To Re-Enchant the World
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. —"Inversnaid," by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The earth and all things in it were created by God. We know this, and yet it seems that the natural world has lost much of its magic and mystery for us. It has been stripped of its divine beauty and holiness, or rather, we have cast aside our reverence for God’s creation and with it the ability to perceive the natural world as it truly is. Jesus said, “For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them” (Matt. 13:15). It almost feels as if Christ’s accusation is referring specifically to our day. Many theological, scientific, historical, and sociological stories have attempted to explain how and why our attitudes toward creation have worsened over the centuries, and these commentaries are important. But as valuable as a clear picture of our ancestors’ mistakes and misdeeds is, even more essential is figuring out what to do going forward. How can we regain the capability to see the earth as God sees it and to hear the song of creation? We must find an example to emulate, a guide with these skills, someone we can follow and learn from.
We live in a day in which consumerism and greed form the core of the globally dominant, Western economic philosophy and culture. Poets and other writers as well as spiritual leaders have long lambasted the mechanization and industrialization of the workforce and the subjugation and commodification of the natural world. We hear echoes of this complaint in the Latter-day Saint scripture. In the Book of Moses, for example, the earth is alive and is pained by our destructive and pollutive actions:
And it came to pass that Enoch looked upon the earth; and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying: Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me? When will my Creator sanctify me, that I may rest, and righteousness for a season abide upon my face? (Moses 5:48).
From the beginning, Latter-day Saint leaders have sought to remind us that the earth is not ours. Brigham Young stated that “Not one particle of all that comprises this vast creation of God is our own. Every thing we have has been bestowed upon us for our action, to see what we would do with it, whether we would use it for eternal life and exaltation or for eternal death and degradation.” Current church president Russell M. Nelson reiterated Brigham Young’s thoughts on the matter: “As beneficiaries of the divine Creation, what shall we do? We should care for the earth, be wise stewards over it, and preserve it for future generations.” We have a responsibility to push back against the ceaseless pollution and destruction of God’s creation and to cultivate and protect it. This is of paramount importance not just for future generations of human beings, but for the sake of all living things.
Despite the scriptural and prophetic counsel admonishing us, as followers of Christ, to treat the natural world with the same loving-kindness and respect that God would in our place, this theme has not been a strong one in Latter-day Saint culture, and, over the years, some of our coreligionists have even (mainly for reasons of political expediency) adopted antienvironmental attitudes. Scripture tells us that God created the earth (Gen. 1–2) and that it is alive (Moses 7), and yet too many of us have adopted the mainstream idea that the earth is a mere object to be used to satisfy our wants. This view is itself a distortion of God’s command that humanity should have dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:26–28).
What does it really mean for us to have “dominion”? Latter-day Saint scholar Hugh Nibley said that “Man’s dominion is a call to service, not a license to exterminate. It is precisely because men now prey upon each other and shed the blood and waste the flesh of other creatures without need that ‘the world lieth in sin’ (D&C 49:19–21). Such, at least, is the teaching of the ancient Jews and of modern revelation.” George B. Handley added that “nature’s intrinsic aesthetic values bear witness of Christ’s love, and therefore we have an ethical responsibility to demonstrate due appreciation. . . . If nature is a witness and a gift of Christ, purely selfish use of nature or misrecognition of its sacred qualities is a sin of considerable measure.” Scholars and prophets alike have indicted us, but how can we repent? How do we turn away from our sins? Being environmentally conscious is difficult and often requires sacrifice and a willingness to oppose those who hold positions of power in this fallen world, those who have the most to lose from a change to the global economic and political order that is wreaking havoc on the earth. As with any form of change, it can be helpful to select a guide on whom to model our actions and ways of thinking, someone who is already walking in the Lord’s way.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844 in Stratford, England, to deeply religious Anglican parents. During his time at Oxford, he studied Classics and began to write poetry. It was also during this time that he made the decision to become a Roman Catholic. Not long after his conversion, he chose to dedicate his life to God and to his brothers and sisters in Christ through ministry, studying to become a Jesuit priest. This change in religious affiliation, while resulting in his estrangement from family, friends, and other acquaintances, was nonetheless pivotal in the development of his poetry and in the progression of his spiritual life. His poetry was deeply influenced by his Catholic beliefs and his dedication to living them.
It is clear upon even a cursory reading of Hopkins’ work that he was on a quest to find and praise God and that he sought to discover the divine in all aspects of life. Indeed, the body of his work seems to suggest that Hopkins believed that God could be found most easily in the tranquil observation of nature. His feelings of wonder toward the natural world, its beauty and complexity, as well as the awe he experienced before the Divine, pervade his work. This is certainly true of his religious poetry and is nowhere more true than in one of his most well-known poems, “Pied Beauty,” which celebrates the varied splendor of God’s creation:
Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
The poem starts by praising God for the “dappled things” of the world. This image is particularly interesting when we consider the meaning of the word “dappled” (i.e., “marked with spots or patches”) together with the scriptural injunction against “spotted” things. The ancient Israelites were commanded to offer sacrifice to God, but to offer up only the most pure animals, which meant those that were healthy and relatively uniform in color, i.e., “unspotted.” The early Jewish Christians of the New Testament built upon this practice, reminding us that Christ, the ultimate and everlasting sacrifice, “offered himself without spot to God” (Heb. 9:14) and instructing us to likewise remain “unspotted from the world” (James 1:27). Hopkins turns this scriptural paradigm on its head, urging the reader to glorify God on account of the existence of “dappled things,” from “couple-colour” skies to “landscapes plotted and pieced,” from “brinded cows” to the multicolored wings of finches to the freckles on the human face. He delights (and wants the reader to delight) in the contrasts, the colors, and the beauty of this world, and to praise God for the gift of creation, to praise God even for those parts of the creation that we, in our human judgment, may feel do not measure up to what we think they should be. Hopkins helps us to see that the “dappled things” of this world, and even the “dappled” (i.e., sinful) people of this world, were also created by God and are likewise saturated with the beauty of creation. Jesus was criticized by the religious elites of his society for associating with the people they considered most sinful, but he pushed back against those criticisms, stating firmly that it was for these “dappled” people that he had come (Luke 5:30–32), for he knew their intrinsic worth and, like a shepherd, wanted all sheep who would answer his call to enter into the fold, their spots notwithstanding. We can gain great insights by reading Hopkins’ poetry in this same spirit.
