The inshape of inscape.

Cotter, James Finn

IN A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ON JUNE 10, 1955, V. de S. Pinto pointed out the use of the word "inshape" in the Sir Philip Sidney-Arthur Golding translation, The Trewnesse of the Christian Religion by Philippe de Momay. (1) He also noted that the OED quotes this work as the sole authority for "inshape." The word appears only in two passages, each with an apparently different meaning. Pinto quoted the first passage and observed that it is used in the context of Parmenides' philosophy and that Hopkins first employs "inscape" and "instress" in discussing Parmenides. He concluded that "Hopkins may have read the passage in A Woorke concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion," and that "his coinage of the term 'inscape' is due to a conscious or unconscious reminiscence of Sidney-Golding's 'inshape'" (p. 317). Before we examine these two passages in detail, we must review the book in which they appear.

The translation of De la Verite de la Religion Chrestienne was first published in London in 1587 and went through three more editions and a reprint before 1617. The Trewnesse of the Christian Religion remained out of print until it was republished in a facsimile edition, with an introduction by F. J. Sypher, in 1976, by Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints. (2) In his preface, Sypher states that copies of earlier editions can be found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and in the British Library. The first six chapters of the thirty-four also are reprinted in volume 3 of The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Albert Feuillerat and published by Cambridge University Press in 1923. (3) Feuillerat believed that he could trace Sidney's prose style in the first six chapters, but that the rest of the translation is by the inferior hand of Golding. The problem of distinguishing between the two translators arises from the 1587 title page which declares: "Begunne to be translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney Knight, and at his request finished by Arthur Golding."

Subsequent scholars have not followed Feuillerat's division and attribution of the text. Some ascribe the entire translation to Golding or at least credit him with revising the whole. Others find it impossible to draw a distinction between Sidney's and Golding's hands. For example, in a 1969 article in the Harvard Library Bulletin, Forrest G. Robinson carefully compares the French original with the English version and deduces that "stylistic analysis, in this case at any rate, is wholly insufficient for the discrimination between authors." (4) After reviewing Elizabethan opinion, Sypher in his preface decides in favor of Sidney: "The preponderance of the evidence indicates that Sidney should be credited with an important share of the printed translation" (p. xv). Traditional opinion up through the Victorian period saw Sidney as the principal author with Golding, after Sidney's death, completing and putting the finishing touches on the translation.

Hopkins was interested in Elizabethan prose style, and may have discovered the Sidney-Golding translation during his Oxford undergraduate days. De Mornay was a Protestant writer, but in his De la Verite de la Religion Chrestienne, published in Antwerp in 1581 when he was just thirty, he avoided inter-Christian polemics in favor of a universal appeal through reason and authority to convince "Atheists, Epicures, Paynims, Iewes, Mahumetists, and other Infidels," as the title page calls them, to accept the one true Christian faith. The author's knowledge is encyclopedic, embracing classical literature and philosophy, biblical writers, rabbinic commentators, and church fathers. He has mastered Christian and Talmudic sources as well as contemporary science, particularly astronomy. He is fascinated by ancient and modern history and is knowledgeable about the non-Christian nations of the East and of Africa and America. His mind was trained in logic and argument through reasoning, and his rhetorical style, while remaining freshly imaginative, at times reaches heights of eloquence, as when, invoking one of his favorite metaphors, he writes that "in every man there is a certeyne Sunbeame of Reason whereby they conceyve things and debate upon them" (p. 284). No wonder Sidney, who knew de Momay personally, was drawn to translate the work. Unfortunately, he died before completing the task.

De Mornay begins his treatise with the universal belief in God as a common ground of agreement. God is one and can be recognized by all in his creation. While there is only one essence in God, there are three Inbeings or Persons who forma Trinity as ancient philosophers and Old Testament prophets perceived. God created the world and governs it through his Providence, giving human beings immortal souls in spite of their fall from grace. The chief "aimingpoynt" in life is to return to the creator: "God in creating the worlde, did purpose an end: And what other could that end bee, than himselfe and his owne glory" (p. 174). To illustrate his idea, de Momay employs a choice simile: "And seeing that the beginner and the end of things (the Archer (I meane) and the marke that he shootes at) are both one, that is to wit God himselfe: can any thing crosse him or incounter him by the way, to hinder his atteyning there unto" (p. 174). God shapes the way to himself through religion which was first revealed to Israel and fulfilled in the coming of Jesus, who is God and Man.

