Hopkins and Augustine.

COTTER, JAMES FINN

IN AN EARLIER ESSAY, "AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS AND THE WRECK OF the Deutschland," I traced the influence of The Confessions on Hopkins' ode, from the explicit reference to Augustine's conversion: "Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill" (101, 1. 78) to the deliberate echo in the lines: "Thou heardst me, truer than tongue, confess / Thy terror, O Christ, O God" (11. 11-12). [1] The autobiography of the Bishop of Hippo, one of the poet's favorite books, was intended as a testimony to God's intervention in his life, an admission of his own sin and misdirection, and a hymn of praise to God's power and majesty in dealing with the human race. All these themes, as well as the imagery of storms and shipwreck, darkness and daybreak, altar, walls, tongue, winged heart, and the crucified and risen Christ, unite the two works in the scriptural and poetic traditions of Christian witness.

In this essay I wish to expand the topic to discuss Augustine's influence on some of Hopkins' central ideas: the Great Sacrifice, the Incarnation, the blessings of creation, the experience of beauty, and the notion of inscape as a Christic and Trinitarian act of perception. I shall point out direct and possible sources, as well as analogues between Augustine's other works, beyond The Confessions, and Hopkins' writings, as part of the Christian spiritual-theological heritage. As the poet-priest testifies in The Wreck on his encounters with his risen King: "For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand" (101, 1. 40), he, like Augustine, devoted his life to discovering how Jesus of Nazareth had become the cosmic Lord of history and creation. "From the creation of the world," St. Paul says of God's presence in the world now revealed in Christ, "His invisible qualities, such as His eternal power and divine nature, have been made visible and have been understood through His handiwork" (Romans 1. 20). The God of yesterday is now the Lord of today; Yahweh is made present in Jesus. From Paul to Augustine to Hopkins, the "Creator and Lord" of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises is "the same, yesterday, today and forever" (Hebrews 13.8).

Among his annotations on a Bible which he received in the fall of 1865, now in the John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections at Boston College, Hopkins makes his earliest reference to an Augustinian work. [2] At Oxford, a year before his conversion, he was already immersed in the Tractarian interest in the writings of the church fathers. 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). The reference is to a homily of Saint Augustine on the Gospel of Saint John. On this verse ("My Father worketh and I work"), Augustine writes: "Behold, the Jews understand what the Arians do not understand. The Arians, in fact, say that the Son is not equal with the Father.... [The Jews] did nevertheless understand that in these words such a Son of God was intimated to them as should be equal wit h God" (XVII, 16). [3]

Augustine then goes on in this passage to explain what "equal with God" means: "Was He not therefore equal with God? He did not make Himself equal, but the Father begat Him equal. Were He to make Himself equal, He would fall by robbery (per rapinam)." He likens such a "usurpation" to the pride of the fallen angels, and continues:

Christ, however, was begotten equal to the Father, not made; begotten of the substance of the Father. Whence the apostle thus declares Him: "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God." What means, "thought it not robbery"? He usurped not equality with God, but was in that equality in which He was begotten. And how were we to come to the equal God? "He emptied Himself, taking upon Him the form of a servant (semitipsum exinanivit formam servi accipiens)." But He emptied Himself not by losing what He was, but by taking to Him what He was not. (XVII, 16, p. 116)

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] In a follow-up letter, he told Bridges that his explication "in reality adds force to St. Austin's interpretation, which otherwise I was following" (p. 175). For Hopkins, as for Augustine, Christ's act of self-sacrifice is the gift of himself to the world in creation and atonement.

