Reflections on Hopkins’ Conversion

“My Hyde is Worse.” Reflections on Hopkins’ Conversion

Eamon Kiernan,
Magdeburg University,
Germany

In a lecture at this Festival in 2013, Duc Dau described Hopkins's turn to Roman Catholicism as “one of his most romantic acts.” His conversion, she claimed, was a conversion to Love, understood primarily as Eros. While Dr. Dau was able to offer supporting evidence from Hopkins's poetry and from the spiritual traditions of Catholicism, her findings remain unsatisfying. It is hard to imagine a religious conversion that is not also a conversion to Love, erotic or otherwise. Nor would the all-importance of Love ever have been denied by the Anglican Church which Hopkins left behind him when he converted. Love, therefore, the telos, no doubt, of all Christian endeavour, does not name anything specific in the context of Hopkins’s conversion. In the following, I will attempt a more precise formulation of the direction of conversion, drawing on Hopkins's diary and journal entries, on his letters, and on relevant poems. To begin with, two simple questions will be asked: Was there a conversion event? What exactly did Hopkins convert from? Was there a conversion event?

Was there a conversion event?

What exactly did Hopkins convert from?
Was there a conversion event?

Gerard Manley Hopkins was received into the Roman Catholic Church on October 21, 1866 by John Henry Newman. On November 4, he was confirmed by Archbishop Manning. Arguably, these public liturgical events are the validation of a private moment of assent which happened previously. The closest one can come to locating such a moment of assent is a journal entry dated July 17 1866, when Hopkins was on holiday near Horsham with some Oxford friends. Hopkins states “it was this night, I believe, or possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England.”

Given the intellectual positions he had adopted, that impossibility meant the necessity of becoming a Roman Catholic. Hopkins's letters offer confirmation for the location, for the date and for the perceived single quality of the event. A letter to his mother (20 October, 1866) refers to Horsham as the place where he made his decision to convert. In letters to E.W. Urquhart (20 or 21 September, 1866 and 04 October, 1866) Hopkins states that he has been “for about two months a convert” and that his conversion was “simple and all in a minute.” The language Hopkins uses in these and comparable communications is matter-of-fact, prosaic. In the letter to Newman in which he asks to be received into the Roman Catholic Church (28 August, 1866), he refers simply to “the only consistent position” and a “conviction which had come upon him suddenly.” In a letter to his father (16-17 October, 1866), he attributes his new found certainty to “(i) simple and strictly drawn arguments […] (ii) common sense (iii) reading the Bible.” A letter to H.P. Liddon (7 November, 1866) asserts that he became a Catholic “because two and two makes four.”

