The Ecological Import of Hopkins’s Sacramental Vision -- Jennifer Doede

Lecture presented at the “Sacramental Approach to Ecology Conference,” Trinity Western University, Oct. 7, 2017.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s vision and poetics give us a strong basis for a robust sacramental ecology. However, Sally McFague, an American Christian feminist theologian, in her book Super, Natural Christians would question this claim about Gerard Manley Hopkins, the 19^th century Jesuit priest and poet. She claims that Hopkins renders invisible or transparent the horizontal array of creation to the vertical referent of Christ. In this paper, I want to contest this idea. Sally McFague in her book Super, Natural Christians praises Gerard Manley Hopkins for his “integrated sensibility, [his] ability to see the natural and the supernatural worlds together” (58,59), but she criticizes his vision of the natural world as understanding nature only as a symbol or instrument to move us toward knowing the divine. She believes Hopkins depicts nature as a means to an end, without its own integrity and purpose. As brilliant as McFague’s book is, she fails to see Hopkins’s sacramental vision as giving nature its full due. However, I want to say  his poetry enacts a double-vision that recognizes, honours, and affirms both realities without compromising the value of either.

McFague draws on three models to illustrate the history of Christians’ relationship with nature: the Medieval model, the Enlightenment model, and the Ecological model. Both the medieval model and the ecological model convey humans and nature as subjects, whereas the Enlightenment model depicts only humans as subjects, thus consigning nature to mere objectified resource. She praises the medieval model for its portrayal of humans as created and governed by God and interconnected to all other forms of life, but she criticizes this model for its failure to recognize intrinsic worth in nature. Nature is never significant in and for itself but rather is reduced to a symbolic or allegorical framework to benefit Christians. The Enlightenment model illustrates the deterioration of the medieval understanding of Christians connectedness with nature, viewing nature only as resource and humans are the sole subjects in the world. There has been an ontological shift; no longer is nature seen as symbolic of God’s relationship to humanity; nature serves humanity. Nature is now utterly object, subjected to human desire.

Download the full paper: The Ecological Import of Hopkins Revised Version