Reading the opening pages of Augustine's commentary on John, young Hopkins would have discovered an imaginative doctrinal presentation that would influence his own thinking and writing on the Incarnation as a student at Oxford and, later, as a Jesuit priest. 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 Dublin sonnet, "No worst, there is none" (157, 1. 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 had 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 Wreck (1875-76), Christ is the "Ground of being and granite of it: past all / Grasp God" (101, 11. 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 Inc arnation; 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, 11. 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. It leads one naturally to rhetorical antithesis to think for instance that after making the world He shd. consent to be taught carpentering, and, being the eternal Reason, to be catechised in the theology of the Rabbins.[7]

In The City of God, Augustine sees the Incarnation as the central event of history. God lavishes his blessings on the human race: our existence, lives, vision of the sky and earth, our intelligence and reason which enable us to seek him who made all these things are his gifts. More than that, when we were overwhelmed by sin, turned from contemplation of his light and blinded by love of darkness, "He hath sent to us His own Word, who is His only Son, that by His birth and suffering for us in the flesh, which He assumed, we might know how much God valued man, and that by that unique sacrifice we might be purified from all our sins, and that, love being shed in our hearts by His Spirit, we might... come into eternal rest" (VII, 31).[8]

In the final book of The City of God, Augustine sums up the blessings God pours out on the human race, from its propagation by the command: "Increase and multiply, and replenish the earth" (Genesis 1.28) to the corporeal beauty of the body in its outward appearance and its inward harmony. Augustine asks his readers to marvel at the wonders of the soul with its ability to know and to seek for wisdom, its love of virtues "which teach us how we may spend our life well, and attain to eternal happiness," and its artistic genius: "What wonderful-one might say stupefying- advances has human industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of agriculture and navigation! With what endless variety are designs in pottery, painting, and sculpture produced, and with what skills executed!" (XXII, 24, p. 852). Creation too brings blessings in abundance with all its beauty and usefulness:

Shall I speak of the manifold and various loveliness of sky, and earth, and sea; of the plentiful supply and wonderful qualities of the light; of sun, moon, and stars; of the shade of trees; of the colors and perfume of flowers; of the multitude of birds, all differing in plumage and in song; of the variety of animals, of which the smallest in size are often the most wonderful-the works of ants and bees astonishing us more than the huge bodies of whales? (XXII, 24, p. 854)

"Glory be to God for dappled things" Hopkins exclaims in his curtal sonnet "Pied Beauty." After describing "skies of couple-colour," stippled trout, chestnuts, and finches' wings, he pictures "Landscape plotted and pieced" and "all trades, their gear and tackle and trim." The poet then generalizes his theme:

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him. (121, 11. 7-11)

The sonnet's development is pure Augustinianism. Beginning with an ejaculation of praise, it moves from particular creatures to a scenic overview and then to the arts of agriculture and the trades. The study in contrasts and in verbal antitheses is a favorite trope of Augustine who observes in The City of God: "As, then, these oppositions of contraries lend beauty to the language, so the beauty of the course of this world is achieved by the opposition of contraries, arranged, as it were, by an eloquence not of words, but of things" (XI, 18, p. 362). The Father creates this variety through his Son who gives design and order to the whole. Robert Frost in a letter to his daughter Lesley missed the point when he wrote of Hopkins: "His poem about All Pied Things good as it is disappoints me by not keeping, short as it is, wholly to pied things." [9] Hopkins had no intention of limiting his focus, but manages to capsulize Augustine's climactic vision of God's blessings in a short space.

For the poet, Augustine's "opposition of contraries" is central to his idea of beauty. For Hopkins, beauty lies in the tension of opposites; at its heart is antithesis in language as in reality. In his 1865 Oxford essay, "The Origin of our Moral Ideas," he gives an important definition: "Beauty lies in the relation of the parts of a sensuous thing to each other, that is in a certain relation, it being absolute at one point and comparative in those nearing it or falling from it." [10] In a dialogue written that same year, "On the Origin of Beauty," Hopkins draws a similar conclusion: "'Then the beauty of the oak and the chestnut-fan and the sky is a mixture of likeness and difference or agreement and disagreement or consistency and variety or symmetry and change"' (p. 90). Beauty involves a balance and blending of the absolute and relative, of regularity and irregularity, of spirit and structure. In tree or sonnet, its unity consists of a hierarchy of parts to parts and parts to the whole, building to a "high er whole" to create the impression of the beautiful and to lead to its contemplation. In a world of change, words and things aspire to the Word "whose beauty is past change."