The language is minimizing, as if the conversion event had little or no emotional impact or transforming power. Indeed, the same letter to Liddon is at pains to deny the influence of personal illuminations or any extraordinary supernatural grace. As Leslie Higgins has pointed out, it was Hopkins's practice to make entries into his journal retrospectively. A process of selection, perhaps even of self-censorship, was at work, which, of course, is also true for the more public utterances of the letters. As Jill Muller has argued, Hopkins seems to have deliberately framed the account of his conversion in his letters on the model of John Henry Newman, probably the most famous convert of the time. Newman’s conversion narrative, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, was published in 1864, shortly after Hopkins went up to Oxford, and would have been widely read there. References to Newman appear regularly in Hopkins's diary for 1865 and 1866. These may be rather cryptic, but they are undoubtedly positive regarding Newman’s example. As Ian Ker makes clear, Newman's was a deliberately cerebral account of conversion, rooted in his need to demonstrate both personal sincerity and intellectual objectivity in the face of hostility and is at pains to present the passage from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism as wholly logical, natural and unavoidable. Similarly, Hopkins’s journal and letters avoid categories personal to himself. No doubt, this protected him better from the remonstrations of his Anglican mentors and his distraught family. Was the young Gerard Hopkins hiding the true magnitude of what had occurred on or around July 17, 1866? It is more than just possible. W.A.C. Macfarlane, one of the friends holidaying near Horsham, who at that point was not yet privy to the fact of conversion, wrote in his diary that Gerard began to exhibit a sudden unreliability and rudeness of manner, whereupon his friends formed a tribunal to force him to be more amenable. As Robert Bernard Martin has noted, bad behavior towards his friends was very much out of character for Hopkins. But it is consistent with someone trying to deal with the powerful emotions of a life-changing inner event. In a journal entry for July 19, 1866, one or two days after the conversion event, Hopkins records that he has found “the law of the oak leaves.” It seems no coincidence that the inner certainty regarding Roman Catholicism and the discovery of the law of the oak leaves should occur at around the same time. The previous year-and-a-half, from about February 1865, is remarkable for the contemporaneity of two intense and protracted inner struggles, the one aimed at moral purity, which emerged from Hopkins’s adoption of the practice of auricular confession, the other, no less religious, but Ruskinian, aimed at comprehending the laws behind the numinosity of natural phenomena. Diary entries for this period juxtapose lists of sins for confession with attempts at finding adequate language for the experience of nature. A rigorous concern with sexual attractions, inattentiveness in church, and so on, went hand in hand with the no less rigorous ordering of closely-observed natural detail. The moral struggle with himself and the struggle to understand natural beauty must have come together in the yearning for God, and thus to have taken on the one form and quality of attention. This, I believe, looks forward to the “single eye” of the tall nun celebrated in The Wreck of the Deutschland, who is able by her heroic faith to order the chaos of the storming elements and see Christ, the heart of everything, even in her imminent death. It seems likely, then, that regarding his conversion, Hopkins's journal entries and letters are inaccurate by omission. The new certainty regarding his religious beliefs probably came with an inner turmoil and a deep personal transformation which, at the time, he was not willing, or able, to record. What did Hopkins convert from? At Oxford, the sincere but conventional High Church Anglicanism of Hopkins's Hampstead home had given way to personal devotions and sacramental liturgies which looked back to the pre-Reformation English Church.

Tractarian, a Ritualist and finally, a Catholic

Hopkins had become aritualist, a tractariant. A Tractarian's concern for the nature of authority in religion and the nature of the Church is evident from the poet’s letters. His practice of auricular confession and his devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, well attested in letters and in diary and journal entries, are typical of Ritualism, as are the different ascetical practices he adopted, such as fasting and the use of the scourge. However, as a letter to Macfarlane (10 July, 1866) indicates, he did not take seriously the extreme liturgical ceremonial which is typically associated with Ritualism. Writing to A.W.M. Baillie (10-12 September, 1865) Hopkins praised “the catholic principle” which the authors of the Tracts for the Times had polemically foregrounded in their attempts to reform the Church of England. Of particular importance to him is “the difference the apprehension of the catholic truths one after the other makes in one's views of everything, beyond all others those of the blessed Sacrament of the altar.”

The word 'catholic' here refers to the 'primitive' Christianity which the Tractarians espoused. As Newman explains it in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, the first Tractarians, seeking a bulwark against Erastianism and Liberalism, had tried to establish, or in their view to re-establish, the principle of Dogma in religion together with its corollary, submission to authority. Tract 2, authored by Newman and entitled The Catholic Church, invoked the Creed to argue that religious authority was vested in the visible Church, which was “Apostolic as founded by the Apostles, Catholic because it spreads its branches in every place; i. e. the Church visible with its Bishops, Priests, and Deacons.” The objective interpretation of the blessed sacrament on the altar had been re-introduced into Anglicanism in a series of writings by E.B. Pusey, one of Hopkins’s mentors at Oxford. In Tract 81, Pusey argued that the doctrine of the Eucharist as Sacrifice, which he now hoped to revive, had been taught by the early Church but had been hidden, though not lost, by the Anglican Church after the Reformation.

