“the theology of gerard manley hopkins: from john duns scotus to the baroque,” the journal of...

The Theology of Gerard Manley Hopkins:From John Duns Scotus to the Baroque

Trent Pomplun / Loyola University Maryland

Scholars have long debated the influence of John Duns Scotus on GerardManley Hopkins. W. H. Gardner, in his famous study of the poet, judgedthe influence to be “profound.” While he acknowledged that it would havebeen possible for Hopkins “to arrive at his metaphysical fusion of God theWord and nature without the aid of a specific external suggestion . . . it ismore probable,” Gardner concluded, “that a direct stimulus came from theSchoolman, Duns Scotus.”1 On the other hand, Todd Bender denied thisvery stimulus: “As all responsible critics admit,” he wrote, “the ideas of Hop-kins are fortuitously congruent to those of Scotus rather than derived fromhim.”2 Truth be told, although Bender was right to note that Hopkins coinedthe terms instress and inscape before he read Scotus, his charge that scholarshave been “reticent” to discuss Hopkins’s actual references to Scotus is un-tenable. A decade before Bender issued this charge, Christopher Devlin, SJ,had provided a thorough account of Scotus’s influence on Hopkins in hisedition of the Jesuit’s Sermons and Devotional Writings. Still, most scholarswho have attempted to judge Scotus’s influence on Hopkins have beencontent to ignore Devlin’s work and return to the metaphysical themes,such as haecceity or univocity, that were already adumbrated by Gardner.When scholars do explore theological themes in Hopkins’s writings, theiranalysis rarely gets beyond a general “incarnationalism” or “sacramental-ism.” At any rate, few studies of Hopkins’s theology of the Incarnation orthe sacraments have dared to follow Christopher Devlin, SJ, into the Latintexts of the Subtle Doctor to determine the depth of his influence on Hop-kins, much less intoHopkins’s other theological sources, and this negligencehas given rise to a standard narrative about Hopkins’s ill-fated career as a

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1 W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins ð1844–1889Þ: A Study in Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relationto Poetic Tradition, 2 vols. ðLondon: Oxford University Press, 1949Þ, 1:21.

2 Todd K. Bender, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Classical Background and Critical Reception of HisWork ðBaltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966Þ, 38.

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theologian in the Society of Jesus. It is broadly assumed that the thought ofScotus was “obscure and suspect” when Hopkins wrote, or even that Hop-kins was drawn to Scotus because the Franciscan “had been marginalizedand rejected over time.”3 Some earnest Thomists, obviously embarrassed byHopkins’s Scotism, have tried to deny it.4 ðIt appears, in many twentieth-century Catholic circles, that the affection for John Duns Scotus is thelove that dare not speak its name.Þ It is likewise assumed that Hopkins“failed” his theological examination in July 1877 because he was Scotistand his teachers were Suarezian. Christopher Devlin, for example, at-tributed Hopkins’s failure “to the fact that Suarez and Suarez only wastaught at St. Beuno’s in his time.”5

In what follows, I will argue that both aspects of the standard narrativeare wrong. First, Scotus’s thought was neither “obscure” nor “suspect” dur-ing Hopkins’s day. Scotism was in the air, so much so that it would havebeen quite impossible for Hopkins not to have caught a whiff of it, or eveninhaled large quantities of the stuff. If anything, Scotism was the statusquo. Second, if we closely examineHopkins’s theology in light of its baroqueprecursors, we will be forced to conclude that there is little reason to thinkthat Suarez ruled the roost. In fact, I think we will have every reason to thinkthat the opposite is true. A closer look at Hopkins’s theology will reveal thathe failed his theological exam not because he was Scotist and his examinerswere Suarezians, but rather because he was Suarezian and his examinerswere Thomists. Not to put too fine a point on it, I will argue that we havereason to believe that Hopkins was among the very first English victims ofa continental neo-Thomism. I will advance this reading in three parts: ð1Þ asurvey of Scotism in England in the decades before Hopkins’s examination;ð2Þ an outline of the theological elements of what Hopkins called the “GreatSacrifice”; and ð3Þ a detailed analysis of the baroque theological trends thatgave rise to Hopkins’s theology. An exploration of each of these aspectsof Hopkins’s theology should yield a fuller bibliographical account of his

3 Philip Ballinger, Poem as Sacrament: The Theological Aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins ðLouvain:Peeters, 2000Þ, 105, 107. Compare Norman White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography ðOxford: Clar-endon, 1992Þ, 274–75.

4 R. V. Young, “Hopkins, Scotus, and the Predication of Being,” Renascence 42, no. 1 ð1989–90Þ:35. Compare Arthur Little, SJ, “Hopkins and Scotus,” Irish Monthly 71 ðFebruary 1943Þ: 53.

5 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, vol. 5, Sermons and Spir-itual Writings, ed. Christopher Devlin ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 1959Þ, 292; hereaftercited as S. I will follow the scholarly conventions by citing Hopkins works with the abbreviationsestablished by the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 8 vols. ðOxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2006–Þ; hereafter cited as CW. As this edition is not complete, I will still cite the oldereditions as well. On Hopkins’s relation to other Jesuits at St. Beuno’s, see Alfred Thomas, SJ,Hopkins the Jesuit: The Years of Training ðLondon: Oxford University Press, 1969Þ, 182–83. For afull account of Hopkins’s theological exam, see Joseph J. Feeney, SJ, “Hopkins’ ‘Failure’ inTheology: Some New Archival Data and a Reevaluation,”Hopkins Quarterly 13, no. 3 ð1986–87Þ:99–114. See also Joseph J. Feeney, SJ, “Hopkins in Community: HowHis Jesuit ContemporariesSawHim,” in Saving Beauty: Further Studies inHopkins, ed.Michael E. Allsopp andDavid AnthonyDownes ðNew York: Garland, 1994Þ, 253–94.

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Scotism than has yet been attempted in the scholarly literature, and, whenHopkins’s Scotism is returned to its proper historical context, we shouldgain a better sense of the tensions that surrounded the Jesuit’s defense ofthe Subtle Doctor during his ill-fated theological examination in July 1877.

I. SCOTISM IN ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Hopkins, by his own account, appears to have read Scotus for the first timein July 1872. In a journal entry for August 3, 1872, he wrote, “At this time Ihad first begun to get hold of the copy of Scotus on the Sentences in theBaddely ½sic � library and was flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. It maycome to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I tookin any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus.”6 Two passages from theJournals even mention conversations about Scotus. An entry from August27, 1873, recounts that Hopkins “walked with Herbert Lucas by the riverand talked Scotism with him for the last time”—a cryptic text that implies atthe very least that Hopkins had shared his enthusiasm over the previousyear.7 No one as yet has discovered anything Lucas has written about Scotus.A more promising entry can be found for July 9, 1874, where, upon visitingthe Oratory, Hopkins writes, “I met Mr. David Lewis, a great Scotist, and atthe same time old Mr. Brande Morris was making a retreat with us: I got toknow him, so that oddly I made the acquaintance of two and I suppose theonly two Scotists in England in one week.”8 Hopkins also mentions Scotusin a letter to Bridges dated February 20–22, 1875: “I have had no time toread even the English books about Hegel, much less the original, indeed Iknow almost no German. . . . I do not afflict myself too much about myignorance here, for I could remove it as far as I should much care to do,whenever it became advisable, hereafter, but it was with sorrow that I putback Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the library some time ago feeling that Icould not read them now and so probably should never. After all I can, atall events a little, read Duns Scotus and I care for him more even thanAristotle and more pace tua than a dozen Hegels.”9 Of course, the mosthighly charged event in Hopkins’s dalliance with the Subtle Doctor wasthe theological examination he took in late July 1877. It is worth nothingthat Hopkins wrote some of his most famous poems, “God’s Grandeur,”

6 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journals and Papers, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey,2nd rev. ed. ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 1966Þ, 221; hereafter cited as J&P. The Scotusedition consulted by Hopkins is John Duns Scotus, Scriptum Oxoniense super sententiis, 2 vols.ðVenice: Gregorium de Gregoriis, 1514–15Þ. It bears noting, however, that Devlin could nottrace some of Scotus’s passages in this edition of Antonio de Fantis ðcf. S, viiiÞ. This points tothe possibility—if not the likelihood—that Hopkins used a later edition of Scotus, such as thebetter-known Wadding edition of 1639.

7 Hopkins, J&P, 236.8 Ibid., 249.9 Hopkins, CW, 1:242, and The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. C. C.

Abbot, 2nd rev. ed. ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 1955Þ, 31; hereafter cited as LRB.

