Hopkins, the Self, and God

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Walter J. Ong is one of the most distinguished of contemporary Jesuit scholars and intellectuals in literary studies; he is therefore ideal as a commentator on the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His book represents an expanded version of the 1980-81 Alexander Lectures given at University College in the University of Toronto.

Father Ong begins with an examination of two interests which Hopkins shared with his fellow-Victorians: a preference for detailed particulars over general principles, and an increasing preoccupation with the nature of the self and its differentiation both from other selves and from the external world. He goes on to examine the specifically Jesuit background that stimulated Hopkins, first St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, and then Catholic academic theology, notably that of Duns Scotus. He ends with a chapter on Hopkin’s curiously modernist sensibility that proved congenial at the time of the belated discovery of his poetry in 1918.

This is a closely argued book, which needs to be read slowly and deliberately. Yet, despite the extraordinary range of Ong’s allusions (embracing not only theology and philosophy but psychology, linguistics, computer technology, etc., etc. — even the names of racehorses!), the book can be read profitably by the serious layman with a basic awareness of Hopkin’s work. (The present reviewer, with little background in Catholic theology and tradition, found himself informed, enlightened, but not overwhelmed.) One learns comparatively little about Hopkin’s poetry in itself (though there are useful discussions of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and the “sonnets of desolation”), but a great deal about the mind that produced the poetry.

Above all, one admires the quiet wisdom of Father Ong’s grasp both of medieval tradition and of the expanding scientific universe of the twentieth century. He is “acutely aware of what modern science has shown the real world to be,” and believes that “God created the actual universe that is, not the construct imagined by Aristotle or even the one imaginatively pictured in Genesis.” His combination of the traditional and the contemporary enables him to set some of the currently fashionable theorists politely, charitably, but firmly and authoritatively, in their place. Hopkins, the Self and God expands the mind, the literary faculties, and the imagination.