VI. Imagination and Created Things

Gerard Manley Hopkins had a hallowed belief: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. In his work as a priest and a poet he drew on the spiritual exercises of Ignatius and the philosophical illumination of Duns Scotus to find a way to say what his mind and heart felt in a world created and loved by God.

When we experience the inscape of a thing, there is a change in our seeing, though what we register is always already there. To see inscape, the one seeing must be emptied of buzzing distraction and surrender to the seeing as a mode of love, love as agape and love as the fire of eros, a desire that consumes without destroying. Instress is a repetition of experience, in which the order of a thing or situation begins to emerge from randomness, revealing its inscape, which might be too fleeting to catch with one glance. Our minds can approach a thing in an incremental and comprehensively descriptive way and still completely miss its inscape. But we can also approach a thing contemplatively, reaching not for all its discrete parts, instead trying to see its inner unity. This unity is its form, and its form is what makes the parts of a thing the parts of a thing. In a created universe, everything is a contingent burst of gifted existence.

Hopkins’s radical view of reality grew from his experience of the created world densely populated by inscape throughout. As each form is grasped by a mind that has been made to perceive form, a relationship between the form and the imagination is created. A poet is someone who craves to express this form in language, shaping a poem until the inward flame of the created thing—the flower, the face, the cloud—shines though. Instress implies more than visible radiance. It suggests a kind of force that we experience as urgent, a light not only seen but also felt in a palpable way that must be dealt with. It provokes the passion that leads to poetry or perhaps to liturgy. Poetry is a shared responsiveness to creation’s demands and to our own sense of being held in existence with everything else in this collection we call a cosmos.

Realism is sometimes thought of as an orientation toward the world that embraces things as they are, rather than merely as they appear on the surface. But for Hopkins, the contrast between reality and appearance is less an ontological distinction, than it is a distinction in our language between what exists and how we experience existence in sense, thought, and feeling. The appearance of a thing has a kind of being, but a thing’s existence is different from its essence (or whatness), and this in turn is different from the source of a thing’s being and whatness.

Within Catholic theology, the history of thought about essence and existence converges on the analogia entis, the analogy of being. This idea shows us how to move from stories about creation to stories about the ineffable creator. It also discloses the difference between creation and an incomprehensible creator, resisting a conception of God that makes God one more thing among things—albeit a really big and powerful thing—and moves us beyond our mythic stories of Zeus, so thoroughly deflated first by theologians, and later by non-theists. The concept of the analogia entis dissembles our static and comfortable immanent-only mythologies about the divine, and it uses our work in ontology to give us better accounts of God, creation, and that part of creation we call imagination.

Hopkins embraced the idea of the Paremenidean One as a yes to being, and the idea of the Heraclitian Flux as a yes to the fleeting shimmers that are the forms skirting the surface of being. But neither was adequate to the work of the philosophical imagination that meets things as they are: part of a thing’s reality is its glory that draws the contemplative mind out of itself into the grandeur of the world as created by God.

In Hopkins’s poetry, the feeling of a thing’s essence appears as inscape, and the feeling of a thing’s being appears as instress. The transformative power of Hopkins’s poetry comes from this connection between a theologically framed ontology and a poetics of delight in creation. Instress implies more than visible radiance. It is not merely a light we glimpse. It is a palpable force demanding an urgent response. This force leads us from contemplation to action, to making, to poetry. For Hopkins, everything is charged with God, both in the electrical sense, in which it gives off sparks and ignites fires and in the economic sense, in which all form, essence, and being shimmers through the surfaces of things, awakening creation to its own debt to God for its very being. Creation never comes to an end of this account, understood as the source of further gifts, and as the story of how we come to be who we are.

The metaphor of electricity was a clue Hopkins was only able to glimpse. Our knowledge of the electrochemistry of the brain—that strange object perched among the ideas and images of the world—gives us a deeper way to see through the lens of the metaphor. Who are we to say that the electricity of a created brain is not, in part, a marvelous means for making the music of metaphysics show up in conversation, or on the page, or at the altar? Who are we to say that the poetry of the created cosmos, the verse of the universe, does not fittingly play on the electrical machine of the brain, as thing reaches to thing and points beyond things, that which can only be approached asymptotically with the nimble calculus of analogy? In a created world, we cannot disregard our instrument of reception, nor insulate ourselves from the voltage lighting up the physical cathedral of creation, and expect to distill a metaphysics that is true.

