Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Priesthood of all Poets

 Joyce (1882-1941)

James Joyce wrote that a poet is "a priest of the imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life" (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).

I discovered this little gem in a footnote while reading Philip A. Ballinger's The Poem as Sacrament: The Theological Aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which is fitting enough as Hopkins is perhaps the most notable example of someone being both a priest and a poet.  Ballinger's work is beautiful in the way that it focuses on Hopkins sacramental poetic vision which is that a poem stresses the 'instress' of a thing or that a poem 're-presents' the 'inscape' of a thing.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Both these definitions may be in Hopkins' particular idiom, but they represent an idea fundamental to both aesthetic and sacramental conversations.  If we begin from the foundations of sacramental theology, we begin with the understanding that a sacrament is an "external visible sign of an invisible grace," or (even better) an "efficacious sign."  To stick with Joyce's idiom, let us focus on the Eucharist as the sacrament at hand, as the Eucharist is the "efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life" (CCC §1325, italics mine).  The efficacious nature of sacraments are that they accomplish what they signify; the Eucharist is a symbol and sign of our communion and it brings about our communion.  Now the hinge in Catholic sacramental theology that allows this accomplishment and significance to co-exist is a handy Latin phrase:

sacramenta continent quae significant 
(sacraments contain what they signify)

The Eucharist brings us into communion with the Body of Christ because our communion and the Body of Christ are contained in the Sacrament: they are the sacrament.  The sign causes our unity to Christ, because he is there.  The intimacy between God and the signs he uses to express Himself are clearly identified from the beginning of John's Gospel where he states that "The Word was God" (1:1).  This  idea can allow Catholics to tip their hats to (the convert to Catholicism) Marshall McLuhan and agree that at least with God, "the medium is the message."

McLuhan (1911-1980)

In Hopkins, we can see a radical appropriation of these ideas to his Logo-centric understanding of language.  Hopkins' understanding of poetic language resonates with a sentiment one often hears in conversations of Catholic apologetics concerning the Eucharist as the Passion of Christ not 'represented,' but 're-presented.'  In this sense the Eucharist is not a play echoing the life of Jesus, but it is the life of Jesus, accessible to us now.  Hopkins' understanding of language follows his metaphysical perspective, which was heavily influenced by John Duns Scotus.  Within Hopkins' Scotian mind there are two dizzying conceptual poles between which the poet is ever-reeling: the univocity of being and haecceity of beings.

John Duns Scotus (1265-1308)

These two poles of all beings' essential unity with Being and their also essential uniquity or particularity ('thisness') are the paradox of metaphysics.  Aquinas resolved this problem with distinctions between being and essence (De ente et essentia) and the analogy of being.  Scotus subsumes this tension into his theology with the distinctions of being per se and being per participationem, where Creation participates in God's being perhaps as Eastern theology distinguishes between God's essence and energies or in theosis how we become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).  The dynamic practical character of Eastern divinization is perhaps more closely fitting to Hopkins' conception of language, due to the spiritual life that creation represents in his poetry.  Hopkins' poetry is best metaphysically understood if one grasps that he writes with the theological tension (or communication) between this being and Being.

Hesse savoring the inscape of a landscape.

From this metaphysical foundation we move on to Hopkins' two primary conceptual innovations.  Hopkins constantly mentions in his journals, letters and essays that he senses the instress and sees the inscape of everything.  These Hopkinsian neologisms Hans Urs von Balthasar defines "power of a thing" and "form of a thing" respectively (GL III, 366).  By way of analogy, one could say Hopkins walking in the woods and stumbling upon a magnificent flower lavishly blooming is like Herman Hesse coming out of a mountain trail which opens up on a stunning view of the surrounding landscape.  In Hopkinsian idiom the 'inscape' is the landscape Hesse contemplates and the 'instress' is that which stuns him into contemplation.

The relation between the instress and inscape is riddled throughout Hopkins' thought and while it can be perplexing (How can the inscape qua form of the landscape, be more than the hills, trees, rocks, etc. and yet also absolutely in each detail of the hill, tree, rock, etc.), but comprehending the inscape is not the matter of this essay, and actually any attempt to do so may actually comprise the integrity of the mystery. 

The point of this present reflection is that the poet is the priest, who tries to convey this instress and inscape to his audience.  The poem stresses, signifies and accomplishes the original instress and inscape, so that the reader might stand with the poet in contemplation of the same thing as the priest and laity commune with one another.  It is this common sentiment, which underscores the Eucharist's ability to bring us back to the Last Supper, Calvary, the Manger, the Heavenly Liturgy, and wherever the Mass was, is, or will be celebrated.

