Alexander Pope

Moral and transmoral visions of human reality are constantly at odds. Where the moralist finds only natural evil and impiety and concomitant sufferings, the transmoralist discerns a delightful spectacle, a aesthetically self-justifying panorama of joy and horror, charity and bloodthirst, egoist and altruist: A masterpiece of black humor and happy absurdity. The moralist hangs every act of nature, god and man in the balance of good and evil. The transmoralist sets his heart and lights—confirms a rare and transcendent weltanschauung—beyond good and evil.

Alexander Pope's dizzying philosophical error is manifest in the first epistle of his famous Essay. Pope here presents the panorama of human folly and titan captiousness in a transmoral vision of perfection and “ORDER” (94); but adulterates his transmoral imaginings with a lukewarm and sophomoric—and completely inappropriate—attempt at theodicy: “To vindicate the ways of God to man” (91). Theodicy is a philosophical instrument appropriate to a moral vision of reality; becoming a ludicrous paradox when superimposed upon the transmoral lens.

The transmoralist, from a poetic height beyond good and evil, perceives the littleness of Man and the absurdity of his argument against the cosmos. This cold, sometimes nearly heartless, vision transcending the dynamics of human contingency, joy and horror and charity and suffering, is an ancient vista well-enjoyed by the master spiritualists of the East. Look to the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna may be understood as expressing the moral view, Krishna the transmoral view, of the overture battlefield spectacle:

Arjuna (overlooking the battlefield, 2.5 etc.): I can find no means to drive away this grief which is drying up my senses...It would be better to live in this world by begging than to live at the cost of the lives of great souls who are my teachers...If they are killed, everything we enjoy will be tainted with blood.

Krishna: (overlooking the battlefield, 2.11 etc.): Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor for the dead...the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and season...Do thou fight for the sake of fighting, without considering happiness or distress, loss or gain, victory or defeat...

Taking a more canny form in Pope, the rhetorical nuances of---“Respecting Man, whatever wrong we call / May, must be right, as relative to all”; “Then say not Man's imperfect, Heaven in fault; / Say rather, Man's as perfect as he ought:”; and “if the great end be human happiness, / Then Nature deviates; and can man do less?”—reflect a transmoral vision of reality. Nature and Heaven take little heed of mankind's happiness: Nature and Heaven lie along the transmoral plane; evidence a transmoral relation to human affairs.

Had Pope called it quits on arguing a transmoral relation between Nature-Heaven and humankind his philosophy of existence would ring nearly sensical. When, however, from this transmoral ground, he asserts the immorality of human resistance to transmoral conceptions of “ORDER” (here we discover the everpresent (everpresent in the ludicrous) Orwellian shadow: CHAOS is ORDER), Pope has mixed categories, has injected a moral effluence into a transmoral spectacle and defiled the purity of his transmoral imagining: “Men [who] would be Angels...[wish] to invert the laws of ORDER, [and sin] against the Eternal Cause.”; All this dread ORDER break—for whom? For thee? / Vile worm!—oh Madness! Pride! Impiety!” (96). 

To belittle the project of human happiness, to set it beyond human hope as in contradiction to the conations of Nature and Heaven, is the poet's delight; whereas to take account of the distress of the human heart in the face of so cryptically ordered a chaos is “Madness! Pride! Impiety!”

These absurdities spring from a fixed conception of the divine. God, when conceived (more scientifically) as the invention (and reinvention and reinvention and reinvention) of the human mind, may be modified as the wisdom of humankind increases. God, in pace with theologizing humankind, is born a child and only after grows wise. 

(One funny fact overlooked by the poet: If "Man's as perfect as he ought," his complaints in the light of the perceived imperfections of Heaven and Nature are perfect as well.)







Works Cited


Bhaktivedanta, A.C. Bhagavad-Gita As It Is. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc. 1989.

Pope, Alexander. "An Essay On Man." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 90-97. Print.