In The City of God Augustine concludes his summary of the beauty of natural wonders with a description dear to the Victorian poet, that of the sea: "Shall I speak of the sea, which itself is so grand a spectacle, when it arrays itself as it were in vestures of various colors, now running through every shade of green, and again becoming purple or blue" (XX, 24, p. 854). Augustine then switches his viewpoint: "Is it not delightful to look at it in storm, and experience the soothing complacency which it inspires, by suggesting that we ourselves are not tossed and shipwrecked?" The church father here alludes to the celebrated passage that opens Book 2 of Lucretius'

De Rerum Natura:

Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis,

e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;

non quia vexari quemquamst iucanda voluptas,

sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est. (2,11. 1-4) [11]

The poet Rolfe Humphries translates the passage:

How sweet it is, when whirlwinds roil great ocean,

To watch, from land, the danger of another,

Not that to see some other person suffer

Brings great enjoyment, but the sweetness lies

In watching evils you yourself are free from. [12]

Hopkins, who quotes lines from De Rerum Natura in his journal notes (p. 44), certainly had this classic commonplace in mind when he wrote in The Wreck of the Deutschland:

Away in the loveable west,

On a pastoral forehead of Wales,

I was under a roof here, I was at rest,

And they the prey of the gales. (101, 11. 185-188)

Of course, both Augustine and Hopkins employ the topos with a different emphasis from the Epicurean complacency of Lucretius. For them, the beauty and power of the storm inspire wonder at the Word's presence in his creation; nevertheless, the contrast between the poet's state of rest and the suffering souls in the shipwreck vividly recalls this famous passage on the real force of nature. His consolation is to know that death has lost its sting, unlike Lucretius whose preoccupation with death in Book 3, and people's inability to deal with it, is echoed in stanza 11 of Hopkins' ode: "But we dream we are rooted in earth--Dust!" (101, 1. 85).

For Augustine the "Beauty so ancient and so new," which in The Confessions he came to love late and after "a lingering-out" struggle, transcends nature and yet remains immanent to it. In the commentary on the opening of St. John's Gospel, he writes: "If, then, on account of some great building a human design receives praise, do you wish to see what a design of God (consilium Dei) is the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, the Word of God? Mark this fabric of the world. View what was made by the Word, and then thou wilt understand what is the nature of the world" (I, 9, p. 10). His command to mark (adtende) and look at (vide) "the beauty of the heavens" is echoed in Hopkins' sonnet "The Starlight Night" (112): "Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!" "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" (111) through his Son and Spirit. In "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo," the poet finds this beauty in present everyday objects. In an 1882 letter to Bridges he defends the poem, explaining that "the thought is o f beauty as of something that can be physically kept and lost and by physical things only, like keys" (p. 161). How to keep physical beauty "from vanishing away," the poet asks. His response is childlike and direct: he has found the key: "Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God beauty's self and beauty's giver" (148, 1.35).

Beauty is the design of the Word stamped into his material creation. Augustine continues his homily on the Gospel of St. John:

So, dearly beloved brethren, because the Wisdom of God, by which all things have been made, contains everything according to design (secundum artem) before it is made; therefore those things which are made through the design itself are not forthwith life, but whatever has been made is life in Him. You see the earth, there is an earth in design (in arte); you see the sky, there is a sky in design; you see the sun and the moon, these also exist in design; but externally they are bodies, in design they are life. (I, 17, p. 12)

"Personally wisdom is Christ our Lord" Hopkins reflects in his meditation notes (Sermons, p. 257). The Word Incarnate is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14.6). He is the original artisan whose idea and art gives existence to what He makes. His design in creation is Himself, his sacramental presence waiting to reveal Himself to the beholder who is eager "[d]own all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour":

These things, these things were here and but the beholder

Wanting; which two when they once meet,

The heart rears wings bold and bolder

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

("Hurrahing in Harvest," 124, 11.6, 11-14)

For Hopkins, beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder: it is also in what and Who are beheld. In Wales, on August 17, 1874, he recorded one such encounter with Christ in the universe: "As we drove home the stars came out thick: I leant back to look at them and my heart opening more than usual praised our Lord to and in whom all that beauty comes home" (Journals, p. 254).