The English version of the treatise is marked by innovative language while retaining fidelity to the original. The translators are fond of compound words to describe philosophical concepts. God is "the great workemayster, the Sea of Beautie, the Ground of all good things, and the true Beeing" (p. 39). He is the "togetherbeer" whose "joyntworking" makes him the former and shaper of diverse creation (pp. 89, 74). Man's "Inwit" searches the "underkynd and upperkynd" of nature, while some superstitious infidels become "Birdgazers and Bowelgazers" in their pursuit of the truth (pp. 173,383). Colorful metaphors illustrate abstract ideas. Epictetus, for example, is quoted: "If I were a Nightingale, I should doe as Nightingales doe: but being a reasonable Creature, what shall I doe now? I will evermore prayse God (saith he) without ceasing; and I will exhort you all to do the same" (p. 352). Quotations often are striking for their simplicity. Seneca is cited: '"God is whatsoever thou seest, and whatsoever thou seest not': That is to say, wheras thou canst not see him in his proper being, thou seest him in his works" (p. 243). Summaries are pointed and memorable: "Whereas wee seeke for an ende or restingpoint, the world is made for man, man for the Soule, the Soule for the mynd, the mynd for a much higher thing than it self, and what els can that be but God?" (p. 336).

Shape is a central concept in this system of natural theology. God is the shaper, the giver and former of shape (p. 158), and in creation, "a shape is nothing els than the forme or fashion of a substance" (p. 141). Among human beings, "like as the soule is the shape of man, so is the knowledge of God the shape of al understanding" (p. 327). "Inshape" first occurs in Chapter 6: "That the Philosophie of old tyme consenteth to this doctrine of the Trinity." De Mornay cites early Greek philosophers to support his thesis that "three Gods togither in one" was an idea found in various times and cultures. He writes:

 And Parmenides did set downe Love as a first beginner; insomuch
 that in disputing in Plato, he leaveth us there an evident marke of
 the three Inbeeings or Persones as Plotine noteth; but we shall see
 it layd foorth more plainly hereafter by Numenius the Pythagorist.
 Zeno the father of the Stoiks, acknowledged the word to be God,
 and also the Spirit of Jupiter. And Alcinous reporteth that Socrates
 and Plato taught God is a mynde, and that in the same there is a
 certaine Inshape, which Inshape as in respect of God, is the
 knowledge which God hath of himselfe; and in respect of the worlde,
 is the Patterne or Mould thereof; and in respect of it selfe, is
 very essence. This in fewe words conteyneth much matter, that is to
 wit, the one essence which God begetteth by the considering of
 knowing of himselfe, according to the patterne whereof he hath
 buylded the world. (pp. 74-75)

The word "Idee" in the original French text (p. 73) is here translated as "Inshape," and the word "modele" is rendered "Patterne or Mould." The translators transform the original Platonic terms and slant them to their own Christian philosophical and theological purposes to give them the Trinitarian interpretation that de Mornay develops in his text. "Inshape" is threefold: the essence of God in himself who is the Father, the knowledge God has of himself, the Logos and Word who is Christ, and the Pattern of Christ in the world who is the Spirit and Paraclete:

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ("God's Grandeur," ll. 13-14) (5)

The Three act as One because they are one Being. Hopkins wrote in his retreat notes for August 7, 1882: "God's utterance of himself is God the Word, outside himself is this world. The world then is word, expression, news of God. Therefore its end, its purpose, its purport, its meaning, is God and its life or work to name and praise him." (6)

