An Essay on Man

Overview

Published

Anonymously in London: Epistles I–III in 1733, Epistle IV in January 1734; first acknowledged by Pope in his Works of 1735

Genre

Philosophical verse epistle; a didactic poem on ethics and natural theology

Metre

Heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter)

Length

Four epistles, about 1,300 lines (294, 294, 318 and 398 lines in the standard numbering)

Addressee

Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Tory statesman, freethinker and Pope's friend and neighbour

Subject

Man in relation to the universe (I), to himself (II), to society (III) and to happiness (IV)

Central claim

The universe is an ordered whole designed by a good God; apparent evils are parts of a universal good, so 'Whatever is, is right'

Larger plan

Intended as the opening of an unfinished 'opus magnum' on human nature, morals and government, of which the Moral Essays (Epistles to Several Persons) are fragments

Key intellectual contexts

Theodicy and optimism (Leibniz, William King, Shaftesbury), the Great Chain of Being, Newtonian science, Lockean psychology

Reception

Hugely popular and widely translated in Europe; attacked for heterodoxy by Crousaz (1737), defended by Warburton; mocked by Voltaire after the Lisbon earthquake (1755)

Context

By the early 1730s Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was the most celebrated poet in England. He had made his name with the Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock, had grown rich on his translations of Homer, and had fought his enemies in The Dunciad. A Roman Catholic, barred by law from university, public office and a house in London, he lived at Twickenham on the Thames, where he gathered a circle of friends that included Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot and, from 1725, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who had returned from exile and settled nearby at Dawley. The Essay on Man grew out of conversations with Bolingbroke, and the poem opens and closes by addressing him as 'my St John' and as Pope's 'guide, philosopher, and friend' (Mack 1985) (Hammond 1984).

Pope planned the Essay as the first part of a great ethical work, his 'opus magnum', which was to move from the general nature of man to particular subjects such as knowledge, the uses of wealth, education and civil government. The plan was never completed; the four Epistles to Several Persons (later called the Moral Essays) are what survives of its later parts (Leranbaum 1977). The Essay itself was published anonymously by John Wilford in 1733 (Epistles I–III) and January 1734 (Epistle IV). Pope wanted readers, and especially his enemies, to judge the poem without knowing who wrote it, and several of them praised it before the secret came out. He acknowledged it in the 1735 edition of his Works.

The poem belongs to a long tradition of philosophical verse that runs back to Lucretius' De rerum natura, and to the Horatian verse epistle, a conversational letter in verse addressed to a friend. Its argument draws on ideas widely shared in Pope's time: that the universe is a 'plenum', full of every possible kind of being arranged in a graded scale from God down to nothing (the Great Chain of Being); that a good and wise Creator must have made the best world possible; and that self-interest, properly understood, leads to benevolence. These ideas had recently been set out by Leibniz in his Theodicy (1710), by Archbishop William King in De Origine Mali (1702, translated by Edmund Law in 1731), and by the third Earl of Shaftesbury in his Characteristicks (1711) (Lovejoy 1936) (Mack 1950) (White 1970).

Pope chose the heroic couplet, the form he had brought to a high polish, because it suits argument: each couplet tends to close on a balanced statement, and the antitheses within the line can set opposites against each other and then reconcile them. The Essay is therefore full of lines that have become proverbs: 'Hope springs eternal in the human breast', 'The proper study of mankind is Man', 'An honest man's the noblest work of God'. In his Design (a prose preface) Pope said that he wrote in verse partly because principles are more easily remembered in that form, and partly because verse allowed him to express them more concisely than prose. (Rogers 2006)

The poem was immediately famous and was soon translated into French, German, Italian and many other languages. Its theology, however, provoked controversy. In 1737 the Swiss Protestant theologian Jean-Pierre de Crousaz attacked it as a system of fatalism and natural religion, close to Spinoza and Leibniz, with no place for revelation or grace. William Warburton, later Bishop of Gloucester, answered him in a series of letters (collected as A Vindication of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, 1740), won Pope's gratitude and became his literary executor (Crousaz 1737) (Warburton 1740). Later in the century the poem's optimism became a target for Voltaire, while Johnson, Kant and Rousseau each formed influential judgements of it.

