Gospel & Universe 🪐 At The Wild & Fog

Pope: A Mighty Maze

Like many in the Age of Reason, Alexander Pope (1688-1744) sees the world as wild and chaotic, yet still governed by a civilized God. Pope urges us to focus on Nature and human concerns rather than on theological complexities, yet he insists that behind Nature and humanity lies a Divine Plan.

Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;
A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot;
Or garden tempting with forbidden fruit.
— An Essay on Man, 1733-4

We see God’s Plan in the passage above in his allusion to the Garden of Eden: humans may try to gain knowledge of things such as good and evil, yet they err in their thinking. Yet even their errors fit into the Grand religious Design of Fall and Redemption. Or, as Pope says in his Essay on Criticism (1711), “to err is human; to forgive divine.” The plan Pope refers to here isn’t the plan of evolution, but the Plan of a God who expresses Himself through Nature and through biblical stories such as the Garden of Eden.

It’s important to note that Enlightenment thinkers like Pope believed that science uncovers more and more of God’s design, yet they also believed that humans are mere specks in the universe. They’re therefore forever unable to grasp this larger design:

Say first, of God above, or man below
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of man, what see we but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known,
’Tis ours to trace Him only in our own.
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 has made us as we are.

From our 21st century perspective, Pope’s sense of the larger unfolding universe seems at odds with his certainty about a universal plan. Yet we have to remember that Pope was writing before evolutionary theory, neurology, DNA, or Hubble. We now know a great deal more about how large the universe is, and about how science offers a more rationally compelling argument than religion regarding nature’s operations and our development within them.

Agnostics admire Pope’s notion that “system into system runs,” yet they also see within Pope’s unnumbered worlds the very real possibility that there may not be a plan, and that there may not be a Heaven to guide us and tell us who we are. Yet, to put a finer point on the ambiguities within agnosticism, an agnostic would also entertain the possibility that Pope was in fact right about a Greater Plan. Despite the fall of old religious timelines, and despite the contradictions that arise when we compare religious texts, believers may be right that the universe is guided by an orderly, benevolent Force. Who really knows? Que savons-nous? The agnostic doubts that there is such a Plan, yet he also doubts that anyone is qualified to say for sure.

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Given Pope’s belief in a universal plan, it’s not surprising that his couplets are orderly and succinct, and that he uses them to bring the chaos of life together into a clear and overwhelming truth:

 All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame;
[…]
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.

Agnostics may admire Pope’s poetry, yet his conclusions, and the clarity with which he expresses these, may still be difficult to digest without a large dollop of Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief. “In erring reason’s spite” rhymes powerfully with “whatever is, is right,” yet the rhyme is perhaps too perfect because the idea is too idealistic, at least for many of us in today’s more existential world.

Pope’s couplets reflect an Age where people could still believe that science was proof of God’s Plan. Or, as Pope puts it, “Nature and Nature’s Law lay hid in Night. / God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.” This was at least one century before we discovered that evolution appears to be the main plan, the Bible appears to be a book written by fallible humans, and our bodies appear to be guided more by DNA and the particulars of our environment than by a power called Essence, God, Heaven, or Fate. Two hundred years after Pope we started to see everything as relative and perhaps even chaotic, much like the original status quo of the Greeks. In any case, it became more and more difficult to see everything as right or as controlled in a benevolent manner by an unerring God. In response to Pope’s couplet, Sir John Squire writes in the early 20th century: “It did not last; the Devil howling, Ho! / Let Einstein be! restored the status quo.”

This isn’t to say that everyone in the 18th century agreed with Pope, or that everyone found his writing that insightful. According to Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Pope elevates himself too high above others, and the power of his writing often overpowers the points he makes. In his Lives of the Poets (1781), Johnson says that Pope “supposes himself master of great secrets” and that he “was in haste to teach what he had not learned. […] Having exalted himself into the chair of wisdom he tells us much that every man knows, and much that he does not know himself.” Johnson argues that Pope’s apparent mastery over wisdom and philosophy comes from his powerful writing, which he calls “an egregious instance of the predominance of genius.”

When these wonder-working sounds sink into sense and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its ornaments, is left to the powers of its naked excellence, what shall we discover?

Johnson answers his own question by listing off a dozen commonplace understandings of the Enlightenment, starting with “That we are, in comparison with our Creator, very weak and ignorant; that we do not uphold the chain of existence.” A paragraph later, Johnson adds,

The vigorous contraction of some thoughts, the luxuriant amplification of others, the incidental illustrations, and sometimes the dignity, sometimes the softness of the verses, enchain philosophy, suspend criticism, and oppress judgment by overpowering pleasure.

While Johnson turns Pope’s stylistic power against him, I wouldn’t go so far. And yet I take an obliquely similar point from Johnson’s admonishment: the grandeur, condensation, and antithetical perfection of Pope’s poetry presents a vision of reality that’s too perfect, too balanced, too much like an ideal realm, and not enough like the world as we know it.

I would add, however, that Johnson also asserts what he doesn’t know — for instance that there’s a “chain of existence” which is upheld by God.

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