A biographer who has any other end in view, however secondary and
incidental, than faithfully to reproduce in the mind of his readers his
own apprehension of the personality of his subject, will be so far
biassed in his task of selection; and, without any conscious deviation
from truth, will give that undue prominence to certain features and
aspects which in extreme cases may result in caricature. A Catholic
biographer of Coventry Patmore would have been tempted to gratify the
wish of a recent critic of Mr. Champneys' very efficient work, [1] and
to devote ten times as much space as has been given to the account of
his conversion, and a good deal, no doubt, to the discussion and
correction of his eccentric views in certain ecclesiastical matters;
thus giving us the history of an illustrious convert, and not that of a
poet and seer whose conversion, however intimately connected with his
poetical and intellectual life, was but an incident thereof. On the
other hand, one less intelligently sympathetic with the more spiritual
side of Catholicism than Mr. Champneys, would have lacked the principal
key to the interpretation of Patmore's highest aims and ideals, towards
which the whole growth and movement of his mind was ever tending, and by
which its successive stages of evolution are to be explained. Again,
with all possible respect for the feelings of the living, the biographer
has wisely suppressed nothing needed to bring out truthfully the
ruggednesses and irregularities that characterize the strong and
somewhat one-sided development of genius as contrasted with the regular
features and insipid perfectness of things wrought on a small scale. If
idealizing means the filing-away of jagged edges--and surely it does
not--Mr. Champneys has left us to do our own idealizing. The faults that
marred Purcell's _Life of Manning_ are here avoided, and yet truth is no
whit the sufferer in consequence.
In speaking of Patmore as a thinker and a poet, we do not mean to
dissociate these two functions in his case, but only to classify him
(according to his own category) with those "masculine" poets whose power
lies in a beautiful utterance of the truth, rather than in a truthful
utterance of the beautiful.
We propose, however, to occupy ourselves with the matter rather than the
mode of Patmore's utterance; with that truth which he conceived himself
to have apprehended in a newer and clearer light than others before him;
and this, because he does not stand alone, but is the representative and
exponent of a certain school of ascetic thought whose tendency is
diametrically contrary to that pseudo-mysticism which we have dealt with
elsewhere, and have ascribed to a confusion of neo-platonic and
Christian principles. This counter-tendency misses the Catholic mean in
other respects and owes its faultiness, as we shall see, to some very
analogous fallacies. If in our chapter on "The True and the False
Mysticism," it was needful to show that the principles of Christian
monasticism and contemplative life, far from in any way necessarily
retarding, rather favour and demand the highest natural development of
heart and mind; it is no less needful to assign to this thought its true
limits, and to show that the noblest expansion of our natural faculties
does not conflict with or exclude the principles of monasticism. I think
it is R.H. Hutton who remarks that it is not "easy to give us a firm
grasp of any great class of truths without loosening our grasp on some
other class of truths perhaps nobler and more vital;" and undoubtedly
Patmore and his school in emphasizing the fallacies of neo-platonic
asceticism are in danger of precipitating us into fallacies every whit
as uncatholic. It is therefore as professedly formulating the principles
of a certain school that we are interested in the doctrine of which
Patmore constitutes himself the apostle.
Lights are constantly breaking in upon me [he
writes] and convincing me more and more that the
singular luck has fallen to me of having to write, for
the first time that any one even attempted to do so
with any fulness, on simply the greatest and most
exquisite subject that ever poet touched since the
beginning of the world.
The more I consider the subject of the marriage of
the Blessed Virgin, the more clearly I see that it is the
_one_ absolutely lovely and perfect subject for poetry.
Perfect humanity, verging upon, but never entering the
breathless region of the Divinity, is the real subject of
_all_ true love-poetry; but in all love-poetry hitherto, an
"ideal" and not a reality has been the subject, more
or less.
Taking the "Angel of the House" as representing the earlier, and the
"Odes" the later stage of the development which this theme received
under his hands, it seems as though he passes from the idealization and
apotheosis of married love to the conception of it as being in its
highest form, not merely the richest symbol, but even the most
efficacious sacrament of the mystical union between God and the soul. He
is well aware--though not fully at first--that these conceptions were
familiar to St. Bernard and many a Catholic mystic; it was for the
poetic apprehension and expression of them that he claimed originality;
or, at least, for their unification and systematic development. "That
his apprehensions were based generally--almost exclusively, on the
fundamental idea of nuptial love must," as Mr. Champneys says, "be
admitted." This was the governing category of his mind; the mould into
which all dualities naturally fell; it was to his philosophy what love
and hate, light and dark, form and matter, motion and atoms, have been
to others.
