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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2013
This article provides a critical interpretation of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry and vision of reality by comparing some of his focal ideas with those of Alfred North Whitehead. There is a fairly explicit theological cosmology in Hopkins' poetry, just as there is poetic expression in the cosmology of Whitehead. The creative and idiosyncratic terms and phrases of Hopkins are explained as they are correlated with technical terms in Whitehead's cosmology. Some of the comparisons or tentative equations worked out in this article include creativity in Whitehead with instress in Hopkins, concrescence in Whitehead with inscape in Hopkins, style in Whitehead with selving in Hopkins, selftaste with satisfaction, and transmutation in Whitehead with rhyming in Hopkins.
1 Gardner, W. H., Introduction to Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Gardner, W. H. (New York: Penguin, 1985), xx–xxiiGoogle Scholar: “As a name for that ‘individually distinctive’ form (made up of various sense data) which constitutes the rich and revealing ‘oneness’ of the natural object, he coined the word inscape; and for that energy of being by which all things are upheld … he coined the term instress.” I will put the technical or idiosyncratic terms of Hopkins in italics the first time I use them and when referring to them as terms.
2 Milward, Peter, “Hopkins on Man and Being,” The Fine Delight: Centenary Essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Fennell, Francis L. (Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1989), 130Google Scholar: “For it is in his eyes the dappledness in form that constitutes the uniqueness and originality of things in nature, where no two objects are precisely alike.” See also Donaghue, Denis, The Ordinary Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 84f.Google Scholar; Ong, Walter, Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 3.Google Scholar
3 Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, ed. Griffin, David Ray and Sherburne, Donald W. (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 18Google Scholar: “‘Actual entities’—also termed ‘actual occasions’—are the final real things of which the world is made up.” Microscopic building blocks of the universe, they perish as soon as they are realized, and so, in every instant the world is made up of a novel set of occasions. Nevertheless, complex patterns of inheritance provide for endurance. See ibid., 18–20; Sherburne, Donald W., A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966), 247.Google Scholar I will put the technical terms of Whitehead in italics the first time I use them and when referring to them as terms.
4 Hopkins, , “Pied Beauty,” Poems and Prose, 30–31.Google Scholar
5 Hopkins, , “Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola,” Poems and Prose, 149Google Scholar: “… that selftaste which nothing in the world can match. The universal can not taste this taste of self as I taste it.”
6 Milward, Peter, A Commentary on the Sonnets of G.M. Hopkins (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1969), 79Google Scholar; Milward quotes Hopkins' letter for May 26, 1879 thus: “I mean by it (sake) the being a thing has outside itself … and also that in the thing by virtue of which especially it has this being abroad. …” Hopkins also takes sake to mean “distinctive quality in genius.”
7 Hopkins, , Poems and Prose, 28–9.Google Scholar In “The Lantern out of Doors,” Hopkins writes:
Christ minds: Christ's interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd.
Their ránsom, their réscue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.
8 Ballinger, Phillip A., The Poem as Sacrament: The Theological Aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 144Google Scholar. For Hopkins, “through the Incarnation everything ‘rhymes in Christ’.”
9 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 251Google Scholar: “[Transmutation] arises by reason of the analogies between the various members of the prehended nexus [group of data], and eliminates their differences. Apart from transmutation our feeble intellectual operations would fail to penetrate into the dominant characteristics of things.” In virtue of the category of transmutation many data are felt as one in a single prehension and are assigned a single subjective form.
10 Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 52.Google Scholar According to the principle of plenitude, “the universe is a plenum for marum in which the range of conceivable diversity of kinds of living things is exhaustively exemplified. …” Applied to Hopkins, the principle of plenitude means the profuse variety of individuals and species, but not the necessary and exhaustive appearance of all possible beings and kinds of beings.
11 For Hopkins, the universe itself is a Christscape. The image of the incarnate Christ is impressed upon the universe and everything in it, indeed by every scene or scape perceived by the human eye.
12 Milward, , “Hopkins on Man and Being,” 141Google Scholar: “his [Hopkins’] readiness to ‘give beauty back … to God’ as ‘beauty's self and beauty's giver’ brings him a renewal of hope and a reaffirmation of being.”
13 Hopkins, , “The Principle or Foundation,” Poems and Prose, 143Google Scholar: “… we make it worth God's while to have created us…. This is a thing to live for.”
14 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 343–51.Google Scholar
15 Hopkins, , “The Golden Echo,” Poems and Prose, 54Google Scholar; Hopkins, , Selected Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 139.Google Scholar
16 Boyle, Robert R., Metaphor in Hopkins (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 48.Google Scholar For the connection between glory and Shekinah, see Ong, , Hopkins, the Self, and God, 78–81.Google Scholar
17 Schaya, Leo, The Universal Meaning of the Kabbala (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), 154–56.Google Scholar The Shekinah is a term used to mean the mystical body of Israel. It rests upon the community in dispersion, and continues to radiate only in weak reflections. Nevertheless, Kabbalists as “embers have continued to flare up with an increased light, and, sporadically, its [the Shekinah's] true ‘grandeur’ has been recaptured among the elect.”