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“The Windhover,” and “Pied Beauty,” as he anticipated his fourth and finalyear of theological study’s at St. Beuno’s. Hopkins, however, received a “lowpass” on his exam and had his theological training curtailed. Scholars havelong speculated on the possible reasons for Hopkins’s so-called failure intheology. Often they have attributed it to Hopkins’s fondness for the Sub-tle Doctor—a point to which I shall return. In any case, Hopkins’s admira-tion for Scotus seems not to have waned over the years. In another letter toBridges from January 4–5, 1883, Hopkins defends a particular point of histheory of rhyme by alluding to Scotus: “Hereby, I may tell you, hangs a veryprofound question treated by Duns Scotus, who shews that freedom iscompatible with necessity.”10 Still later, on January 3, 1884, Hopkins wrotewhat is often thought to be a veiled self-assessment to Coventry Patmore:“And so I used to feel of Duns Scotus when I used to read him with delight:he saw too far, he knew too much; his subtlety overshot his interests; a kindof feud arose between genius and talent, and the ruck of talent in theSchools finding itself, as age passed by, less and less able to understand him,voted that there was nothing important to understand and so first mis-quoted and then refuted him.”11

The entries in Hopkins’s journals create the impression that Scotism wasrare or tacitly forbidden in England. It was not. The leading lights of GreatBritain in the nineteenth century, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, haddiscussed Scotus’s views on the Incarnation and the Atonement for twodecades before Hopkins read the Subtle Doctor. If we start with the menmentioned by Hopkins and trace the circles of his friends more widely, weshall see that Scotus was not so “passed by” as Hopkins himself imag-ined. Consider Hopkins’s contemporaries. I myself am puzzled by Hopkins’smention of David Lewis ð1814–95Þ, who worked as Newman’s curate atSt. Mary’s and converted to Catholicism in 1846. Lewis edited HerbertThorndike’s Of the Government of Churches ð1841Þ and later translated Nich-olas Sanders’s The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism ð1877Þ but is bestknown after his conversion for translations of St. John of the Cross andSt. Teresa of Avila.12 I can find no trace of Scotism in his writings, but I see lit-tle reason to doubt Hopkins’s judgment that he was a Scotist. John BrandeMorris ð1812–80Þ appears to be a more promising candidate for influenceon Hopkins. Morris, whose habit of remaining in Exeter Tower reading thechurch fathers earned him the nickname “Simeon Stylites,” was a patristicscholar and an orientalist of some renown who also entered the Catholic

10 Hopkins, CW, 2:560, LRB, 169.11 Hopkins, CW, 2:656, and Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. C. Abbot, 2nd rev.

ed. ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 1956Þ, 349.12 Newmanmentions Lewis as one of the friends who visited him on February 23, 1846, as he

left Oxford; John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions,ed. Martin J. Svaglic ðOxford: Clarendon, 1967Þ, 213.


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Church in 1846.13 Morris’s works include translations of St. John Chrysos-tom and St. Ephrem the Syrian, along with more exotic fare such as An Essaytowards the Conversion of Learned and Philosophical Hindus ð1843Þ and the versedrama Taleetha Koomee, or the Gospel Prophecy of Our Lady’s Assumption ð1858Þ.For our purposes, however, his most important work is Jesus the Son of Mary;or, The Doctrine of the Catholic Church upon the Incarnation of God the Son, whichMorris completed in two volumes in 1851. Although Morris expostulated onthe predestination of Christ at some length in the first volume of Jesus Sonof Mary and on Immaculate Conception in the second, his only mention ofScotus comes in a discussion of whether Christ may legitimately be called thesavior of the angels. Morris rightly noted the connection between this theo-logical problem and the celebrated controversy over whether the Wordwould have become incarnate even if Adam had not sinned, but he did notargue for the Scotist thesis at this time. “So far as I am able,” he wrote, “Icannot keep to the Scotist theory, however taking. Sed plus amo discere,quam docere, as St. Austin somewhere says.”14 If we take Hopkins at hisword—and I see no reason why we should not—Morris must have adoptedthe Scotist view at some point between writing this passage and his meet-ing with Hopkins more than two decades later. Still, already in 1851, we seean English Roman Catholic discussing not just Scotus but specifically theScotist view on the motive of the Incarnation that Hopkins will later adopt.John Brande Morris was not the only person in Hopkins’s circle of ac-

quaintances who inclined toward the Scotist position on the motive of theIncarnation. In fact, the Scotist view was common enough to be taught bynone other than William Bernard Ullathorne ð1806–89Þ, the Bishop of Bir-mingham who presided over Newman when he founded the Oratory:

First, then, and at the head of the book of eternal counsel stands decreed the in-carnation of the Son of God. By that decree shall He, in the fulness of time, be “madeof a woman,” that is of a particular and predestinated woman. And shall become achild, that is, He shall become a child of Mary. And thus Mary stands next to Jesus inthe divine decree, as the chosenmediumof incarnation. . . . And, if thusHe choseHisadopted children in Christ, ere the world was constituted; first, and before them all,He chose and decreed the existence and graces of that mother, through whom theSon should come to bring this grace.15

BishopUllathorne bringsmost of the usual prooftexts to bear on the problemof the motive of the Incarnation and even lists Scotus first among the “great

13 Morris is often though to be behind Newman’s allusion to some “occurrences of an awk-ward character” when he returned to Oxford in 1839. See Newman, Apologia, 120.

14 John Brande Morris, Jesus Son of Mary, 2 vols. ðLondon: Toovey, 1851Þ, 1:394. The Au-gustine quotation ð“I should love to learn rather than to teach”Þ is from epistle 193.

15 William Bernard Ullathorne, The Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God: An ExpositionðBaltimore: Murphy, 1855Þ, 61–62.


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theologians of very different schools” who maintained that the hypostaticunion was the object of Satan’s envy.16Here, the bishop shows himself familiarwith the basic contours of arguments in the Scotist school about the predes-tination of Christ and Mary that had come into vogue again with the defi-nition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854.Frederick William Faber ð1814–63Þ, a friend of Lewis and Morris, and ar-

guably the best-known Catholic writer in England at the time, also endorsedthe Scotist view. In The Creator and the Creature ð1855Þ, Faber presented boththe Thomist and the Scotist views as acceptable, but inclined toward theThomist:

There are two views of God in theology, the Scotist and the Thomist. The Scotist seemsto bring God nearer to us, to make our conceptions of Him more real, to representHim as more accessible to our understanding, even while he remains incompre-hensible. . . . The Thomist view, by driving us away from many of the analogies onwhich the other view rests, or by regarding these analogies asmore equivocal, seems toput God further from us, and to thicken the darkness which is roundHis throne. But,if the Scotist view tends more to love, it is exposed to much greater philosophicaldangers than the Thomist. . . . Thus the Thomist view is safer.17

By 1856, however, Faber seems to have decided for the Scotist view of themotive of the Incarnation:

The third view of the Incarnation, and the one assumed throughout this essay to betrue, is the view taken by the Scotists, and by Suarez, and many other theologiansboth ancient and modern. It teaches, that our Lord came principally to save fallenman, that for this end he came in passible flesh; but that even if Adam had not fallenHe would have come, and by Mary, in impassible flesh, that He was predestinatedthe firstborn of all creatures before the decree which permitted sin, that the In-carnation was from the first an intentional part of the immense mercy of creation,and did not merely take occasion from sin, which only caused Him to come in theparticular way in which he came, and was not the cause of His coming altogether.18

The view advanced by Faber in this passage is not quite Scotistic, but it bearsnoting that he believed the teachings of Scotus and Suarez on this score tobe the same. As we shall see, this identification was not as uncommon asone might think during Hopkins’s day. That said, Faber also connected theScotist teaching on the predestination of Christ to the recently-proclaimeddogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception: “It may be added,” he writes,“that the definition of the Immaculate Conception is an additional preju-dice in favor of the Scotist view. For that beautiful mystery was an almostintegral part; or at least a ready consequence of Franciscan theology.”19

16 Ibid., 68.17 FrederickWilliamFaber,The Creator and the Creature; or, TheWonders of Divine Love ðLondon:

Richardson, 1855Þ, 28.18 Frederick William Faber, The Blessed Sacrament; or, The Works and Ways of God, 2nd ed.

ðLondon: Richardson, 1856Þ, 429.19 Ibid., 430.