It was, at all events, the predominance of this conception
which bound together his whole life's work,
rendering coherent and individualizing all which he
thought, wrote, or uttered, and those who study
Patmore without this key are little likely to understand
him.
And it is the persistent and not always sufficiently restrained use of
this category that made much of his writing just a trifle shocking to
sensitive minds.
These latter will have "closed his works far too promptly to discover
that far from gainsaying the Catholic instinct which prefers virginity
to marriage" (not a strictly accurate statement) he makes virginity a
condition of the idealized marriage-relation, and finds its realization
in her who was at once matron and virgin. Following the fragmentary
hints to be found here and there in patristic and mystical theology, he
assumes that virgin-spousals and virgin-birth were to have been the law
in that Paradise from which man lapsed back into natural conditions
through sin; that in the case of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph the
paradisaic law was but resumed in this respect. Accordingly, he writes
of Adam and Eve in "The Contract,"
Thus the first Eve
With much enamoured Adam did enact
Their mutual free contract
Of virgin spousals, blissful beyond flight
Of modern thought, with great intention staunch,
Though unobliged until that binding pact.
To their infidelity to this contract he ascribes the subsequent
degradation of human love through sensuality; and all the sin and
selfishness thence deriving to our fallen race:
Whom nothing succour can
Until a heaven-caress'd and happier Eve
Be joined with some glad Saint
In like espousals, blessed upon Earth,
And she her fruit forth bring;
No numb chill-hearted shaken-witted thing,
'Plaining his little span.
But of proud virgin joy the appropriate birth,
The Son of God and Man.
The rationalistic objection to this suppression of what seems to be of
the essence or integrity of matrimony is obvious enough, and yet finds
many a retort even in the realm of nature, where the passage to a higher
grade of life so often means the stultifying of functions proper to the
lower. As to the pre-eminence of that state in which the spiritual
excellencies of marriage and virginity are combined, Catholic teaching
is quite clear and decided; in this, as in other points, Patmore's
untaught intuitions, and instincts--his _mens naturaliter
catholica_--had led him, whither the esoteric teaching of the Church had
led only the more appreciatively sympathetic of her disciples, from time
to time, as it were, up into that mountain of which St. Ambrose says:
"See, how He goes up with the Apostles and comes down to the crowds. For
how could the crowds see Christ save in a lowly spot? They do not follow
Him to the heights, nor rise to sublimities"--a notion altogether
congenial to Patmore's aristocratic bias in religion as in everything
else. Undoubtedly it was this mystical aspect of Catholic doctrine that
appealed to his whole personality, offering as it did an authoritative
approval, and suggesting an infinite realization, of those dreams that
were so sacred to him. As far as the logic of the affections goes, it
was for the sake of this that he held to all the rest; for indeed the
deeper Catholic truths are so internetted that he who seizes one, drags
all the rest along with it under pain of self-contradiction.
No one knew better than Patmore the infinite insufficiency of the
highest created symbols to equal the eternal realities which it is their
whole purpose to set forth; he fully realized that as the lowliest
beginnings of created love seem to mock, rather than to foreshadow, the
higher forms of which they are but the failure and botched essay, so the
very highest conceivable, taken as more than a metaphor, were an
irreverent parody of the Divine love for the human soul. It is not the
_same_ relationship on an indefinitely extended scale, but only a
somewhat _similar_ relationship, the limits of whose similarity are
hidden in mystery. But when a man is so thoroughly in love with his
metaphor as Patmore was, he is tempted at times to press it in every
detail, and to forget that it is "but one acre in the infinite field of
spiritual suggestion;" that, less full and perfect metaphors of the same
reality, may supply some of its defects and correct some of its
redundancies. We should do unwisely to think of the Kingdom of Heaven
only as a kingdom, and not also as a marriage-feast, a net, a treasure,
a mustard-seed, a field, and so forth, since each figure supplies some
element lost in the others, and all together are nearer to the truth
than any one: and so, although the married love of Mary and Joseph is
one of the fullest revealed images of God's relation to the soul, we
should narrow the range of our spiritual vision, were we to neglect
those supplementary glimpses at the mystery afforded by other figures
and shadowings.
