World as Word: Philosophical Theology in Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Downes, David Anthony

By Bernadette Waterman Ward. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8132-1016-X. Pp. x + 291. $59.95.

After finishing this book, I could not think of any other major English poets for whom philosophical theology is the underlying structure of thought in their poems. Gerard Manley Hopkins is unique in this regard. Of course, there are some writers whose thinking about reality principles can be traced in their work, but in general poets do not develop their notions of how they know reality with much systematic reflection. Bernadette Waterman Ward's book demonstrates that such is not the case with Hopkins.

Ward opens her study by exorcising the intimidations of deconstruction propounded by her graduate instructors. She does this not only because she now holds that such literary theory is destructive of appropriating literary texts, but also because deconstruction has no relevance whatsoever to a poet for whom words bridge the realities of the world. Interestingly, having defined her critical attitudes at the outset, she ends her book with the same affirming testimony.

Ward's study is basically a compendium of the philosophical and theological thinking that Hopkins developed over his lifetime. She takes up the evolution of Hopkins' speculations as he developed them stage by stage. She draws up accounts of a flowering sensibility in Hopkins as a youth, his growing and demanding piety, and his thirst to found his experience on true ideas about the structures of reality. She shows that what emerged was an enormous capacity for observations of the external world, a correspondent reading of his interior visions, and a powerful imaginative capacity to express both his external and interior perceptions. Ward examines how Hopkins sorted himself out, based upon the elemental drive of his consciousness, to found his personal religious and poetic convictions on some intellectual and historical verities that would stand the test of reason.

The first phase was to define this goal. The next three phases that Ward examines are those in which Hopkins found information, advice, perspective, and ideas that helped him eventually to establish his own understanding of himself, his aspirations, and the natural and supernatural worlds. He encountered a swirl of attitudes while in college--some helpful, some distracting, some provocative in the persons of his teachers and associates. Among these the dominant influences were John Ruskin on visual truth and John Henry Newman on religious assent. Ward also exhibits knowledgeably the pattern of attitudes that Hopkins considered among the Greeks, the Romantics, the Tractarians, the Higher Critics, and the Materialists before reaching his own conclusions. These were, in general, that there was truth in ontology; that his religious personalism, in all of its rich imaginative and passionate intensity, was also a depository of reality's truth; that poetry (and the arts) were real apprehensions of the ways in which the world means; and, most especially, that utterances (words) are licit bridges to grasp and express meaning about the self and the world. Hence, he affirmed that poetic words uttered by the imaginative intellect do convey real truths and that the individualized self is in valid touch with the universe.

Having clearly exposed this foundation of thought, Ward goes on to examine Hopkins' mature considerations of the self, the epistemology of "selving" the durability of language, the nature of religious testimony, the word as sacrament, and the determinations that philosophers historically had used to find rational grounds for religious faith.

Her central focus here is John Duns Scotus, the medieval thinker whose philosophy, in Hopkins' Jesuit educational regimen, was sidelined by theologian Francisco Suarez's summaries of Scholasticism. Ward spends her longest chapters on sorting out how Hopkins adapted Scotus's notions to his own views of human personality, of cosmological order, of human perception, and of the meaning of Creation, Incarnation, and Real Presence in sacramental theology--all of these as perspectives needed to understand what Hopkins meant by "inscape" and "instress." Along the way Ward demonstrates how these notions underlie the verbal structures and formal patterns of many of Hopkins' mature poems, suggesting their pervasively Scotistic coloring: "His poems are permeated by a subtle and complex understanding of the relationship between linguistic structures and the world of experience. At the center of it all is community between God in the world and his creation, between humans and the message of God in the world, and especially among humans telling each other about it" (264).

Generally I agree with Ward's hermeneutic focus and her analysis of Scotus's influence on Hopkins' literary art. However, I do not think that her attempt to apply Hopkins' Scotism to the "Dark Sonnets" adequately helps us to read these very different poems in his canon. What has changed in these poems is that the bridge of utterances (words) that Hopkins had built between self and God could no longer be crossed with the same engagement of feeling and presence that earlier poems mediated. In these earlier, celebratory poems nature, in all of its visible and auditory presence, was seen, felt, and heard as a powerful mediation between his "inscaping" selfness and God. Self, nature, and God were "wired" in verbal circuits linking his most discrete observations and surcharging his powerful spiritual feelings. Through his poetics Hopkins knew a deeply selved connection with the real world (Creation), Christ (Incarnation), and the Catholic Eucharist (Real Presence). In this period of his life, as Ward richly demonstrates, Hopkins could account hermeneutically for the awareness of self and God present to him in nature. However, when these lines went down, nature and God no longer "talked" to him, no longer energized spiritual communion. Thus God's will darkened for him, and the integrity of his dual vocations as priest and poet were cast in doubt. Both words and Word seemed to have receded into a black silence. Being, God, and self for Hopkins had to have a terminology, a speech audible to the mind, heart, and soul.

In this spiritual predicament of acedia, any sincere person would have feelings of self-accusation. In Hopkins' case, however, the crisis was so overwhelming that he accused himself with the same intensity of conviction that he employed when spiritual and poetic mediation flowered. Though as a priest he tried silent suffering, as a poet he had to vent his "sins" in the wails and despair of the "Terrible Sonnets." Ward tries to ferret out some struggling spiritual hope expressed in "I wake and feel" by noting that Hopkins does not say he was damned but like the damned, ending her discussion with the comment that "it was in Scotus's ideas about fulfillment of self that Hopkins finds hope in the 'Terrible Sonnets'" (239). Her appeal to sacrifice as a spiritual purgation is one way to delve into this mystery in Hopkins' life. Others have suggested Ignatian spirituality to understand this religious calamity. However, just to say that such things can happen in one's spiritual life is not to account for it in the real circumstances of a particular life, in this case the life of a man with an extraordinarily powerful religious and poetic consciousness.

However we account for these last poems, we must start, I think, with the awareness that they represent and express a collapse of Hopkins' religious consciousness so that, as a poet, he was left to talk mainly to himself about this breakdown in his religious selving. God was not in the mediative circuit but rather far off, as a younger Hopkins described in "Nondum":

 God, though to Thee our psalm we raise,
 No answering voice comes from the skies;
 To Thee the trembling sinner prays,
 But no forgiving voice replies;
 Our prayer seems lost in desert ways.
 Our hymn in the vast silence dies.

Later cries for the "instress" of hope are not like the first cries. The earlier ones were for finding God; the later ones are are about losing God. Perhaps God would hear and reply, perhaps not. We are left with this enigma in reflecting on Hopkins' religio-poetic consciousness in these dramatic poems of suffering and sorrow.

Ward's study of the philosophical and theological substratum of Hopkins' poetry is a valuable contribution to research on Hopkins. Her scholarship is wide and solid. Although the focuses are not new, their fresh assembly is lucid and their application to Hopkins firmly demonstrated. The exposition of Scotus's influence is especially rich and suggestive in understanding the interactive dynamic of "selving" in Hopkins' writings. I also liked the author's personalized conclusion in which she recalls a philosopher professor, to whom she was explaining the dense epistemic details of Matthew Arnold's poetics, finally asking, "'But tell me this: do you love Arnold?'" Ward notes that his question changed the relationship between literature and "selving": "[T]he answer, though I did not know it then, was a turning point in my life" (266). This scholar clearly loves Hopkins.

David Anthony Downes

California State University, Chico