Religio Poetae by Coventry Patmore
Part 6
By Dale Nelson
“The Weaker Vessel,” the 20th and penultimate chapter of Religio Poetae, would affront many readers today, but they’ll probably never hear of it. For that matter, many Christians may only rarely, or never, have heard 1 Peter 3:17, from which the expression derives, read out in church.
Patmore announces: “there are few more damnable heresies than the doctrine of the equality of man and woman.” “The happiest result of the ‘higher education’ of woman cannot fail to consist in the rendering of her weakness more and more daintily conspicuous.”
He says, “every woman is a species in herself – nay, many species. The aspects of reason are finite, but those of unreason infinite.” “The true happiness and dignity of women are to be sought, not in her exaltation to the level of man, but in a full appreciation of her inferiority and in the voluntary honour which every manly nature instinctively pays to the weaker vessel.” “When man becomes womanish, and ceases to be the transmitter of the heavenly light of wisdom, [woman] is all abroad, she does not know what to do with herself, and begins to chatter or scream about her rights.”
If one reads the whole chapter, it becomes clear that Patmore wants his readers to take away from this essay the necessity of men living up to their callings as men. He doesn’t advocate new laws to restrict women or policies forbidding education to them. He puts the blame primarily on men if women are confused.
Happy marriages, Patmore believes, are the foundation of a happy society. The corollary would be that, when people look instead to prescriptive social reforms to manufacture a happy society, they are fooling themselves or have been fooled.
Patmore was obviously no early proponent of the society that lay ahead beyond his time. For a century or so, if not more, English-speaking society has mostly looked to “leaders” in education and government to scrutinize, to surveil, to adjust, to engineer, to regulate, ever more details of life in order to promote justice, equality, and – it is assumed — happiness. As for marriage, it has been reimagined as a contractual and contingent relationship, not between husbands and wives, but between “partners,” dissoluble at any time should either partner so desire.
C. S. Lewis’s account of the marriage of Mark and Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength shows how married people who would truly love are likely to have a great deal to unlearn in a time like ours.
Patmore presents a wrongheaded version of a truth, namely the complementarity of the sexes. People today who are nincompoop adherents of the characteristic social phenomena of our moment — supportive, for example, of hideous drag queens defiling public libraries and blasting the sight of defenseless children — are unworthy to say a word against Patmore.
His final chapter, “Dieu et Ma Dame,” is a Christian treatment of eros in marriage. One may affirm its reminder that “a man can only love a woman with full felicity by understanding and obeying Christ’s injunction that he should love her as He loves the Church” – though Patmore’s reference would have been more exact if he had referred to the injunction as being that of St. Paul.
Poets typically have a vocation rightly to celebrate real love. People commonly think of poets as unnecessary – but, Patmore asseverates, “If society is to survive,” poets must keep alive in people’s minds the quality of love that they perhaps knew only briefly in youth. “The whole of after-life depends very much upon how life’s transient transfiguration in youth by love is subsequently regarded; and the greatest of all the functions of the poet is to aid in his readers the fulfilment of the cry, which is that of nature as well as religion, ‘Let not my heart forget the things mine eyes have seen.’”
That is from Chapter 19, “Love and Poetry,” and the quoted maxim is close to one cherished by Machen, “Let us not deny in the darkness what we have known in the light.”
Patmore continues, “The world is finding out…. that it cannot do without religion. Love is the first thing to wither under its loss. What love does in transfiguring life, that religion does in transfiguring love.” (The Savior warned of the time when “because lawlessness will abound, the love of many shall wax cold” — St. Matthew 24:12.)
Patmore writes further, “Nothing can reconcile the intimacies of love to the higher feelings unless the parties to them are conscious – and true lovers always are – that, for the season at least, they justify the words, ‘I have said, Ye are gods.’” This remark should be glossed by C. S. Lewis’s discussion of the “Sky-Father and Earth-Mother” in married love, in the Eros chapter of The Four Loves (1960).
C. S. Lewis held Patmore’s poetry in high regard. “I think him really great within his own limited sphere. To be sure he pushes the parallel between Divine and human love as far as it can sanely or decently go, and perhaps at times a little further.”
But did we notice? – in these chapters Patmore does not seem so dependent on the idea of the few and the many. He has something to say about universal, or at least, it seems, common human experience and its nature and its needed discipline.
NOTES
A note on the Petrine verse, from the Lutheran Study Bible (2009): “Some feminist interpreters have taken offense at this expression [‘weaker vessel’]. However, the apostle actually chooses his wording to express care, not disrespect, for women. Physically, women are typically smaller in size and weaker in strength, which could make them vulnerable to abuse. Peter admonishes husbands not to exploit their size and strength in unkind ways. Husband and wife complement each other in God’s design.” Where in the writings of ancient pagans is there anything even approaching the compassion and wisdom of such counsel?
Machen: “As Coventry Patmore says, quoting from an earlier writer, ‘Let us not deny in the darkness that which we have known in the light’” (Things Near and Far, Chapter 9).
Lewis’s assessment of Patmore’s poetry, quoted above, is from his letter of 8 May 1939 to Bede Griffiths. In his last letter to Ruth Pitter, 20 August 1962, Lewis sought to open a discussion about Patmore’s poetry. Pitter’s honors include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 1955 (the first woman so honored) and the Royal Society of Literature’s most high award, the Companion of Literature, 1974, etc. What adjustment of Patmore’s thinking would have been effected if he had met Pitter’s poetry or Dorothy L. Sayers’s literary and conservative polemical writings?
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