And this leads us to the consideration of a difficulty connected with
another point of Patmore's doctrine of divine love. He held that the
idealized marriage relationship was not merely the symbol, but the most
effectual sacrament and instrument of that love; "yet the world," he
complains, "goes on talking, writing, and preaching as if there were
some essential contrariety between the two," the disproof of which "was
the inspiring idea at the heart of my long poem (the 'Angel')." Now,
although in asserting that the most absorbing and exclusive form of
human affection is not only compatible with, but even instrumental to
the highest kind of sanctity and divine love, Patmore claimed to be at
one, at least in principle, with some of the deeper utterances of the
Saints and Fathers of the Christian Church; it cannot be denied that the
assertion is _prima facie_ opposed to the common tradition of Catholic
asceticism; and to the apparent _raison d'être_ of every sort of
monastic institution.
It must be confessed that, in regard to the reconciliation of the claims
of intense human affection with those of intense sanctity, there have
been among all religious teachers two distinct conceptions struggling
for birth, often in one and the same mind, either of which taken as
adequate must exclude the other. It would not be hard to quote the
utterances of saints and ascetics for either view; or to convict
individual authorities of seeming self-contradiction in the matter. The
reason of this is apparently that neither view is or can be adequate;
that one is weak where the other is strong; that they are both imperfect
analogies of a relationship that is unique and _sui generis_--the
relationship between God and the soul. Hence neither hits the centre of
truth, but glances aside, one at the right hand, the other at the left.
Briefly, it is a question of the precise sense in which God is "a
jealous God" and demands to be loved alone. The first and easier mode of
conception is that which is implied in the commoner language of saints
and ascetics--language perhaps consciously symbolic and defective in its
first usage, but which has been inevitably literalised and hardened when
taken upon the lips of the multitude. God is necessarily spoken of and
imagined in terms of the creature, and when the analogical character of
such expression slips from consciousness, as it does almost instantly,
He is spoken of, and therefore thought of, as the First of Creatures
competing with the rest for the love of man's heart. He is placed
alongside of them in our imagination, not behind them or in them. Hence
comes the inference that whatever love they win from us in their own
right, by reason of their inherent goodness, is taken from Him. Even
though He be loved better than all of them put together, yet He is not
loved perfectly till He be loved alone. Their function is to raise and
disappoint our desire time after time, till we be starved back to Him as
to the sole-satisfying--everything else having proved _vanitas
vanitatum_. Then indeed we go back to them, not for their own sakes, but
for His; not attracted by our love of them, but impelled by our love of
Him.
This mode of imagining the truth, so as to explain the divine jealousy
implied in the precept of loving God exclusively and supremely, is, for
all its patent limitations, the most generally serviceable. Treated as a
strict equation of thought to fact, and pushed accordingly to its utmost
logical consequences, it becomes a source of danger; but in fact it is
not and will not be so treated by the majority of good Christians who
serve God faithfully but without enthusiasm; whose devotion is mainly
rational and but slightly affective; who do not conceive themselves
called to the way of the saints, or to offer God that all-absorbing
affection which would necessitate the weakening or severing of natural
ties. In the event, however, of such a call to perfect love, the logical
and practical outcome of this mode of imagining the relation of God to
creatures is a steady subtraction of the natural love bestowed upon
friends and relations, that the energy thus economized may be
transferred to God. This concentration may indeed be justified on other
and independent grounds; but the implied supposition that, the highest
sanctity is incompatible with any pure and well-ordered natural
affection, however intense, is certainly ill-sounding, and hardly
reconcilable with the divinest examples and precepts.
The limitations of this simpler and more practical mode of imagining the
matter are to some extent supplemented by that other mode for which
Patmore found so much authority in St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Teresa,
and many another, and which he perhaps too readily regarded as
exhaustively satisfactory.
In this conception, God is placed, not alongside of creatures, but
behind them, as the light which shines through a crystal and lends it
whatever it has of lustre. In recognizing whatever true brilliancy or
beauty creatures possess as due to His inbiding presence, the love which
they excite in us passes on to Him, through them. As He is the primary
Agent and Mover in all our action and movement, the primary Lover in all
our pure and well-ordered love; and we, but instruments of His action,
movement, and love; so, in whatever we love rightly and divinely for its
true merit and divinity, it is He who is ultimately loved. Thus in all
pure and well-ordered affection it is, ultimately, God who loves and God
who is loved; it is God returning to Himself, the One to the One.
According to this imagery, God is viewed as the First Efficient and the
ultimate Final Cause in a circular chain of causes and effects of which
He is at once the first link and the last--a conception which, in so far
as it brings God inside the system of nature as part thereof, is, like
the last, only analogously true, and may not be pressed too far in its
consequences.
