If the only Jesuit you ever met was a character in a work of fiction in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life?
In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library when he entered the search term "Jesuit" and filtered it through the genre of "Fiction". The novels that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar Jesuits.
This week: the non-fictional Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J., as portrayed by Ron Hansen in his biographical novel, Exiles.
" The inscription read:
Pray for the souls of Barbara Hultenschmidt, Henrica Fassbender, Norberta Reinkorber, Aurea Badziura, Brigitta Dammhorst, Franciscan Sisters from German who were drowned near Harwich in the wreck of The Deutschland, Dec 7th 1875. Four of whom were interred here Dec 13th. RIP.
Hopkins felt a pang of regret for not having given their names in his poem, but he prayed that he had otherwise done them justice…" Exiles (p. 145)
In his 2008 novel Exiles, Ron Hansen uses the famous Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” to frame his biographical exploration of a very real poet. He blends letters and other source materials with fiction to portray a complex and talented Jesuit caught between two worlds: poetry and priesthood.
Born on July 28, 1844, Hopkins is “ginger haired, with gleaming eyes that were the colour of hazelnuts, a head that seemed slightly too large for his weedy frame, and a long nose and jutting cleft chin.” (p. 85)
By the time he is a Jesuit in training at St Beuno’s in North Wales, he has earned the nickname “Skin” because of his “scrawniness, his spindle shins, the green yarns of vein in his forearms, his face so thin that his zygomatic bones and jaw shaped harps underneath his ginger-brown, one-inch beard and moustache. (p. 3)
As a Catholic convert he creates tensions in his anti-Catholic family and has been labeled “‘a pervert,’ the Victorian term for those Queen Elizabeth had called ‘recussant Catholics.’” (p. 92)
The priest/poet surfaces early in his as vocation as “the scruples to which he was prey caused Hopkins to consider the worldly pursuit of poetry writing in conflict with his vocation to the priesthood. Just before entering the Society of Jesus in 1868, Hopkins resolved to pen no more verse unless his religious superiors requested it.” (p. 17)
There is an austerity to all he does and once he reads the article in The Times describing the shipwreck, slowly creeps in his imagination. “Casting back on his day in his nightly examination of conscience, Hopkins accused himself of a snorting, sour, unspiritual tone to some of his conversations, prayed for those who’d died, were injured, or lost loved ones in the shipwreck, but thanked God for the beauties and contrariness of nature, the tonic of outdoor exercise, and the cheer and solace of his Jesuit brothers.” (p. 10)
In the course of his Jesuit formation he teaches at Manresa House in Roehampton where he “was a marvel to his students – scholarly, amusing, incisive, pithy, and intolerant of shoddy reasoning – yet he worried that he taught stiffly and was reluctant to judge their papers and examinations for fear of falling into the established fault of critics: ‘to cramp and hedge in by rules the free movement of genius.’” (p. 95)
He spends much time in silent reflection and one night, “as Hopkins walked into the Novitiate chapel after midnight his legs buckled, so that he fell into a kneel on the cold marble, and facing the tabernacle in his helplessness, he confessed his liabilities and wretchedness. He wept like a child and was glad for his isolation in the night silence of the wee hours.” (p. 104)
Hopkins the Jesuit often silenced Hopkins the poet. “Recalling the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, Hopkins accepted the recommendation that he ‘should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonour, a long life to a short life,’ but chose ‘what is more conducive to the end for which we are created,’ which was to ‘praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord.’ Whether he published his poetry or not seemed to the conscientious Hopkins another vagary over which a good Jesuit should exercise no partiality.” (p. 124)
Even so, Hopkins the literary critic had no qualms about demonstrating his Jesuit side when commenting on the literary output of one of his non-Jesuit friends. “Weekly community encounters within the Society of Jesus – so-called fraternal corrections – had instilled in Hopkins the invaluable gift of candor, and he was so frank in his criticisms of that first book, but also gracious and perceptive in his esteem, that Bridges had begun to depend on Hopkins’s judgments as the only ones he trusted.” (p. 143)
This Jesuit is decidedly vulnerable and human. When at the age of 33, and after nine years in the Society, he was ordained and his parent did not show up he “finally permitted himself to fume over his family’s shunning him, thinking, This is my wedding and they aren’t here.” (p. 157)
This fierce, austere Jesuit also has a surprisingly tender side, when he was (briefly) in parish work his parishioners were disarmed because they “considered Hopkins a highbrowed intellectual whose sermons were either sentimental or perplexing, and who are once sinned to the pastor’s ears by calling Jesus a ‘Sweetheart.’” (p. 163)
He drifts from manic phases in which he composes music “even though he could only play the piano with stabbing fingers” to moments when there “he slogged through his workday as if he’d been sleepless. To his mother, he wrote, ‘I am going to pieces with a cold,’ or ‘I am in a sort of languishing state of mind and body, but hobble on.’” (p. 177-8) By the time he is only 44, these bouts of depression are worse. “Welts of insomnia pouched his eyes, and yet his white face was still boyish.” (p.194) This is also the time in which he confesses “not just of sins such as petulance, laziness, and rash judgment but of shutting off the grace of inspiration by not paying enough attention to his poetic gift.” (p. 202)
And then… but why not read the rest in Exiles – A Novel by Ron Hansen, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
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Note: An English Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889) was not widely known as a poet until after he died; his collected poems were first published in 1918 at the instigation of his friend Robert Bridges, who was at the time the Poet Laureate of England. Hopkins was both an observant lover of natural beauty and a deeply faithful man who suffered from depression, themes that reoccur in many of his poems. As a poet, he was also an experimenter, relying on alliteration, innovative meter, and created words, as well as on traditional forms such as the sonnet. The full text of Hopkin's poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland" can be found at http://www.bartleby.com/122/4.html [1]
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Next in Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Fiction – Enrique Joven’s The Book of God and Physics – A Novel of the Voynich Mystery
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Note to the Reader:
– This series represents a tiny selection from a wide range of possibilities.
– igNation invites readers to describe a Jesuit character they have encountered in fiction. Tell us about the character in 300 words or less and send your article to pungente@sympatico.ca [2]
– igNation welcomes your articles!