Chapter 2
"Whatever
is, is right": Learned Ignorance and The Coincidence of Opposites in
An
Essay on Man
Alexander Pope concludes his Essay on Man
by asserting that
WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT;
That REASON, PASSION, answer one great aim;
That true SELF-LOVE and SOCIAL are the
same;
That VIRTUE only makes our Bliss below;
And all our Knowledge is, OURSELVES TO
KNOW.
(IV,
394-398) <1>
The
triumphant tone of these proclamations may induce the reader to forget
that
they proudly oppose man's common knowledge.
The great poet of common
sense
seems intent on blasting common sense. The first assertion dismisses the
existence
of evil in the world; the second unites a pair of exact opposites as
does
the third; the fourth denies almost all man's strivings after happiness;
the
last implicitly denies the existence of God.
This discrepancy between the
tone of
certainty and the content of contradiction is but the final opposition
in a poem
full antitheses. <2>
The entire argument of Essay on Man and
many of the particulars of Pope's
thoughts
in it seem to follow those of Nicholas of Cusa, whose ideas I have
discussed
in chapter one. This passage from the
end of the poem makes foolish
most of
man's wisdom, as it, like the entire poem, encourages the reader to
let go
of his insistence of reason, on the law of non-contradiction, in order
to
achieve a higher vision, or at least a higher acceptance of the universe of
God. Like Cusanus, Pope uses techniques of learned
ignorance to present his
message.
As shown in this passage, the task of the
poet is to inform us that we
have
made the wrong separations: ourselves from God, ourselves from each
other,
and even ourselves from ourselves. Once
he makes us aware of the
separations,
he then reconciles them in his poem and urges us to do likewise
in our
lives. In trying to teach the reader
this lesson, the poem moves from
wandering
confusion to blissful certainty, which resolves the very oppositions
which
had produced that uncertainty. Apparent
separations are resolved into
intermingled
parts of the whole.
The most important opposition in the poem,
around which all the others
focus,
is the infinite gulf between God and man.
That infinite gulf was also
the
major concern of Cusanus, who proposed the solution of Christ, the
coincidence
of the opposites of God and man.
Although Pope was also a staunch
Catholic,
he does not explicitly introduce Christ into his poem. But in a way
similar
to that of Cusanus, Pope insists that since man's finite limitations
can
never grasp the infinity of God, he must go beyond ordinary human logic in
order
to think about God at all. Cusanus's
formulation fits Pope's poem
exactly:
In
every enquiry men judge of the uncertain by comparing it with an object
presupposed certain, and their judgment is
always approximative; every
enquiry is, therefore, comparative and uses
the method of analogy. . . .
the infinite as infinite is unknown, since
it is away and above all
comparison.
<3>
No matter how much man learns, his learning
is but ignorance: the more he
knows
about himself and about God, the more he knows that he does not know. He
does
not find himself any closer to God than he was before; he finds himself
instead
in a state of learned ignorance. This
oxymoron foreshadows the larger
coincidence
of opposites that learned ignorance leads to.
If God, who is
beyond
our direct knowledge, is infinite in time and space, then he includes
everything
in time and space. He is A and non-A at
the same time and to the
same
degree. Therefore ordinary Aristotelian
logic, which does not allow such
contradictions,
fails the thinker who wants to investigate the infinite. Such
a
thinker needs a logic which allows for the coincidence of opposites, for the
co-existence
of A and non-A in defiance of the rules of ordinary logic.
How can God and man be united when they
are separated by an infinite gap?
The answer
to that question, worked out through the course of the poem, is
encapsulated
in the epigrams, quoted above, which end the poem. A summary of
the
meanings of the last lines of the poem will prepare for a more detailed
examination
of the poem as a whole.