In this view, to love God supremely and exclusively means practically,
to love only the best things in the best way, recognizing God both in
the affection and in its object. God is not loved apart from creatures,
or beside them; but through them and in them. Hence if only the
affection be of the right kind as to mode and object, the more the
better; nor can there be any question of crowding other affections into
a corner in order to make more room for the love of God in our hearts.
The love of Him is the "form," the principle of order and harmony; our
natural affections are the "matter," harmonized and set in order; it is
the soul, they are the body, of that one Divine Love whose adequate
object is God in, and not apart from, His creatures.
It would not perhaps be hard to reconcile this view with some utterances
in the Gospel of seemingly opposite import; or to find it often implied
in the words and actions of Catholic Saints; but to square it with the
general ascetic traditions of the faithful at large is exceedingly
difficult. Patmore would no doubt have allowed the expediency of
celibacy in the case of men and women devoted to the direct ministry of
good works, spiritual and corporal: a devotion incompatible with
domestic cares; he could and did allow the superiority of voluntary
virginity and absolute chastity over the contrary state of lawful use;
but he could hardly have justified--hardly not have condemned those who
leave father, friend, or spouse, not merely externally in order to be
free for good works, but internally in order that their hearts may be
free for the contemplation and love of God viewed apart from creatures
and not merely in them. He might perhaps say that, as we cannot go to
God through all creatures, but only through some (since we are not each
in contact with all), we must select according to our circumstances
those which will give the greatest expansion and elevation to our
natural affections; and that for some, the home is wisely sacrificed for
the community or the church. Yet this hardly consists with the
pre-eminence he gives to married love as the nearest symbol and
sacrament of divine.
Both these modes of imagining the truth, whatever their inconveniences,
are helpful as imperfect formulations of Catholic instinct; both
mischievous, if viewed as adequate and close-fitting explanations.
Patmore was characteristically enthusiastic for his own aspect of the
truth; and characteristically impatient of the other. Thus, of à Kempis
he says:
There is much that is quite unfit for, and untrue of, people who live in
the ordinary relations of life. I don't think I like the book quite so
much as I did. There is a hot-house, egotistical air about much of its
piety. Other persons are, ordinarily, the appointed means of learning
the love of God; and to stifle human affections must be very often to
render the love of God impossible.
In other words, the further he pushed the one conception the further he
diverged from à Kempis, whose asceticism was built almost purely on the
other.
Most probably a reconciliation of these two conceptions will be found in
a clear recognition of the two modes in which God is apprehended and
consequently loved by the human mind and heart; the one concrete and
experimental, accessible to the simplest and least cultured, and of
necessity for all; the other, abstract in a sense--a knowledge through
the ideas and representations of the mind, demanding a certain degree of
intelligence and studious contemplation, and therefore not necessary, at
least in any high degree, for all. The difference is like that between
the knowledge of salt as tasted in solution and the knowledge of it as
seen apart in its crystallized state; or between the knowledge and love
of a musical composer as known in his compositions, and as known in
himself, from his compositions. The latter needs a not universal power
of inference which the most sympathetic musical expert may entirely
lack.
Of these two approaches to Divine love and union, the former is
certainly compatible with, and conducive to, the unlimited fulness of
every well-ordered natural affection; but the latter--a life of more
conscious, reflex, and actual attention to God--undoubtedly does require
a certain abstraction and concentration of our limited spiritual
energies, and can only be trodden at the cost of a certain inward
seclusion of which outward seclusion is normally a condition.
Instinctively, Catholic tradition has regarded it as a vocation
apart--as, like the life of continence, a call to something more than
human, and demanding a sacrifice or atrophy of functions proper to
another grade of spirituality. Even what is called a "life of thought"
makes a similar demand to a great extent; it involves a narrowing of
other interests; a departure from the conditions of ordinary practical
life. The "contemplative life" is inclusively all this and more; it is a
sort of anticipation of the future life of vision. Still, though for a
few it may be the surest or the only approach to sanctity, yet there is
no degree of Divine love that may not be reached by the commoner and
normal path; there have been saints outside the cloister as well as
inside. One could hardly offend the first principles of the Gospel more
grievously than by making intelligence, culture, and contemplative
capacity conditions of a nearer approach to Christ.
