A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Catharine Randall (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Catharine Randall Philip Ballinger A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins. By Catharine Randall. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2020. Pp. 195. $22.95 paperback. ISBN: 978-0-8028-7770-3.) Professor Randall offers readers a refreshing and succinct reflection upon the life, writings, and faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her book is scholarly in its roots yet purposefully accessible to a wide audience as an introduction to the person, art, and religious experience of Hopkins. Randall's presentation of Hopkins contains no hint of hagiography. The Hopkins portrayed is fully human—brilliant, loved, not always understood, steel-willed at times, physically fragile, and substantially plagued with neuroses and depression. Her realistic portrayal of Hopkins makes his incarnation-amplifying faith and chiming poetic creativity all the more shining and striking. A reader new to Hopkins, however, may underappreciate the degree to which the joyful and playful seasoned much of his life. Professor Randall describes her method in this biography as holistic. This means that the chronologies of Hopkins' life and writings do not always correspond, particularly in the first chapters of her book. She purposefully follows this method to heighten a "you are there" feeling and face-to-face encounter with Hopkins (p. xiv). More importantly, she hopes that this interpretive biography will assist readers in seeing Hopkins' life through the prism of his theology. I think her method will help a new Hopkins reader move to the heart of the matter with alacrity. A reader familiar with Hopkins, however, may experience some disorientation. Professor Randall quickly moves the reader into the mainstream of Hopkins' faith and art—the world of the senses is the high road to the world of the spirit. Woven through by this contextual theme, her summative recounting of Hopkins' childhood, education, conversion to Roman Catholicism, and formation and life as a Jesuit priest is substantive and, at times, innovative. For example, while discussing how Hopkins experienced nature, Randall offers the possibility of some neurological idiosyncrasy as the cause. While I do not think that Hopkins was in some altered state in his perception and experience of beauty in nature, I appreciate the thought-provoking discussion. In any case, Professor Randall here introduces a hermeneutic lens through which she views Hopkins—he is an "ecstatic," "one who entered into and took on the life around him in an imagined, artistic creation of a new form of participation in essence" (p. 59). [End Page 418] While focusing upon Hopkins' Jesuit formation and training, Professor Randall justifiably discusses at length the probable influence of Duns Scotus. In this context, she suggests and supports the possibility of influence by the Cappadocian fathers. This offers her a creative opportunity to introduce the patristically-rooted and currently prevalent theme of the Cosmic Christ into the discussion of Hopkins' theological thought and its expression in prose and poetry. Her following analyses of Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "The Windhover" compellingly bring this Scotian influence and theological theme to life. Professor Randall's last chapter, "Desolation," portrays the final years of Hopkins' life in Dublin as a time of internal disintegration and physical collapse. She weaves Hopkins' own words and the reflections of others to show how near he was to madness and even temptation to suicide. It is a dark, distressing portrayal rooted in primary sources and well conveyed by the author. Then, in the last pages of her book, Randall wonderfully describes Hopkins' sudden break into light as best expressed in his poem "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection." She suggests this re-enlightenment is a return to or remembering of an earlier shining faith in and perception of the Cosmic Christ in creation. This end time and last flash of creativity in Hopkins' life seems not so much a resolving denouement as a kind of resurrection from darkness and internal death. I wonder if Hopkins' experience of abandonment by God was so discontiguous from the end of his life and his final words—"I am so...