As Matthew Harlow usefully summarizes, Pusey later elaborated on the meaning of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, portraying it as the Sacrament through which union with Christ is given. Union with Christ depended on His objective, Real Presence, which, for Pusey, was spiritual, not physical. As a letter to his father (16-17 October, 1866) makes clear, Hopkins was firmly convinced of the objective Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but he felt he could honestly hold this belief only as a Tractarian or as a Roman Catholic. When, in his view, the Tractarian arguments for the primitivity and catholicity of Anglicanism failed, Roman Catholicism was revealed as the true locus of the doctrinal infallibility of the visible Church and the only protected setting for devotion to the Passion of Christ and His Real Presence. In the letter to Baillie previously mentioned, Hopkins declares: ... .the sordidness of things wh. one is compelled perpetually to feel, is perhaps, taking ἕν ἀνθ᾽ ἑνὸς, the most unmixedly painful feeling one knows of: and this is (objectively) intensified and (subjectively) destroyed by Catholicism. The location of this sentence leaves no doubt that Hopkins was referring primarily to the spiritual effects of devotion to the Real Presence. There is, however, a further aspect, revealed by the Greek phrase ἕν ἀνθ᾽ ἑνὸς “one thing set against another,” in Jowett's translation. Following Leslie Higgins, this appears to be a reference to Plato’s Republic, which Jowett had lectured on the year before, with Hopkins in attendance. In The Republic Book 1 Part 3 (331B) “one thing set against another” is the phrase used by Cephalus to weigh his arguments when he declares that being rich is good because it makes it easier to live a good life and avoid the wrath of the gods. This position is then revealed as insufficient to constitute Justice. Taking one thing set against another, but letting nothing be truly itself, is a style of argument typical of worldly wisdom, a process of mentation which reduces things to a use value, and thus makes them sordid. Because it also allows things to be unquestioned and indeterminate, it is a style of argument which Hopkins came to find objectionable among leading Anglicans, who often avoided taking their arguments to final conclusions for fear of favouring one of the different factions in their Church over another.

In the letter to his father quoted earlier, the “daring majesty” of the Roman Catholic claims to the truth, which impresses the young convert so much, is contrasted with Anglicanism, which “makes no claims.” The Catholic Principle, then, involves the submission of the mind and heart to the authority of the visible Church, which teaches infallibly. Through the doctrine of the Real Presence, it makes the Passion of Christ and the Eucharist the centre of devotion. It also involves the rejection of a self-serving worldly wisdom and the refusal to reduce things to a use value. It is a principle by which each thing remains resplendent in itself yet harmonises with every other thing. It is also a principle of honest striving for final consequences. It looks forward, I believe, to the oneness of thisness, to the one Christ revealing himself in a myriad of unique and beautiful beings, which later became the theme of many poems. Conversion as a journey in selected poems It is clear that Hopkins's conversion, though undoubtedly perceived by him as a single event, was the culmination of a spiritual journey on which the 'catholic principle' served him as a guide. As Margaret Johnson has shown, the trope of a journey is characteristic of the writing of the Tractarians, many of whom were poets and placed a high value on the use of poetry in raising and sustaining religious emotion.

Hopkins' Religious Struggle

Before his conversion, Hopkins's poems often show these Tractarian concerns. Two such poems, The Half Way House and Let me be to Thee as the Circling Bird, are especially interesting in the present context, because the joy-filled certitude they assert, and with it the spiritual journey itself, seem to be undermined by an anticipation of failure of which the poet is not fully conscious.

If this reading is acceptable, it is further evidence of a deep and agonising religious struggle at the heart of the conversion process. The Half Way House describes an encounter with Love in the breaking of bread. From the wording of the last line, this can be taken as a reference to the Biblical story of the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:35). Here, the going is tough. The Church of England, the “national old Egyptian reed” (l. 5) has failed the poet. He relies now on a simple but sturdy staff in the form of a cross made from a vine. As he walks, the poet is caught in the paradox of love: “[...] Love, when all is given / To see Thee I must [see] Thee, to love, love” (l. 14). Were it not for the title, with its allusion to Newman's characterization of the deficiencies of Anglicanism, there would be nothing in the poem to suggest Roman Catholicism, or even Tractarianism. The Biblical reference does not necessarily pertain to the later theological construct of the Real Presence nor does the poet’s desire, as expressed in the last line, to see and love Christ in a way that goes beyond the mere use of words. It seems rather that the poem expresses a longing for a Christianity reduced to the essentials, for a faith in Christ prior to ecclesiastical constructs.