It seems to us then that Patmore failed to get at the root of the
neglected truth after which he was groping, and thereby fell into a
one-sidedness just as real as that against which his chief work was a
revolt and protest.
As a convert, Patmore is most uninteresting to the controversialist. His
mind was altogether concrete, affirmative, and synthetic, with a
profound distrust of abstract and analytical reasoning. As we have said,
Christianity and, later, Catholicism appealed profoundly to his
intellectual imagination in virtue of some of their deeper tenets, for
whose sake he took over all the rest _per modum unius_.
The idea [of the Incarnation] no sooner flashed upon me as a possible
reality than it became, what it has ever since remained, ... the only
reality worth seriously caring for; a reality so clearly seen and
possessed that the most irrefragable logic of disproof has always
affected me as something trifling and irrelevant.
Again: "Christianity is not an 'historical religion,' but a revelation
which is renewed in every receiver of it." "My heart loves that of whose
existence my intellect allows the probability, and my will puts the seal
to the blessed compact which produces faith"--an ingenious application
of his favourite category.
Of the efforts of Manning and de Vere to proselytize him, he says:
Their position seemed to me to be so logically perfect that I was long
repelled by its perfection. I felt, half unconsciously, that a living
thing ought not to be so spick and span in its external evidence for
itself, and that what I wanted for conviction was not the sight of a
faultless intellectual superficies, but the touch and pressure of a
moral solid.
Whatever some may think or have thought of his theology, none who knew
him could have any doubt as to the robust and uncompromising character
of his faith. It was because he felt so sure of his footing that he
allowed himself a liberty of movement perplexing to those whose position
was one of more delicate balance. He had a ruthlessness in tossing aside
what might be called "non-essentials," that was dictated not so much by
an under-estimate of their due importance, as by an impatience with
those who over-estimated them, confounding the vessel with its contained
treasure.
When he says: "I believe in Christianity as it will be ten thousand
years hence," it would be a grave misinterpretation to suppose that he
implied any lack of belief in the Christianity of to-day. It is but
another assertion of his claim to be in sympathy with the esoteric
rather than the exoteric teaching of the present; to be on the mount
with the few and not on the plain with the many. For as the glacier
formed on the mountain slips slowly down to the plain, so, he held, the
esoteric teaching of to-day will be the popular teaching of future ages.
However little we may relish this distinction between "aristocratic" and
vulgar belief; however strongly we may hold that best knowledge of
God--that, namely, which is experimental and tactual rather than
intellectual or imaginative--is equally accessible to all; yet just so
far as there is question of the intellectual and imaginative forms in
which the faith is apprehended, the distinction does and must exist, not
only in religion but in every department of belief, as long as there are
different levels of culture in the same body of believers. It is, after
all, a much more superficial difference than it sounds--a difference of
language and symbolism for the same realities. Where language fits
close, as it does to things measurable by our senses, divergency makes
the difference between truth and error; but where it is question of the
substitution of one analogy or symbol for another, the more elegant is
not necessarily the more truthful; nor when we consider the infinite
inadequacy of even the noblest conceivable finite symbolism to bring God
down to our level, need we pride ourselves much for being on a mountain
whose height is perceptible from the plain but imperceptible from the
heavens.
Hence to say that the distinction between esoteric and exoteric teaching
means that the Church has two creeds, one for the simple, another for
the educated, is a thoughtless criticism which overlooks the necessarily
symbolic nature of all language concerning the "eternities," and
confounds a different mode of expression with a difference of the facts
and realities expressed.
Matthew Arnold, too, believed in the Catholicism of the future; but in
how different a sense! What he hoped for was, roughly speaking, the
preservation of the ancient and beautiful husk after the kernel had been
withered up and discarded; what Patmore looked forward to was the
expansion of the kernel bursting one involucre after another, and ever
clamouring for fairer and more adequate covering. With one, the language
of religion was all too wide; with the other, all too narrow, for its
real signification. Arnold belongs to the first, Patmore to the last of
those three stages of religious thought of which Mr. Champneys writes:
The first is represented by those whose creed is so simple as to afford
little or no ground for contention; the second by such as in their
search for greater precision enlarge the domain of dogma, but fail to
pass beyond its mere technical aspect; the third consists of those who
rise from the technical to the spiritual, and without repudiating or
disparaging dogma, use it mainly as a guide and support to thought which
transcends mere definition.
_Dec._ 1900.
Footnotes:
[Footnote 1: _Coventry Patmore_. By Basil Champneys. Geo. Bell and Sons,
1900.]