His poetry is imbued with an intense yearning for spiritual transcendence. This is exemplified in his sonnet “The Windhover,” which embodies the idea of “inscape” permeating much of his work. According to Hopkins, all things have an “inscape,” an essential metaphysical uniqueness instilled in them by God. In this sonnet’s octave, Hopkins portrays what he feels is the eponymous kestrel’s inscape, or the moment when the “windhover” is acting most “windhovery”:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
The poet relishes in the falcon’s most falcon-like behavior; he takes joy in what he perceives to be the falcon’s joy at flying like a falcon. By recognizing the windhover’s inscape, Hopkins is engaged in an act of “instress,” which is the moment when one creature fully grasps the inscape of another. This realization gives the poet a glimpse of the divine, as can be understood in the sonnet’s sestet:
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
From Hopkins’ experience of deliberate comprehension of the kestrel’s core, we can learn how to connect to our fellow creatures in similar ways.
We also see this sentiment in the poem “God’s Grandeur”:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Hopkins tells us explicitly that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” (1.1), that “grandeur” being the inscape of the world as well as the inscapes of all things in it. The poet then warns that the grandeur of God we see in the world “will flame out” (1.2) because we have stopped giving heed to God’s words (1.4) and have given in to a lust for lucre which has pushed us to cut ourselves off from and trample over God’s creation (1.5–8). For ages, prophet-poets have warned against the human tendency to turn our backs on God and bow down before Mammon’s throne. Hopkins raised his voice and joined it to those of his spiritual predecessors to call future generations to repentance and encourage us to turn away from our greed, to respect this world God has made for us, to stop treating it like our personal cash box and trash bin, and to recognize that rather than being the owners of this earth, we are its stewards and should act accordingly. Reading Hopkins, we can come to feel that we are not proprietors of the earth but custodians. Hopkins’ poetry is more important today than it has ever been before.
For decades, scientists concerned with the health of the natural world have acted as secular prophets in our culture, inviting, demanding, and pleading with the people of the world and our leaders to repent of the wickedness being perpetuated in the name of progress. We have been admonished to lessen our habits of consumption, pollution, and destruction, but their words have fallen on deaf ears. The call to willingly give up conveniences and take on the hardships to pay the necessary price to fulfill our duty as stewards is a tough sell to a civilization instilled with the belief that the earth is nothing more than a commodity, and that human beings are entitled to continuously consume its resources for the gratification of personal and societal whims. All knowledge comes from God, including modern scientific knowledge. The knowledge we have gained through science has improved the human condition immensely, especially in how it has helped to make us relatively free from the ravages of famine, sickness, and plague. However, we cannot ignore the fact that modern science has also been used to great effect in the battering of the earth, improving our capacity to lay waste to this world and its inhabitants in the satiation of our hatred, lust, and greed. For example, the same scientific method that human beings have used to develop new technologies to increase agricultural output and reduce hunger has also been used to help us more efficiently decimate vast swaths of forests and other natural habitats. Modern science is only a tool that can be used for good or evil, depending on the motivations of its wielder, and so cannot be the solution to the problems that we face.
The culture of the Western world (which has become the foundation of today’s global culture) has been focused for too long on expansion, acquisition, and consumption. Our ancestors were told to seek after more land and resources. While the quest for land acquisition is no longer a major focus, the spirit of the quest has remained; our culture still teaches us to always seek more. We are constantly inundated with the message that we should be actively pursuing more of whatever it is that we want—more promotions, more money, more stuff; more prestige, more power, more fame. We should always be moving upward, in the name of progress and development. The easiest and quickest way to gain more and to enrich ourselves has been through the exploitation of our brothers and sisters and this earth that God created for us. Just as it did in the time of Enoch, the earth is crying out; it is singing a dirge of pain, but many of us don’t have “ears to hear” it (Matt. 11:15). Our culture has taught us to tune out and ignore the song of the earth, but if we are ever to right the wrongs that our ancestors have committed (and that we continue to commit) and help the earth to heal, we will need to regain the ability to hear God’s creation.
We need a guide that can help us to re-enchant the world—in the literal sense of the word “enchant,” that is, to help us relearn the song of creation so that we may harmonize our desires with the will of God. We need to be retaught the capacity to see God in both the catastrophes and the eucatastrophes of life. We need to reacquire the faculty to recognize the inscape of all our fellow creatures, both human and otherwise, so that we may see the inherent godly beauty that lies at the heart of creation. We need to rediscover the ability to see the beauty in life’s dappled things and in God’s “dappled” children. Hopkins’ poetry can help us to see this world for what it truly is: a gift from God, populated by creatures that we, as the earth’s caretakers, are responsible for safeguarding and nurturing.
All poems taken from W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, eds., The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
D.A. Cooper is a poet and writer from Houston, TX. He recently completed his MFA in poetry at the University of St. Thomas, Houston.
Art by Anna Atkins.