If so, it reaches for a primitive Christianity that is prior even to the dogmatic principle. Given Hopkins’s rejection of Evangelicalism, evident from a letter to E.W. Urquhart (6 January, 1865), it could not be accommodated in any form of faith available to the poet. In Let me Be to Thee, the poet hopes through the constancy of his faith to resemble either a circling bird or a bat, which he sees as a creature of the “half-light”(l. 2). Having apparently tried all the experiences life has to offer (l. 5-8), the poet has come to a final conclusion: “I have found the dominant of my range and state Love O my God to call Thee love and love” (l. 13f) In a poem that claims so great a certainty, there is remarkable indeterminacy in the choice of image. Why either bird or bat? Why the half-light? On July 20, 1865, when he was probably still working on this poem, Hopkins had referred to himself in his diary as a rook or a crow, an image which would recur in later years. He had also copied into his journal a new sonnet “Myself Unholy from Myself Unholy,” a melancholy reflection on sinfulness. A dark, flying thing must have seemed an appropriate image for the self given to sin that he felt himself to be. In Let me Be to Thee, the darker of the two images, the bat, the archetypal night creature, with its “departing rings” (l. 3) suggestive of disloyalty, and thus of evil, provides the most concrete, that is, the most certain image in the poem, the “air-crisping wings” (l. 2). The image therefore points away from God, even as the poet compels grammar to move towards Him. The “authentic cadence” (l. 9) the poet claims for himself is not authentic. The repeated “I have found”(l. 5, l. 13) and the strong claim to “know infallibly” (l .8) lack substance and therefore point to their opposites.

Knowing Infallibility

Knowing infallibly, it would seem, entails the abandonment of further thought. The “dominant” of the last stanza, a fruitful play on words, frames love in terms of abject submission, but also, following the musical meaning, as a modulation to another key, a journey to another quality. In tonal music, the dominant, being the key closest to the tonic, is the first and easiest of the possible modulations. The poet's “range and state” (l. 13) is correspondingly limited. Submission to God therefore implies the refusal of many of life's pathways, a sacrifice with which the poet, despite his protestations to the contrary, does not seem content. He may have found love, but not knowing if love will enrich him or impoverish his experience, he does not know if love is Love. The Wreck of the Deutschland, written some ten years after conversion, has again spiritual journeying as one of its themes. But the terrain is dark and catastrophic, indeed, more real. Here, the submission to God is no longer simply considered, or tried out, it is done, radically and absolutely. A new note of Grace is sounded: the extremity of fear and self-loathing is healed by Mercy after the offering of self to Christ. God, a distant cypher in the earlier poems, is recognised as “ipse, the only one” (St. 28, l. 5). In Stanza 10 we meet two famous Christian converts. Saint Paul is taken by Christ “once at a crash” (l. 5) that is, suddenly, violently. Saint Augustine is taken slowly and subtly, “a lingering-out sweet skill” (l. 6). In both cases, God takes. He masters and remakes the person, but at the same time nourishes and rejuvenates. Mastery and mercy are one. “Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring Through him, melt him but master him still:” (St 10, l. 3 -4)

The Wreck, Part 1, represents Hopkins's poetic account of his conversion?