In the chiasmus, "Whatever is, is
right," the world of finite man and the
universe
of infinite God are the terms. The first
two words posit the
existence
of certain finite facts which can be verified by observation; the
last
two words reverse the terms and see them from an infinite perspective,
which
cannot be verified by man's direct observation, but which must be
accepted
on faith. "Whatever" exists in
the finite world is "right" from the
perspective
of the infinite world. <4>
As I point out in my introduction, Leopold
Damrosch in Symbol and Truth in
Blake's
Myth says that a true coincidence of opposites can be achieved only by
someone
who fundamentally accepts things as they are: "A true acceptance of
opposites
demands a skeptical temperament and a commitment finally to things
as they
are". <5> This kind of
complacency, so attacked by the Romantics, is
the
foundation of Pope's poem. He allows his
elitist conception of society to
infect
his picture of the universe. In his satires
he will excoriate the
abuses
he sees; here he seems rather to excuse them.
Elizabeth Tebeaux
explains how Pope's ideas here fit into the tradition of
Pyrrhonism. <6> In that
form of skepticism, rational arguments are rejected
because
all arguments generate equally valid counter-arguments. Many
Catholic
Pyrrhonists, like Pope, used this principle to suspend judgment and
to
allow themselves to accept the teachings of the Church, since their reason
was
incapable of answering ultimate questions on its own.
At the beginning the poet's easygoing
manner, that of a country gentleman
strolling
around his estate, complacently surveys the dangerous mysteries
which
lurk behind the foliage. He will
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man,
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;
A Wild, where weeds and flow'rs
promiscuous shoot,
Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.
(I, 5-8)
Throughout
the poem Pope seems to stand complacent before the horrors of
existence. Where the environment is wild, there
beautiful and ugly sex and
violence
burst forth; where it is tamed, there the temptation of the fruit of
the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil threatens man's peace.
Canfield
sees the theme of the Fall worked in throughout the poem. Although
the
poem explicitly seems to deny the Fall, frequent images of rising and
falling
and frequent use of the word "fall" imply a theological stance:
Pope insists again and again that the entire
world, including man, could
never have existed in any other than its
present state of imperfection.
<7>
In
fact, in Canfield's interpretation, Pope starts to sound quite like Blake:
Pope reinterprets the Fall as a metaphor
for something which occurs not
once but perennially, synchronically, in
man's continual fall through
'reas'ning
pride.' <8>
False
reason opposes the mysterious coincidentia oppositorum of God, which
includes
all oppositions, including garden and wild.
The contrast of the garden and the wild
contains one of the basic
oppositions
of the poem: the uncontrolled passion of self-love, which can
destroy,
versus the overweening pride of reason, which can presume to usurp
God's
knowledge. Only God's knowledge can
discern the plan that informs the
apparent
maze; <9> man's speculations toward knowledge of the nature of garden
or wild
must begin with his own experience, as they must in Cusanus:
Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
(I,17-18)
Reasoning
from what we know can somehow lead us to some knowledge of God.
Cusanus abstracts from mathematical
knowledge in order to speculate about
God
after making a statement very similar to Pope's:
it is only by way of postulates and things
certain that we can arrive at
the unknown. . . . but the more we abstract
from sensible conditions, the
more certain and solid our knowledge is.
<10>
Instead
of presenting us with various analogies from our world which
correspond
to the higher world, as Cusanus does, Pope prefers to present us
with
puzzles and paradoxes as a way of contradicting ordinary sense and
raising
us to a vision of the infinite. Man's
knowledge can not rise above
his own
sphere, yet he can be sure that there is a grand plan through his
faith. Carefully concealing any explicit
consideration of God's revelation to
man and
to the incarnation of Christ, Pope limits his poem to the realm of
man. His Christianity is kept implicit throughout.
The distance between the realm of man and
the realm of God remains
absolute:
"'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole"
(l. 60). As long as we
are
living, we can never hope to see the whole.
Pope's emphasis on our
limited
knowledge places him in the skeptical tradition:
Pope's scepticism
leads him to place truth in the reality of the
spiritual, the One, Whose presence and
order pervade all things. . . .