In his notes on the Spiritual Exercises, Hopkins observes: "God's utterance of himself in himself is God the Word, outside himself is this world. This world then is word, expression, news of God" (Sermons, p. 129). In "The Wreck," he repeats the thought: "Wording it how but by him that present and past, / Heaven and earth are word of, worded by? (101, 11. 229-230). Creation is a great book, according to Augustine, and creatures are the text in which we read the Word of God. They are visual letters that spell out his presence; they also appeal to our hearing by crying out "Ipsefecit me!" Augustine sums up his teaching in a sermon on Psalm 26:

Let your mind roam through the whole creation; everywhere the created world will cry out to you: "God made me." Whatever pleases you in a work of art brings to your mind the artist who wrought it; much more, when you survey the universe, does the consideration of it evoke praise for its Maker. You look on the heavens; they are God's great work. You behold the earth; God made its number of seeds, its varieties of plants, its multitude of animals. Go round the heavens again and back to the earth, leave out nothing: on all sides everything cries out to you of its Author; nay, the very forms of created things are as it were the voices with which they praise their Creator. [13]

Hopkins' sonnet "As kingfishers catch fire" makes the same point: each mortal thing in crying out "myself" declares "God made me!" On the level of grace, the just man fully expresses what the natural world partially embodies, for he "Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--Christ" (115, 1. 11). The just watch birds and dragonflies and hear the stones ring out their Creator-Lord.

For Hopkins, the process by which one discovers the design and pattern that is Christ in the world and in one's self is called "inscape." For him, "beauty [is] the virtue of inscape and not inscape only" (Journals, p. 289). Beauty is the "success and excellence" of inscape, the end toward which it aims, "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing" (120, 1. 8). We can shed light on his coinage by tracing Augustine's dialectic of beauty as summed up in his treatise De vera religione (The True Religion). The method is Platonic, moving from sensible data to immutable forms, a method that Hopkins at Oxford would know thoroughly and often examine in his writings, as, for example, in his college essay, "The Position of Plato to the Greek World," and employ in his own "Platonic Dialogue," "On the Origin of Beauty." We must try to attain, Augustine urges, "to the vision of the immutable pattern of things, to the beauty which is always constant with itself and everywhere the same, beauty never distorted by changes of pl ace or time, but standing out one and the same under all circumstances, the beauty whose very existence men discredit, but which in fact has the most true, the highest form of existence"(3, 3). [14] Hopkins told Bridges in 1882 that "for work to be perfect there ought to be the sense of beauty in the highest degree both in the artist and in the age" (p. 161). Such is the ideal, for the Christian artist and beholder always begin and end with faith not in an abstract Beauty but in the person of Jesus who embodies all Being, Goodness, and Love.

To approach this ideal, one should activate the senses and focus them through mental activity. Augustine observes: "We must not be passive and thoughtless in our contemplation of the beauty of the Heavens, the order of the heavenly bodies, the splendor of the sun, the alternation of day and night, the monthly phases of the moon, the four seasons of the year" (Religion, 29, 52, p. 132). Hopkins' close observation of sky, clouds, sea, trees, plants, and seasons are not merely natural interests but intimately connect with his interior search for God. He follows the spirit of the church father's advice: "Our consideration of these phenomena must not be one of thoughtless, passing curiosity, but should become a step towards the undying and the everlasting" (Religion, 29, 52, p. 132). As early as 1865, Hopkins had given poetic expression to the main elements of his aesthetic and spiritual quest:

Beauty it may be is the meet of lines

Or careful-spaced sequences of sound,

These rather are the arc where beauty shines,

The temper'd soil where only her flower is found.

Allow at least it has one term and part

Beyond, and one within the looker's eye;

And I must have the centre in my heart

To spread the compass on the all-starr'd sky.

("Floris in Italy," 31, 11. 1-8)

Matter, sense, and soul all fuse in the experience of beauty. The images of arc, center, and compass also play a major part in the poet's final formulation of inscape.