We want a metaphysics that is true, like a good compass that registers true North, giving our minds and bodies reliable direction, so that we can think and then move. But true North, alas, is not actually what we see on our compass. The compass points to magnetic north, and the northern magnetic pole moves over time because of the magnetic changes in the Earth’s core. The Earth is a big, shifting magnetic, with reversals of magnetic north and south occurring many times over the duration of the planet, a geomagnetic topsy-turvy reorientation that works well as a metaphor for the sometimes-disorienting effects of feeling and other forces on the fragile compass we call our minds. But in the created world of imaginative creatures prone to a stable idolatry, disorientation is sometimes a condition for truer reorientation. The whip the compass needle makes to the left or right because of sadness or ecstasy might indicate that we are near something real and important that we need to understand as the journey continues. Maps have tops and bottoms, but the Earth is round, and the universe is boundless and without a center. If our imaginations are going to reach past its well-trodden path to meet the rest of creation, the behavior of our compass is best taken as a clue to some bonding force that is an adventure, even if it also feels like a threat. We have to trust that God has created us in such a way that our minds are the kinds of things that are meant to encounter creation.

Hopkins suffered from severe depression.

This atmosphere of grace is redemptive. We breathe an air of transformation, not only when we tumble into unexpected radiance but also when we relax into the final meditative silence of the passage we call death. In his poem “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins wrote about this radiance:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell;

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And, for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.²

What startles in nature comes from the same source that created both sunrise and sunset. This is not a puzzle to be worked through systematically in the way we find solutions to problems in the laboratory. Instead, it is a fully felt discovery by a prayer-shaped imagination encountering the mystery that resides in the deep parts of reality, demanding not the contained register of a cool and systematic mind but an ecstatic breaking out of homey ignorance into the strangeness of beauty. This disorients us until we see that the landscape is closer to home than anything we have known in the grey mist of the local weather, where we tuck our heads under umbrellas and squint our eyes.

We suspect that we are made for more. We suspect that the ache in our backs and shoulders is not because of overexertion but the result of a constriction of wings that becomes apparent through the presence of a peculiar pain. That pain comes from a disjunction between the way we currently act in the world and the truth of what we are meant to be and to become. The experience—the urge and urgency—of being a creature that is always becoming is a kind of ecstasy. But there is also a pathos in always being on the way, especially when the end toward which we are moving is obscured, leaving us with a vision of our own nature and situation that is partial, incomplete, and sometimes lonely. This is a kind of sadness, where sadness is a placeholder for a feeling that might be called anxiety, dread, depression, ennui, or even madness. The experiences of ecstasy and madness are not mutually exclusive, if only because they often occur in the same soul. The ecstasy of erotic love can lead to the birth of another person, while the wave of madness can lead to someone’s death. Though the erotic is enlivening, and though sadness is illuminating, both have been subjected to the cures and consolations of philosophy for millennia. But those who have known passionate love or grief know that more is needed if we are ever to be truly consoled.

We are better off if we remember that philosophy is the love of wisdom, not the possession of wisdom. Philosophy itself is always on the way. Perhaps the best consolation it can offer is to help us understand how partial our wisdom is, so that we can live fully into the strain of this polarity of ecstasy and sadness, where every momentary experience of wholeness and unity is followed by sadness, and every sadness is embedded in a world full of small shimmering ecstasies. Philosophy is the conversation we have on the journey. It is the eruption of observation and commentary among pilgrims who travel to strange, wonderful, and dangerous lands, not people who set up shop in a harbor. Such conversations may never lead to final answers or systematic completeness, but they can lead to better questions by making us better questioners.

