The Incarnational Aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins

2010

Ames 1 Christ Being Hopkins and Hopkins Being Christ Gerard Manly Hopkins often struggled to creatively question and inspire as a Victorian poet while simultaneously maintaining a humble servitude to God as a Jesuit priest. He quantifies this paradoxical relationship between the self and God by dichotomizing "Christ being man and man being Christ" (Heuser 71). The Petrarchan sonnet "As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame" (1881) explores the first part of the relationship, Christ being man, in a positive light. In the poem, the speaker observes the inscape, or unique essence, contained within both animate and inanimate entities in nature and concludes that human inscape is the echo of the internal self through external actions. Hopkins' conjunction of natural and mortal inscape, and allusions to the poem itself as an act of inscape, repeatedly assert that identity and action are inevitably fused. Therefore, direct references to Christ imply there is no difference between men who act like Christ and Christ himself. The "terrible" sonnet "Carrion Comfort" (1885-1887) explores the second part of the relationship Hopkins preached, man being Christ, and negatively concludes that this isn't possible because the self is flawed. The speaker reflects on past persecution and ponders over the question of whether he should accredit God the oppressor or his own identity for emerging strengthened out of despair. Although this poem certainly depicts a man who is spiritually lost, it implicitly reveals that the reason for his anguish isn't a struggle with God, but rather Christ. Hopkins juxtaposes active and passive will, alludes ambiguously to Christ as a tormenter, and muddles traditional Ignatian meditation to demonstrate the failure that will occur when a man attempts to sustain self while simultaneously upholding to Christ's perfect example. Since both poems explore opposite ends of the paradoxical

Journal of Humanities and Education Development, 2020

The research paper aims to exhibit and explore pious, philosophical, and existential aspects of Gerard Manley Hopkins' selected poems which remain an invaluable contribution to the shape and development of the Christian thought both for theologians and academic critics. The author of the article emphasizes that Hopkins's challenging, highly ambitious and complex works, filled with spiritual anxiety, dualism and struggle between reason and sensuality, harmony and violence, happiness, and suffering, were mostly reject able by the Victorian audience and critics. Hopkins's "model of the world" (Barańczak 1981), his depiction of tragic human existence and the presentation of two contradictory facets of God meet more the expectations of contemporary readers and are more appreciable by today's thinkers, philosophers, and critics.

Body and Religion, 2017

Andrew Ter Ern Loke has proffered a creative, novel, and bold model of the Incarnation as a contribution to analytic theological discussions of Christology. Recent work in this field has offered a distinction between abstract-nature and concrete-nature conceptions of natures. The former holds that entities have properties which entail their membership in a particular kind, the latter holds that being a member of a certain kind entails the having of certain properties. Loke’s model, what he calls the Divine Preconscious Model, holds that at the Incarnation the divine attributes of the Word were submerged into the Word’s preconscious, while the conscious of the Word took on certain human properties. This model, Loke holds, entails Christ’s full divinity and full humanity without falling into Apollinarianism or Nestorianism. However, I argue that because Loke avers that his model runs on a concrete-nature account of natures, he is not able to maintain the full humanity of Christ. I suggest two ways Loke might be able to maintain the integrity of his model, either by embracing a form of new-Apollinarianism or by adopting the abstract-nature perspective of natures.

Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2020

An attempt to apply a dogmatic definition into a literary analysis

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was held to be a priestly metaphor of Victorian Poetry and a syntactical simile of Modern Poetry. He had prophetically been in search of the “authentic cadence” that paved the way for his spiritual fulfillment. Hopkins motivation is to know God; therefore, he crafts his poems in forms. For Hopkins, everyone is, in a small way, the image of God. By nature, Hopkins is a deeply religious man who has been an ardent believer in God and in the divinity of Christ. From his childhood, Hopkins has a very powerful ascetic strain in his temperament, Whereas the people of his age take pleasure in the facilities provided by the scientific discoveries. Hopkins wants to engage himself in his own solitude. The verbalized and mystic perception of God is metamorphosed into the utter poetic silence, chosen by Hopkins himself. Believing that the writing of poetry is self-indulgence for one who has decided to dedicate his life to God, Hopkins does not practise his hand on poetry for seven years. He engages himself in his self –chosen, austere devotion towards God by observing Jesuit orders, meditations, study of theology, noviceship and spiritual exercises. This paper deals with Hopkins’s constant awareness of the divine presence in the universe as well as his poetic attempt to achieve spiritual fulfillment.

In the long history of Christian hermeneutics, the Incarnation is hardly ever addressed as embodiment. In part, this is because the early influence of Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophy contributed to the tradition of Christian asceticism that emphasized the denial of the body. Yet to assert, as Christians do, that “the Word became flesh” is to claim that God himself became embodied. This implies that to understand the Incarnation, we have to understand embodiment. The centrality of the Incarnation, the fact that it distinguishes Christianity from Islam and Judaism, demands that we take embodiment as a central element guiding Christian hermeneutics. In this essay, I describe our embodiment in terms of its ontological structure as an intertwining. I then use this structure to interpret the Incarnation.

Many recent theologians have sought to construct an account of God's relation to the world in ways which respect plurality and difference. It is one of the merits of Laurel Schneider's recent Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity 1 As we will see, relying on the insights of Gilles Deleuze, Schneider develops an idea of divine incarnation in a body comprised by multiple, shifting relations to other bodies. Bodies, in Deleuzian perspective, are sites for the complex, always-changing interactions of vital prepersonal forces or energies. The famous image of the "body without organs" is meant to suggest that being a body is not a matter of being comprised of static hierarchies (i.e., rationality over emotions, or superego over id) which are imposed from without, but rather of being organized by that it leverages classical christological affirmations toward this end. In the process, Schneider offers an account of the Incarnation which links God inextricably to multiplicity by way of embodiment in a complex, deeply relational world. The Christology she develops from this account is characterized by several important strengths: (1) it is able to avoid compromising the importance of the body, (2) it exposes and challenges tendencies toward Docetism which continue to haunt christologies developed from Chalcedonian orthodoxy, and (3) it takes Jesus' hospitality and openness to others with welcome ontological seriousness. However, despite her strong efforts precisely to avoid it, I will argue here that her own Christology in the end leans in the direction of Docetism in an equal and opposite way, and I will attempt to offer a modification which will help avoid this difficulty while remaining within the framework of a quest for a Christology of multiplicity.

International Journal of Systematic Theology, 2008