“To One Another as Christians” : Alexander Pope and Jesuits

Alexander Pope famously wrote to Francis Atterbury that he thinks both religions, Catholic and Anglican, “equally good” and that he found himself to be alternating between “a Papist and a Protestant.” His Catholic status has long received the scholarly attention that it merits, yet the same has not been true regarding Pope’s perspectives on other Christian denominations. In arguing the need for further investigation of Pope’s relations with other orders of the Christian faith, this essay focuses on Pope’s interactions with the Society of Jesus and examines the influences from the poet’s formative years as well as those which René Rapin, John Oldham, and Sir William Temple bore upon his works