Religio Poetae by Coventry Patmore
Part 4
By Dale Nelson
Employing a pardonable visual compression of sequence and meaning, iconographic artists have depicted God the Creator drawing a woman from the side of the sleeping Adam. What Genesis says, of course, is that God removed a rib from Adam, and from the rib made Eve. It seems that it’s in this sense that Eve was taken from the man – just as he had been taken from the dust.
Genesis doesn’t say that God originally created an androgyne from which our first parents were divided into man and woman, though this idea intrigues Patmore. And definitely contrary to Genesis is the further notion that Patmore approves in Chapter 7, that the separation of Eve from Adam was “a consequence of the fall.” Such a profound re-imagining of Genesis seems to be a fancy of Renaissance Kabbalism. Patmore finds himself writing thus after making an ill-advised argument for the natural knowledge of the Holy Trinity. This awareness, not dependent on revelation, would derive from the existence of ”three sexes,” namely “the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, or third, forgotten sex spoken of by Plato, which is not the absence of the life of sex, but its fulfilment and power”; this tripartite division of mankind would be a natural reflection of the Trinity.
In this 7th chapter, “The Bow Set in the Cloud,” then, Patmore draws upon Plato and Greek mythology and Holy Scripture and other sources. His agenda at first is the finding of hints of Christian revelation in the world’s mythologies, for which there’s something to be said, but in the second half of the chapter he ventures into the heterodox notions I’ve just mentioned.
What Arthur Machen thought of this latter part of Patmore’s chapter I don’t know. Two of his relatively early stories deal with something like the androgyne idea. At the end of “The Great God Pan,” as Helen Vaughan is destroyed, the unveiled entity changes and melts “from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast.” In “The Novel of the White Powder,” the secret ingredient of the Witches’ Sabbath evokes from the man who consumes it an alluring shape that is “the man himself.” I don’t assume Machen would desire us to take these horror tales as parables whose details communicated his mature religious convictions.
We may speculate about vestiges or adumbrations of divine revelation in the world’s ancient cultures, but this should never be at the expense of the Biblical record of the uniquely chosen nation from which the Savior would be born. Long before Jesus was born, Deuteronomy gave us the sure principle: Abscondita, Domino Deo nostro, quae manifesta sunt, nobis et filiis usque in sempiternum, ut faciamus universa verba egis huius; “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
Of the great deeds of God, then, the Faithful are to speak and sing continually (e.g. Psalm 103, Ephesians 5:19), in remembrance and praise and thanksgiving (and, sometimes, admonition). Hence the many feasts and prayers of Holy Church, her treasury of orthodox sermons, her best hymns, the abundance of works of art on sacred subjects. In contrast, Patmore’s 6th chapter, “‘A People of Stammering Tongue,’” focuses on the increasingly aphoristic words or eventually the silence of the “very small proportion of the human race [that is] capable of at once receiving self-evident truth.” Indeed, Patmore says, “A sculptor who could see, in one moment, all the possible forms of beauty which might be wrought from his block of marble would be quite unanxious and unable to develop any one of them.”
Chapter 8, “Christianity and ‘Progress,” disdains the making of a case for Christianity based upon its having been beneficial for society. The secular liberal Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019) is friendly to that case. Yet Patmore has a point, which his fellow conservative Machen would have appreciated, that Christ was not come “that everybody should have plenty to eat and drink, comfortable houses, and not too much to do.” Sometimes well-meaning clergymen and others may have tried to defend the Faith on something like those grounds. But haven’t they got a point too? People who have been compassionately fed or even just given a drink of cold water in Christ’s Name might appreciate what the comfortably-off Patmore never had to worry about.
I like to remember what Machen wrote in Chapter 9 of Things Near and Far. He describes a paranormal experience he underwent in his room at 4 Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn. And he adds: “This is all wonderful? I suppose that it is; but let me here say firmly that I consider an act of kindness to a wretched mangy kitten to be much more important.”
Anyway, we might guess, having read so much of Religio Poetae, that the book appealed to Machen at least as an alternative to, even a reaction against, too much merely moralistic religion. He might have caught whiffs of that sort of thing while growing up in Wales and, later, while residing in London. Whatever the extent of his firsthand experience of it may have been, he’d have encountered plenty of satire directed against such excessive moralism, both in popular fiction and highbrow literature. That stereotypical Pharisaical kind of religion also often displayed an insensitivity to the beauty all around us. It might deploy phrases about the splendor of heaven but seemingly had never felt a sense of wonder coming through the appearances of daily life. A kind of plodding piety could coexist with worldly “getting and spending” and be lacking in holy obedience and joy. The churches should not abet that sort of thing.
Note
Don Richardson’s Eternity in Their Hearts (1984) is an interesting first book on the subject of adumbrations of God’s truth among people not yet given the Gospel.
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