18 Hopkins, , “The Windhover,” Poems and Prose, 30.Google Scholar
19 Rahner, Karl, “Theological Thinking and Religious Experience,” Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965–1982, ed. Imhof, Paul and Biallowons, Hubert, trans. ed. Egan, Harvey D. (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 328Google Scholar: “In my theology the givenness of a genuine, original experience of God and his spirit is of fundamental importance….”
20 Egan, Harvey D., The Spiritual Exercises and the Ignatian Mystical Horizon (St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1976), 98Google Scholar; “Ignatius’ phrase, ‘finding God in all things,’ must often be understood christocentrically…. The phrase, therefore, often means ‘finding Jesus Christ in all things.’” See also, Burghardt, Walter J., Long Have I Loved You: A Theologian Reflects on His Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 194Google Scholar; “Ignatius asks me to consider how God (i.e., Christ) works and labors for me in all creatures upon the face of the earth….”
21 Rahner, , The Dynamic Element in the Church, trans. O'Hara, W. J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 115Google Scholar: “They [ The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius] are rather an attempt, to provide and give practice in a formal, systematical method of discovering this individual will of God.”
22 Ballinger, , The Poem as Sacrament, 100Google Scholar: “I claim Hopkins was more ‘Franciscan’ than ‘Jesuit.’” What is more likely the case is that Ignatius and Jesuit spirituality had inherited some of its particularism from earlier Franciscan and Scotist influences. Hopkins draws upon the richness of both of these sources as parts of a single continuous tradition.
23 Eco, Umberto, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Bredin, Hugh (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 87.Google Scholar “Rather, it [ haecceitas ] is a principle which completes a thing in its concreteness: ‘the ultimate specific difference is simply to be different from everything else’.” Thus Eco quotes Scotus.
24 Whitehead, Alfred North, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: The Free Press, 1957, 12Google Scholar: “It [style] is an aesthetic sense, based on admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste.”
25 Hopkins, , “Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola,” Poems and Prose, 146.Google Scholar
26 Hopkins pictures Christ dying on the cross as “Lovescape crucified” in “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” See Milward, Peter and Schoder, Raymond, eds., Readings of the Wreck: Essays in Commemoration of G. M. Hopkins' “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1976), 28.Google Scholar See also Bender, Todd, “Scope, Scape, and Word Formation in the Lexicon of Hopkins,” in Milward, , The Fine Delight, 122Google Scholar; Peters, W. A. M., Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Essay towards the Understanding of His Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 2.Google Scholar
27 Rahner, Karl, “Panentheism,” Theological Dictionary, trans. Strachan, Richard (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), 333–34Google Scholar: Panentheism “does not simply identify the world with God in monistic fashion … but sees the ‘All’ of the world ‘within’ God as an interior modification and manifestation of God, although God is not absorbed into the world.”
28 Hopkins, , “Parmenides,” The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. House, Humphrey and Storey, Graham (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 127.Google Scholar See Ballinger, , The Poem as Sacrament, 192Google Scholar: “The ‘stem of stress’ between human beings and nature is the word itself….” Again, Ballinger quotes Hopkins thus: “… ‘stress’ means ‘the making a thing more, or making it markedly, what it already is: it is the bringing out of its nature.’”
29 Rahner, Karl, “The Theology of Symbol,” Theological Investigations, vol. 4: More Recent Writings, trans. Smyth, Kevin (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), 224.Google Scholar Thus Hopkins' idea of inscape has much in common with Rahner's theology of the symbol.
30 Ong, , Hopkins, the Self, and God, 154–59.Google Scholar Ong describes “Hopkins’ Own Inscape” as “his unique sensitivity to differentiation or particularity in the external world … and his equally exquisite sensitivity to the differentiation or particularity that constitutes the internal world [of the self]” (ibid., 154).
31 Hopkins, , The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Devlin, Christopher (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 195.Google Scholar
32 Hopkins, , “Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola,” Prose and Poems, 146Google Scholar: “Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this self being of my own.”
33 Hopkins, , “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” Prose and Poems, 51 and xxv.Google Scholar See also Milward, , “Hopkins on Man and Being,” The Fine Delight, 130Google Scholar: “Above all, the emphasis of Hopkins moves from the ‘thisness’ which is in all things to the selfhood that is most marked in man.”
34 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 25Google Scholar: “The ‘subjective aim,’ which controls the becoming of a subject, is that subject feeling a proposition with the subject form of purpose to realize it in that process of self-creation.”
35 Ibid., 166: “The Subjectivist principle is that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of subjects. Process is the becoming of experience.”
36 Peters, , Gerard Manley Hopkins, 7Google Scholar: “There is evidence in his writing that Hopkins was acutely aware of the fact that, in spite of profound generic and specific differences, man and beast and inanimate nature were all alike ‘selves’.”
