The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Aakanksha Virkar Yates

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Aakanksha Virkar Yates Winter Jade Werner (bio) The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Aakanksha Virkar Yates; pp. ix + 180. New York and London: Routledge, 2018, $149.95, £105.00. Aakanksha Virkar Yates’s nimble and well-researched The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins gifts its reader with a genealogy of the intrinsic mysticism of the Tractarian religion, showing its profound influence on Hopkins’s theology and poetics. Yates does not simply demonstrate Hopkins’s indebtedness to this tradition, especially as it informed “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1918) (the primary focus of her book). She also challenges under-interrogated presumptions regarding mysticism’s character and reach. Both the slimness of this volume and the relatively niche topic implied in its title thus belie an impressive breadth of terrain covered: from the theology of the Greek fathers to the meditative practices of St. Ignatius; from St. Augustine’s Confessions (c. 397–400) to John Henry Newman’s The Via Media of the Anglican Church (1877); from the tradition of Christian exegesis of the Song of Songs to the tradition of the baroque heart emblem. Weaving together this patchwork of religious practices and thought, Yates argues that Hopkins’s poetry must be understood in reference to mysticism’s dedication to spiritual perfection, even as she shows how mysticism was not solely or even primarily “a disregard for the physical world in favour of an immaterial spiritual realm”: an understanding of mysticism that helps account for “how Hopkins can be a mystic and yet be wholly engaged in the world” (31). Though in some ways resonant with the themes and issues explored in Dennis Sobolev’s The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology [End Page 154] (2011), Yates ultimately diverges from Sobolev’s conclusions when it comes to “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Sobolev deems Hopkins fundamentally analytical instead of mystical; Yates, by contrast, contends that the poet is “preoccup[ied] with divine union and the vision of God achieved through the sacraments and mystical body of Christ, and the soul’s contemplative ascent” (159). Over the course of ten chapters, she shows us how this is the case. The first few chapters (re)construct the discourses of Christian contemplation and meditative practice that historically informed the Oxford Movement. Chapter 1 examines Clement’s and Origen’s writings on contemplation to achieve gnosis to show how they inform Newman’s idea of “conscience and the real apprehension as the intuitive vision of God” (16): an idea that finds an analogue in Hopkins’s understanding of the heart. The excellent second chapter turns to the relationship between contemplation and Aristotle’s energeia (activity) as apprehended in a Pauline tradition. Yates notes Hopkins’s understanding of energeia as the “motion” or “outworking” that bridges the gap between “pure matter” or “pure form,” and discovers the extent that it overlaps with his definition of stress in his famous Parminedes essay (the first instance in which he uses the words inscape and instress) (17). Hopkins’s view of the material world as fundamentally dynamic finds a likely basis, then, in energeia and contemplative practice as conceived in the Greek patristic tradition—hence why Hopkins’s mysticism involves rather than precludes keen attention to worldly engagement. Subsequent chapters examine Newman’s “belief in the baptismal gift of the divine indwelling [as] the seed and centre of Tractarian mysticism” (37) and “the symbolic vocabulary of baptism” to lay the groundwork for typological and allegorical readings of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” in reference to the Song of Songs, Augustine’s Confessions, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century heart emblems in Ignatian meditation (61). Chapter 9 turns to the nature poems of 1877: “The Windhover,” in particular, but also “Hurrahing in Harvest,” “The Valley of Elwy,” “Ribbesdale,” “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” and the final chapter returns to “The Wreck” to assert that the poem ultimately is “Hopkins’s incantational, mystical prayer of the heart; a hymn to divine love” (165). As she herself asserts, Yates is interested in a hermeneutics enabled by typology and allegory. Everywhere in “The Wreck of...