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0309 Lou.Stu. 03 Ballinger Louvain Studies 22 (1997) 153-180 Created to Praise: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ignatius of Loyola Philip Ballinger In the realm of aesthetic expression, few explicitly Catholic artists have captured the consciousness of the modern age as has Gerard Man- ley Hopkins. Dying in relative obscurity in 1889, his poetry was not published until 1917. Even then, it did not gain wide recognition until after 1930. Thus, an oft misunderstood and ill-appreciated artist in his own time, Hopkins became, anachronistically, the celebrated poet of modernity in the twentieth century. Since 1930, hundreds of articles have been written about Hopkins' influence and meaning by scholars from diverse academic domains. Though his work is claimed and mined by critics and admirers from areas as varied as English literature, theol- ogy, ethics, aesthetics, and social history, one contentious question is certainly in the midst of the field – how and to what degree was Hop- kins influenced in his thought and poetry by Ignatius of Loyola and the Spiritual Exercises? This article intends to present and critique the main lines of thought on this central question in Hopkins studies. The author additionally hopes to present an alternate and new point of view on this touchstone issue in Hopkinsian criticism. Poet vs. Priest Poet and priest – in the history of Hopkins literary criticism, these vocations have been seen both in union and in conflict. Certainly, the early disparagement and even negation of the Jesuit influence on Hop- kins' poetry erupted in part because of the overt anti-Catholicism pre- sent in Victorian England.1 Nonetheless, one still finds lament over 1. For example, see E. E. Phare's The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). This early classic of Hopkinsian criticism 154 PHILIP BALLINGER Hopkins having been a Jesuit priest.2 “Never was a squarer man in a rounder hole.”3 Imagine what could have been if he had exclusively fol- lowed his true calling, that of poet, goes the cry. Variations on this theme abound. The strict discipline and duties of Jesuit life sapped ener- gies which would have otherwise fostered the realization of his poetic gift. The repression and even social isolation necessary to live the Jesuit vocation in Victorian England psychologically damaged Hopkins, dead- ening his creativity and art. Finally, the sheer, potentially sacrilegious freedom necessary to be a good poet is circumscribed by the priestly vocation, thus Hopkins' Jesuit life cannot be seen as an influence, rather, it must be seen as an unfortunate detriment.4 Hopkins himself approaches the poet with an overtly anti-Catholic bias. Such bias probably explains the hagiographic character of another early work in Hopkinsian criticism, Gerard F. Lahey, S. J.'s Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1930). 2. Cf. Sophie Herzburg, “The Winter World of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” Faith and Freedom 44 (Spring/Summer 1991) 22. She writes that “in joining the Jesuit Order, he deliberately isolated himself from familiar places and his own family and, without realising it at first, began to destroy those artistic roots which were so necessary a part of his personality.” A. R. Coulthard writes that “what limits his literary achievement … is not the brevity of his canon but the fact that he lived his curtailed life as a priest … Religion constricted Hopkins' poetry …” Coulthard contends that Hopkins' priesthood kept him “one rung short of greatness” and made him “a poet of excellent passages more than excellent poems.” His vocation and theology were the spoilsports of his poetry. Furthermore, Coulthard claims that Hopkins' “Dionysian instincts” and “self-abnegating moralism” were in a constant conflict which muted his brilliance and led to “schizo- phrenic poetry.” Cf. A. R. Coulthard, “Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest vs. Poet,” The Victorian Newsletter 88 (Fall 1995) 35-36. 3. Humphry House, “A Note on Hopkins' Religious Life,” New Verse 14 (April 1935) 3. Also see John Gould Fletcher, “Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest or Poet?,” American Review 6 (1936) 331-346. Other comments from the same period are quoted in Martin C. Carroll, S. J., “Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Society of Jesus,” Immor- tal Diamond: Studies in Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman Weyand (New York: Octa- gon Books, 1969) 3-50: “Humanly speaking he made a grievous mistake in joining the Jesuits for on further acquaintance his whole soul must have revolted…;” “the rigid and pitiless Society of Jesus exhausted, discouraged, and perhaps destroyed him…;” finally, “the pathos and waste of such a situation have so affected the well-meaning world of literary criticism that the twenty-one years which Hopkins spent as a member of the Society of Jesus are generally considered to have left him a frustrated voluptuary, a genius blasted by asceticism, a soured and disappointed man” (p. 3). 4. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Amer- ican ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966) 425-426. Graves writes with refer- ence to Hopkins and others: “It has become impossible to combine the once identical functions of priest and poet without doing violence to one calling or the other … The poet survived in easy vigour only where the priest has been shown the door …” Graves insists on the necessity of an almost ‘pagan' freedom for the creation of true poetry. Graves' point of view seems unwittingly taken up by Canon H. J. Hammerton in “The Two Vocations of G. M. Hopkins,” Theology 87 (1984) 186-189. Hammerton also posits a stark opposi- tion between the two “functions” in Hopkins' life and concludes that “we can be thankful that his first vocation to poetry saved him in the end” (p. 89). More recently and in a more subtle fashion, B. Belitt follows this trend in The Forged Feature: Toward a Poetics of Uncer- CREATED TO PRAISE 155 gives cause for doubt as to the compatibility of these two vocations.5 He clearly struggled with their co-existence in his life and never achieved a peaceful synthesis of the two.6 Struggle and conflict – here is the rub of the alternative view. Artistic genius often consorts with struggle, and conflict can be creative as well as destructive. Hopkins was a true artist in this sense. One aspect of his personality led him to delight in the lav- ishness of nature's beauty while the other drew him to asceticism and the denial of the senses necessary to his art. In Hopkins, the aesthete wrestled with the ascetic. He struggled not only with seemingly contra- dictory vocations, but also with the conundrum forced by his aesthetic and theological center, namely, how to unify the ideal of sacrifice and selfless endeavor with the Romantic artist's intense self-consciousness and dwelling on true selfhood as beauty and ultimate perfection.7 Can a tainty (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995) 229-279. He implies that viewing Hopkins as a ‘scientific' rather than priestly poet is the more useful paradigm. 5. Hopkins tried to explain his view of the relationship between his vocation as a Jesuit and writing poetry in a letter to his friend and admirer, R. W. Dixon: “Our Soci- ety values… and has contributed to literature, to culture; but only as a means to an end. Its history and its experience show that literature proper, as poetry, has seldom been found to be to that end a very serviceable means. We have had for three centuries often the flower of the youth of a country in numbers enter our body: among these how many poets, how many artists of all sorts, there must have been! But there have been very few Jesuit poets and, where they have been, I believe it would be found on exami- nation that there was something exceptional in their circumstances or, so to say, coun- terbalancing in their career. For genius attracts fame and individual fame St. Ignatius looked on as the most dangerous and dazzling of all attractions.” Cf. The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1955) 93-94. 6. R. K. R. Thornton writes: “At times you might think that Hopkins set no value on poetry or art at all, so strongly does he reject it or belittle it; at other times he gives the appearance of being fascinated by it but only as a meaningless if superb irrele- vance.” Cf. R. K. R. Thornton, “Gerard Manley Hopkins: Aesthete or Moralist?,” Saving Beauty: Further Studies in Hopkins, ed. Michael E. Allsopp (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994) 40. Thornton recognizes, however, that Hopkins was not consistent in his disdain. He desired to create art but he chose to be a priest or, as Thornton con- cludes, Hopkins had an inability to reconcile the elective and affective will (p. 57). Canon Dixon's pleading letter to Hopkins dated November 4, 1881 demonstrates the reaction his non-Jesuit friends had to Hopkins' struggle. In response to Hopkins' state- ments marginalizing the place of writing poetry in his life as a Jesuit, Dixon hit the mark in his remonstration that “surely one vocation cannot destroy another.” Cf. The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, 90. 7. For a reflection on conflict in Hopkins' life, see John Hawley, S. J., “Hopkins and the Christian Imagination,” Gerard Manley Hopkins Annual 1993, ed. Michael Sundermeier and Desmond Egan (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1993) 45-55. Additionally, see R. A. Jayantha's, “Gerard Manley Hopkins: Devotional Poet of ‘Unpropitious' Times,” The Literary Criterion 24 (1989) 133-146. Jayantha offers valu- able thoughts on the difficulty of being either priest or religious poet in the Victorian age, a philosophically and theologically disjunctive time fraught with doubt and charac- terized by Matthew Arnold as “deeply unpoetical” (p.
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