The ascent to Beauty must rise above the senses to the mind. There the mind judges what is beautiful by evaluating proportion and number which, for Augustine means symmetry, rhythm, harmony, and shape, all stepping-stones to the Eternal Source. In The True Religion, he writes: "But in all arts there is symmetry which pleases us and which imparts to everything a perfect and beautiful unity." However, no object in itself can offer complete satisfaction: "For all bodies are changing by passage from one degree of beauty to another, or from one place to another" (30, 55, p. 134). So we must seek their pattern in some perfect proportion seen by the mind: "Thus that proportion and unity, known only to the mind, and serving as a criterion for the mind to pass judgment upon corporeal beauty, as reported to the senses, do not fluctuate in place and in time" (30, 56, p. 134). Geometric patterns emerge for the mind to judge. Augustine frequently finds examples for beauty in architecture and pottery. The same criterion for judging roundness applies to a bowl or a wheel: the circle. The mind seeks out the true in the beautiful and forms its judgments accordingly.

Robert O' Connell draws a similar conclusion from another Augustinian work, the De Ordine: Augustine "accords to the higher senses the power to 'judge' on the existence of sensible beauty." [15] Our judgments, of course, are not infallible and remain mysterious because we do not really know why things give us pleasure or why they are as they are. However, we can rely on the source and inspiration, the aim and goal of the quest for beauty, the person of the Word. For, according to The True Religion, only Christ the Truth is the true judge: "For just as we and all rational souls rightly judge of inferior things by the criterion of truth, so we are judged by that only Truth when we cling to it" (31, 58, p. 136). As Hopkins wrote to Canon Dixon: "The only judge, the only just literary critic, is Christ, who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more than the receiver himself, can, the gifts of his own making." [16] For Hopkins and Augustine, Christ is the sole critic and criterion of beauty.

Inscape then moves from the sensible object and its visible shape to its geometric unity and on to Christ. Hopkins notes in his journal: "There is one notable dead tree in the N. W. corner of the nave, the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of branches up to the tops of the timber" (Journals, p. 215). And again: "All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose" (p. 230). Hopkins reflected that "there are certain forms which have a great hold on the mind and are always reappearing and seem imperishable"; their composition "strikes the mind with a conception of unity which is never dislodged. . . --the forms have in some sense or other an absolute existence" (p. 120). As I have shown elsewhere, the archetypal shape is that of Omega, as the poet makes explicit in his "On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue," written at Oxford and dated May 12, 1865. [17] T he leaves of the chestnut-fan "shape out another figure, do they not? partly irregular, though containing variety; I mean that of a Greek Omega"' (p. 92). From the inscape of a bluebell with its Omega-shaped blossom, round and irregular, the beholder concludes: "I know the beauty of our Lord by it" (p. 199). Hopkins rewrote his notes to recollect in tranquility his inner epiphany, to shape its meaning, and to deepen in prayer his contact with his Savior. Omega is the "arch-inscape" (p. 245) and the repeated form in his poetry: ash tree, elm, bell, breast, egg, nest, smile, garland, rainbow, or "windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth" (146, 1. 5). In "Felix Randal," the ordinary horseshoe, traditional sign of good luck, becomes "for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!" (142, 1. 14). Iron matter has been transfigured and forged by fire into a symbol of glory.

