At Once What Christ Is: The Deifying Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

At Once What Christ IsThe Deifying Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins David Meconi SJ (bio) I. Introduction A robust theology of Christian deification can be found throughout the poetry of the English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Informing much of Hopkins's theistic imagery is his exhortation to his readers to become another Christ. What may sound like a daunting, if not heretical, claim has always been at the heart of the Christian faith in general and the core of Hopkins's spirituality in particular. Embedded in his most memorable pieces is a two-act drama wherein the Son of God becomes human as the curtain is raised, so that in the second act, we humans might become the sons and daughters of God. This is precisely what the best of the Christian Tradition taught to be the end and goal of the Christian life: not only to embrace God-made-flesh, but actually to continue his enfleshed presence in the world. If this were not somehow true, as St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) put it, so much of sacred Scripture would be thrown into question: Now, however, I wonder if we shouldn't have a look at ourselves, if we shouldn't think about his body, because he is [End Page 116] also us (quia et nos ipse est). After all, if we weren't him, this wouldn't be true: When you did it for one of the least of mine, you did it for me (Mt 25:40). If we weren't him, this wouldn't be true: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? (Acts 9:4). So we too are him, because we are his organs, because we are his body, because he is our head, because the whole Christ is both head and body.1 There is no other way to makes sense of Christ's admonition to be "perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:48).2 This theology of deification was not only a consistent strand of thought running from the Fathers through the medieval doctors and into such contemporaries of Hopkins himself, such as Cardinal Newman (d. 1890) in his own beloved England or Matthias Scheeben (d. 1898) in Germany, it was a key evangelical principle embedded in Hopkins's own Jesuit training, evident most clearly in the Spiritual Exercises which he made every year of his religious life. The following article will therefore show how Hopkins drew from this ancient Christian soteriology of the "great exchange"—that God became human, so humans could become God—to inform his poetry's most central Christian imagery. Divided into two main sections, I first set out to appreciate the theology of divinization Hopkins would have been trained in through his post-Tridentine, Jesuit formation. Deification is not something normally associated with the Council of Trent (1545–63) and subsequent catechesis, nor is it readily found in the writings of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Society of Jesus. Yet, thanks to a more concentrated academic focus today, scholars have uncovered how the reality of "becoming god" does in fact run through these centuries of the post-Reformation period. The second half of this study will then turn to Hopkins's own writings and lay out where and how he draws from this ancient theme in composing some of his more memorable lines. [End Page 117] II. Brief Biography Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford in Essex on July 28, 1844 and was the oldest of nine children. The Hopkins family was intellectually refined. His father was a London shipping insurer who also published poetry, and his mother enjoyed the best education her physician father (who himself was educated in poetry by John Keats as a young man) in London could have provided. The home was by all evidence full of literature, music, and a deep appreciation for art, especially the sketches and woodcarvings of Gerard's aunts Annie and Maria. At primary school Hopkins became friends with Ernest Hartley ("E.H." in his letters) Coleridge, the grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before going up to Balliol College (1863–67), where he would take first...