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In The Blessed Sacrament ð1860Þ, Faber writes, “It was always part of His in-tention that the Creator should become as it were part of His own creation,and that an Uncreated Person should really and truly assume a creatednature and be born of a created mother. This is what we call the mystery ofthe Incarnation.”20 After a short meditation on the speed of light, the vastdistances between the stars, and the countless suns greater than our own,Faber exclaims, “What an idea this gives us of the grandeur and magnifi-cence of God! Yet we know that all these stars were created for Jesus andbecause of Jesus. He is the head and the firstborn of all creation.”21 TheBlessed Sacrament shows that English divines were aware that Eph. 2:10 andCol. 1:15–20 were often quoted in favor of the Scotist understanding of theIncarnation. It also shows Faber to be familiar with the common Scotisttrope that the angels owe all of their graces to Christ’s merits.22 PerhapsFaber’s most expansive meditation on the motive of the Incarnation isfound in “In the Bosom of the Father,” the opening meditation of Bethlehem:

Thus the predestined created nature of the Word lay everlastingly in the vast Bosomof the Father. It was a human nature eternally chosen with a distinct and significantpredilection. It was the first creature. It is He who in His assumed nature we call Jesus.All angels, men, animals, and matter, were made because of Him and for Him simply.He is the sole reason of the existence of every created thing, the sole interpretation ofthem all, the sole rule and measure of every external work of God. It is in the light ofthis predestination of Jesus that we must regard all life, all science, all history, all thegrandeurs of angels, all the destinies of men, all the beautiful geography of thisvariegated planet-garden, all the problematical possibilities of world-crowded space.Our own little tiny life, our own petty orbit, like the walk of an insect on a leaf, lies inthe soft radiance of the predestination of Jesus.23

Whatever one makes of these reflections, it cannot be denied that Ul-lathorne and Faber were mainstream Catholic voices in Victorian England.And yet one can expand the circle of Scotist sympathizers considerably. Forexample, two men whom Hopkins mentions in his journal on the occasionof Canon Liddon’s sixth Bampton lecture can be shown to have had someknowledge of Scotus, as can Liddon himself.24 The first, William Lockhartð1820–92Þ, actually precededNewman into the Catholic Church in 1843 andtook simple vows as a Rosminian on April 7, 1844.25 Although I have not yetfound an explicit confession of Scotism on Lockhart’s part, we might notethat it was the view of his master Antonio Rosmini ð1797–1855Þ.26 Indeed,

20 Frederick William Faber, The Precious Blood; or, The Price of Our Salvation ðLondon: Rich-ardson, 1860Þ, 9.

21 Ibid., 11.22 Ibid., 15.23 Frederick William Faber, Bethlehem ðLondon: Richardson, 1860Þ, 29.24 Hopkins, J&P, 135.25 Lockhart’s conversion precipitated something of a crisis in the then-Anglican Newman.

Compare Newman, Apologia, 162–64.26 Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, Teosofia, Opere edite e inedite, 49 vols. ðRome: Anonima Ro-

mana Editoriale, 1938Þ, 4:256–57, 260–61.


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Rosmini’s Theosophy, which is especially praised in Lockhart’s Life of Rosmini,teaches the Scotist view.27 With the second, Henry Nutcombe Oxenhamð1829–88Þ, we get much closer to Hopkins’s own inspiration. Oxenham,with whom Hopkins exchanged photographs as a token of friendship in1864, had also graduated from Oxford ðBalliolÞ and had been received intothe Catholic Church in 1857.28 A somewhat ambivalent convert who con-tinued to dress as an Anglican ecclesiastic and refused to update his visitingcards after both the Jesuits and the Oratorians refused to acknowledge thevalidity of his Anglican orders, Oxenham endorsed the Scotist view withsome eloquence:

But there is in fact another and far more fundamental, difference between the “sub-tle” and “angelic” doctors, in their way of regarding the Atonement, which, if it didnot at the time exercise so perceptible an influence over their modes of expression,could not but make itself in the long run more deeply felt; for it materially affectedthe relative importance and bearings of the whole question. I refer to their oppositeviews of the primary motive of the Incarnation. This, according to Aquinas, was theredemption of fallen man. If there had been no sin, Christ would not have come inthe flesh; in the prevision of His conception was included the prevision of His cross.Against this Duns Scotus urges, that His human nature was predestined antecedentlyto the Fall, and was the model on which ours was formed; and that Christ would, inany case, have come to be the Second Adam and Head of the mystical body.29

More to our purposes, Oxenham directly linked the Scotist view of the mo-tive of the Incarnation to sacrifice: “We have seen, again,” he writes, “howsome of the greatest fathers, like St. Augustine, are specially careful to pointout the priority of the idea of sacrifice to the idea of sin, and in this they arefollowed by later Catholic divines. Sacrifice is the spontaneous expression ofthe homage due from the creature to his Creator, and the purest Heathensacrifices were those which simply expressed this idea. . . . Without the Fallthere would have been no Passion; perhaps, but only perhaps, there wouldhave been no Eucharist.”30 Oxenham concludes that the Scotist view on themotive of the Incarnation “is anyhow beyond dispute” and reports that it,“though by no means universally accepted, has obtained the general suf-frage of the later Church.”31 Later, after noting that the Scotist view of theIncarnation could have no meaning for those who accepted a Protestantview of satisfaction, Oxenham remarks that as the Scotist view “graduallyspreads among Catholic theologians, the broader and nobler idea of sacri-fice predominates within the Church.”32

27 On Rosmini’s Theosophy, see William Lockhart, Life of Antonio Rosmini, Founder of theInstitute of Charity, 2 vols. ðLondon: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886Þ, 2:144.

28 Hopkins, J&P, 51, 135.29 Henry Nutcombe Oxenham, The Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement: An Historical Inquiry into

Its Development in the Church ðLondon: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1865Þ,100.

30 Ibid., 102–3.31 Ibid., 103.32 Ibid., 106.


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The “nobler” idea of sacrifice mentioned by Oxenham was, in short, onethat emphasized self-offering in voluntary love and service rather than onethat implied penal substitution or some form of necessary “destruction” ofthe sacrificial victim—a theme common to Anglican and Catholic writers ofthe period.33 In this respect, it was not just Scotus’s theology of the Incar-nation that interested the Tractarians and various Catholic ’verts in the yearsleading up to Hopkins’s conversion, but his particular reworking of St. An-selm’s theology of Atonement. It is in this context that Henry Liddon de-livered the 1866 BamptonLectures thatHopkins attended. Liddon, whowasHopkins’s spiritual advisor during his early years at Balliol, lectured on themerits of traditional Christology against the new critical methods of Ger-man theology and unsavory Catholic developments such as the ImmaculateConception. Later, Charles Voysey ð1828–1912Þ, who wrote a theologicalcritique of the lectures attended by Hopkins, deployed Scotus, “one of theprofoundest masters in scholastic theology,” against Liddon’s view of theAtonement, borrowing information fromOxenham and,more tantalizingly,fromBenjamin Jowett’s “OnAtonement and Satisfaction.”34 Jowett ð1817–93Þ,for his part, mentioned Scotus only in passing, but in the broader context ofa proper theology of sacrifice.35 Still, in Liddon and Jowett, we have two ofHopkins’s most important teachers at Oxford whowere familiar with Scotus.Nor was such knowledge particularly noteworthy among Anglican divines.Beyond Hopkins’s immediate circle, the most prominent advocate for theScotist view of the Incarnation among Anglican divines was Brooke FossWestcott, the editor of the controversial Westcott-Hort edition of the NewTestament and Bishop of Durham.36 In his essay, “The Gospel of Creation,”Westcott provides both a historical survey of the problem and a modern ver-sion of the argument taken largely from Protestant scholastic sources. In anattempt at fairness perhaps, Bishop Westcott spent far more time exploringthe arguments of Aquinas and Bonaventure against the opinion, and hisenthusiasm for Scotus—or at the very least Scotus’s style—was muted.37 Still,he quoted and translated the appropriate texts to support his own position

33 For a contemporary summary of the nineteenth-century debate, see AlfredD.Mortimer,TheEucharistic Sacrifice: An Historical and Theological Investigation of the Sacrificial Conception of the HolyEucharist in the Christian Church ðLondon: Longmans,Green, 1901Þ. For a discussion of sacrifice inTractarian poetry, see Bernadette Waterman Ward,World as Word: Philosophical Theology in GerardManley Hopkins ðWashington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002Þ, 76–99.

34 Charles Voysey, An Examination of Canon Liddon’s Bamptom Lectures on the Divinity of OurLord and Savior Jesus Christ ðBoston: Little, Brown, 1872Þ, 371.

35 Lewis Campbell, ed., Theological Essays of the Late Benjamin Jowett ðLondon: Frowde, 1906Þ,245–46.

36 Brooke Foss Westcott, The Epistles of St. John: The Greek Text with Notes and Essays ðLondon:Macmillan, 1883Þ, 270–315.