Sensible experience for Hopkins, as for Augustine, leads to knowledge and to love. Beauty involves the reason (ratio) at its key moment because its goal is the Logos (Reason). The light that illuminates the inner eye is Christ himself in the mind. He is the source of physical beauty and mental vision and its end, its Alpha and Omega. In his homily on St. John's Gospel, Augustine describes the miracle at Cana when Christ turned water into wine. If we wonder at the miracle done by the man Jesus, all the more should we marvel at the works of Jesus God: "By Jesus God were made heaven, and earth, and the sea, all the garniture of heaven, the abounding riches of the earth, and the fruitfulness of the sea;--all these things which lie within the reach of our eyes were made by Jesus God" (VIII, 1, p. 57). Augustine has been criticized for not placing enough emphasis on the senses in the soul's journey to God. True, he distrusts the senses because they belong to fallen human beings;' however, here again Augustine asks his listeners to turn to nature to find their Lord: "And we look at these things, and if His own Spirit is in us they in such manner please us, that we praise Him that contrived them; not in such manner that turning ourselves to the works we turn away from the Maker" (VII, 1, p. 57). In turning our faces to the things made, we do not turn our backs to their Maker. Hopkins would certainly agree, as he argues this Augustinian viewpoint in "To what serves Mortal Beauty?" which concludes: "Yea, wish that though, wish all, God's better beauty, grace" (158, 1. 14). Inscape is a human act touched by grace that begins, as in "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection" (174), with a "Cloud-puffball" and ends with a similar Omega circle, no longer opaque and air-filled but solid, durable, and luminous: "immortal diamond." [18]

"Few concerns are closer to Augustine's heart than his preoccupation with showing us that the entire universe, open to the eyes of the believing--and understanding--Christian, is a truly sacramental universe: a forest of signs figuratively disclosing the creative and redemptive work of the Trinitarian Godhead" (O'Connell, p. 164). Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bring beings into existence so that all things are good. When human beings fell through Adam, the Son returned them to the Father though his crucifixion and resurrection, and the Spirit completes this saving act in the faithful so that they rediscover God in creation. Augustine writes in The True Religion: "With a knowledge of this Trinity proportioned to this life, we can see beyond the shadow of a doubt that every intellectual, animate, and corporeal creature has its existence, in so far as it exists, its proper nature, and its perfectly ordered career, from the creative power of this same Trinity" (7, 13, p. 210). The Three act as One, for "at one an d the same time each and every nature has been made by the Father through the Son and in the gift of the Holy Spirit. For every thing or substance or essence or nature ... has these three perfections at once: it exists as a single something; its own nature sets it off from other beings; and it does not deviate from the universal order of things" (7, 13, p. 210). Its inscape is Trinitarian: existence from the Father, species from the Son, milieu from the Holy Spirit.

Inscape is not an esoteric activity of philosophers and theologians, a prerogative of poets and deep thinkers, but it is a response of the loving mind and heart: "Since, though he is under the world's splendour and wonder,/His mystery must be instressed, stressed" (101,11.38-39). Inscape is a gift, a grace from God, a participation in his uncreated Being. [19] Since we are not yet in heaven, these experiences are fragmentary and momentary, but they are nonetheless real and available to all who seek the Father in the Son through the Holy Spirit. Gazing at the roof and tie-beams whose crossbars made them look like giant A's, Hopkins observed: "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" (Journals, p. 221). The beauty of the Word made flesh may be found in stars, trees, flowers, waves, and clouds, a church nave, or a barn roof. In Augustine's words: "By the presence of His majesty He maketh what He maketh; His presence governs what He made. Therefore was He in the world as the Maker of the world; for, 'The world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not"' (Homilies, Tractate II, 9, p. 17, quoting John 1.10). In the crisis of "The Wreck," the tall nun sees the huge Omega-curve of "the breaker" about to drown her and calls out, "'O Christ, Christ, come quickly"' (101, 11. 189, 191). She "christens her wild-worst Best" (1. 192) and inscapes "Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head" (1. 221) in her last act and with her dying breath. She meets her Maker in the world he made and governs by being himself everywhere present, even in waves that kill, and she joins him in "the heaven-haven of the reward" (1. 274).

JAMES FINN COTTER is Professor of English at Mount Saint Mary College. In addition to numerous articles on Hopkins, he is the author of Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1972).

Notes

(1.) See James Finn Cotter, "Augustine's Confessions and The Wreck of the Deutschland," in Saving Beauty: Further Studies in Hopkins, ed. Michael Allsopp and David Anthony Downes (New York: Garland Pub., 1994), pp. 313-325. All citations of Hopkins' poetry are from The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Numbers refer to poems.

(2.) The notes are printed and edited by James Finn Cotter, "Hopkins' Notes on the Bible," in Gerard Manley Hopkins Annual, 1993, ed. Michael Sundermeier and Desmond Egan (Omaha: Creighton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 89-101.

