Mysticism · 3 of 24

Epigraph

“What the world, which truly knows nothing, calls ‘mysticism’ is the science of ultimates, . . . the science of self-evident Reality, which cannot be ‘reasoned about,’ because it is the object of pure reason or perception. The Babe sucking its mother’s breast, and the Lover returning, after twenty years’ separation, to his home and food in the same bosom, are the types and princes of Mystics.”

Context

Coventry Patmore (1823-1896) — English Catholic poet, mystical theologian, friend of Hopkins and Francis Thompson. The Rod, the Root, and the Flower (1895), the source of this epigraph, is his late prose collection of mystical aphorisms ('Aurea Dicta' — 'golden sayings') in the tradition of Pascal's Pensées. Patmore's theology of married love as a sacramental icon of divine union runs underneath the babe-and-lover pairing he chooses to define mysticism: nursing infant and returning lover are both figures for the soul restored to the breast of the Real. Underhill takes the epigraph because Patmore's image refuses the abstraction usually attached to the word 'mysticism' — it grounds the term in the most ordinary acts of dependence and reunion.Coventry Patmore, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower (1895), 'Aurea Dicta' section; on Patmore's nuptial mysticism see Frederick Page, Patmore: A Study in Poetry (1933).

COVENTRY PATMORE,

“The Rod, the Root, and the Flower”