37 Ibid., 292: “The transition from the calm and eloquent tenderness of Bonaventure to thestern roughness of Duns Scotus is most abrupt. Duns Scotus ðdoctor subtilisÞ is simply the dia-lectician, without grace, without sympathy, inexhaustible in ingenuity, and unhesitating indecision. He is the master without the softening experience of the ecclesiastic.” CompareBrooke FossWestcott,Christus Consummator: SomeAspects of theWork and Person of Christ in Relationto Modern Thought ðLondon: Macmillan, 1886Þ, 99–128.


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and judged that “no fresh arguments appear to have been added to eitherside after Duns Scotus.”38 It is sufficient to note that one of the most famousAnglican divines of Hopkins’s day was a proponent of the view commonlyattributed to Scotus, and his opinions in this regard were so well known that acontemporary who addressed the issue in another context could say, “West-cott’s essay on The Gospel of Creation will be known to most readers.”39

The most surprising advocate of the Scotist view by far should be noneother than John Henry Newman ð1801–90Þ, who mentions the Scotist viewin his translations of Athanasius: “There are theologians of great name,” hewrites, “who consider that the decree of the Incarnation was independentof Adam’s fall; and certainly by allowing that it was not absolutely necessary . . .for the divine forgiveness of sin, and that it was the actual and immediatemeans of the soul’s renewal and sanctification, as we shall see presently,Athanasius goes far towards countenancing that belief.”40 Newman alludes toScotus more directly in his fifteenth discourse to mixed congregations:

TheWord andWisdom of the Father, who dwelt in His bosom in bliss ineffable fromall eternity, whose very smile has shed radiance and grace over the whole creation,whose traces I see in the starry heavens and on the green earth, this glorious livingGod, it is He who looks at me so piteously, so tenderly from the Cross. He seems tosay,—I cannot move, though I am omnipotent, for sin has bound Me here. I hadhad it in mind to come to earth among innocent creatures, more fair and lovelythan them all, with a face more radiant than the Seraphim, and a form as royal asthat of Archangels, to be their equal yet God, to fill them with My grace, to receivetheir worship, to enjoy their company, and to prepare them for the heaven to whichI destined them; but, before I carried My purpose into effect, they sinned, and losttheir inheritance; and so I come indeed, but come, not in that brightness in which Iwent forth to create the morning stars and to fill the sons of God with melody, but indeformity and in shame, in sighs and tears, with blood upon My cheek, and with mylimbs laid bare and rent.41

We do not know which of these sources Hopkins may have known. We doknow that selections from Faber’s The Blessed Sacrament, The Creator and theCreature, and Bethlehem—each of which recommended the Scotist positionon the motive of the Incarnation—were read in the refectory as Hopkinstrained to be a Jesuit.42 We also know that Hopkins’s circle of friends andacquaintances were favorably inclined, if not enthusiastic, about the SubtleDoctor. Although Lewis, Morris, Lockhart, and Oxenham might be con-sidered minor figures today, surely Bishop Ullathorne, Faber, and Newman

38 Westcott, Epistles of St. John, 293.39 Robert L. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, 4th rev. ed. ðLondon: Methuen, 1908Þ, 522.40 John Henry Newman, Select Treatises of St. Athanasius in Controversy with the Arians, 5th ed.,

2 vols. ðLondon: Longmans, Green, 1890Þ, 2:187–88.41 John Henry Newman, Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations ðLondon: Longmans,

Green, 1897Þ, 321–22.42 For a list and analysis of refectory readings at St. Beuno’s from 1868–74 and 1881–82, see

Thomas, Hopkins the Jesuit, 214–45.


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ðamongCatholicdivinesÞ and Liddon, Jowett, andWestcott ðamongAnglicandivinesÞ must be counted among the towering influences in Victorian En-gland. If we have yet to determine the extent of Scotus’s influence on Hop-kins, the textual evidence I have provided above should demonstrate beyondthe shadow of a doubt that Hopkins’s interest in Scotism—notwithstandinghis own protests to the contrary—was neither counter nor original during hisday, much less spare or strange.

II. THE ELEMENTS OF HOPKINS’S THEOLOGY

If Scotus was well known in England in the two decades before Hopkinsread him, he was read principally for his teachings on the motive of theIncarnation, the Atonement, and the Immaculate Conception. What wenow think of as the Subtle Doctor’s distinctive metaphysical and episte-mological doctrines—the univocity of the concept of being, the formaldistinction, haecceity—were little studied and found few advocates. In thissense, Scotism, as a full-fledged “system” of thought, was but little known inEngland during Hopkins’s day; in consequence, scholars have thought theJesuit a bit of a magpie, gathering various bits and pieces of Scotus in or-der to incorporate them into a larger whole conceived only by himself.43

I myself am not inclined to think that Hopkins was a flighty reader or thathe merely browsed Scotus. Devlin has sufficiently demonstrated Hopkins’sdependence on Scotus for ðamong other thingsÞ his preference for intro-spection in proofs for God’s existence; his notion that there is an intrinsicgrade of existence in created things; his corresponding emphasis on God’sinfinity; his distinction between the elective and affective will; his notion ofluxuria as the first sin; his notion of intention; his understanding of hell’spoena; his understanding of the relationship of creation to God’s will; hisadoption of the notion of “indifferent” acts; his supratemporal interpre-tation of the Eucharist; his particular doctrine of the relationship of thethree faculties of the soul; his understanding that theology is a practical,not speculative science; the idea that the persons of the Trinity constitutenot the general, but the specific, end of our natural desire for beatitude;and his notion of sacramental adduction.44 Beyond these specific Scotist

43 In 1948, Anthony Bischoff, SJ, wrote to Christopher Devlin, SJ, “The impression grows onme that GMH was, with few exceptions, a ‘flighty’ reader, a skimmer, one who read nervouslyand with frequent interruptions. He seldom read thoroughly; he read enough to be stimu-lated, then often went off on speculations of his own. Hence, I am inclined to conjecture thathe only ‘browsed’ through Scotus, noting mainly, if not only, those headings that were ofparticular interest to him. . . . As you will, I think, agree, he had come upon his notions ofinscape, stress, and instress long before he ‘discovered’ Scotus.” Bischoff papers ð July 23,1948Þ, cited by Ballinger, Poem as Sacrament, 108–9.

44 S, 122 ðintrospectionÞ, 124 ðintrinsic gradeÞ, 128 ðinfinityÞ, 130 ðelective and affective willsÞ,132–33 ðluxuriaÞ, 136 ðintentionÞ, 141 ðhellÞ, 146 ðvoluntarismÞ, 167 ðindifferent actsÞ, 171, 197ðEucharist ante incarnationemÞ, 174 ðsoulÞ, 175–76 ðtheology as a practical scienceÞ, 186 ðdesideriumnaturaleÞ, 200 ðadductionÞ. This is not to suggest thatDevlin is beyond reproach. For a criticism of


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theses, Devlin identified Scotus’s doctrine of the Incarnation as the “themewhich runs all through his writings on the Spiritual Exercises”45 and identi-fied Hopkins’s essay “Creation and Redemption: The Great Sacrifice,” atightly reasoned meditation on the Three Sins from the First Week of theSpiritual Exercises that was inspired by the Long Retreat Hopkins made inNovember and December 1881, as the point at which the thought of Scotushad its most “decisive effect” on Hopkins.46 With this list in view, any scholarought to consider the attempt to minimize Scotus’s influence on Hopkins acase of special pleading. And, with regard to the scholars who still insist onHopkins’s virtual Thomism, we shall soon see that when Hopkins departedfrom Scotist teachings in his presentation of certain theses in Eucharistictheology, he adopted not Thomist, but rather more Jesuit, theses. Still, al-though most of the elements that make up Hopkins’s theology are broadlyScotistic in pedigree, not all of them are found in the writings of Scotushimself, but more generally in his commentators, who used the Subtle Doc-tor’s notions of Christ’s predestination and Mary’s Immaculate Conceptionto develop a full-blown Scotistic synthesis in the seventeenth and early eigh-teenth centuries.Consider the following passage, which is often quoted by Hopkins schol-

ars:

The first intention of God outside himself or, as they say, ad extra, outwards, the firstoutstress of God’s power, was Christ; and we must believe that the next was theBlessed Virgin. Why did the Son of God thus go forth from the father not only in theeternal and intrinsic procession of the Trinity but also by an extrinsic and less thanperfect, let us say aeonian one?—to give God glory and that by sacrifice, sacrificeoffered in the barren wilderness outside of God, as the children of Israel were ledinto the wilderness to offer sacrifice. This sacrifice and this outward procession is aconsequence and a shadow of the procession of the Trinity, from which mysterysacrifice takes its rise. It is as if the blissful agony or stress of selving in God had forcedout drops of sweat or blood, which drops were the world, or as if the lights lit at thefestival of the “peaceful Trinity” through some little cranny striking out lit up intobeing one big “cleave” out of the world of possible creatures. The sacrifice would bethe Eucharist, and that the victim might be truly victim like, motionless, helpless, orlifeless, it must be in matter.47

This passage, arguably the most important in Hopkins’s theological writ-ings, contains his theology of the Incarnation in nuce. Its constituent ele-ments include: ð1Þ a Scotist theology of the Incarnation as the primumvolitum, the first creature willed by God; ð2Þ a Scotistic ordering of the signa

45 S, 275.46 S, 109. The text of Hopkins’s essay is found at S, 196–202.

his reading of the Scotistic notions of the species specialissima, for example, see Leonard J. Bow-man, “Bonaventure and the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” in S. Bonaventura, 1274–1974,5 vols. ðRome: Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1974Þ, 3:554–57. Nevertheless, I will add further refer-ences to Scotus’s texts that Devlin did not mention.