37 Boyle, , Metaphor in Hopkins, 304.Google Scholar See also Ballinger, , The Poem as Sacrament, 120Google Scholar; “for Scotus, creation was dependent on the decree of the Incarnation.”
38 Hopkins, , Sermons and Devotional Writings, 154.Google Scholar
39 Copleston, Frederick, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, part I (New York: Doubleday/Image, 1962), 236.Google Scholar
40 Lovejoy, , The Great Chain of Being, 304.Google Scholar
42 Gardner, W. H., Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1948), 1:27.Google Scholar
43 Donoghue, Dennis, The Ordinary Universe, 84:Google Scholar “This [poetry] was his [Hopkins'] way of certifying his imagination, giving it a crucial part in the worship of God.”
44 Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1969), 75–94.Google Scholar See ibid., 79: “The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it.”
45 Donoghue, , The Ordinary Universe, 81.Google Scholar
46 Ibid., 83.
47 Ibid., 85. Donoghue notes an entry in Hopkins' journal: “All the world is full of inscape and, and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose …”
48 Milward, , “Hopkins on Man and Being,” The Fine Delight, 136Google Scholar: “Here Hopkins rather associates the thought of Parmenides with the perception of instress in things, as it were a perception of the divine energy at work in the world. … Here he seems to see the ‘inscape’ of a thing as that which holds its many parts together as one, arisng as it were from the depths of its inmost being or ‘instress’.”
49 Miller, Joseph Hillis, “The Univocal Chiming,” in Hopkins: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Hartman, Geoffrey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), 109.Google Scholar
50 Milward, , “Hopkins on Man and Being,” The Fine Delight, 143.Google Scholar See also Hopkins, , “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,” Poems and Prose, 66.Google Scholar
51 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, xivGoogle Scholar: “the creative advance of the world is the becoming, the perishing, and the objective immortalites of those things which jointly constitute stubborn fact.”
52 Daiches, David, “Since 1890,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, ed. Abrams, Meyer (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1962), 1238–41.Google Scholar See also idem, God and the Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 105–07.
53 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 349Google Scholar: “The consequent nature of God is the fulfillment of his experience by his reception of the multiple freedom of actuality into the harmony of his own actualization.” God absorbs into himself all the perfection achieved by the world as it perishes away.
54 Lovejoy, , The Great Chain of Being, 82–84.Google Scholar Lovejoy notes the transformation of Platonism into romanticism: “Thus, at last, the Platonistic scheme of the universe is turned upside down. Not only had the originally complete and immutable Chain of Being been converted into a Becoming….(ibid., 325–26).”
55 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 344Google Scholar: “The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character.”
56 Ibid., 345. “Thus analogously to all actual entities, the nature of God is dipolar. He has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious…. The primordial nature is conceptual….”
57 Ibid., 348: “In each actuality [actual entity] there are two concrescent poles of realization—‘enjoyment’ and ‘appetition,’ that is, the ‘physical,’ and the conceptual.”
58 Ibid., 60: “This concrete finality of the individual [actual entity] is nothing else than a decision referent beyond itself.”
60 Ibid., 149: “The four stages constitutive of an actual entity [concrescence] … can be named, datum, process, satisfaction, [and] decision.”
61 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 333. He points out that Whitehead “gives the name of God, not to the Infinite Fecundity of emanationism, but to the ‘principle of limitation.’” Lovejoy quotes Whitehead: “God is the ultimate limitation, and his existence is the ultimate irrationality.” On this, see Whitehead, , Science and the Modern World, 178.Google Scholar
62 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 31Google Scholar: “it [creativity] is the pure notion conditioned by the objective immortality of the actual world….”
63 Ibid., 108: “pure mental originality [the initial aim] works by the canalization of relevance arising from the primordial nature of God.”
64 Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 179.Google Scholar For Whitehead, creativity is a “factor of activity,” indeed, the ultimate principle of activity and activation. “The creativity is the actualization of potentiality, and the process of actualization is an occasion of experiencing [actual entity].”
65 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 149ff.Google Scholar For discussion of the satisfaction stage as superject and not subject, and as following, not preceding, the decision stage, see ibid., 84ff.
66 Ibid., 289: “An actual entity in reference to the publicity [in distinction from the internal immediacy] of things is a ‘superject’ … it adds itself to the publicity which it transmits.”
67 Ibid., 25.
68 Ibid., 19: “The analysis of an actual entity into ‘prehensions’ is that mode of analysis which exhibits the most concrete elements in the nature of actual entities.” See also ibid., 235: “The actuality [actual entity] is the totality of prehensions with subjective unity in process of concrescence into concrete unity.
69 Ibid., 23: “That every prehension consists of three factors: (a) the ‘subject’ which is prehending, namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is prehended; (c) the ‘subjective form’ which is how that subject prehends that datum.”
70 Ibid., 351.
71 Hopkins, , Poems and Prose, 30Google Scholar; The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 69.