Like Nicholas of Cusa, Pope can still be
very much a sceptic and find
consolation in the Christian Neo-Platonic
notion that man is a future
creature who must die to be able to
apprehend and comprehend the highest
level of cognition. <11>
Any
attempt to judge God by human standards foolishly falls under its own
futility. Like Cusanus's learned ignorance, man's
knowledge must not succumb
to
hubristic attitudes:
Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense
Weigh thy Opinion against
Call
Imperfection what thou fancy'st such,
Say, here he gives too little, there too
much;
Destroy all creatures for thy sport or
gust,
Yet cry, If Man's unhappy, God's unjust;
If Man alone ingross
not Heav'n's high care,
Alone made perfect here, immortal there:
Snatch from his hand the balance and the
rod,
Re-judge his justice, be the GOD of GOD!
(I,
113-122)
The
handling of oppositions in this passage of imagined disturbance of the
Great
Chain of Being typifies Pope's method of confounding man's finite reason
on its
own terms, thus forcing man to acknowledge, if not actually understand,
the
need to yield to the infinite knowledge of God.
The part cannot be wiser
than
the whole. The balanced phrases
ironically echo man`s attempts to upset
the
balance of God's universe. In line 116
"here" opposes "there"; "too
little"
opposes "too much." The
balanced oppositions highlight the fact that
such an
opinion accuses God of not distributing his gifts in a balanced way,
and
thus shows man's refusal to acknowledge the ignorant aspect of learned
ignorance. Line 113, the only line in this quotation
that does not contain a
balanced
opposition within its limited ten syllables, scorns the puny scales
of
man's limited perspective in relation to the grand balance of God. Trying
to
weigh his tiny opinion against God's unlimited providence, the presumptuous
man
dares to contemplate usurping God's distribution of happiness (the
balance)
and therefore tries to usurp God's authority of rulership
(the rod).
In line
114, "thy Opinion" opposes "
primary
contrast between man and God. However,
when in line 118 "unhappy" is
balanced
by "unjust," these two terms do not contradict each other; instead,
their
almost synonymous parallelism provides a variation on the series of
antonymous
parallelisms. The hypothesis of the
proposition--"If Man's
unhappy"--is
true, certainly, but if the conclusion is true--"then God's
unjust"--then
man has presumed that he knows more than God knows; he has, in
fact,
made himself into a God over the real God.
If man is God, then God is not God; the
infinite being does not exist, and
man's
presumptuous reason has destroyed the structure of the whole universe.
However,
the danger here is no more real than it is later when Pope pictures
the
whole universe careening out of control (I, 241-258). Rather like the
story
of the
attaining
any such heights as he pridefully may attempt to
scan. The near
repetition
of the word "justice" and the exact repetition of the word
"God,"
repetitions
balanced in the two hemistiches of line 122, reassure us of the
security
of the grand scheme, for the only judge of justice is God and the
only
God of God is God. This certainty of the
entire scheme anticipates
Blake's
safety net--the impossibility of falling past certain merciful limits-
-that I
discuss later.
It is crucial for Pope to make sure that
the distinctions that he wishes
to
maintain are not lost in his coincidences of opposites, as later when he
says
that black and white still exist even though they often blend. Any
theory
of the coincidence of opposites first puts heavy emphasis on the
opposites
themselves and on their irreconcilable nature, the better to perform
the
miracle of coincidence or interpenetrability.
But if this God cannot be grasped by man,
if He is an infinite distance
away,
then what is his relationship to the finite world? If he simply created
the
world and then stepped away, we don't need him any more. On the other
hand,
if he is in everything, then there is no separation between God and the
world. Pope accepts neither of these extremes. Instead he leans toward a
neo-Platonic
explanation which combines God's transcendence and his immanence:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body, Nature is, and God the soul;
That, chang'd
thro' all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in th'aethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the
trees,
Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all
extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent,
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile Man that
mourns,
As the rapt Seraph that adores and burns;
To him no high, no low, no great, no small,
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals
all.
(I, 267-280)
As
Cusanus explains of the neo-Platonists:
They were of opinion that all movement came
from this Soul of the World
which, they said, was entire in the whole
and entire in each part of the
world though its influence is not the same
in different parts; just as
with the rational soul, which is entire in
the whole and in each part of
man, and yet its activity in the hairs and
the heart is not the same.
<12>
The
whole equals more than the sum of its parts because God as the soul gives
it
life, just as man is more than the sum of his parts because he possesses a
soul. The chiasmus of line 269, the terms of which
are "chang'd-all" and
"all-same,"
embodies the paradox of simultaneous unity and multiplicity.