The Garden of Eden is the beautiful and frightening myth of our ongoing journey. When Adam was alone in the garden, there was a kind of unity in creation. The elements of the natural world were what they were, and they did not bend back on themselves to behold their own incompleteness and contingency. There was a unity, but there was also a nascent sadness in Adam’s consciousness. Adam could not recognize it but God did. It was not good that Adam was alone. So the animals were formed, and God waited to see what Adam would name them. Whatever name Adam gave to them, that was their name. The friendship of Adam with the animals was a part of creation celebrated by the saints. But it was still not enough companionship. So God formed a different companion, another person for whom Adam began to long. He became more of who he truly was by realizing that in some way he was not complete in himself. Only with her did he taste completeness. But even that taste of completeness was not the final destiny. That taste was a goad toward something that was as ineffable to Adam and Eve as it is to us.

In the myth two things came into the cosmos that did not exist before: there was the glimmer of what we long for, and there was the opportunity to mistake the glimmer for the thing itself. Waking up to one’s contingency and incompleteness is necessary for the journey. But this awakening makes it possible to mistake the harbor for the journey, the gift of respite in the inn for arrival at the destination. Such is the dawn of the knowledge of good and evil: we can be true to our nature, or we can repeatedly interrupt the forward energy of eros that is meant to drive us further in and further up on our ecstatic journey and instead become caught in a cycle of erroneous and momentary satisfaction. It takes a very great force to make us step out of that impotent repetition and continue on the journey. That force is the looming specter of death. Our only way forward is to be banned from the garden so that we cannot reach the tree of life and become susceptible to a truly interminable cycle of repeated momentary ecstasies, followed by sadness that drives us back into craving for ecstasy. Our salvation lies ahead, and death is the hound that keeps the caravan moving forward.

John Henry Newman received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church in 1866. Newman thought of poetry as a kind of speech in which our deepest heart speaks to the deepest heart of another. Hopkins was concerned that poetry was self-indulgent and too individualistic. He changed his mind when he read Duns Scotus, whose work deeply affirmed Hopkins’s poetic idea of inscape. Scotus argued that we have direct knowledge only through the this-ness (haecceitas) of particular objects in this world. He rejoiced in the particulars of this world, including the particularity of his own heart. For Hopkins, this lit up both the created world and the inner world of mind and imagination. In his notes on spiritual exercises, he wrote that human nature is highly pitched and distinctive and must have evolved from the stuff of world, not by virtue of lower forces but under the influence of a force higher and more finely-pitched than itself. This is especially true for the activity of the mind, which is capable of self-consciousness, including the unique feeling and taste of our individual selves: “Searching nature, I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being. The development, refinement, condensation of nothing shows any sign of being able to match this to give me another taste of it, a taste even resembling …”³

Hopkins describes a singular insularity, but one which longs to be seen and to be spoken. Interior experience is different from exterior expression. Our ability to express ourselves is a gift, but it is a gift that changes us and constitutes a kind of sacrifice. This is part of the complexity of human sexuality, which is deeply related to the urgency of our search for meaning in creation. Virginity—not merely in the physical sense but in the sense that Mary Magdalene was venerated as a virgo intaita because of her single-minded passion for Jesus—is the state of oneness. The interior and the exterior are fused. But there is a play in virginal intactness that deepens the sense of what is given in the gift, and what is received, and of how the growth of a person is fostered when the gift is given: a person can become more virginal by relinquishing one form of virginity and uniting with another person. This is the erotic fulfillment of the spiritual injunction that one must lose oneself to find oneself, an imitation of the act of God that Hopkins described a couple of years later in his notes on the spiritual exercises: “God’s utterance of himself in himself is God the Word, outside himself is this world … The world, man, should after its own manner give God being in return for the being he is given or should give him back the being he has given by great sacrifice. To contribute then to that sacrifice is the end for which man was made.”⁴

What can we sacrifice? Our time? Our limbs? Our life? Our self? Yes, all of these. But in the strange economy of grace in which we find ourselves by losing ourselves, putting off these things is putting off the things that confine us. The terror and attraction of death is that it might be dissolution or it might be a transcending of limits. Which is it? The question shines light on the ways Western poets have tenaciously linked authentic sexual connection between two people with the act of dying. Both forms of letting go leave us with the taste of our instability and conscious unease. If our urgent questions lead us to practice an honest ontological phenomenology, we eventually realize that the unstable fault line runs through the middle of our own souls and bodies. We try to keep the world whole by creating our stories, poems, myths, and philosophical treatises. But mere making never satisfies us, because even our connections deepen our awareness of the duality of our existence. Nonetheless, we are compelled to express the unity we glimpse through our aesthetic, sexual, and mystical experiences, because these reveal to us, however faintly, something besides the darkness of the abyss we peer into as we stand on the threshold of death. The experiences rescue us, in a literally momentary way, from the stretch of time reaching into the untouchable past and future. They remind us that the only part of time that we can call home is now, so we should fully do what we are doing and fully see what we are seeing. Such is the ecstasy Hopkins reaches for as nature is lit up by the supernatural in “The May Magnificat”:

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple

Bloom lights the orchard apple

And thicket and thorp are merry

With silver-surfed cherry

And azuring-over greyball makes

Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes

And magic cuckoocall

Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth

Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth

To remember and exultation

In God who was her salvation.⁵

Hopkins the priest was drawn toward the mirth of the Mother of Christ, in whom nature became more fully itself by being carried beyond itself. He distilled feeling from nature, and connected cosmos and creation in his leap from the magic of a calling cuckoo and the ecstasy of mothering Earth to Mary remembering her God. Such an act of imagination shows a kind of philosophical charity and play that does not merely console but that gives us courage to hurl ourselves into the world, trusting in spiritual laws that we have only begun to meet as in a dream. We are creators inside creation finding home. Hopkins bodied forth in his poetry the joyful humility of the analogia entis that mediates between the infinite separation of creator and creature that we see in Karl Barth, and the partnership of creator and creature we see in Alfred North Whitehead’s vision of constructing the world. He wrote “God’s Grandeur” to show us the ecstatic wildness of nature that is never spent and that is filled with a dear freshness that lives deep down things as the Spirit broods over them with warm breast and bright wings. He wrote “Pied Beauty” to show us the Earth full of dappled things, where the peace we pray for in our liturgy must be a peace among discordant elements, a peace of contrasts.

Because the unity of God is singular and not susceptible to imitation, the inscape of anything that is created is beautiful in itself—it will be dappled, it will be couple-coloured. If we want to experience things as gifts, we must learn to see in a way that does not impose a false unity by dissolving things into the manageable abstractions of generalized laws and concepts. The impulse to abstraction is understandable, with a laudable and revealing aim, and it can be motivated by an impulse toward worship. But beauty, truth, and goodness show up concretely in the world. The inscape and instress of radiant things reveal a creator who sustains creation through an unfathomably intimate presence, while being utterly and unfathomably different from creation. This is the beautiful but difficult concept of God’s relationship to creation expressed in the idea of the analogia entis.

Duns Scotus taught Hopkins the philosophical expression of the unique way things body forth in the experience of inscape. He gave Hopkins a philosophical frame for the fundamental language of nature that Bonaventure witnessed in his own worship, inspired by the beauty of the stars. Rather than seeking for a false unity in abstraction, Hopkins’s poetic imagination was schooled in ways of reading the contrasting forms of nature. Nature is a language that speaks the unspeakable through its radiant forms. Hopkins answered this with a language of his own in his poems, as he journeyed toward the mystery of God—a creator who does not merely dwell beyond the things but who lights up creation from inside.

Hopkins experienced no clear line between a natural and a supernatural perception of the creator and creation. In both cases, the love of God is the only answer to disorientation. He showed us how the converted imagination can relearn to see the source and sustainer of all created things through the things themselves, lit by an internal light. This is true for the highest celestial object, but it is also true for the face of the next person we see on the street. In a journal entry from 1871, he wrote, “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you, hence the true and false instress of nature … Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.”⁶ He tried to hold true opposites together as an expression of creation in its endlessly varied difference from God, whose divine language of love is spoken through the prismed light of creation. The symphony of contrasts in a poem like “Pied Beauty” is a form of rejoicing in the beautiful mess to which the converted imagination bears witness.

The idea of the poetic apriori resonates with Hopkins’s conviction that words bring to mind the Word, the source of all words. The first line of “Pied Beauty” is a poetic statement of the analogia entis, turning toward the things of creation in joy and awe because they are from God and therefore must be connected to God. That connection is the only true link between the universal and the particular, the abstraction and the concrete. The converted imagination in a world of created things sees the unifying source of the multiplicity through the internally illuminated things themselves.

