Hopkins, the self, and God.

Hopkins, the Self and God

by Walter J.Ong, SJ (University of Toronto, 180 pp., $20)

HAD IT BEEN up to his fellow Jesuits,the life and work--the incredible lyric flights, the acute observation of nature, the poetic experiments in sound and stress--of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) might have come and gone known only to the poet himself, and to God. Unpublished in his lifetime, Hopkins's incomparable poetry was given to the world by a non-Catholic admirer who discreetly anthologized a few poems in 1893, and then published a relatively complete edition in 1918. Ever since, commentators, both Jesuit and non-Jesuit, have made up handsomely for previous neglect; and now, on the verge of the centennial of Hopkins's death, an Ignatian brother, Father Walter Ong of St. Louis University (where he allegedly teaches "Onglish'), has provided an "inscape' of Hopkins that is worthy of the man. To the crafting of this "inscape' (a typical Hopkins coinage, which Ong glosses as "the distinctive controlling energy that makes the being itself and connects it distinctively with all else'), Father Ong brings two especial talents. One is the capacity for exploring the world of the mind that one would expect from a Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry. The other is a fascination with the sound and sense of words not unlike Hopkins's own. The two combine to form an instrument for probing the interplay of Hopkins's freeborn artist's personality, nurtured by his Victorian environment, and his acquired character as a Jesuit priest. Ong discusses four aspects of his subject: Victorianism as a self-conscious culture; Hopkins's decision as a child of that culture to enter the Society of Jesus; the enriching tension between his theology and his lyricism; and, finally, an intensely focused probing of the interplay of Hopkins's interior and exterior worlds and his consequent role in foretelling a new cosmology integrating the 15-billion-year-old universe with the short and recent history of Homo sapiens. Here Hopkins's perception of "the rose moles all astipple on the trout that swims' provides its own mystic analogue to the fish phylum in the Darwinian construct. Much the same counterpoise emerges in Ong's closing lines, where the alienation from the Divine implicit in The Origin of Species is more than offset by the mystic encounter deep in the psyche: "Here is where the most intimate action of the Catholic faith has always occurred, though action has involved different forms for different ages. Here Hopkins felt at home. Here, he felt, for himself and for all others, is the meeting point of each person with God.'