The good news, evangelion, the resonating expression, sounding and proclaiming of God's inbeing in the world, is experienced in clouds and ocean waves, aspens and violets, falcon flight and thrush song, mountain shoulder and ploughman's ribs, thighs and shank. It is the very essence of inscape for Hopkins to be revelatory of Christ not only in nature but in language and artifacts as well, in poetry, architecture, arts and crafts, the human acts performed in love and imitation of Christ. As he looked up at the crossbeams in a barn roof, Hopkins reflected: "I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again." (7)

The poet also used "inscape" as a synonym for pattern: "But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry." (8) Poetic inscape reveals its pattern in the shaping of the poem, its structure, sound and meaning; it is the key that underlies the poem's tone and style and that expresses the poet's aim and purpose. Again Hopkins readily moves from art to nature, for "a single sonnet-like inscape" informs an ash tree as it does a verse. The same eternal shaper is at work in all creation. The creative activity cannot be separated from its ultimate spiritual goal: to give back God his own glory already showered into creation in the gifts of nature and human beings.

For Hopkins, traces of the Trinity are to be discovered in pre-Christian thought. References to Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hindu, and Welsh sources are to be found in his letters and notes. He wrote to his friend A. W. M. Baillie about Trinitarian prototypes: "It seems likely that there was a Greek Trinity of the same gods as the Trinity of the Capitol at Rome, which was of Jove, Juno, and Minerva." (9) Like de Momay, Hopkins studied the natural philosophy of the pre-Socratics, particularly of Parmenides on Being, sphere and spirit. In unpublished notes on "Plato's Philosophy," he traced in the Timaeus an image of the Trinity in Platonic creative myth. He writes that the Demiurge fashioned the world with the aid of nous and spirit, mind and love (see Inscape, pp. 16-17).

The second reference to "inshape" occurs much later in de Mornay's treatise, in Chapter 28, "That the Mediatour or Messias is promised in the Scriptures to be both God and Man, that is to wit, the everlasting Sonne of God taking mans flesh unto him." Human beings need a savior who can act between them and God, a "Mediator God and Man, able to discharge man of everlasting death ageinst God, and to purchase him the soverein felicite of lyfe.... [T]his marke is so of the very substance and inshape of Religion, that Religion without that, should be utterly unavaylable and vayne" (p. 493, misnumbered as p. 463). Here the meaning is again "essence," and it retains its originally Christological connotation in that the word "inshape" refers back to Christ, the Word made flesh. His incarnate person marks the historical focal point of true religion, giving shape and form to the whole story of humankind.

The shift from "inshape" to "inscape" presented no problems for Hopkins. In an entry of an early diary for September 14, 1864, he noted that "Sk and sc are notoriously often exchanged for sh, as bushy, bosky; rush, ruscus," and he goes on to remark the parallel between dish and disc (Journals, p. 46). If he did read these passages on "inshape," the poet could have easily adapted the word to his own purposes, even if he had already fashioned his coinage. However, with no references to the Sidney-Golding translation in Hopkins' extant works, no definite conclusions about its influence on the poet may be drawn, but the probabilities remain intriguing and the inferences rewarding. Certainly, the similarities between de Momay's historical and cosmic theology and the Christology Hopkins later developed help throw light on the possible origins of the poet's religious worldview during his pre-conversion Oxford years.

Notes

(1) V. de S. Pinto, "Hopkins and 'The Trewnesse of the Christian Religion,'" TLS, June 10, 1955, p. 317. For a discussion of the influence of Parmenides on the meaning of inscape, see James Finn Cotter, Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), pp. 12-16.

(2) Philippe de Mornay, A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion, trans. Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding, with introd, by F. J. Sypher (Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976). All citations are from this edition. The French references are to the edition, De la verite de la religion chretienne (Paris: Chez Claude Micard, 1583), for which I am indebted to Professor Rene Gallet.

(3) The translation was reprinted in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), 3:185-307.

(4) Forrest G. Robinson, "A Note on the Sidney-Golding Translation of Philippe de Momay's De La Verite De La Religion Chrestienne," HLB 17 (1969): 102.

(5) Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), p. 128.

(6) The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin, S.J. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 129.

(7) The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 221.

(8) The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), p. 66.

(9) Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), p. 260.