Alexander Pope: Erasmian Catholic

Abstract

NANCY K. LAWLOR HAS ARGUED that Pope's Essay on Man is a serious attempt to reconcile natural revealed religion. Believing that Pope as a Catholic would not undertake such a task with no regard for canonical authority, and that Pope's Catholic education must have included familiarity Thomist thought-either the major works themselves or simplified interpretations, Miss Lawlor finds specific applications of Thomist thought everywhere in the Essay on Man and believes the poem fully consonant the thought expressed in the Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles.' Further on I will show why I think it questionable whether Aquinas can have had so much influence on Pope. More important, however, are two assumptions Miss Lawlor shares other students of Pope's religious views. The first is that Pope as a Catholic necessarily believed in a specific body of doctrine, easily discoverable by reference to Aquinas or some other source of Catholic orthodoxy. Behind this assumption lies another-that Roman Catholic teaching was as monolithic, as unified, as clearly defined a body of doctrine in Pope's day-or nearly so-as it may seem to have become in the next two centuries. Surely the place to begin is Patrick Cruttwell's question what did Pope's membership in the Roman Catholic church mean to his mind? For Cruttwell, Pope is attempting to retain the Catholic faith while rejecting all those things in it-or on its peripherywhich conflict the demands of Augustan reason. He is rejecting, in particular, the and the medieval-and that means, the theology of the Church. But what was the orthodox theology of the Church in Pope's day? Was it altogether clerical and medieval in any case?2 How important, to take a pertinent in-