The sacerdotal role of the poet is so prevelant in Hopkins, because Christ is behind everything in Hopkins' poetry, because he is behind every thing—as he wrote: "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things." Hopkins has such percipience into the unfathomably unique minutia of the natural world, because in it he sees the Christ in whom "all things hold together" (Col 1:17).  Because Christ is the Word which orders everything that is, Ballinger artfully writes that for Hopkins "all things 'rhyme' because they are patterned by the Word" (145).  Hopkins' is able to see a world "charged with the grandeur of God" and can see Christ truly play "in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his."

Balthasar (1905-1988)

From the superfluity of this revelation rushes the unrivaled musicality of Hopkins' language, which Balthasar writes "sweeps the whole cultivated world of beauty of the Victorian age into the dustbin" (GL III, 362).  Hopkins' stress on his language's rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance and musicality in general is absolutely unparalleled.  While the Victorian aestheticism of Dandyism and "art for art's sake" rendered art absurd, decorative or superficial, Hopkins' poems were sacraments and incarnations.  The music of his language and how it challenges the tongue and delights the ear could not be swept away like the others, because Hopkins' words signified and manifested the Word himself, who is the Rock of Ages which was not cut by human hands (Dan 2: 34, 45), the Rock upon whom poets and priests build their houses (Matt 7:24).

But just as the Eucharist is not mere bread but a sacrifice of love, so too the foundation of these houses is the sacrifical "lamb slain from the foundations of the world" (Rev 13:8).  Balthasar writes, in his treatment of Hopkins, that coupled with this Eucharistic image, Christ's Cross "is the fundamental, ontological presupposition of all natural processes that all, knowingly or not, intrinsically signify or intend by pointing beyond themselves" (GL III, 394).  As a priest, it is Christ's sacrifice that imbues Hopkins' vision of the world and Christ's sacrifice of love is the heart of the world.  Hopkins' sensitivity to the most minute beauties of nature, which rendered him odd to his fellow Jesuits (who did not know about his secret and personal poetic life), was because he intuited that all the beauty in existence derived from the Lamb, whose sacrifice is gratuitously offered as a supper: "How soldiers platting thorns around CHRIST’S Head/ Grapes grew and drops of wine were shed."

"For what has to be interpreted is not concepts (of 'universal', abstract truths), but images (of the unique, personal, divine-human truth), and here poetry is the absolutely appropriate theological language, and Hopkins brings the great English tradition back into the Church by his own creative achievement" (Balthasar, GL III, p. 391, emphasis mine)

Perhaps Balthasar's understanding of poetry as the absolutely appropriate theological language, stems from the essentially sacramental character of Catholic theology.  The centrality of the Eucharist in Catholic theology is unquestionable; it is "the source and summit of the Christian life" (CCC §1324).  Thus the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist is perhaps concentrically of the next importance, and Hopkins' sacramental poetics have a lot of potential insight.  Though Hopkins' poetry might not meet all people where they are at, anyone can see that the creative use of language is captivating whether it be in music, poetry or even advertising, and obviously the language of prayer (whose form echoes stanzas of poems already) needs to be in dialogue with poetry.

But the relationship between liturgy and poetry is deeper than mere wording.  Liturgy's etymology means the "work of the people" (λειτουργία) and the poetry's etymology comes from the verb "to do" or more specifically "to make" or "create" (ποιηω).  Careful reflection and participation in the poetic life as we have seen exemplified in Hopkins (attentiveness to "instresses" and "inscapes," contemplation of beauty, openness to creatively and spontaneously responding to God) is absolutely what has the potential to rejuvenate the liturgical life of the Church, which is to say the life of the Church itself.

The lesson to be learned in this reflection of Hopkins, is that it is imperative that we move from praxis to poiesis, from mere or habitual 'doing' to creative collaboration with God in His own creative life.  Realizing our "priesthood of all believers" may need to begin with recovering the poetry of believing.  For if we neglect our poetic stewardship, we stop being co-workers or pro-creators with God and how is any species to survive without procreation?  Hopkins' theo-poetic vision invites us to be struck by the instress of God that we might contemplate His inscape and offer our own pens, paper, voices, minds, hearts and ultimately lives to stressing and representing them with our our poems, our lives and our selves sacramentally. 


References
Video Biography of Hopkins Part I
Biography of Hopkins
The Poetry Foundation's Podcast: Close reading of "The Windhover"

Introductory Poems
God's Grandeur
"As kingfishers catch fire"
Pied Beauty
The Windhover
Binsey Poplars (Watch his attention to nature's unified and individual beauty)
The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe (Mariology in Hopkins' sacramentality is another expansive issue)
May Magnificat
Wreck of the Deutschland (A Longer Poem)

It seems all of his English Poems and Fragments (No Latin, Greek or Welsh)