The other chiasmus in this long passage of
comparisons and oppositions
occurs
in the statement of the essential metaphor: "body:Nature::God:soul."
(l.
28) The two chiasmi
both illustrate that the infinite world reverses the
terms
of the finite world, even while being analogous to it. Lines 270-272
show a
physical world fully infused with the presence of God. (In line 271,
the
ambiguous verb forms even make it sound as if God himself enjoys the sun
and the
wind.) The virtual tautologies of line
273 imply that without God as
the
soul life does not exist. The anaphora
of lines 276-277 echoes the
content:
God is no less full and perfect in hair than in heart, in man than in
seraph.
The two lines of ten monosyllables each (lines 269, 279) show the
equalizing
effect which God exerts on the creations (and he is equal to all of
it). In line 280 the four verbs sum up much of the
poem: he fills all by
virtue
of his immanence; he bounds all by virtue of his position as creator;
he
connects all through the power of his love; and he equals all because he is
fully
in every thing.
When A.O. Lovejoy's discusses this concept
in many writers, his insistence
on
unit-ideas and Aristotelian logic leads him to comment:
He [God] was the Idea of the Good, but he
was also the Idea of Goodness;
and though the second attribute was
nominally deduced dialectically from
the first, no two notions could be more
antithetic. The one was an
apotheosis of unity, self-sufficiency, and
quietude, the other of
diversity, self-transcendence, and
fecundity. <13>
Lovejoy
further complains of
the permissibility and even necessity of
contradicting oneself when one
spoke of God. . . . It might appear easy to
affirm of the divine nature
what to us must seem incompatible
metaphysical predicates; but it was
impossible to reconcile in human
practice. <14>
Lovejoy
thus reveals the difficulty of accommodating the elusive coincidence
of
opposites that Pope is asserting here.
God's simultaneous immanence and
transcendence make it absolutely clear
that
each aspect of finite life finds its correspondence and even its raison
d'etre in the infinite life; the perspective of any part is
necessarily only a
part of
the perspective of the whole:
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.'
(I, 294)
The poet
insists that his reader submit to an infinite perspective which man
cannot
know, see, or understand as fully as God can.
The four sets of
apparent
opposites hammer home the message: finite Nature equals infinite Art;
finite
Chance equals infinite Direction; finite Discord equals infinite
Harmony;
finite Evil equals infinite Good; finite actuality equals infinite
correctness. Any refusal to accept these paradoxical
formulas brands the
recalcitrant
reader as a presumptuous, prideful rebel who desires to upset the
whole
universe, as a weak creature who has let his reason blind him to his own
weakness
and who has set himself up as the judge of God, in an attempt to
disturb
the Great Chain of Being by presuming that learning is not ignorant
and that
man is equal to God in the wrong way.
Immediately after this passage, having peremptorally disposed of any wrong
notions
of man's relationship to God, Pope begins Epistle II with a portrait of
man
himself. Since we know that God eludes
our analysis, perhaps we can do
better
looking at ourselves, by beginning with what we can know. However,
even
within our own realm, our own qualities and desires baffle and confuse
us:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is
Plac'd 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:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself abus'd,
or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to
all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
(II, 1-18)
Once
man has accepted the contradictions between his wisdom and God's, he must
now
accept the contradictions within himself.
At first reading, the passage
seems
simply to delineate, in the most cynical manner possible, the hopeless
middle
state in which man finds himself, but upon closer examination, it
reveals
the seeds of hope that will find fruition in the progress of the poem,
after
long and difficult struggle.
Included in the harshly phrased realities are
the equally real optimistic
possibilities,
which will build back up to reunite the man and God who were so
definitely
separated in Epistle I. First of all, an
isthmus, however gloomy,
is not
as gloomy as an island. An isthmus,
although threatened on two sides
by
oceans, is also connected on its two ends to the mainlands,
in this case
God and
Nature. Furthermore, man is wise and
great, albeit his wisdom sees
through
a glass darkly and his greatness is primitive compared to God's.
