Charles Darwin, too, loved what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “dappled things”:
. . . rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim, fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls,
finches’ wings . . .
The Origin of Specifies is a marvelous book, an endless catalog of tiny details. The sensitivities of the foot-stocks of leaves. The mutual fertilization of three varieties of gourds. The way certain species of beetles blow away in the wind. Orchid petals, barnacle shells, the twists and turns of worms in the rich earth—and finch wings, too, and the beaks of finches.
Darwin and Hopkins loved little things. They were “beholders,” Elizabeth Johnson says, they looked patiently and hard, and from the dappled and the tiny they inferred the presence of something far greater—for Darwin the vast sweep of evolution, for Hopkins the informing presence of God in the world.
It’s a startling comparison.
There’s no record of them meeting, but we can imagine it, Hopkins coming to pay his respects at Darwin’s rambling house in county Kent, say in 1880, Darwin an old man, 71, tall and a little heavy, with his famous white beard, Hopkins much younger, 36, slight and mercurial.
The distinguished scientist, the great man of his age, and the obscure Jesuit priest, the poet, unpublished and unknown.
Darwin had the biases of his class against Catholicism, but he was a gentle and courteous man, unfailingly gracious. Hopkins was beloved by his friends, quick to laugh.
They were both upper-class Victorian gentlemen–though it’s in this that their real difference lies.
Darwin was liberal in his politics and revolutionary as a scientist, but he was at home in the ordered world of upper-class Victorian England, he belonged there, and I think he couldn’t help but imagine God as a king. That’s why he rejected him. If God is a monarch, and a monarch reigns over an ordered world, and nature is in fact random and intricately branching, God must not exist.
It was a principled conclusion, a matter of intellectual integrity, given the evidence and the way Darwin believed he had to interpret it, whether he wanted to or not.
But Hopkins believed he had experienced God, had known him, at least for brief moments now and then, and the God he’d glimpsed wasn’t a king at all or a king in the way Darwin seems to have assumed.
Hopkins was an educated English gentleman, a product of the same world Darwin grew up in, and when he saw a sparrowhawk hovering over a field, and was struck by its beauty and its force, it was only natural for him to describe it at first as a “dauphin” or prince, a “chevalier” or knight.
But in that moment of recognition and connection, in his great poem, “The Windhover,” something radically different suddenly happens. The hawk “buckles,” it dives, straight down to earth, and as it dives in the morning light, a fire “breaks” from it, a fire “a billion times lovelier” than all our conventional images and terms. Suddenly the hawk becomes both the figure of Christ and Christ himself, breaking into the world, shattering all our expectations.
Hopkins didn’t believe in God because of his power but because of his love, what in a letter to a friend he calls “the incredible condescension of the Incarnation”:
that our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion, etc, or the insults, as the mocking, blindfolding, spitting etc, but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.”
God may be omnipotent, but he has descended from that height and obliterated that distance. He has given away his power.
He doesn’t dominate our life. He dies into it.
Buckle: both to collapse, to fall, and to bring things together. To cinch.
There is great strength here, too, of course, “brute valour” and “act.” The hawk is diving to strike its prey. And we are the prey.
At the end of the poem Hopkins describes the way a plow smooths the plowed-up soil in the furrows and causes it to shine–or the way the “blue-beak embers” in a fire “fall, gall themselves, and gash-gold-vermillion.” In Christ God allows himself to be plowed up, galling himself, falling, and in that galling and “gashing” a red and golden light shines through the ashes.
The crucifixion and the resurrection. Death leading to new life. The joy of things and their sorrow. All of it.
God isn’t a monarch but a mother, Hopkins says in “God’s Grandeur,” and she “broods” over the world as a mother dove broods over her chicks, “with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
Brood: a family of young.
To brood: to think deeply. To worry. To grieve.
This isn’t a rational deduction, the result of careful study. Darwin worked slowly and patiently amassing evidence, and his conclusions, when they finally come, are measured. Hopkins’ faith is instantaneous and ecstatic. He believed he had encountered the Lord, had known him and been known by him, and the only way he could express his joy and his hope is through the richness of image.
He couldn’t explain it, he couldn’t prove it, he wasn’t always sure of what he had experienced. He knew great sadness and loss. He knew the darkness. Sometimes he describes an indifferent universe, entirely unconcerned with us, the universe Darwin left us all to face.
But then a sparrowhawk hovers above a field, in the bright morning light.
And then it buckles. It dives.
A billion times lovelier.