47 S, 197.


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rationis, the “logical moments” of God’s decree, that places Mary and theangels before the creation of Adam and the Fall; and ð3Þ a Scotistic notionthat Christ “redeems” Mary and the angels by preserving them from sinrather than rescuing them from it. To these Scotist or Scotistic elements, wemay add three more Jesuit emphases: ð4Þ the notion that Christ is predes-tined as a passible, not an impassible, redeemer before the prevision ofthe Fall; ð5Þ an explanation of Christ’s predestination through a particularexploration of God’s knowledge of possible worlds; and ð6Þ a particularnotion of Christ’s continued “humiliation” in the Eucharist. Devlin alludedto the first of these elements, which is properly Scotist, but did not note thefollowing five. In all likelihood, this is because they are not found in thewritings of Scotus himself, but rather in his baroque commentators or inJesuit theologians who adopted and modified Scotist theses for their ownpurposes. Pace Devlin, it is these writings, and not merely the writings ofScotus, that influenced Hopkins’s theology of the Great Sacrifice. Beforeaddressing Hopkins’s baroque precursors, let us consider each of these sixelements of Hopkins’s theology of the Incarnation in turn.When Hopkins identifies Christ as God’s first intention ad extra, he is al-

luding to a well-known Scotist argument about the predestination of Christ:“The predestination of anyone to glory is prior by nature to the prevision ofanyone’s sin or damnation. . . . So much the more is this true of the pre-destination of that soul that was predestined to the highest glory. For itseems universally true that one who wills in an ordered rather than disor-dered way first wills that which is more proximate to the end.”48 Predesti-nation is prior in God’s mind to any foreknowledge of sin. Assuming thatGod acts in an ordered way, Scotus points out that a rational agent alwayswills the end before the means. Cutting back to Hopkins, we read: “There istherefore in the works of creation an order of time, as the order of the SixDays, and another order, the order of intention. . . . In the order of intention‘other things on the face of the earth’ are created after man, the moreperfect first, the less after. From this it follows that the more perfect iscreated in its perfection, that is to say/if perfectible and capable of greaterand less perfection, it is created at the greatest.”49 The two ordersmentionedby Hopkins, the ordo intentionis and the ordo executionis, are also put to greateffect by Scotus: “With an artistic act,” the Subtle Doctor reasons, “the pro-cess in execution is the opposite of the same act in intention.”50 The artist

48 Scotus, Ordinatio III, dist. 7, qu. 3, in B. Ioannis Duns Scoti opera omnia ðVatican City: TypisVaticanis, 2006Þ, 9:287: “Praedestinatio cuiuscumque ad gloriam praecedat ex parte obiectinaturaliter praescientiam peccati vel damnationis cuiuscumque . . .multo magis est hoc verumde praedestinatione illius animae quae praedestinabatur ad summum gloriam; universaliterenim, ordinate volens prius videtur velle hoc quod est fini propinquius.” For the correspondingquestion in Hopkins’s edition of Scotus, see Scriptum Oxoniense super sententiis, 2:17–17v. Unlessotherwise noted, all translations are my own.

49 S, 196.50 Scotus, Ordinatio III, dist. 7, qu. 3, in Opera omnia, 9:289: “Potest dici quod cum in actione

artificis sit contrarius processus in exsequendo ei qui est in intendendo.”


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first has an idea ðthe order of intentionÞ, then he makes the work of art ðtheorder of executionÞ. In human history, the Incarnation of the Word is priorto Christ’s growth in grace and exaltation in glory. In the order of inten-tion, however, God wills the more perfect first, the less after.51 One can seewhy such an illustration might have appealed to Hopkins: it makes God theSupreme Artist and Christ his most consummate work of art. According toHopkins the Scotist, then, God predestines Christ to be the firstborn of allcreation independently of Adam’s sin; Christ is the first “outstress” of God’spower, and all things were created in him and for him.52 It is no surprisethat Hopkins followed the passage above with quotations of Eph. 2:10,1 Cor. 3:22–23, and Col. 1:15–20. Such passages, along with Phil. 2:5–8 andRom. 8:28–30, are well attested in the Scotistic literature on the Incarnation.The structure of the passage into logical moments, with the first outstress

of God’s power being Christ, the second being the Virgin Mary, and soforth, derives from Scotus’s famous ordering of the signa rationis:

Thus this was the order in the divine foreknowledge: first, God knows Himselfunder the aspect of the highest good; in the second moment, he knows all crea-tures; in the third, he predestined some to glory and grace, but with no such act forthose not predestined; in the fourth, he sees all those who will fall through Adam;and fifth, he sees and ordains a remedy for that fall, namely, how these will beredeemed by His Son’s Passion. Thus Christ, as to His flesh, as with the elect, wasfirst seen and predestined to grace and glory before Christ’s passion was seen as aremedy for the fall, in the same way that a physician first wills the health of a manbefore he chooses the medicine that will cure him.53

Scotus has another account of the signa rationis in Ordinatio III, distinc-tion 32: “God is therefore a most reasonable agent. . . . Thus He first lovesHimself in an orderly way, and not with such disorders as jealousy or envy.

51 The Scotist tradition generally readsOrdinatio III, dist. 7, qu. 3, in light ofOrdinatio, dist. 19,and—more to the point—Ordinatio III, dist. 13, qu. 1–4. Compare Opera omnia, 9:385–422.Hopkins appears to have followed this trend. I will provide a more detailed analysis of it below.For the corresponding question in Hopkins’s edition of Scotus, see Scriptum Oxoniense supersententiis, 2:24–26v.

52 Devlin makes one very significant mistake in his interpretation of the Scotist theology ofthe Incarnation when he says, “Had there been no sin of angels or men, the coming of Christwould have been the efflorescence or natural consummation of the creative strain” ðS, 290Þ.Although this might be true in a colloquial sense, Scotist theologians are generally adamantthat the motive of the Incarnation prior to the Fall cannot be thought a “natural” process bywhich the universe is brought to completion. Such an interpretation forgets that the end towhich God predestines Christ remains supernatural.

53 Scotus, Ordinatio III ðsuppl.Þ, dist. 19 ðAssisi com. 137, fol. 161vbÞ: “et tunc iste fuit ordo inpraevisione divina; quod primo Deus intellexit se sub ratione summi boni; in secundo signointellexit omnes creaturas; in tertio praedestinavit aliquos ad gloriam et gratiam, et circa aliquoshabuit actum negativum, non praedestinando; et in quarto praevidit omnes istos casuros inAdam; in quinto praeordinavit de remedio quomodo redimerentur per passionem Filii sui, itaquod Christus in carne, sicut omnes electi, prius praevideretur et praedestinabatur ad gratiamet gloriam, quam praevideretur passio Christi ut medicina contra lapsum, sicut medicus priusvult sanitatem hominis, quam vult de medicina ad sanandum hominem.” For the correspond-ing question in Hopkins’s edition of Scotus, see Scriptum Oxoniense super sententiis, 2:38v–39v.


