy of living.
Pope
orients readers to his discussion on his philosophy of being alive by introducing two of
the three main points:
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What can we reason, but from what we know? / Of
Man what see we, / ... / Thro' worlds unnumber'd tho' the God be known, / 'Tis ours to
trace him only in our own.
In
this, Pope lays out the scope for two-thirds of his discussion: man and man's
relationship to God. The third point, man's relationship to nature, is presented by
Pope's lines: "Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made / Taller or stronger than the
weeds they shade?" Through questioning "mother earth," Pope explores the relationship
between man and nature. This he paints as a changeable and unpredictable one, with
levels of chaotic arrangement in how man and nature
relate:
When
the proud steed shall know why Man restrains / His fiery course, or drives him o'er the
plains; / ... / Then shall Man's pride and dullness comprehend / ... / Why doing,
suff'ring, check'd, impell'd; and why / This hour a slave, the next a
deity.
Elsewhere, Pope brings
up natural calamities ("earthquakes swallow, ... tempests sweep"). Pope deepens his
questioning of nature by asking if nature errs when death descends from the "livid sun"
or when "towns" are taken to "the grave." The answer Pope presents is that the "first
Almighty Cause" acts by "gener'l" not specific precepts, therefore calamities are not
aimed at humankind, they are purely vagaries of "mother earth," and "mother earth" is
not perfect: "And what [is] created perfect?" Pope's focus here is present a
philosophical perspective of how to live with nature that is not perfect. In other
words, the meaning in his final statement, "One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, is RIGHT,"
pertains to a philosophic perspective on how to live with God and nature, not to one
explaining destruction and death.
Pope's major points
admonish comprehension of the majesty of God and the imperfect and impartial grandeur of
nature, which he suggests will counter a tendency to complain and rail against
Fortune:
If
nature ... / ... stunn'd him with the music of the spheres,
How would he wish
that Heav'n had left him still
[alone].
He suggests that
such an experience gives new understanding of being
alive:
Just
as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains ... / All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
/ Whose body, Nature is, and God the
soul;
Pope strives to
persuade the reader: "say not Man's imperfect, Heav'n in fault; / Say rather, Man [is]
as perfect as he ought." Pope's philosophical concern with life and living is summarized
as:
All
Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; / ... / All Discord, Harmony, not
understood; / ... / One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, is
RIGHT."
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