What did Pope intend to say by "Whatever is, is right"?

Question

Source: *[The Well-Educated Mind](https://www.amazon.com/Well-Educated-Mind-Classical-Education-Expanded/dp/039308096X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=RB0SQWWEWRN053RYJ13F)* (2 edn 2016), p. 86 Middle. >  Related to this is one final question: What is fiction *meant* to do? Why are you reading a novel at all? Are you expecting to find out some truth about human nature? Should a novel reveal some difficult, hard-to-face truth about ourselves? Do novels show the inevitable end of certain paths? Or are they, instead, agents of moral change? Do they show us models so that we can amend our ways? This idea—that fiction provides us with a model—itself has a certain assumption behind it: There is some standard of human behavior which applies to all of us, in all cultures, and our quest in life is to uncover it.   The opposing idea was once expressed by Alexander Pope in the phrase, **"Whatever is, is right."** The novel doesn't set out an ideal, because to assume that there is such a thing as an unchanging standard of behavior governing all people at all times is narrow minded and myopic. The novel has no business in providing models. It simply explores realities: It opens numerous doors for you to peer through, but makes no suggestions as to which threshold you should cross. [This](https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/need-clairfication-bigger-picture-epistle-1-essay-186233) and [this](http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Wollston/whatever.html) don't explain simply.

Answer 1

I think you're talking about the final line of Book I of Pope's Essay on Man. In that book, he sets out to develop a cosmology of existence such that the classical idea of the Great Chain of Being can synthesize with the novel scientific developments oh his day (around 1730's I think when he was writing this). In truth, Pope may well have taken the entirety more of less of An Essay on Man from one of his friends - a person named Lord Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke had written a prose philosophical tract from a radically deistic perspective. There's a good bit of evidence that Pope used that as either a springboard for his own poem or simply gave meter and rhyme to the prose. The latter is a bit unlikely though given that so much of the poem is indebted to Classical tropes, sources, and drives (things very valuable to Pope). So as to 'Whatever is, is right' - that becomes the basis for much of the poem, which is to diagram the relationship between God, man, and creation. The line is too far-reaching to sum up, but basically creation is God's doing; God is right; so whatever is/ was/ will be created is right.