The Art of New Creation

Trajectories in Theology and the Arts

Jeremy Begbie, Daniel Train, W. David O. Taylor, Jeremy S. Begbie, Daniel Train, W. David O. Taylor

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781514003275
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Literatura y artes en el cristianismo

The biblical themes of creation and new creation are inextricably bound to each other. For the God who created the world is the same God who recreates humanity in Jesus Christ and the same God who promises a new heaven and a new earth.How might the relationship between creation and new creation be informed by and reflected in the arts? This volume, based on the DITA10 conference at Duke Divinity School, brings together reflections from theologians, biblical scholars, and artists to offer insights on God's first work, God's future work, and the future of the field of theology and the arts.The Studies in Theology and the Arts? series encourages Christians to thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music, poetry, literature, film, and more.

PART I

SOUNDINGS

1

In God’s Good Time

Poetry and the Rhythms of New Creation

Devon Abts

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

EPHESIANS 5:15-16 KJV

The biblical proclamation of a “new creation” is, among other things, an assertion that the created order exists in a liminal temporal space between the event of the resurrection and the as-yet-unrealized promise of eschatological fulfillment. According to the New Testament authors, past, present, and future are united in the risen Body of Christ (Eph 1); those who are “in Christ” already belong to the new creation (2 Cor 5:17) and are therefore able to “walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). At the same time, Jesus’ followers remain embedded in finitude, joining the rest of creation in “eager longing” for the day when God will deliver the whole created order from “bondage to decay” (Rom 8:19, 21). In other words, the Christian life exists in a “dialectical tension” between the reality of entropic finitude, on the one hand, and the hope of life in eternity, on the other.1 In light of all this, the injunction to “redeem the time” in Ephesians 5 might be seen as a summons to participate in an ongoing process of transformation by learning how to inhabit the vital rhythms of new creation.

The outbreak of Covid-19 precipitated a seismic disruption to our lived experience of time. Deprived of the usual temporal markers—from daily commutes to family holidays—many of us found ourselves rethinking how we understand and relate to time, both individually and collectively. The shock of this rupture in our temporal perception has been compounded by the degree to which our familiar rhythms had already become “in bondage to decay.” As Charles Taylor observes, human beings in the modern West are generally accustomed to operating in a “thick environment of measured time,” which is “both the condition and the consequence” of our pathological obsession with market production, a perceived need “to make the best of time, to use it well, not to waste it.”2 Our lives are tightly regulated around clocks and calendars: a full schedule is a moral achievement, and productivity the measure of success. Yet in this scheme, a subject has no real agency; she is driven by the coercive pressures of time into a state of inertia.

Thus, it is unsurprising that this dramatic rupture in time has exposed a range of menacing fault lines deep within the strata of our common life. The divisions are not new; rather, the exigencies of the moment have merely exacerbated longstanding structural inequalities: racial, economic, and gender hierarchies, to name a few examples. These disparities are borne of a diseased social imagination that serves existing systems of power rather than the needs of God’s beloved creation. In light of present circumstances, Christians are called upon to consider what it might look like to embody the rhythms of the new creation as a mode of protest against such moral and spiritual inertia. How might we “redeem the time” in the midst of such myriad convergent crises?

This essay draws on the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins in order to consider how the notion of poetic rhythm might provide an apposite grammar for theological discourse about what it means to live into the promise of a new creation here and now. Importantly, my arguments are predicated on an understanding that human language is inextricably bound up with the circumstantial pressures and contingencies that shape our lives, and that scrutinizing our verbal habits can therefore help us understand and navigate the broader matrices of created experience. Hopkins is an exemplary test case for this argument, for his most profound and original theological insights are inseparable from the means by which they are communicated: they are registered “in the density of the medium.”3

In order to appreciate the theological achievement of Hopkins’s rhythmic innovations, we must first consider how his lyrical genius nourishes, and is reciprocally nourished by, a highly original theology of language. In what follows, I begin by tracing the broad contours of this underappreciated aspect of his thought, focusing especially on the way that the Victorian poet invites us to conceive of the verbal medium as concretely constituted by the interplay of sin and grace in ordinary circumstances. Having laid this theoretical foundation, I then proceed to shine a light on how the poet negotiates the spiritual exigencies of language in his great ode, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Ultimately, I contend that Hopkins strives to incarnate the rhythms of the new creation in the dense medium of his art through a vitalizing ethic of stress.

