Heraclitean Nature and the Comfort of the Resurrection:Theology in an Open Space Brian D. Robinette (bio) In his masterful sonnet, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection," Gerard Manley Hopkins places us in a landscape recently ravaged by a storm ("yestertempest's creases"). Spellbound for the moment by the shifting contrast of "cloud-puffball" against blue sky, and the "down dazzling whitewash" at his feet as sunlight and tree shadow dance upon the land's pock-marked and rutted surface, the poet imagines the whole of nature as did Heraclitus: as a massive, "ever living fire," where all things arise from and again are consumed by flame. 1 With senses saturated and self-consciousness porous, the poet stands transfixed by nature's riotous display, a reflective filament in the glittering cascade of it all. "Million-fuelèd, nature's bonfire burns on." Though seemingly timeless in its peculiar duration, the moment of ecstasy does not last. For as the poet takes notice of the tire tracks and footprints now succumbing to erasure by sun and wind—the only traces left by previous countryside travelers ("manmarks")—his initial feelings of expansion congeal into thoughts, into hardened and heavy reminders that his own human life is no less subject to volatility and eventual oblivion. He too participates in the ceaseless [End Page 13] flow that Heraclitean Nature awesomely displays, but with this difference (which in the end, he fears, makes no difference at all): he has become grippingly aware of the contingency of things. Humankind too—nature's "clearest-selvèd spark"—is subject to the cyclical and merciless leveling down of Heraclitean fire. Overwhelmed with a sense of the tragic, and the reflexive protest such awareness can bring, the poet's words shift into a frightful register: But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd sparkMán, how fást his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!Bóth are in an únfáthomable, áll is in an enórmous dárkDrowned. O Pity and indig nation! Manshape, that shoneSheer off, disséveral, a stár, death blots black out; nor mark Is ány of him at áll so stárkBut vastness blurs and time beats level. And yet, in mid-thought—literally in mid-line of the sonnet—the poet defiantly shifts to an altogether different vision, one buoyed by eschatological hope: Enough! The Resurrection,A héart's-clarion! Awáy grief's gasping, joyless days, dejection. Across my foundering deck shoneA beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trashFáll to the resíduary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash,I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, andThís Jack, jóke, poor pótsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. How shall we interpret this abrupt disjunction that nearly splits Hopkins's sonnet in two? Perhaps one might accuse the poet of being disingenuous—or worse, pious—as though by declaring "Enough!" [End Page 14] so categorically he has merely suppressed the disquieting truth of his initial contemplation. Would it not be more consistent and courageous, as Friedrich Nietzsche declared, to accept the truth that the only "resurrection" possible or desirable for us (should we even wish to use the word) is the "eternal return" of the Heraclitean cycle, suffering and all? Isn't the hope for individual survival beyond death, however conceived, in fact a "no" to life as it is, a facile projection that alienates the individual from the species, indeed from the whole of nature? "One will see," declares Nietzsche, "that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering." Whereas Dionysius presents us with the "promise of life," the resurrection of the Crucified is, in the end, only the "redemption...