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Secondly, he wills to have other lovers, and this is nothing other than will-ing that others possess His love. . . . Thirdly, He wills those things that arenecessary to attain His end, such as grace. Fourthly, He wills other thingsthat are more remote for their own sake, such as this sensible world.”54 Suchpassages are the remote sources for Hopkins’s speculation about the orderof God’s actions ad extra. Are there more proximate sources? For now, itsuffices to say that after Scotus almost every theologian who addressed thequestion of the motive of the Incarnation offered a list of the logical mo-ments implied in God’s single decree or labored mightily to banish themfrom the discussion. ðWe will explore a few in the next section.Þ The Scotisttradition generally read Scotus’s argument for the Incarnation into thesecond signum: God, they reasoned, first loves himself. This, of course, isuncontroversial. Scotist commentators, however, generally read the secondsignum to mean God wills another to share his love in the most perfect man-ner. In other words, they saw Christ’s absolute predestination entailed inthe second signum. On such a reading, God first knows himself ad intra, thenhe predestines Christ and others with him to glory, then he decides to givethem grace, and then he creates the world accordingly. God’s first inten-tion ad extra, then, would correspond to Scotus’s second signum, and the restwould follow accordingly.Scotus did not assign the Virgin Mary a place in his ordering of the signa

rationis. As we shall see in the following section, that task was left to hisfollowers. Hopkins, however, following a generally Scotistic line of rea-soning, identifies the predestination of Mary as the second outstress ofGod’s power and—again following a Scotistic line of reasoning—treatsMary and the angels in terms of Christ’s preservative redemption. In an-other place, Hopkins writes,

Christ then is the redeemer in three or four senses: of his own created being, whichhe retrieves from nothingness, when it becomes divine and of infinite worth; of theblessed Virgin not only from nothingness but also from the worthlessness towardsGod or unworthiness of God which is in every pure creature, and this he retrieves todivine motherhood, a status in kind and not in degree higher than what is attainableby any other creature’s correspondence with grace; of the angels not only fromnothingness and worthlessness but also from that shortcoming which all creaturesbut the Blessed Virgin would seem to have from their want of correspondence withgrace, and these, as theRedemptor Saeculorum, he relieves from imperfection; of fallen

54 Scotus,Ordinatio III, dist. 32, inOpera omnia, 10:136–37: “Sic etiamDeus rationabilissime. . . .primo vult finem, et in hoc est actus suus perfectus, et intellectus eius perfectus, et voluntas eiusbeata; secundo vult illa quae immediate ordinantur in ipsum, praedestinando scilicet electos,qui scilicet immediate attingunt eum, et hoc quasi reflectendo, volendo alios condiligere idemobiectum secum . . . Tertio autem vult illa quae sunt necessaria ad attingendum hunc finem,scilicet bona gratiae; quarto vult - propter ista - alia quae sunt remotiora, puta hunc mundumsensibilem, pro aliis ut serviant eis.” For the corresponding question in Hopkins’s edition ofScotus, see ScriptumOxoniense super sententiis, 2:59–59v.


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man, whom he reprieves from original and actual sin. As unfallen Adam’s redeemerhe would fill an office like that towards the angels.55

In this passage, we see the Scotistic ordering of the signa rationis mirrored inan account of salvation history in which Hopkins expands the notion ofredemption to include every act of being brought to perfection, such thatChrist may be said to be the “redeemer” of his own sinless human nature, ofthe immaculately conceived Blessed Virgin, of the good angels, and indeedeven, as the final sentence indicates, of Adam unfallen. Although this maylook like an exotic theological proposition, it is in fact nothing more thanthe notion of preservative redemption beloved by baroque Scotists, such asCarolus del Moral and Montalbanus de Sambuca. Although its root is theSubtle Doctor’s remark that Christ redeemed Mary “in the most perfectmanner” in the Immaculate Conception—compare Hopkins’s remark thatMary was “beyond all others redeemed” ðS, 197Þ—the notion of preserva-tive redemption allowed Scotists to argue that the Incarnate Word was thesource of all grace, including the graces by which God predestines theVirgin Mary, the graces through which God prevents the good angels fromfalling into sin, and the graces in which God created Adam and Eve.According to Hopkins, the Word incarnates first in the “heaven or aeon ofMary” in which he “ismanifested to the angels” before he dwells among us inhuman history ðS, 177Þ. “This took place,” Hopkins avers, “bymeans of somedimension counter to the leading dimension of the angelic action: the mat-ter is most recondite and difficult. At any rate I suppose the vision of thepregnant women to have been no mere vision but the real fetching, pre-sentment, or ‘adduction’ of the persons, Christ and Mary, themselves”ðS, 200Þ. Devlin speculates that Hopkins derived this idea from Scotus’s ownspeculations on the supratemporal nature of sacramental presence—thechief clue being the distinctly Scotist notion of sacramental adduction—and I see no better alternative to this explanation ðS, 307–8Þ. Still, Hopkins isdeveloping themes about Mary and the angels that are far more prominentin baroque theologians than in the writings of the Subtle Doctor himself.If Hopkins sees Christ as the preservative Redeemer of Mary, the angels,

and humankind, we should still point out that the primary point of theIncarnation is not for Hopkins redemption, even a Scotistic “preservativeredemption,” but rather the glorification of God through sacrifice. Here,too, Hopkins is following a baroque Scotist trend more than the writings ofScotus himself, but this time Hopkins has given it a particular Jesuit twist.This is a subtle point, but one well worth noting. The classic Scotist posi-tion, which was maintained by the baroque Scotist tradition, maintains thatGod predestined Christ to be impassible before he foresaw Adam’s sin,such that it was only after Adam sinned that the Word took on the humil-iations of passible flesh. Many Jesuits, however, were not satisfied by this

55 S, 170 ðhereafter cited parenthetically in the textÞ.


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position. They felt it more proper to teach that the Word was incarnate in apassible body from the beginning, such that he would be willing to sufferthe greatest extremes of love should the need arise. They thus taught that Godby his scientia media predestined Christ as a passible Redeemer whose sac-rifice of joy and adoration only incidentally became one also of sorrow andreparation. I will treat this position more fully in the next section of thisarticle. For now, we might simply note that this was a position for whichHopkins had a deep and lasting sympathy. On July 6, 1879, in a sermon atSt. Clement’s Chapel, Oxford, on the Feast of the Precious Blood, Hopkinshad remarked that Christ’s blood “is so especially precious and dear to theEternal Father because it is the blood of the great sacrifice, not only hisdivine son’s blood but that shed in his honour, shed as an act of perfectdevotion, of the utmost piety towards him” ðS, 14Þ. Continuing in a Trac-tarian devotional mode, Hopkins noted, “Religion is the highest of themoral virtues and sacrifice is the highest act of religion. Also self sacrifice isthe purest charity. Christ was the most religious of men, to offer sacrificewas the chief purpose of his life and that the sacrifice of himself ” ðS, 14Þ.Hopkins then offered what we will later see is an exegesis of Christ’s kenosisin St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “As entering church we bless our-selves, as waking in the morning we are told to lift our hearts to God, soChrist no sooner found himself in human nature than he blessed andhallowed it by saluting his heavenly Father, raising his new heart to him andoffering all his new being to his honour. That offering was accepted, buthe was told that the sacrifice must be accomplished on the cross of shame”ðS, 14–15Þ. Hopkins offers this exegesis as an illustration of the nature ofChrist’s sacrifice and indeed of sacrifice in general. As such, Christ’s sac-rifice is the highest act of religion, which itself is the highest of the moralvirtues. It is the act of charity par excellence. What is more important,sacrifice as an act consists of two components, offering and immolation,that Hopkins parses as protological “moments” in the Incarnation. In thefirst “moment” of the Incarnation, the Word no sooner finds himself inhuman nature than he raises his heart to the Father and offers him his verybeing. In the second “moment,” the Word learns that his sacrifice is to beaccomplished on the cross. Note that Hopkins does not say that the Wordlearns that his self-offering will be consummated by an act of sacrifice;rather, he says that his sacrifice will be accomplished on the cross. Sacrifice,for Hopkins, does not consist in immolation alone; it consists both in theoffering and the immolation. For Hopkins, these two “moments” can be—and indeed should be—logically separated. As Devlin says of this passage,“Therefore ‘the Word was made flesh’ in order to express his love for thefather through adoration”—not to redeem us from sin, which is the pur-pose of the second logical moment ðS, 275Þ.Another aspect of Hopkins theology of the Great Sacrifice that develops

Scotism in more Jesuit directions is his emphasis on possible worlds. Recall


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the point in Scotus’s Ordinatio III, dist. 19, above in which Scotus says, “Godknows all creatures.” As we will soon explore in more detail, baroque theo-logians spent no small amount of energy explaining the scope of God’sknowledge. Now consider Hopkins:

And besides the actual world there is an infinity of possible worlds, differing in alldegrees of difference from what now is down to the having nothing in common withit but virgin matter, each of which possible worlds and this actual one are like somany “cleaves” or exposed faces of some pomegranate ðor some other fruitÞ cut inall directions across; so there is an infinity of possible strains of action and choice foreach possible self in these worlds ðor, what comes to the same thing, in virginmatterÞ and the sum of these strains would be also like a pomegranate in the round,which God sees whole but of which we see at best one cleave. ðS, 151ÞLater Hopkins will write, “This suggests that ‘pomegranate,’ that pomumpossibilium. The Trinity saw it whole and in every ‘cleave,’ the actual and thepossible. Of human nature, the whole pomegranate fell in Adam” ðS, 171Þ.The interest in possible worlds is a common feature of Scotism, but Hop-kins gives it the particular twist of Jesuit congruism:

Therefore in that “cleave” of being which each of his creatures shews to God’s eyesalone ðor in its “burl” of being/unclovenÞ God can choose countless points in thestrain ðor countless cleaves of the “burl”Þ where the creature has consented, doesconsent, to God’s will in the way above shewn. But these may be away, may be very faraway, from the actual pitch at any given moment existing. It is into that possibleworld that God for the moment moves his creature out of this one or it is from thatpossible world that he brings the creature into this, shewing it to itself gracious andconsenting; nay more, clothing its old self for the moment with a gracious andconsenting self. ðS, 154ÞGod creates the world in view of our own consent, such that nothing is toseparate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus Our Lord ðRom. 8:38–39Þ—neither the “depth” of our possible actions, nor “anything else in all crea-tion,” that is, in the entire range of possible worlds, the “burl of being.” TheIncarnation opens a cleave in the pomum possibilium, in which all thingsare possible, indeed in which all things work together for our very redemp-tion. Ignatius taught Hopkins to touch, to kiss, and to embrace the groundon which holy persons trod or sat, always with a view of deriving some spir-itual fruit from the practice of the application of the senses. In an echo ofone of his best known poems, Hopkins says of his final meditation duringhis Long Retreat: “All things therefore are charged with love, are chargedwith God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire,yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him” ðS, 195Þ.One aspect of Hopkins’s synthesis that bears a distinctly Jesuit stamp is his

peculiar statement that Christ is “motionless, helpless, or lifeless” during theGreat Sacrifice. Although Scotus’s understanding of the possibility of a su-pratemporal Eucharistic presence is at the root of Hopkins’s Eucharistic


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reading of the Great Sacrifice, Hopkins’s claim about the state of “victim-hood” in all likelihood is taken, at least indirectly, from the baroque Jesuittheologian, Juan de Lugo ðd. 1660Þ. Much ink, of course, has been spilled onthe disputed point of whether the transformation of the res oblata of theEucharist must involve the so-called destruction of the Eucharistic victim. Itis impossible to render these arguments in detail. Suffice it to say thatHopkins adopted one of these theories and derived great spiritual fruit fromit, namely, that of Cardinal Juan de Lugo, who felt that Christ’s voluntaryself-abasement to the condition of food and drink sufficed to explain howtheMass was a true sacrifice. According to Lugo, the abasement by which theIncarnate Word divests himself of the powers connatural to his glorifiedbody in the Eucharist is akin to the very kenosis by which he divested him-self of his divine glory during the Incarnation.56 As such, the double Eucha-ristic consecration effected a “symbolic” or “moral” slaying of the Eucharis-tic victim, although Christ’s impassibility made a genuine physical slayingimpossible. Jesuits who followed Lugo included Juan de Ulloa ðd. 1719Þ andDomenico Viva ðd. 1726Þ in the early eighteenth century.57 Indeed, it seemsto have been almost a fad, as prominent Scotists such as Franz Hennoðd. 1713Þ adopted the position, as did theWirceburgenses ðca. 1766–71Þ.58 Italso underwent something of a revival in the late nineteenth century, beingadopted by prominent neo-Thomists such as Johann Baptist Franzelinðd. 1886Þ and by Hopkins’s own theology teacher, Bernard Tepe ðd. 1904Þ.59I will say a little more about this curious fact in the final section of this essay.For now, let us concede that Hopkins might very well have been a flighty ornervous reader. It is difficult to prove or disprove such assertions. Whateverthe Jesuit’s reading habits might have been, I think we can now see that heseems to have been familiar with several arguments foundnot in the writingsof Scotus himself but rather in the baroque disciples of the Subtle Doctorand their Jesuit interlocutors. Whether Hopkins read such sources directlyor knew them by hearsay is difficult to determine. At the very least, I think itfair to conclude that Hopkins constructed his theology of theGreat Sacrifice

56 Juan de Lugo, Disputationes scholasticae et morales: De sacramento Eucharistiae, disp. 19 ðLyons:Sumptibus Haered. Petri Prost, 1644Þ, 520–66, esp. 532–35, 539–43.

57 Juan de Ulloa, Theologiae scholasticae, tom. 4, disp. 8–9 ðAugsburg: Sumptibus Philippi,Joannis, & Martini Veith, 1719Þ, 287–380; Domenico Viva, SJ, Cursus theologicus ad usum Tyr-onum elucubratus, tom. 7, disp. 5 ðPadua: Ex Typograpfia Seminarii apud Joannem Manfre,1712Þ, 117–27.

58 FranzHenno, Theologia dogmatica, moralis, et scholastica: De sacramentis, tom. 2, tract. 4, disp. 11ðVenice: Apud Antonium Bortoli, 1719Þ, 371–76; Wirceburgenses ½Thomas Holtzclau�, Theologiadogmatica, polemica, scholastica, et moralis: De sacramentis, 3rd ed., tom. 9, diss. 3, cap. 6, art. 2 ð1776;Paris: Berche et Tralin, 1880Þ, 400–403.

59 Iohannis Baptist Franzelin, Tractatus de SS. Eucharistiae: De sacrificio, th. 16 ðRome: Typis S.Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1858Þ, 365–97. See esp. Bernard Tepe, Institutiones theo-logicae in usum scholarum, tom. 4, prop. 45–51 ðParis: Lethielleux, 1896Þ, 314–34, quote at 314:“Essentia hujus Sacrificii adaequate in consecratione consistit; per hanc enim Christus ðqui estvictima animata et vivensÞ incruento modo immolatur, quatenus vi illius sub speciebus panis etvini constituitur, atque ita ad statum rerum inanimatarum reducitur.”


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from different elements provided by them, a fact that seems to have goneunnoticed in studies of Hopkins’s theology.

III. HOPKINS’S BAROQUE PREDECESSORS

Most scholars have been content to ignore the influence of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century theologians on Hopkins.60 If Scotus had indeedbeen neglected or marginalized in nineteenth-century England, it seemsonly reasonable to assume that no one read his commentators or the menwho refuted them. After all, Hopkins himself seems to have idealized thedecline of Scotus. We have already cast doubt on this estimation; still, it isremarkable how easily scholars have allowed themselves to be misled by thespirit of the times, if not by Hopkins himself. Take, for example, the ac-counts of Hopkins by his contemporaries. In 1927, Joseph Rickaby, SJ, aclassmate of Hopkins at St. Beuno’s and a neo-Thomist of some renown,wrote of Hopkins, “In speculative theology he was a strong Scotist, and readScotus assiduously. That led to his being plucked at the end of his third year:he was too Scotist for his examiners. Hemisapplied what Father Gallwey, theRector, used to tell us, that we should stick up to our professors, and holdour own against them in the schoolroom ðnot in the Examination roomÞ.”61Gerard Lahey, SJ, embellished Rickaby’s letter a bit in his 1930 biographyof Hopkins, noting that Hopkins’s “avocation for Scotism eventuallybecame a passion with him ðdespite the fact that Jesuit theologians areThomisticÞ, so that he was often embroiled in minor duels of intellect.”62 Inthat same year, the Dublin Jesuits offered their view of Hopkins: “As aconvert to the Catholic religion he was filled with enthusiasm, but as atheologian his undoubted brilliance was dimmed by a somewhat obstinatelove of Scotist doctrine, in which he traced the influence of Platonic phi-losophy. His idiosyncrasy got him into difficulties with his Jesuit preceptorswho followed Aquinas and Aristotle.”63 Joseph Feeney, SJ, in the mostcomprehensive study of Hopkins’s theological examination to date, con-cluded that Hopkins’s preference for the opinions of Scotus instead of theSuarezian Thomism taught by his professors “probably played a major rolein his failure.”64

I cannot say why Hopkins’s contemporaries believed what they did, but Isuspect they were influenced by debates in the 1910s and 1920s in whichSuarez was created as a modern foil to a neo-Thomist conception of Thomas

60 See, e.g., the remarks of James Finn Cotter, Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of GerardManley Hopkins ðPittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972Þ, 122, 139.