RHYTHMS OF SIN AND GRACE: HOPKINS’S THEOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

Hopkins’s entire theological worldview is predicated on an understanding that everything in creation is generated and sustained by the a priori gift of divine grace. Therefore, we may begin our investigation of his theology of language by examining how he translates this theological conviction into a linguistic principle through his enigmatic theories of inscape and instress. First, however, it is important to remember that Hopkins never defined either term; in fact, his references to both are generally unsystematic. He employs them variously, sometimes as nouns, sometimes as verbs, and each coinage holds together myriad ontological, linguistic, and spiritual inflections. While I cannot fully excavate the manifold layers of Hopkins’s terminology here, I do hope to elucidate a fresh understanding of their significance for his theology of language. By resisting the urge to impose a precise definition on either concept, we will be able to see more clearly how the poet’s terminology loosely articulates a compelling vision of grace as the inexhaustible divine gift that sustains and vitalizes word and world alike.

According to Hopkins, each created form is inwardly marked by its inscape, an “individually-distinctive beauty”4 that distinguishes “each mortal thing” (“As kingfishers catch fire,” line 5) or pattern in creation from all others.5 Importantly, Hopkins stresses that its beauty is more than material: it springs from the vital depths of Being itself.6 Thus, to perceive an inscape is to glimpse some aspect of reality that is normally “buried away” from sight: “Unless you refresh the mind from time to time,” the poet writes, “you cannot remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.”7 Yet he also declares, “the world is full of inscape,” and if we had eyes to see “it could be called out everywhere.”8 Thus, while most critics stress distinctiveness as inscape’s primary characteristic, my more modest proposal is that this term captures Hopkins’s astonishment at the beauty of finite things encountered in their irreducible otherness. Correspondingly, it also captures the poet’s sense of wonder at belonging to a universe that is filled to bursting with endlessly differentiated forms, each one in touch with the vital depths of Being. It is therefore highly significant that he names inscape as “the very soul of art”9 and “the essential and only lasting thing in poetry.”10 By placing this conceptual term at the center of his poetic theory, Hopkins ascribes the same sense of excess and inexhaustibility to language itself. In sum, I would suggest that inscape expresses the poet’s supreme delight in the infinite, inexhaustible otherness that indwells each finite form and each verbal expression in their depth and density.

Inscape is upheld by instress, a vital pulse that surges within and between things, inwardly sustaining inscapes and outwardly generating relations between them. In other words, instress acts upon the world in two interrelated ways: on the one hand, it “unmistakably distinguishes and individualizes” things, and on the other it binds them together.11 Importantly, I would suggest that Hopkins derives his concept of instress partly from his understanding of poetic stress, which he describes in a letter to Coventry Patmore as “the making a thing more, or marking it markedly, what it already is; it is the bringing out of its nature.”12 Instress has this same effect on an inscape: it “marks it markedly,” deepening and drawing out or disclosing the “nature” of things without collapsing or reducing their essential otherness. Hopkins therefore frequently characterizes instress as an unsolicited, gracious bestowal—an ontological gift that opens the depths of an inscape to a perceiving subject, who in turn “instresses” the beheld inscape into her own self, thereby deepening the unity of subject and object.13 Yet the perceiver’s capacity to receive this gift is by no means given; it takes an attentive and aspirational imagination to “catch” instress, which only discloses fleeting glimpses of the ontological mysteries that are ordinarily “buried away.”14 Therefore, instress may be described as that which expresses the beauty-in-otherness of inscape as an intelligible reality to be beheld and known—but never wholly exhausted—within the depths of another.

Balancing the inexhaustible otherness of inscape with the communicating power of instress, Hopkins grounds his poetic theory on a principle of unity-in-multiplicity: while inscape preserves the irreducibility of each finite form, instress affirms that all such forms are bound together at an ontological level. Yet I would suggest that what makes inscape and instress so innovative from a theological perspective is the way that Hopkins fuses this evolving ontopoetic vision with an understanding of divine presence in order to approximate a distinctively pneumatological theology of grace. For the Jesuit Hopkins, self-being is perfected when we fuse our inscape to Christ,15 who makes “New Nazareths in us” (“The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe,” line 60) by the gift of grace. In his retreat notes, Hopkins writes that grace

is any action, activity, on God’s part by which, in creating or after creating, he carries the creature to or towards the end of its being, which is its self-sacrifice to God. . . . It is divine stress, holy spirit, and, as all is done through Christ, Christ’s spirit . . . Christ in his member on one side, his member in Christ on the other.16

Hopkins thus echoes traditional accounts of the Spirit’s role in sanctification: it is “divine stress, holy spirit” that facilitates our transformation—quite literally, in this passage—into Christ. This notion of grace corresponds to instress and is pneumatologically charged: as Hopkins writes in a sermon, “The Holy Ghost passes like a restless breath from heart to heart,” inscribing Christ within his followers.17 In the same way, instress surges both through the world and within ourselves, sustaining each inscape and forging connections between things at their deepest level of being. And, for Hopkins, the deepest level of being is always the Being of God.18

In other words, instress analogically relates each inscape through Christ—which, for Hopkins, means that God is viscerally present in and to the things of this world. This notion of divine intelligibility is one of the most pervasive themes in his poetry: “Christ pla...