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.