The Faith of the Millions (2nd series)

by George Tyrrell

POET AND MYSTIC.

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.]