(3.) St. Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, trans. John Gibb and James Innis, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol.7, ed. Philip Scheff (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903), Tractate XVII, 16, p. 116. Latin interpolations are from Augustinus, In Iohannis Evangelium, Tractatus CXXIV (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), pp. 178-179. The Library of the Fathers, the series of English translations initially co-edited by John Henry Newman under the inspiration of the Oxford Movement, began with Augustine's Confessions (1838) translated by E. B. Pusey, still in print. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman acknowledges Augustine's influence on his thought and conversion, calling him "one of the prime oracles of Antiquity" (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 110. The Tractatus was among the works of Augustine on the reading list for Greats at Oxford.

(4.) The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), p. 173. For more on Hopkins' ideas on the Great Sacrifice, see James Finn Cotter, Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), pp. 38-39, 48-51; on Augustine, pp. 115-120, 128-129. See also David Anthony Downes, The Great Sacrifice: Studies in Hopkins (New York: Univ. Press of America, 1983), pp.42, 54-56, and Jeffrey B. Loomis, Dayspring in Darkness: Sacrament in Hopkins (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 32-34.

(5.) The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin, S.J. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 263.

(6.) St. Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany, trans. Thomas Comerford Lawler, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 15 (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1952), p. 107.

(7.) Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 19-20.

(8.) St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1950), p.238. St. Ignatius Loyola, through his reading of The Golden Legend, derived his meditation on the Two Standards in the Spiritual Exercises from The City of God, according to Hugo Rahner, S.J., The Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola (Chicago: Loyola Univ. Press, 1980), p.28. Augustine "became the model of St. Ignatius" who studied and applied the Rule of St. Augustine in writing the Jesuit Constitutions, p. 77.

(9.) Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (New York: The Library of America, 1995), p. 736.

(10.) The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 80. For a philosophical discussion of Hopkins' aesthetic theory, see Daniel Brown, Hopkins' Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 82-91. Brown traces the influence of Kant and German Idealism on Hopkins' thought during his Oxford years.

(11.) Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), p. 84.

(12.) Lucretius, The Way Things Are, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), p. 52.

(13.) St. Augustine on the Psalms, ed. and trans. Scholastica Hebgin and Felicitas Corrigan, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 29 (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1960), pp. 272-273.

(14.) St. Augustine, The True Religion (De Vera Religione), trans. C. A. Hangartner and G. R. Sheahan, in The Essential Augustine, ed. Vernon Bourke (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1953), p. 48. See also Of True Religion, in The Earlier Writings, trans. John H. S. Burleigh, The Library of Christian Classics, vol. 6 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), pp. 218-283. There is no proof that Hopkins read the De Vera Religione, or The City of God for that matter, but he cites the Confessions and the De Musica (which will be the subject of another paper) where Augustine employs the Platonic dialectic of beauty as outlined in De Vera Religione, an important early work. For more on Hopkins' Platonism, see Alan Heuser, The Shaping Vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 18-22. See also Hopkins' October 22, 1879 letter to Bridges where he expounds on the hierarchy of beauty of body, mind, and character, p. 95.

(15.) Robert J. O'Connell, S.J., Art and the Christian Intelligence in Saint Augustine (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), p. 15.

(16.) The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), p. 8.

(17.) See James Finn Cotter, Inscape, pp. 276-277, and "Inscape Once Again," America 150 (January 21, 1984): 31-33.

(18.) See James Finn Cotter, "Apocalyptic Imagery in Hopkins' 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,"' VP 24(1986): 261-273, and "Immortal Diamond: An Image in Hopkins," Thought 65 (December 1990): 563-571.

(19.) The act of inscape, of course, is open to all, as is God's grace. Those who possess reason, find beauty in nature and art, and seek "God beauty's self and beauty's giver" may experience it, for, in Tertullian's celebrated adage, anima naturaliter Christiana, and in Paul's words, quoted earlier, "His invisible qualities, such as His eternal power and divine nature [and beauty], have been made visible and have been understood through His handiwork" (Romans 1.20).