Because
he knows of his own darkness and rudeness, he may want to reject
reason
altogether and become a sceptic. However, he has too much knowledge to
do
that. But if he puts too much faith in his knowledge, then he may take on
the
pride of a stoic, who relies exclusively on reason. His own inescapable
weaknesses,
however, prevent that attitude. Pope
thus refuses to allow man
the
comfort of embracing either extreme or the comfort of ignoring either
extreme. In fact, in Pope's formulation, the limits of
human knowledge seem
positively
good instead of to be resented.
Man cannot change the position in which God
has placed him, but he can
choose
what to do about it. The oppositions
have been carefully chosen and
balanced,
and absolutely true, unmistakably admitting the existence of two
extremes
in each case. But man's thinking too
much or too little leads him
into
various errors, in which he separates those things which should not be
separated. In Epistle I it very important to make the
correct separations
between
oppositions; in Epistle II it is very important to put together things
which
should not be separated.
The poet allows foolish man to pose false
separations: action or rest, God
or
beast, mind or body. Each of these three
pairs is preceded by the
anaphoric
"in doubt," the opposite of an implied "in faith." The faith which
led to
an acceptance of the coincidences of opposites in the universal scheme
at the
end of Epistle I now has turned to doubt, which refuses the oppositions
within
the individual, and tries to make false choices. Instead of admitting
his
middle state, man tries to make up his mind about which of the two
extremes
he really belongs to. He should certainly lean toward the first of
each of
the pairs; he should prefer the first terms in their proper hierarchy,
but he
should not deny the lower terms. And if
he allows himself to think too
curiously
on his condition, he will become too passive:
Fix'd like a
plant on his peculiar spot,
To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot.
(II, 63-64)
Of
course on the other extreme, thinking too little and taking too much
action,
like a physical beast, will make him
meteor-like, flame lawless thro' the
void,
Destroying others, by himself destroy'd.
(II, 65-66)
If man allows himself to fall into these
false distinctions and
separations,
then he can become a chaos of thought and passion, all confused.
This
condition echoes the condition before the creation, before God said, "Let
there
be light." Once God, in the
original act of Creation, has created the
light
and separated it from the darkness, it is up to man to maintain or re-
create
that balance or alternation within himself.
Later in the Epistle he is
instructed
how to do so:
This light and darkness in our chaos join'd,
What shall divide? The God within the mind.
(II, 203-204)
The
power of God within the mind must re-establish order within the mind.
Thus
Pope implies a dynamic, continual creation, analogous to that of Blake.
He also
anticipates Coleridge's definition of the imagination in which man's
primary
and secondary imaginations are echoes of the great "I AM" of
God. Man
does
not create the order, but must re-create within himself the order which
God has
already created. Man's power is
analogous to God`s, which was so
definitely
and vehemently separated from man's in epistle I.
In between the chaos at the beginning of
Epistle II (1-18) and the
seemingly
obvious and simple solution near the end of the epistle (203-204) the
poet
explains the understanding necessary to re-create God's order. First he
traces
the inevitable course of a proud reason which tries to reach God by its
own
power. If it tries to rise in the wrong
way, then in effect it tries to
usurp
the place of God. Trying to escape the
lowness and confusion of the
human
condition, man may proudly try to mount above his condition, but he then
finds
that too much height can lead to sudden depth:
Go, wond'rous
creature! mount where Science guides,
. . .
Go, soar with Plato to th'
empyreal sphere,
. . .
And quitting sense call imitating God;
. . .
Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule--
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!