Plot overview

The Essay has no story; its 'plot' is the progress of an argument. Epistle I begins with the poet inviting Bolingbroke to survey with him 'this scene of Man', a mighty maze that has a plan, and announces that his aim is to 'vindicate the ways of God to Man'. Human beings, it argues, can reason only from what they know, and they know only their own small station in a vast system. They should not complain that they are weak and blind, for a full universe needs every rank of being. Pride, which wishes to rise above our place, is the root of our errors. Natural evils such as earthquakes and moral evils such as tyrants are parts of a design we cannot see. The epistle ends: 'Whatever is, is right'.

Epistle II turns from the universe to the individual. 'Know then thyself', it begins: man is a creature of the middle state, half god and half beast. Two principles govern him, self-love, which drives, and reason, which restrains. The passions are modes of self-love, and in each person one 'ruling passion' grows strong and absorbs the rest; but providence grafts virtue onto it, so that even our vices can be turned to good. The epistle closes with a sad and funny picture of life's ages, each content with its toys, and the reassurance that 'Though Man's a fool, yet God is wise'.

Epistle III considers man in society. The whole of nature is bound by a 'chain of love', in which every creature serves and is served. Pope traces the growth of human society from the 'state of Nature', which was 'the reign of God', through the family and the patriarchal tribe, to the rise of kings, the corruption of government and religion by force and superstition, and their restoration by wise legislators and poets. Self-love and social love turn out to be the same.

Epistle IV asks what happiness is and where it may be found. It cannot depend on external goods, for heaven has distributed these unequally while giving everyone an equal chance of happiness. Wealth, honour, nobility, greatness, fame and talent are examined in turn and found hollow. The only true happiness is virtue, which is open to all; and virtue grows outward from self-love, like ripples on a lake, to embrace family, country, mankind and all creation. The poem ends with a tribute to Bolingbroke and a summary of its whole argument.

Book by book

Characters

Addressees and figures

Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke

Tory statesman, Secretary of State under Queen Anne, exiled after 1715 for his Jacobite intrigues and later allowed to return. Witty, learned and sceptical in religion, he was Pope's close friend and the addressee of all four epistles. Pope called him the 'master of the poet, and the song', and Bolingbroke later claimed to have supplied the poem's philosophy. His posthumous works, published in 1754, revealed his deism and made his share in the Essay a matter of controversy.

The poet-speaker

The voice of the poem, a guide who walks with Bolingbroke through the 'mighty maze' and alternates between preacher, philosopher and satirist. He presents himself as modest, distrustful of system-building, and confident only in the order of the whole. His tone moves from exhortation to irony to warm personal tribute.

Man

The poem's real protagonist, addressed as 'Presumptuous Man', 'wondrous creature', 'Vile worm' and 'fool'. He is the creature of the middle state, proud, curious, passionate and blind to the design that contains him, and every epistle examines him from a new side.

The 'poor Indian'

A Native American who sees God in clouds and wind and hopes for a simple afterlife where his faithful dog will accompany him (1.99–112). Pope uses him to contrast humble natural piety with the pride of learned speculation, though the figure also reflects the period's stereotype of the 'noble savage'.

Bacon, Cromwell, Caesar and other examples

Historical figures cited as examples, especially in Epistle IV: Francis Bacon, 'The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind'; Oliver Cromwell, 'damn'd to everlasting fame'; Caesar, Alexander ('young Ammon'), the Borgias and Catiline as scourges permitted by providence. They show that greatness, talent and fame do not bring happiness.

Philosophers in the background

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

German philosopher whose Theodicy (1710) argued that God, being good and wise, must have created the best of all possible worlds. Pope said he had not read him, but Crousaz linked the Essay to Leibniz's system, and Voltaire's Candide later satirised both together.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury

Moral philosopher whose Characteristicks (1711) taught that humans have a natural sense of virtue and benevolent affections and that the universe is a harmonious system. His optimistic natural religion lies close to the arguments of Epistles I, III and IV.

William King

Archbishop of Dublin whose De Origine Mali (1702) defended God's goodness by arguing that evil is necessary in a world containing every grade of being. Edmund Law's English translation (1731) appeared just before the Essay, and Mack's edition shows how closely Pope's arguments parallel it.

Isaac Newton and John Locke

Newton's physics, with its universal laws, gave Pope's age its model of an ordered cosmos and appears in the poem both as a triumph and as a warning (2.31–34). Locke's psychology, which stressed the limits of human understanding, underlies Pope's insistence that we reason only from what we know.

