Religio Poetae by Coventry Patmore
Part 3
By Dale Nelson
“A voice crying in the wilderness”—Machen likened Patmore to St. John the Baptist in a 1907 essay. Earlier, Patmore turned the Baptist into an allegorical figure in Religio Poetae.
Chapter 2, “The Precursor,” is a specimen of allegorical reading of the New Testament. Without denying the historical reality of the Baptist, Patmore presents him as an allegory of natural love, which is seen as a forerunner of the divine love—of which Our Lord Himself provides an allegorical figure. Both figures, then, represent stages in the mystical ascent of the soul. (Herod, besotted with a dancing girl, allegorically represents sensuality, which offers a false imitation of natural love. Herod’s murder of the Baptist allegorically represents the way sensuality profanes natural love.)
Interpreting a revered text allegorically has a long pedigree. It is found in Greece centuries before the New Testament era, when it eased the embarrassment felt by thoughtful persons who read about the licentious antics of the Homeric gods and goddesses. These could be interpreted as veiled accounts of cosmology and so forth. Plato wrote, in Theaetetus, that “the ancients…hid their meaning from the common herd in poetical figures.” Of Heraclitus, Diogenes Laertius wrote, “According to some, he deliberately made it the more obscure in order that none but adepts should approach it, and lest familiarity should breed contempt.”
Among Christians, Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century worked with the allegorical mode and applied it to the Bible. The 4th-century treatise by St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, is an ancient standout. There, the Exodus text is allegorized in the service of an exposition of a program of mystical stages.
Patmore disparages the plain text of the Bible in Religio Poetae Chapter 4. There, he compares the “letter of Scripture” to the “unsightly” walls of a clay oven. However, through the cracks in the clay, he says, light may be seen blazing. Patmore adds that the “white heat of a life whose mysteries of felicity it is ‘unlawful to utter’” is lost on “religious people [who] are in too great a hurry of spirit to see anything but the clay walls, and they lead mean and miserable existences while loudly professing the faith.” Thus he also disparages the lives of a great many Christians. In his letters, St. Paul rebuked sinning Christians, urged negligent brothers and sisters in Christ to amend their lives. His concern was pastoral. Patmore seems mostly just to dislike them.
The allegorical exposition of Scripture is vulnerable to the perils of eisegesis, that is, instead of reading the meaning out from the passage, one brings to the reading of the Bible a meaning or meanings to which the reader is already committed, perhaps on questionable grounds. Someone once said in regard to the author of Signatura Rerum and Mysterium Magnum, that there is a picnic in which Jacob Boehme brings the words and the reader brings the meanings. Does this happen too often when Scripture is read allegorically?
Practitioners of the allegorical approach, moreover, may resort to making adjustments to certain texts in order to make them support the message they favor. Patmore does this in Chapter 3. There, he speaks of the caution exercised by the Church regarding disclosure of “a body of knowledge which ought not and cannot be effectually communicated to all.” Now, for this reason, he says, She “obey[s] the command: ‘Tell not the vision to any man till Christ be risen’ in him.”
Patmore is partially quoting the words of the Savior Himself just after His Transfiguration: “Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of Man be risen again from the dead.” What Jesus commanded was spoken specifically to His disciples. As the following verses demonstrate, they were not yet ready to proclaim the Gospel of the reign of Christ.
In his quotation, Patmore suppresses Our Lord’s reference to His resurrection. But he adds the two words “in him” to make the sentence he quotes fit a spiritual meaning he is committed to but which is absent from his text. Reading St. Matthew 17:9 does not speak of the mystical birth of Christ in the soul of the believer. Patmore’s reading seems to brush by, and thus to devalue, what the Lord actually said. He offers his altered text, yet—note well—gives the adjusted text as proof that the Church is obeying a commandment of the Lord’s when She withholds certain things from certain people. But St. Matthew 17:9 is not a commandment about withholding truths that a speaker is well qualified to communicate but that his hearers are not ready to hear.
It may be asked—Machen was a Christian, but how often do we find him interested in the meaning of a Biblical passage? In a passage I am sure I have read but didn’t manage to locate, he felt free to refer slightingly to portions of Holy Writ such as the annals of the kings of Israel and Judah as of no interest. Mostly, it seems, Machen quotes the Psalms, sometimes ironically, as when, at the end of Things Near and Far, telling about his departure from a journalistic job he had hated, he thought of the 39th Psalm (Vulgate numbering; Psalm 40 in the English version). One wonders how much difference there was for Machen in quoting the Vulgate Psalter from quoting secular Latin tags. I don’t mean to clobber Machen about this, but let’s remember that the Psalter was a source book for the most ancient Church when She contemplated Her Savior (e.g. No. 110), and, even more, that in His hour of greatest suffering, He quoted the Psalter (No. 22) from the Cross. Perhaps Machen would have acknowledged this if it had come to the point.
Note
Machen’s “‘Consolatus’ and ‘Church-Member’” (1907) is quoted as reprinted in Vincent Starrett’s compilation The Glorious Mystery (Chicago, 1924).
The quotations from Classical Greek authors are from “A Chronological Compilation of Testimonial Evidence for Esotericism,” prepared by Arthur M. Melzer, author of Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014). The compilation is available online.
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And, of course, St. Paul in his Letter to the Galatians 4:24 even uses a form of the verb ‘allegoreo’. (A verb – and practice – of his Jewish Alexandrian contemporary, Philo, too.)
I would like to know more about Machen as Latinist – he seems fluent – and therewith how much of his familiarity with Latin Psalms – and other Bible verses – comes from liturgical sources – the Roman Missal, the Roman Breviary (pre- as well as post-1914), other Uses (such as Sarum and Dominican), or from the Vulgate (could he, like Lewis writing to St. Giovanni Calabria in Latin, apologetically make his own Latin rendering of a Biblical quotation if his Vulgate was not to hand?), or one or another of the Latin translations of the Book of Common Prayer, including Psalter. I presume when, in his Observer article of 20 February 1927, he quotes St. Augustine on St. Valentine from one of the sermon selections included in the Roman Breviary he is offering his own translation from the Latin Breviary (What Do We Know?, p. 141).
I’m just reading with great interest the late Sister Benedicta Ward’s booklet-length introduction to her translation of The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm (Penguin, 1979 rpt. of 1973 ed.) – for example, that the liturgy and private prayers “were not so much a conscious source as a mental climate” and that for Anselm and his predecessors “‘reading’, ‘meditation’, and ‘prayer'” “were different aspects of the same thing, not separate exercises in their own right.” How much might something like that be true for Machen – or how much, if separate, might such exercises be interrelated?
Interestingly, coming to this article, among the things she notes is attention to different aspects of the life and mission of St. John the Baptist over time.
I would think Patmore’s attention to the rising of Christ in distinct men (i.e. human beings) both simply and absolutely presupposes “Our Lord’s reference to His resurrection” – and the subsequent fact of it.
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