(II, 19, 23, 26, 29-30)
The
extremes, however confusing and painful, cannot be simply escaped. And
straining
to go too high leads to the diametrical opposite of depth. In
either
case, man is trying to explore the self; this poem insists that there
is a
right way and a wrong way to do so. The
mind must learn to exist in a
state
of dynamic tension combining contraries, a simultaneous separation
between
man and God with a recognition of the combinations of apparent
opposites. Earl Wasserman, writing of the concordia
discors in "
when
an appetite is not brought into concordant clash with a contrary
force it paradoxically both grows to its
own excess and in this act
destroys itself by becoming its own
opposite. <15>
Or, to
put it in words which Pope himself had read:
He, who acts in a conformity to the nature
of things, carries on the
system of God, and cooperates with him: and
surely to put the system of
divine wisdom in execution, and to
cooperate with the creator is honor
enough for the creature. Thus we may attain to the perfection of our
nature, and, by pretending to no more, we
may do it real honor: whereas,
by assuming that we imitate God, we give
the strongest proof of the
imperfection of our nature, whilst we
neglect the real, and aspire vainly
at a mock honor. <16>
A man
who climbs with his proud reason thinks he is becoming more self-
sufficient. But self-sufficiency is possible for God
only, not for man. If
man
presumes to becomes God, he presumes to become complete unto himself; the
result,
however, is not ultimate self-knowledge, but ultimate self-deception,
self-abuse. Man alone does not rise, but instead drops
into himself. Instead
of
knowing himself by trying to see what he is, he falls into the very lowness
that he
was trying to escape.
The proper condition of reason is
prescribed in II, 43-46.
Trace Science then, with Modesty thy
guide;
First strip off all her equipage of Pride,
Deduct what is but Vanity, or Dress,
Or Learning's Luxury, or Idleness.
Reason
must be spartanly stripped down to its essentials, accompanied by
modesty,
not pride.
Once Pope has shown the wrong and right
uses of reason, he contrasts it
with
self-love. Although the impulses of the
two forces are contrary to each
other,
Pope explicitly refuses to exalt one over the other:
Two Principles in human nature reign;
Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to
restrain;
Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call,
Each works its end, to move or govern all:
And to their proper operation still,
Ascribe all Good; to their improper, Ill.
(II,
53-58)
Pope
anticipates Blake in his refusal to separate good and bad absolutely.
Rather
the separation is in the use of the forces.
Passion and reason are
thus in
a reciprocal relationship, each necessary to the other.
Three metaphors for the relationship
between passion and reason explain
the
complex balancing that man must maintain within himself. These images
progress
from the mechanical through the natural to the creative. A
mechanical
metaphor makes self-love and reason into parts of a watch:
Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the
soul;
Reason's comparing balance rules the whole.
(II,
59-60)
Another
metaphor, chosen from nature, has the two principles performing
complementary
functions, but in this one reason exerts no force of its own:
The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
Parts it may ravage, but preserves the
whole.
On life`s vast
ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but Passion is the gale;
Nor God alone in the still calm we find,
He mounts the storm, and walks upon the
wind.
(II, 105-110)
Whether
the word "card" is interpreted to mean map or compass, in either case
it
still fills only an advisory function.
In another metaphor, however,
reason
becomes a vigorous artist:
Passions, like Elements, tho' born to fight,
Yet, mix'd and soften'd, in [God's] work unite:
Suffice that Reason keep to Nature's road,
Subject, compound them, follow her and God.
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's
smiling train,
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain;
These mix'd with
art, and to due bounds confin'd,
Make and maintain the balance of the mind:
The lights and shades, whose well accorded
strife
Gives all the strength and colour of our life.
(II, 111-122)
Here
the balance to be maintained is not between reason on the one hand and
passion
on the other, but between two sets of passions.
Like the dark and
light
paints on an artist's palette, the passions must be mixed and ordered by
reason,
which confines the passions to their proper bounds just as God
confined
the elements at the creation. <17>
The power of the infinite dwells in men
both in their reason ("the God
within
the mind") and in their passion ("like Aaron's serpent"), and so
reason
and
passion can work together to help man find happiness. Self-love, the
desire
for sexual gratification and for safety, founds families and societies,
and so
unites individual and social goals. The
bliss which men seek on this
earth
comes only from acknowledging the rightness of God's plan, incorporating
the
power of God inside themselves in their reason and their passion, loving
those
outside themselves as much as they love the souls within themselves, and
realizing
that only virtue allows men to find this bliss.
Paradoxically, to
find
this proper relationship to God, self, and others, man must admit that he
can
know nothing but himself; he must accept learned ignorance.