Jean-Pierre de Crousaz and William Warburton

The Swiss theologian Crousaz attacked the Essay in 1737 as fatalist and anti-Christian; the English clergyman Warburton defended it from 1738 as orthodox, became Pope's friend and editor, and shaped the way the poem was read for decades.

Themes

Theodicy and the problem of evil

The Essay is a theodicy, an attempt to show that the existence of evil does not contradict the goodness of God. Pope's strategy is to argue that we see only a part of the universe, and that what seems evil from our point of view is good from the point of view of the whole. Earthquakes, plagues and tyrants all have their place in a design we cannot fully understand.

This argument is consoling but also troubling. It asks for trust rather than understanding, and it tends to turn moral evil into a kind of natural process. Pope tries to balance it by insisting that we remain responsible for our passions and that virtue is our true happiness, but the tension between cosmic acceptance and moral effort runs through the poem.

Pride and the limits of human knowledge

Pride is the poem's central vice. It makes men think the universe was made for them, judge God by human standards, and wish to rise above their station in the scale of being. Against it Pope sets humility: the acceptance that human reason is limited and that our 'proper study' is ourselves.

This theme connects the Essay with the scepticism of Montaigne and Pascal and with Locke's account of the limits of the understanding. It also has a satirical edge: the scientist, the philosopher and the theologian who claim too much are as foolish as the miser and the conqueror.

Order, hierarchy and the Great Chain of Being

The poem imagines the universe as a continuous scale of beings, from God through angels and men to animals, insects and nothing. Every degree is necessary, and the whole depends on each part keeping its place. 'Order is Heaven's first law', Pope says in Epistle IV.

This idea of order supports social hierarchy as well as cosmic harmony, and modern readers often find it conservative. Yet Pope also uses it to humble the great, since happiness does not depend on rank, and Epistle III turns hierarchy into mutual dependence, a 'chain of love'.

Self-love, reason and the passions

Pope refuses to treat the passions as simply evil. Self-love is the 'spring of motion' in the soul, and reason is its guide, not its enemy. Each person has a ruling passion that reason can direct towards virtue.

The poem's moral psychology culminates in the claim that 'true Self-love and Social are the same'. Properly understood, the desire for one's own good leads naturally to love of others, a hopeful view that sets Pope against Hobbes and Mandeville. (Shaftesbury 1999)

Happiness and virtue

Epistle IV argues that happiness is equally available to all because it depends on virtue rather than on fortune. Wealth, birth, fame and talent are not sources of happiness and may obstruct it.

This doctrine is democratic in its moral implications: 'Honour and shame from no condition rise; / Act well your part; there all the honour lies.' It is also, critics have noted, a comfortable doctrine for a prosperous society, since it removes any need to change the distribution of goods.

Motifs

Antithesis

Pope's couplets constantly set opposites side by side: god and beast, rise and fall, self-love and social, part and whole. The form of the verse thus enacts the poem's argument that apparent contradictions are reconciled in a larger order. (Tillotson 1938)

Changes of scale

The poem moves between the immense and the tiny, from planets and suns to mites, flies and spiders. These shifts teach the reader to see human concerns from a cosmic point of view and to recognise the fitness of every creature's faculties.

Sight and blindness

Images of seeing recur: man is 'blind' to the future, sees only a part, and lacks the 'microscopic eye'; the good man 'looks through Nature up to Nature's God'. Knowledge is figured as a limited point of view.

Gardens and cultivation

From the opening 'garden, tempting with forbidden fruit' to the grafting of virtues onto passions and the 'Plant of celestial seed' that is happiness, the poem uses the language of cultivation, appropriate to the poet of Twickenham's garden and to a moral theory of improving nature. (Mack 1969)

Satirical portraits

Brief sketches of types and historical figures, the miser, the fop, the conqueror, the old man with his prayer-books, bring the satirist's method into the philosophical poem and give its general claims concrete examples.

Symbols

The chain

The 'Vast chain of being' of Epistle I and the 'chain of love' of Epistle III symbolise the connectedness of creation. Breaking one link would destroy the whole, so that order becomes both a comfort and a constraint.

The maze

The 'mighty maze! but not without a plan' of the opening represents the world as it appears to us: confusing from within, but designed from above.

The isthmus

Man's 'isthmus of a middle state' is a narrow strip of land between two seas, an image of the human position between angel and beast, and of the precariousness of that position.

