Religio Poetae by Coventry Patmore
Part 2
By Dale Nelson
In Charles Williams’s novel The Greater Trumps (1932), young Nancy Coningsby, in love with gypsy Henry Lee, goes dutifully to church with her father and aunt on Christmas Day. Nancy doesn’t expect that the service will be anything much but an exercise in creaky English custom. However, her attention is seized abruptly by Byrom’s hymn “Christians, Awake”: especially by the phrase “Rise to adore the mystery of love.” Could Christianity have something to do with her life after all, something organically related to the strange new world opening up in her because she is in love? “Rise to adore the mystery of love.” She whispers to her aunt, “Is it true?” Aunt Sybil replies fervently, “Try it, darling.”
“Christianity is an experimental science, and the best answer to one who questions, Is it true, is, Try it.”
Thus begins Chapter 5 of Religio Poetae, “Christianity an Experimental Science.” Perhaps this was the source of that passage in The Greater Trumps. Nancy has been living a rather ordinary life, not in the least attracted by her father’s nominal Christianity, but she may be capable now of something higher (or deeper).
Many readers will hesitate over what Patmore goes on to say. Patmore contrasts “the great mass of men, who live, often virtuously, or at least decorously, contented with knowing and enjoying only [the] natural shadows” of spiritual realities, with the few who “devoutly and substantially [discern them in accordance with a] higher order of perception.” The superior ones include the mystics who have undergone the necessary asceticism, and also, Patmore says, “some men of genius” who possess well-developed spiritual senses although they apparently are lacking in “moral perfection.” (What the names are of some such geniuses, Patmore doesn’t say.)
So a theme of the chapter is the Few and the Many, first of all, as we have just seen, the few and the many as regards persons. Patmore applies this principle also to the religious denominations. There are the many sects, the conventicles which “will always remain narrow in the possibilities of experimental knowledge” as compared with, say, the Church of England which has once in a while, Patmore writes, “brought forth a Hooker or a Keble”; but that in turn is a paltry church as compared with the Roman Catholic, with its Augustine, Bernard, and Theresa. However, Patmore also holds that, “wherever the elementary dogmas of Christianity are taught, there the man who is perfectly sincere and faithful” may have a chance of attaining spiritual experience and even excelling some of the lesser saints of the best church. All that is really necessary to start with, he says, is “belief in a personal God and in His right to command and judge us.” Does this counsel bypass the Crucified and Risen Christ?
Williams emphasized the line “Rise to adore the mystery of love.” Nancy is stirred by the possibility of a vita nuova inaugurated by her love of Henry. She is not so interested in the hymn as a celebration of Christ’s birth –
Let us, like these good shepherds, then employ
Our grateful voices to proclaim the joy;
Trace we the Babe, who hath retrieved our loss,
From His poor manger to His bitter cross –
nor does Patmore here seem very interested in such Christ-centered celebration.
I’m reading Religio Poetae for the first time and am no expert either on Patmore or some of the things he was most concerned with, so these columns are by no means the last word. I have to express some misgivings.
In Religio Poetae, Patmore, like Nancy, does not seem to be much interested in the Apostolic narrative of the birth, life, death on the cross, and resurrection, in our history, of Jesus Christ, the Son of God – who is the one Way to the Father. Christ is found in His Church, in every book of the Bible (in some way or other), in the preaching of God’s law and Gospel, in the Sacraments; and these provide the foundation for prayer, study, intelligent actions of love. Patmore’s attention gravitates towards the aspirant who, he says, is sure of success if he is “perfectly sincere and faithful” (his italics). Oh, indeed – so that’s all that is needed!
It is ironic that Patmore is very critical of “conventicles,” by which I suppose he means small groups of “spiritual” Protestants who differentiate themselves from the “carnal.” Many, since in this concern of his with the Few and the Many his spirit can seem similar to theirs. Isn’t it, rather, the case that as the Christian grows in grace, he occupies his mind less and less with generalizations about the spiritual levels of the few and the many (“Judge not”!) and rather learns to love each of his brothers and sisters in Christ, esteeming them better than himself?
And Machen? Anyone who has read him knows there is something of Patmore’s spirit to be found in his work. But I cherish the incident, in “The Great Return,” wherein a pastor rebukes the narrator – “Machen” – with spiritual pride, and Machen suffers it and accepts it.
Patmore’s third chapter, “The Language of Religion,” celebrates esoteric writing and reading. He sees esotericism as, historically considered, a common practice. About this, he is evidently correct, if a book I have looked into but not read, Arthur M. Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (University of Chicago, 2014), deals with the same sort of thing, as I suppose it does. Melzer has posted online a long document of citations, “A Chronological Compilation of Testimonial Evidence for Esotericism.” Patmore cites the Neoplatonist Proclus and the 18th-19th century English neo-Orphicist Thomas Taylor.
Possibly Patmore has mainly in mind the kind of allegorical reading of Holy Writ practiced e.g. by Origen. But surely Origen wasn’t addressing himself to a secret circle of disciples, was he? Was not Origen, rather, trying to bring forth “treasures old and new” from the Bible for the benefit of the Faithful?
