Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

Poetry has always been one of the favored ways of getting at God – especially when it comes to describing a religious vocation. It’s certainly the case for Hopkins enthusiasts, both scholarly and otherwise.

Although the biography itself has been in book stores for some months now, the reviews of Paul Mariani’s Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life continue to trickle into the press. There’s a good one on the PBS website for Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

An excerpt:

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844, the eldest of nine children of a prosperous middle- to upper-middle-class family. He went to a very good grammar school, Highgate, where he excelled academically and in 1863 won a scholarship to Balliol, one of the best colleges at Oxford.

It is at Oxford in 1863—when Hopkins was 22 and caught up in contentious religious controversies that swirled through the school, particularly reconsiderations of the Church of England’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church—that Mariani begins his narrative. Apparently a deeply pious but religiously conflicted young man, Hopkins was, as Mariani tells it, on the edge of the epiphany that “for complex reasons” he needed to become a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit priest. “So give it a day, a date, a going forth, a crossing over, all in an instant, finally, a yes and a yes again.…Call it what he would with its wondrous, irresistible forces working on him. The instress of it, like the ooze of virgin oil crushed in the press of God’s hands, an anointing, a yielding, a yes.” Instress, of course, is one of Hopkins’s coined words with a less than static meaning, but it generally points to the impulse or energy given off by an inscape—another of Hopkins’s words signifying the essential meaning or uniqueness of a thing or experience.

From his lyrical portrait of Hopkins’s decision to “go over” to Rome and, further, become a Jesuit, Mariani backfills with a dash of Hopkins’s family and a splash of his schooling. Neither, however, comes fully alive, nor are they fully realized. The result is that in some sense neither is Hopkins. In particular, one would have liked a fuller discussion of the religious revival that was the Oxford Movement, its efforts to renew the Anglican Church’s Catholic inheritance, and the panoply of religious currents and crosscurrents—Tractarians, Ritualists, High Church Anglicanism, Broad Church Anglicanism, and Roman Catholicism—that were so much a part of the intellectual milieu at Oxford when Hopkins was there, and how the young man worked his way through them to his ultimate decision to convert. Additionally, a fuller discussion of Hopkins’s Oxford life beyond the conversion decision would have helped round out the spiritually anguished but religiously and academically questing Hopkins, especially a more full-bodied rendering of friends, companions, and correspondents such as the very important Robert Bridges (poet, physician, and hymn writer who became Hopkins’s editor and literary executor) and the scholar Alexander Baillie, as well as Oxford tutors such as art and literary critic Walter Pater and the classicist and theologian Benjamin Jowett.

(“The Gentle Hop” – by-the-way – was one of Gerard’s nicknames in the Society.)