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from Part III - Religious, Theological, and Philosophical Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2025
Gerard Manley Hopkins embraced Roman Catholic sacramental theology. Grace, which creates recipients anew in their deepest selves, may be offered within sacraments or outside of them. A valid sacrament establishes a formal relationship; this ‘thing-which-is-also-a-sign’ distinguishes sacraments from other sources of grace. The words consecrating the Eucharist, Hopkins believed, literally embody Christ upon the altar – unlike poems. Sacraments require physical, not merely intellectual elements. Poems are more like ‘sacramentals’, which do not establish a reality without intellectual recognition and willed assent. Keenly aware of the relation between nature’s physicality and the physicality of sacraments, Hopkins did not confuse natural awareness of God’s goodness with sacramental grace, and rejected pantheism. He developed his personal vision of Catholic sacraments and their relation to Nature through Tractarians like Henry Parry Liddon, as well as the aesthetics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Ruskin.
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