The pebble in the lake

The spreading circles of Epistle IV symbolise the expansion of self-love into benevolence, from the individual centre to all creation.

Aaron's serpent

The rod that became a serpent and swallowed the others symbolises the ruling passion, which absorbs all the others but may still serve a divine purpose.

Critical debates

Is the poem orthodox?

The Essay vindicates God almost entirely through natural reason, with little mention of the Fall, redemption or Christ. In 1737 Crousaz accused it of fatalism and of a natural religion incompatible with Christianity, and his attack (soon translated into English, one version by the young Samuel Johnson) put Pope on the defensive. Warburton's letters argued that every doctrine in the poem was consistent with revealed religion, and Pope, a practising Catholic, gladly accepted this reading; his 'Universal Prayer' (1738) was in part an answer to the charge of fatalism.

Modern scholars remain divided. Mack's Twickenham edition traced the poem's ideas to a broad tradition of Christian and classical thought and argued that its theology is that of contemporary Anglican apologetics; others see it as essentially deist. Harry M. Solomon argued that the poem has been misread through the polarised categories of later critics, and that it is better understood as a sceptical, open-ended work that deliberately avoids dogma (Crousaz 1737) (Warburton 1740) (Mack 1950) (Solomon 1993).

How much did Bolingbroke contribute?

Bolingbroke claimed that the poem's ideas were his own, and Johnson repeated the story that Pope versified a prose scheme supplied by his friend. Bolingbroke's Fragments, or Minutes of Essays, written in the form of letters to Pope, were published after his death and seemed to confirm the claim, while also revealing a deism hostile to revealed religion.

Brean Hammond's study of the friendship argues that the relationship was a genuine exchange, in which Bolingbroke supplied stimulus and some arguments but Pope shaped the poem's structure and tone. Many scholars now stress that the ideas were common property and that the poem's distinctive achievement lies in its form, not in a borrowed system (Hammond 1984) (Mack 1985) (Johnson 2006).

Poetry or philosophy?

Johnson's Life of Pope is the classic statement of the case against the Essay as philosophy. He grants its brilliance of expression but argues that its ideas are commonplace or confused, concluding that never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised. Since then critics have asked whether the poem's value lies in its argument or in the art with which it is expressed.

Twentieth-century critics shifted the terms of the debate. F. R. Leavis praised Pope's Augustan poise and the civilised intelligence of his verse while finding the Essay less alive than the satires; Reuben Brower showed how the poem draws its authority from allusion to Horace, Milton and the classical tradition. A. D. Nuttall's study took the philosophy seriously, examining the coherence of its arguments and showing where the poetry exposes their difficulties (Johnson 2006) (Leavis 1936) (Brower 1959) (Nuttall 1984).

The Great Chain of Being

Arthur O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being (1936) traced the idea of a full, continuous and graded universe from Plato and Plotinus to the eighteenth century, where it reached its widest popularity. He treated the Essay on Man as one of its most representative expressions and argued that the idea's inner logic, the principle of plenitude, implied that every possible form of being must exist, so that evil and inequality became necessary.

Lovejoy's account has shaped every later discussion of the poem's cosmology. Critics have debated whether Pope's chain is a static hierarchy or a dynamic system, and whether its social implications are as conservative as they seem, given the levelling force of Epistle IV's argument that virtue and happiness are open to all (Lovejoy 1936) (Willey 1940).

Optimism and the Lisbon earthquake

On 1 November 1755 an earthquake destroyed much of Lisbon and killed tens of thousands of people. Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756), subtitled as an examination of the axiom 'All is well', attacked the optimism of Pope and Leibniz as a cruel response to real suffering; Pope had himself asked, 'If plagues or earthquakes break not Heaven's design'. Candide (1759), with its philosopher Pangloss, made the same critique comic.

Rousseau replied to Voltaire in a letter of 1756, defending a version of Pope's providence and arguing that much of the disaster was the result of human choices, such as building crowded cities. The debate marks the moment when the Essay's optimism ceased to be a consensus and became a position to be argued over (Voltaire 2000) (Leibniz 1951).

European fame and translation

The Essay was one of the most widely read English poems in eighteenth-century Europe. French translations by Silhouette (prose) and du Resnel (verse) appeared in 1736, and German, Italian, Dutch and many other versions followed. Kant admired it and quoted Pope in his early work on cosmology, the Universal Natural History (1755); in the same year Lessing and Mendelssohn wrote the pamphlet Pope ein Metaphysiker! in response to a Berlin Academy prize question on Pope's system.