Having shown us the extreme of overweening
reason and the proper balance
of
reason and passion, Pope then proceeds to show us the extreme of passion in
any
individual, which may be termed one's "ruling passion":
. . . one master Passion in the breast,
Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest.
(II,131-132)
The
image of Aaron's serpent swallowing up the serpents of the magicians of
Pharaoh
implies that one's ruling passion is a sign of God's power, that He
sends
it to work his ends. In similar fashion
one's ruling passion delivers a
person
from the confusion and chaos which beset him because it allows him a
chance
to organize his life around some consistent principle.
Bertrand Goldgar
points out that Pope makes relatively new use of a
complex
body of ideas about the passions. Goldgar even goes so far as to
assert
that
Pope elevates the notion of a ruling
passion into the principle which
makes the ultimate reconciliation between
the elements of apparent discord
in man's nature and the contrasting
attitudes which he has held in balance
throughout the Epistle. <18>
Goldgar's
assertion seems to over-ride the savage destructiveness of the
ruling
passion (II, 133-138) and the continuing necessity for reason (II,
197). As a force analogous to instinct in animals,
it is in a sense a direct
manifestation
of the power of God within man. However,
the ruling passion not
only
fails creatures with life, but also destroys them:
As Man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,
Receives the lurking principle of death;
The young disease, that must subdue at
length,
Grows with his growth, and strengthens with
his strength:
So, cast and mingled with his very frame,
The Mind's disease, its ruling Passion came.
(II, 133-138)
The
implication is that man begins to die as soon as he is born and even more
than
that, the cause of his death is the same force which is the cause of his
active
life. Here the relationship between
reason and passion is a savage
one;
like a parasite, the ruling passion parallels the growth of the mind and
constantly
threatens to destroy it. Because the
principle of death does
indeed
destroy every person, the image implies that the ruling passion always
destroys
the mind.
Extreme ease (as in the earlier dichotomy
between body and mind, rest and
action),
would turn man into a vegetable, and so some dis-ease
is necessary to
animate
him, but surely the poet expresses deep melancholy here (perhaps
colored
by his own view of his life as a long disease) in the admission that
life is
inextricably entwined with death. The
final hemistiches of lines 133-
134
balance the "moment" of breath against the "principle" of
death. The
former
is fleeting, finite; the latter, eternal, infinite.
Although the ruling passion unites and
directs the efforts of men, it
violates
a very important principle which is the direct cause of its
destructiveness. Instead of vital humors flowing to the whole
and thus
creating
the proper balance in the body and soul, they flow only to the ruling
passion,
thus creating an imbalance which leads to destruction (II, 139-150).
Just as
proud reason can repeat the sin of Eve in desiring to know all that God
knows,
so the ruling passion can usurp the wholeness of man by trying to
control
all.
Each individual can, however, attempt to
imitate the grand balance of God's
whole
universe by following the better aspect of his ruling passion:
Th'Eternal Art educing
good from ill,
Grafts on this Passion our best principle:
'Tis thus the
Mercury of Man is fix'd,
Strong grows the Virtue with his nature mix'd;
The dross cements what else were too refin'd,
And in one interest body acts with mind.
As fruits ungrateful to the planter's
care
On savage stocks inserted learn to bear;
The surest Virtues thus from Passions
shoot,
Wild Nature's vigor working at the root.
What crops of wit and honesty appear
From spleen, from obstinacy, hate, or fear!
See anger, zeal and fortitude supply;
Ev'n av'rice, prudence; sloth, philosophy;
Lust, thro' some certain strainers well refin'd,
Is gentle love, and charms all womankind:
Envy, to which th'ignoble
mind's a slave,
Is emulation in the learn'd
or brave:
Nor Virtue, male or female, can we name,
But what will grow on Pride, or grow on
Shame.
Thus Nature gives us (let it check our
pride)
The virtue nearest to our vice ally'd;
Reason the byass turns
to good from ill.
(II, 175-197)
And so
the wild at the beginning of the poem becomes one with the garden.
Using
the knowledge he has now gained about God's relation to the world and
about
the proper relation of reason and passion, man can use the God within
his
mind to re-create the order which belongs there.
Immediately after the phrase "The God
within the mind," Pope draws an