By the presence of His majesty He maketh
what He maketh; His presence governs what He made" (II, 10, pp. 16-17).
This physical immanence of Christ in space and time is an essential
part of Hopkins' faith, expressed at the time of his conversion
and throughout his life. In The
Deutschland (1875-76), Christ
is the "Ground of being and granite
of it: past all / Grasp God " (101, ll. 254-255). In his
last retreat notes of 1889, he writes: "All
that happens in Christendom and so in the whole world affected, marked, as a
great seal, and like any other historical event, and in fact more than any
other event, by the Incarnation; at any rate by Christ's life and death, whom
we by faith hold to be God made Man." (5)
"Christ is in every sense God and in every sense man,"
Hopkins wrote Bridges in 1883, "and the interest is in the locked and inseparable
combination, or rather it is in the person in whom the combination has its
place." The events of Christ's life are called mysteries,
"the mysteries being always the
same, that the Child in the manger is God, the culprit on the gallows God, and
so on" (p. 188). Augustine often returns to the same
paradoxes; one famous passage from a Christmas sermon is typical:
Man's Maker was made man,
that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breasts; that the
Bread might be hungry, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired
from the journey; that the Truth might be accused by false witnesses, the Judge
of the living and the dead be judged by a mortal judge, Justice be sentenced by
the unjust, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Vine be crowned with thorns,
the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might be weak, that He who
makes well might be wounded, that Life might die. (6)
Trivial Accidents
Years earlier in 1866,
before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Hopkins wrote to his friend E. H. Coleridge of the mystery
Augustine so eloquently described:
It is one adorable point
of the incredible condescension of the Incarnation (the greatness of which no saint
can have ever hoped to realise) that our Lord submitted not only to the pains
of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion etc. or the insults, as the
mocking, blindfolding, spitting etc, but also to the mean and trivial accidents
of humanity.
Where’s the Foil?
…“The
Windhover” is drawn from Hopkins’ knowledge of Robert Southwell’s A Hundred Meditations on the Love of God, which contains an image of “Christ as a hawk in flight”
(181) and an image of the “sprinkled
out…flames of fire” (187).
~James Finn Cotter,
Gerard Manley
Hopkins and Saint Augustine. Mount St. Mary College, Newburgh, New York
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