Scholars have studied how translation changed the poem, since Crousaz's first attack was based partly on French versions that sharpened Pope's ideas. The European reception shows the Essay functioning less as a poem than as a manifesto of Enlightenment natural religion, admired by readers who had little interest in its couplets (Crousaz 1737) (Rogers 2007).

The Essay and the 'opus magnum'

Pope's letters and Spence's records of his conversation show that he planned the Essay as the first book of a larger ethical work. Miriam Leranbaum reconstructed this plan and argued that the Epistles to Several Persons and parts of the late satires are fragments of it.

This view encourages us to read the Essay not as a self-contained treatise but as the general foundation for a body of moral poetry, in which the theory of the ruling passion and the doctrine of the use of riches are tested in particular portraits. It also helps explain the poem's abstractness: it was meant to be the preface, not the whole (Leranbaum 1977) (Mack 1985).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. How does Pope's aim to 'vindicate the ways of God to Man' differ from Milton's aim in Paradise Lost?

   Compare narrative and argument, revelation and natural reason. Consider what Pope leaves out (the Fall, Christ, grace).

2. What does 'Whatever is, is right' mean in the context of Epistle I?

   Distinguish between 'right' as morally good and 'right' as fitting its place in the whole. Look at the antitheses of lines 289–94.

3. How does the heroic couplet shape Pope's argument?

   Look at the balance of halves within lines and the closure of couplets. Does the form persuade by sound as well as sense?

4. Why is pride the central error in the Essay?

   Consider Epistle I's discussion of man's claim that the universe is made for him, and the image of men wishing to be angels.

5. Explain the theory of the ruling passion. Is it compatible with human freedom?

   Look at Epistle II, lines 123–98. Consider the images of disease and grafting and the role assigned to reason.

6. How does Epistle III answer Hobbes's account of the state of nature?

   Look at the 'reign of God' and at Pope's history of tyranny and superstition. Consider Shaftesbury's influence.

7. Is Pope's account of happiness in Epistle IV democratic or conservative?

   Weigh 'Order is Heaven's first law' against 'Honour and shame from no condition rise'.

8. Was Crousaz right to call the poem unorthodox?

   Consider the absence of revelation, the image of God as nature's soul, and Warburton's defence. Think about Pope's position as a Catholic.

9. Is Johnson's verdict on the Essay fair?

   Consider whether a poem should be judged by the originality of its ideas, and what Pope's verse adds to commonplace thoughts.

10. How did the Lisbon earthquake change the way the Essay was read?

    Consider Voltaire's poem and Candide, Rousseau's reply, and Pope's own line on 'plagues or earthquakes' (1.155).

Further reading

• Brower, Reuben A. Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.
• Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de. A Commentary on Mr. Pope's Principles of Morality, or Essay on Man. Translated by Samuel Johnson. London: E. Cave, 1742. [French original: Examen de l'Essay de Monsieur Pope sur l'homme, 1737.]
• Hammond, Brean S. Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study of Friendship and Influence. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984.
• Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works. Edited by Roger Lonsdale. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.
• Leavis, F. R. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus, 1936.
• Leibniz, G. W. Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil. Translated by E. M. Huggard, edited by Austin Farrer. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.
• Leranbaum, Miriam. Alexander Pope's 'Opus Magnum', 1729–1744. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
• Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.
• Mack, Maynard, ed. An Essay on Man. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 3.i. London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.
• Mack, Maynard. The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731–1743. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969.
• Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
• Nuttall, A. D. Pope's 'Essay on Man'. London: Allen and Unwin, 1984.
• Rogers, Pat, ed. Alexander Pope: The Major Works. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Rogers, Pat, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Solomon, Harry M. The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope's Essay on Man. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.
• Tillotson, Geoffrey. On the Poetry of Pope. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938.
• Voltaire. Candide and Related Texts. Translated by David Wootton. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000.
• Warburton, William. A Vindication of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, from the Misrepresentations of Mr. de Crousaz. London: J. Robinson, 1740.
• White, Douglas H. Pope and the Context of Controversy: The Manipulation of Ideas in An Essay on Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
• Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period. London: Chatto and Windus, 1940.