Augustine, Hopkins and Christ's Act of Self-Sacrifice

Augustine quotes the passage from Philippians 2.6-8, the basis for Hopkins' belief in the Great Sacrifice, which, years later in 1883, he paraphrased for his friend Robert Bridges: Christ "thought it nevertheless no snatching-matter for him to be equal with God, but annihilated himself, taking the form of a servant."(4)…

On the verse from John 5.17: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," Hopkins writes: "[Jesus] defends the work done on the Sabbath day. After the seventh day of creation God never ceases to work. Saint Augustine quotes the Jews, as wiser than the Arians" (p. 94)…

O the mind, mind has mountains

For example, the church father first compares John to a mountain from which we glimpse the whole landscape and seascape of revelation. John and the other prophets point the way to God: "This they were able to do, the great minds of the mountains, who have been called mountains, whom the light of divine justice pre-eminently illuminates" (II, 3, p. 14). "O the mind, mind has mountains," the poet exclaimed in his 1885 (?) Dublin sonnet, "No worst, there is none" (157, l. 9). No visionary, he could only gape at these "no-man-fathomed" mountains and crouch in his darkness. He experienced the cost of sacrifice himself and felt emptied out in his isolation.

Augustine next explicates the text: "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him" (John 1.10), explaining that the Word made flesh was in the world as "an Artificer governing what He has made." He continues: "God, infused into the world, fashions it; being everywhere present He fashions, and withdraweth not Himself elsewhere, nor doth He, as it were, handle from without, the matter which He fashions. 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)

The incarnational theme of "The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe," for example, echoes the Augustinian imagery in "God's infinity / Dwindled to infancy" that "Men here may draw like breath / More Christ and baffle death" (151, ll. 18-19, 66-67). 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.

The Ambiguous Buckle in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover”

Aileen Liu 10

…“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