While the world's been obsessed with the late pope, I've been reacquainting myself with one from the 18th century. He was Catholic but Pope only in name.
A friend is writing a book about The Odyssey and talking with him about it recently reminded me that I had long ago wanted to read Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's epic. If this sounds to you like a project only a lapsed English major could harbor into middle age ... well, yeah. The 18th century was my early graduate-school concentration and I suppose had I continued I might have written another shopworn dissertation on Pope's prosody or the use of the indefinite article in Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.
Partly my devotion to Pope traced to his uncanny skill with the rhyming couplet, the singsongy building block of so many bad poems, from Pope's contemporaries to obit-page eulogists. In most hands, a string of chiming lines of iambic pentameter sounds either forced or impossibly saccharine. But Pope's easy touch nearly always sings. I picked a page at random from The Odyssey, as Pope describes the Calypso-captive Ulysses:
For now, reluctant, and constrained by charms
Absent he lay in her desiring arms,
In slumber wore the heavy night away,
On rocks and shores consumed the tedious day ...
This skill would be vain if it had not been joined to eminent good sense about the world and human foibles—what Pope and his contemporaries called "judgment." Even shorn of their rhymes, many of his lines remain efficient aphorisms: "Hope springs eternal in the human breast"; "a little learning is a dangerous thing"; "to err is human, to forgive divine."
In Pope's worldview, the central sin of humankind was pride: "In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies / All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies."
These lines are taken from Pope's Essay on Man (yes, of course, women, too; Pope's anachronistic failure to see this does not dull his wit). His verse treatise of 1734 pegs pride as our internal enemy, forever impelling us to believe ourselves more than we are.
I used to think that Pope, in condemning "reasoning pride," aligned himself with the Catholic popes of his and earlier ages, who condemned Galileo and other scientists for contesting the given order of the spheres. John Paul II, to his credit, apologized for these earlier errors. But by "reasoning pride" Pope did not mean that reason was evil, only that the gift of reason sometimes leads us to presume too much for ourselves. Pope lived in the age of Newton, for whom he composed this epitaph: "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light."
Reason was not pride's only prey; in fact, pride was the agent of almost all sin in Pope's age. Had I been bright enough, I might have focused a dissertation on Western society's upended notion of pride. We live in a time, after all, that values pride as a virtue, not a vice. Partly the shift traces to the 20th century's abundant claims of the "marginalized." My father, son of an immigrant coal miner, would berate me for sloppy appearance: "Don't you have any pride in yourself?" And various interest-group leaders, often with good reason, seized on pride as the antidote for the withering effects of the society's disdain.
Fine enough, but society also has developed a consumer-based ideal of pride that transcends category. De Tocqueville found it almost endemic in the young United States. Freedom and individualism, he thought, had produced a needlessly grave and self-involved citizenry whose members confused gravity with dignity, and valued self and family above community. Generations of hucksters and campaign managers have perfected the exploitation of personal entitlement, to the point at which the seeming advance of one group's pride is a zero-sum loss for everyone else—especially for you, poor, put-upon middle-American.
That gravity that De Tocqueville thought early Americans exuded in order to appear dignified has certainly diminished in our Oprah-fed age of self-advertisement, but it persists nonetheless. We seize any opportunity to stoke emotion, and we gratify ourselves by linking our isolated lives with great media convulsions. Thus Baptists whose grandparents vilified "the whore of Babylon" wept with Catholics in mourning the pope. And regardless of sect, the pious find common cause in contesting presumed slights by "elites," whether it's "liberal Hollywood" or snooty scientists who challenge biblical inerrancy. Evolution's just a theory, you know.
Pope, as I mentioned, was a Catholic, and Catholics were distrusted, if not persecuted, in the England of his time. He lived in Richmond because he was not allowed to live in London. But he did not pursue this indignity in his poetry, possibly because he understood his audience would not be sympathetic but also because it would have been prideful to flaunt one's victimhood for public entertainment. He nonetheless had much to say about God. It was not the pride of questing scientists he challenged, but the hubris of those who claimed to know God's will or intent: "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man."
This is a lesson well-remembered today, when greed is a virtue and pride masquerades as piety. As Pope argued: "For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight; His can't be wrong whose life is in the right."
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.