Excerpt:
The Dialogue
1. …basically I look at some of the possible choices made by a selection of nineteenth-century writers to the challenge of faith in what was a radically changing and challenging society. I include writers who continue to maintain their faith throughout their lives such as John Henry Newman and Christina Rossetti, writers who make some kind of accommodation between faith and doubt, such as the deism of Thomas Carlyle or the religious humanism of George Eliot; and writers who completely lose their faith, as in the case of Algernon Swinburne and Thomas Hardy.
2. …students will be surprised how the personal journeys of faith made by those Victorian man and women writers can connect with roads travelled by 21st century Christians. Their texts may influence the students’ faith negatively or positively but as Holmes argues, ‘the educated Christian must be at home in the world of ideas and people.’1
3. Our aim is to create educated Christians with self-knowledge and with reasons for belief. We have a responsibility to influence our students to become critical thinkers, and that sometimes means taking risks.
4. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet in question, will be the main focus of my paper. I have always included his poetry because in it he explores a unique and compelling journey from faith through deep despair and doubt back to faith again.2 Hopkins was a man of his time. As a Victorian, he expressed the spirit of his age, which involved an unusually strong sense of self-consciousness. Note Matthew Arnold in his preface to his poems of 1853 where he ‘informed his readers that “the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced” ’.3
5. For many Victorians, like John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hardy and Charles Darwin, along with that internal dialogue had come ‘“doubts” [and] “discouragement” ’and the loss of their Christian faith.4 But Hopkins chose to remain a Christian despite an acute awareness of the reasons for disbelief so haunting his contemporaries. His final faith position does however seem to have been a more tentative, somewhat modified version of his earlier youthful faith, which was so full of exuberance and celebration. I feel that very honesty about the possibility of change and development in faith makes him a helpful model for students to study.
6. Hopkins had a highly attuned sense of self:
And this is much more true when we consider the mind; when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut-leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.27
d. Poetry is the sacrament of flesh, word, and spirit charged by their interpenetration with each other. When his resistance broke, Hopkins’ highest gift was released.38
1. So the poem ends with a ‘moving request for some kind of fertility of spirit…Christ, the maker of the universe, is asked to bring [him] renewal’.39
2. Hopkins and the Psalms: …and as Merton reflected in Bread in the Wilderness…
This expression of a man approaching the edge of the abyss and finally returning with hope to the reality of himself and his relationship with God has valuable parallels with other literature including the biblical. There is a fruitful correspondence between Hopkins’s experiences and those expressed in the Psalms.40 Walter Brueggemann, in his book Spirituality of the Psalms, talks of them in terms of psalms of orientation, disorientation and new orientation… Finally there are the psalms of new orientation which ‘bear witness to the surprising gift of new life when none had been expected…
3. Hopkins’s final sonnets also cannot recapture the purity and simplicity of the faith he once embraced. But at a point when he had lost hope, he was able to believe that new life was emerging and that his Lord would ‘send [his] roots rain’. This spiritual movement, more accurately a spiral than a circle, from orientation through disorientation to new orientation, is very appropriate for Hopkins’s own journey. The key for him, as for the psalmist, is that ‘everything must be brought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God, who is the final reference for all of life’.48 In that renewed conversation with God, he has managed to accept ‘God’s grace [that] gives man the power to transcend himself, to rise to a higher pitch of self’. Hopkins describes this perfectly in the paradox he uses in his poem ‘On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People’: ‘The selfless self of self, most strange, most still’.49
4. To see how Hopkins emerges from his doubt into a new faith is equally significant since it offers reassurance to those who feel they may have to deny their early faith because it no longer answers all their questions. Faith changes, develops, and in line with Fowler’s Stages of Faith, may be able to hold more questions in tension in its later stages than in its earlier ‘first naïveté’.51 Hopkins’s penultimate poem – with the marvellously grand title, ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’ – closes with words which reveal the new orientation he has attained.
5. They reveal a man who can still speak words of glorious and powerful faith:
Enough! The Resurrection,
A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire leave but ash;
In a flash, in a trumpet crash, …
~ from Penny Mahon, THE SEARCH FOR INTEGRATION: A STUDY OF THE FAITH JOURNEY IN THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS -Newbold College, England