Patmore may have confused esotericism, common among the world’s cults from ancient Egypt to the Freemasons, with the Biblical depiction and counsel of Reserve. A classic paper on the latter subject is Isaac Williams’s Tract for the Times No. 87, “On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge” (1838). Isaac Williams shows how, for example, the miracles of Our Lord were typically hidden from casual view: not for the sake of engendering a mysterious mood, but for the sake of people who might see and, even so, not believe, to their great spiritual peril. Likewise the dogmas of the Faith were taught carefully to catechumens. St. Paul had not carelessly rolled out a detailed exposition of the Faith when he addressed the pagans on Mars Hill. Relevant to the present discussion also is Keble’s Tract No. 89, “On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers, of the Church” (1840), a defense not of esotericism but of typology and allegory.
How did Patmore conceive of his readers? I wondered about this because it seems likely that many readers would be puzzled by this essay, assuming that it was one of the Religio Poetae chapters originally printed in the Tory St. James’s Gazette or other periodicals.
As for Machen, my sense is that through much of his life, yes, he felt the appeal of alleged mysteries hidden from the many. That would have been an ingredient in his long friendship with the esotericist A. E. Waite. Didn’t Machen, though, outgrow a lot of that sentiment, one apt to appeal to perpetual adolescents?
The Holy Church is wiser. One of her great feasts is Epiphany/Theophany, celebrating the divine “publicity” of the Father’s disclosure of Jesus as His well-pleasing Son, and other occasions of the Christ’s divinity being made manifest. But she refrains from promiscuous and irreverent scatterings-about of her sacred truths, and with pastoral stewardship reserves the Feast at her altar to those communicants at least presumptively prepared for it. Before the Eucharistic distribution, “Let the catechumens depart!” cries the Orthodox deacon, while the adherents of the Lutheran Confessions fence the Altar and refuse the Sacrament to those outside the fellowship in faith; and continue to be reproached for that.
Note
I laboriously attempted to explain typology, with reference to Tolkien’s imaginary history, to a “fannish” audience, in “Contemplated But Not Resolved: Opening Up Lear and Lord of the Rings,” in Portable Storage #6 (Autumn 2021), pp. 30-41. This may be read online for free at the efanzines.com site:
PortableStorage-06.pdf (efanzines.com)
darklybrightpress.com 
Funnily enough, I find the Wikipedia article about that friend of the Lewises and Tolkiens, Austin Farrer, saying “his typological approach to the reading of scripture, notably in his books on Mark and the Book of Revelation, was out of the mainstream of biblical scholarship”! I would say I agree with Dale Nelson that Tolkien has a distinctly typological imagination, very much at work in The Lord of the Rings.
I don’t have a proper sense of Patmore’s Religio Poetae (yet? – I think I’ve dipped into it), but my sense of the poetry I’ve read is that he can be emphatically attentive to Christ, the centrality of the Incarnation, and, given the Fall of Man, of His salvific Passion and Resurrection. I would say the same of Williams and Tolkien, with all their distinct differences.
And, not having read right through Religio Poetae, I can only wonder if the things mentioned here which remind me of George MacDonald (especially, I think in his sermons) would prove similar or different in detail.
With respect to Nancy and the Coningsbys, an interesting question here is whether there is implicit attention to her and their Baptismal Incorporation into Christ (so to put it), as there is explicit attention in the cases of characters in Williams’s novels Shadows of Ecstasy and All Hallows’ Eve – how that may unconsciously affect them, how they may even live out their Membership, as it were ‘tracing the Babe’ with varying degrees of awareness that they are doing so.
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The paragraph including”the adherents of the Lutheran Confessions fence the Altar and refuse the Sacrament to those outside the fellowship in faith” belatedly reminded me of the Kikuyu controversy when an interdenominational missionary conference in Kikuyu (in what is now Kenya) in June 1913 ended with a service of Holy Communion held by the Bishops of Mombasa and Uganda in which non-Anglicans (mostly Methodists and Presbyterians) were invited to receive. Do we know if Machen wrote about this?
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Throughout his nonfiction, Machen certainly stated his opinions about the aforementioned denominations, and not always in a conciliar manner. However, I have not come across any mention of his views on this event or concerning open vs closed Communion generally, which would be interesting to know. My best guess would be that he would not be in support of open Communion for two reasons. Firstly, he held Canterbury as a see equal in rank to Rome and Constantinople and did not hold other Protestant bodies to have such a claim. Second, his personal attachment to “initiation” would have conflicted too greatly with open reception of the Sacrament.
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Thank you! It would be interesting to know more about Machen’s ecclesiology – which sounds in some ways ‘classically’ Anglican along Richard Hooker’s lines (in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, nicely discussed by C.S. Lewis in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century) – and indeed also Richard Baxter’s in his Autobiography (in the Everyman’s Library version) – not least with respect to Rome and Constantinople. Charles Williams has some interesting remarks in the 1920s to his friend John Pellow about St. John the Divine being in some ways analogous to St. Peter, where the English Church is concerned, which I have not followed up thoroughly, though I wonder if he is playing in War in Heaven with the possibility that Prester John is in fact St. John. Williams’s priest-friend Arthur Hugh Evelyn Lee (who, if I recall aright, took the name ‘Hilary’ in Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross) says some things about St. John which make me wonder if there is a wide(r)spread esoteric thinking about St. John as peculiarly related to the English Church.
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