Part the First of the Wreck arguably represents Hopkins's poetic account of his conversion. In a letter to Robert Bridges (25 February, 1878), Hopkins assures his friend that the references to his personal experience in the poem are all “strictly and literally true,” which indeed encourages a biographical reading. However, because there is no trace of the farmhouse near Horsham of ten years previously, or of any other details of time and place, the 'strict and literal truth' of the poem is one of visionary memory. This would have been amplified by a decade of Jesuit teaching and discipline and set in place by the poet's decision to identify himself with the tall nun of the poem. It may well be that very many smaller moments of assent to Christ are apotheosised into one all-encompassing moment of self offering, as if the struggle for such a moment were ongoing and its finality unachieved, perhaps unachievable. In the first stanzas of the poem, when news of the shipwreck comes to the poet, he relives the moment when he “did say yes” (St. 2, l. 1). This was an experience at the extremity of his existence, facing “the hurtle of hell” (St. 3, l. 2). In great fear, he threw himself on God’s mercy (“and fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the host” St. 3 l. 5). One of the effects of that mercy is that he receives himself back as Christ's gift “I […] a vein of the gospel proffer […] Christ’s gift” (St. 4 l. 5-8). Now, in his sense of himself, he is like sand in an hourglass, always rushing towards a fall, at the same time he is like water in a well, steady within its walls, and with a poise come from the constant welling up from a hidden source, which itself is fed by streams of water like those that run down the bare hills of North Wales. These many tiny streams are comparable to the truths of the Gospel by which he is now able to live. This archaic terrain of a dangerous journey with the risk of steep falls everywhere but with protection and nourishment at hand is the ground after conversion. Here, the true Christian journey can begin.

Conclusion

Hopkins dated his conversion, taken as the moment of the coming of inner certainty regarding Roman Catholicism, to July 17 or 18, 1866. The minimizing language he uses in his journal and letters does not fully conceal the inner turmoil and the profundity of the transformation which had occurred. The inner certainty could not have come without a prior journey through Tractarian thought along the trajectory of the ‘catholic principle’, a journey which was fraught with existential uncertainty and in danger of failure. The ‘catholic principle’ was a principle of submission to doctrinal authority, but also of logical consequences, of coherent and honest religious positions, and of compelling devotional implications. It was also a principle of letting things be themselves, undistorted by the use values of worldly wisdom. After conversion, the journey would have to continue. To take a Biblical image, Hopkins, having discovered the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45-46), would have to sell all that he had in order to purchase it. Selling all that one has takes all of one's life. It seems therefore that Hopkins did not convert to Roman Catholicism, he did something much better: he converted to ongoing conversion. He did not convert to Love. He converted to the potential for a deepening of the capacity to love.

On 22 October 1886, Hopkins wrote to Bridges regarding R. L. Stevenson's story, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “This sour severity blinds you to [Stevenson's] great genius…Jekyll and Hyde I have read. [...] You are certainly wrong about Hyde being overdrawn. My Hyde is worse.” Hopkins, it seems, has matured into a respectable professional man who at any moment might turn into a murderous beast. The black flying creature of Let me Be to Thee, that creature of the half-light, ambiguous in its loyalties, has survived every Catholic devotion, every penitential practice, has grown sleek and fat, and reappears now as a frightful doppelgänger. But, the conversational banter of the letter adds its own gloss. This seemingly monstrous development is part of the way. It does not matter all that much if Hyde is there. What matters is that he is not let out. When Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism he converted to ongoing conversion. By this time, three years before his death, he had got used to it.

Author’s Note

After this paper was presented, a Jesuit father pointed out to me that according to Saint Ignatius, conversion must work on three levels, intellectual, emotional and moral, and thus encompass the whole person. This remark shows the way to a deeper consideration of the subject than I could manage here. My thanks to him.

References:

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Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Half-Way House. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-half-way-house/. Retrieved 24.08.2016.

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Newman, John Henry. Tracts for the Times. Tract 2. The Catholic Church. http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract2.html. Retrieved 24.08.20

Plato. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html. Retrieved 24.08.2016.6

Pusey, Edward Bouverie. Tracts for the Times. Tract 81. -Catena Patrum.—No. IV. Testimony of Writers in the later English Church to the Eucharistic Sacrifice, With an Historical Account of the Changes Made in the Liturgy as to the Expression of that Doctrine. http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract81.html. Retrieved 28.08.16. Stewart, Kenneth J. “The Tractarian Critique of the Evangelical Church Invisible: Tracts 2, 11, 20 and 47 in Historical Context.” Churchman 121 4 Winter 2007 349-362.

White, Norman H. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Clarendon Press, 1992.

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