Joy and despair were among the opposites Hopkins held together in his vision of God’s good creation. In the “Sonnets of Desolation” he gave an account of the tormented mind, witnessed from within his own struggle with depression. A mind susceptible to such dulling and sadness needs something other than itself to arrive at a place where it can see the truth of things. Hopkins believed—or at least hoped—that the contemplation of beauty can heal the mind and cure the soul when it is coupled with the practices of caring of others and sacrament. If the world’s truth, beauty, and goodness register in an individual only as they are embedded in the whole, perhaps there is also a collective aspect to mind in the universe that can give the gift of healing to a singular mind. When we are given a gift, the gift becomes our own. We borrow wholeness, but once we are whole, it is truly ourselves who are whole: if our deafness is healed, we hear with our own ears, if our blindness is healed, we see with our own eyes.

Poetry can disclose inscape. When we awaken to the inscape of a thing, we see the thing more perfectly. This contemplative act brings us closer to the true, the beautiful, and the good. Thomas saw that in so far as the thing is, it is good. He saw the equation between the true, the beautiful, and the good. The more we learn to acquiesce to reality revealed in creation, the better we learn to see this equation. Such insights change how we live in this world, because we learn to see beauty everywhere as we learn to see what is. For those who live in a created world, and know they do, every act of seeing what is real becomes an act of learning to see beauty, goodness, and truth. As we learn to see, we want to tell others about the experience. Ontological wonder makes us pick up our pen, paintbrush, or musical instrument to say what we see. When we do this well, we learn to see much more. This is seeing the world in a grain of sand, seeing eternity in an hour. Even a jail cell made of stones is made of stones that are themselves beautiful.

In a created world, to begin with a particular thing is not to end with a particular thing. Our imaginations are pliable, and we can always reach farther. We reach the instress of things by perceiving a thing’s inscape, which is baptized form, a gift of form that is full of meaning because the gift has a giver. The leap from the particular to the absolute is a leap from gift to giver. But we do not leave the gift behind. In a Platonic universe, we gladly exchange the shadow world for the world of forms. But a created thing that is a shadow of its creator becomes more fully itself the more it is seen in its true relationship to the whole. In creation, things are known in an epistemological trajectory that arcs toward relational happiness, rather than mere knowledge of catalogued facts about the world. This arc does not lead toward the encyclopedia but toward ecstasy. The deepest mystery in our adventure of knowing is the felt relation of all contingent, particular things to the One who is their source, sustenance, and reason for being, the One who shows up in stories as the just judge, the ecstatic lover, and the sometimes-outrageous comedian. We weep, desire, and laugh as we tell our stories on the road, knowing that both the road and the journeyers—ourselves—are created by the One toward whom the road is leading. We brood, grow sad, fall in love, and devise pranks. These modest tools are what we use to plumb the depths of the incomprehensible we meet in the poetic apriori.

Poets like Hopkins experience the created world as lit up and suffused with meaning, and they have important things to say about the philosophical imagination. But there is another way to explore the role of the imagination in human life: we can listen to a philosophically inspired poet who was filled with wonder at the idea of the divine but who did not believe in God. In the work of such a poet, only the mechanism is exposed, because there is nothing else to expose: there is no inspiration beyond the fictions we create in an otherwise lonely universe. Wallace Stevens wrote, “Things that have their origin in the imagination or in the emotions (poems) very often have meanings that differ in nature from the meanings of things that have their origin in reason. They have imaginative or emotional meanings, not rational meanings.”⁷ Stevens made many discoveries about imagination, reason, and the mind as he paid attention to his own experience of an accidental, purposeless, uncreated universe in which the reality of the divine is bracketed, and the only minds that show up are our own meaning-making minds full of longing and compelled to tell stories about the world.

¹ Justus George Lawler, Hopkins Re-constructed, Continuum, New York (1998), 98.

² Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2009), 128. All quotations of Hopkins‘s poems are from this edition.

³  Hopkins, The Major Works, 281–82.

⁴  Hopkins, The Major Works, 282.

⁵  Hopkins, The Major Works, 140.

⁶ Hopkins, The Major Works, 204.

⁷  Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, Library of America, New York (1997), 825.