61 Feeney, “Hopkins’ ‘Failure,’” 101.62 Gerard F. Lahey, SJ, Gerard Manley Hopkins ðOxford: Oxford University Press, 1930Þ, 131–

32.63 Fathers of the Society of Jesus, A Page of Irish History: Story of University College, Dublin, 1883–

1909 ðDublin: Talbot, 1930Þ, 104–6 ðquoted in Hopkins, LRB, 319Þ.64 Feeney, “Hopkins’ ‘Failure,’” 108.


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Aquinas. In order words, I believe they based their estimations of Suarezon an anachronism not unlike the one that imagined Scotus to have beenneglected or marginalized in nineteenth-century England. Hopkins’s con-temporaries, to be sure, were familiar with a wide range of baroque theologi-cal writings, but as far as I can tell they did not single out Suarez for specialpraise, even at St. Beuno’s. In fact, it is surprising just how many of Hopkins’scontemporaries were familiar with his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century crit-ics. John Brande Morris, for example, was familiar with Jesuits such as Petaviusðd. 1651Þ and Juan de Lugo ðd. 1660Þ, Augustinian theologians such as HenryNoris ðd. 1704Þ and Gianlorenzo Berti ðd. 1766Þ, modern positive theologianssuch as Giovanni Crisostomo Trombelli ðd. 1784Þ, and minor but interestingfigures such as Cardinal Celestino Sfondrati, OSB ðd. 1696Þ, one of the firstThomists to argue that Aquinas had taught the Immaculate Conception.65

Bishop Ullathorne was acquainted with Suarez, Petavius, and Charles-ReneBilluart ðd. 1757Þ.66 Oxenham cites not Scotus himself but rather the SummaScoti of Hieronymus Montefortino ðd. 1738Þ, and he mentions Petavius andLouis Thomassin ðd. 1695Þ as if no one needed to be told anything moreabout them.67 Even what might appear to us as somewhat bizarre specula-tions, such as Faber’s offhanded remark that it might bemore fitting that theWord assume an angelic nature or Oxenham’s consideration of an EdenicEucharist, have scholastic precursors.68

Here, too, Newman provides a noteworthy example. In a footnote to thepassage on the Scotist theology of the Incarnation in his Discourses to MixedCongregations, Newman quoted a long passage from Domenico Viva’s Cursustheologicus.69 It might seem odd to us today, but Newman turned to Viva with

65 Morris, Jesus Son of Mary, 1:394.66 For an example of Ullathorne’s use of Scotus and baroque scholastic sources, see Im-

maculate Conception, 68.67 Oxenham, Doctrine of the Atonement, 100. The “Summa” of Scotus cited by Oxenham is

actually Hieronymus Montefortino, Summae theologiae Joannis Duns Scoti. 5 vols. ðRome:Ex Typographia S. Michaelis ad Ripam., 1737Þ, a series of Scotus’s passages ðwith a few fromAlexander of HalesÞ arranged in the order of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae.

68 For an angelic Incarnation, see JuanMarin,Theologiae speculativae et moralis, tom. 2, tract. 17,disp. 6 ðVenice: Ex Typographia Balleoniana, 1720Þ, 543–45. Compare Faber, Precious Blood, 10,or ðbetterÞ, the expansivemeditation in Blessed Sacrament, 436–75. This last meditation is a goodexample of the broad influence of baroque theology on the theologians of the nineteenthcentury: Note how many Faber mentions in connection to our topic. For an Edenic Eucharist,see Robert Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, pt. 3, chap. 2, no. 4 ðLondon: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 1986Þ, 135. Compare Oxenham, Doctrine of the Atonement, 102–3.

69 Viva, Cursus theologicus, tom. 6, disp. 3, qu. 1, 221–22: “Thomistae, Vasqu., Amic. utrumquenegant, putantes Christum unice venisse ad nos redimendoes, atque adeo, cessante culpa,Christum non fuisse venturum: contra vero Scotistae docent, Redemptionem non fuisseunicum, & adaequatum Incarnationis motivum; sed etiam ipsam Christi excellentium, & ex-altationem naturae humanae; atque adeo, Adamo non peccante, Verbum incarnandum fuissead habendam in Christo summam complacentiam, & ad exaltandam Naturum humanaminnocentem. Suar. vero docet, motivum Incarnationis esse Manifestationem divinae gloriaeperfectissimo modo, & quia ad hanc conducit, quod ex suppositione peccati Christus sat-isfaciat pro peccatoribus, non supposito vero peccato, Christus exaltet naturam humanaminncoentem; id circo, Adamo peccante, Verbum incarnatum fuit in Carne passibili ad sat-


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some regularity, citing him in connection with debates about whether thepromulgation of Mary’s Immaculate Conception in 1854 required one toadmit a debitum peccati,70 as well as debates about theological method,71 thesupernatural assent to faith,72 and biblical inspiration.73 Although thetheological passages of Viva quoted by Newman are often unremarkable,for Newman the Jesuit represented a freedom that was the very antithesis ofa rigid neo-Thomism. In a justly famous passage about the Jesuit theolog-ical tradition, Newman wrote, “It is plain that the body is not over-jealousabout its theological traditions, or it certainly would not suffer Suarez tocontrovert with Molina, Viva with Vasquez, Passaglia with Petavius, andFaure with Suarez, de Lugo, and Valentia. In this intellectual freedom itsmembers justly glory; inasmuch as they have set their affections, not on theopinions of the Schools, but on the souls of men.”74 Newman witnesses thediversity of the Jesuit theological tradition with approval; whatever the rolethat Suarez was to play in later Jesuit neoscholasticism, we see no evidenceof any such hegemony in Newman’s day. It might also be worth noting thatthe passage of Viva quoted by Newman includes the Jesuits Gabriel Vasquezðd. 1604Þ and Franz Amicus ðd. 1651Þ with the “Thomists” in contradictionto Scotus, on the one hand, and Suarez, on the other. This should alert usto the fact that the theologians of the Society of Jesus did not always takethe same side in this celebrated theological controversy. The great Jesuittheologians of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—Newman’slist is a fair enough sampling—did not merely controvert with one anotheras to how better to defend Thomas Aquinas; they genuinely took differentsides on several issues of lasting theological importance. This fact isnowhere more apparent than in their arguments about the motive of theIncarnation. Arguably, the theologians of the Society of Jesus displayed agreater diversity of views on this topic than on any other—even the cele-brated controversies on the aids to grace or the Chinese Rites—and theirtheological speculation here took on an especially uncommon vigor. Ashort history of this controversy will help situate Hopkins theology of theGreat Sacrifice in the larger history of scholasticism, especially if we attend

70 John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries, 32 vols. ðLondon: T. Nelson, 1961–Þ, 22:225.71 Newman, Apologia, 306.72 Hugo M. de Achaval, SJ, and J. Derek Holmes, eds., The Theological Papers of John Henry

Newman on Faith and Certainty ðOxford: Clarendon, 1976Þ, 37, 139.73 J. Derek Holmes, ed., The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Biblical Inspiration and

Infallibility ðOxford: Clarendon, 1979Þ, 116, 124–26, 128–29, 131, 135, 137–38. Holmes also hasa useful index ð161–62Þ of Newman’s sources, which includes several baroque scholastictheologians. Compare Newman, Letters and Diaries, 15:466, 16:21; Wilfrid Philip Ward, The Lifeof John Henry Newman, Based on His Private Journals and Correspondence, 2 vols. ðLondon: Long-mans, Green, 1912Þ, 2:251.

74 John Henry Newman, Historical Sketches, 3 vols. ðLondon: Longmans, Green, 1896Þ, 2:369.

isfaciendum; Adamo vero non peccante, Verbum incarnatum fuisset in Carne impassibili adexaltandam naturam humanam inncoentem.”


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to each generation’s contribution to this debate. In point of fact, we will seethat each of the elements in Hopkins’s theology of the Great Sacrifice canbe found in the development of this doctrine and that Hopkins’s spec-ulations are not so much original as simply obscured by the passage of time.The two stars around which all other dogmatic theologians circle in the

early modern period are Aquinas and Scotus. The first major Thomist torespond to Scotus in a significant way was Ioannes Capreolus ðd. 1444Þ, whodevised a Thomist ordering of the signa rationis in direct contradistinctionto Scotus’s argument in Ordinatio III ðsuppl.Þ, dist. 19.75 Capreolus wasfollowed by both Franciscus Silvester Ferrariensis ðd. 1526Þ and Tommasode Vio Gaetano ðd. 1534Þ—or “Cajetan” as we know him today—both ofwhom made such significant concessions to Scotus’s arguments aboutChrist’s predestination.76 Capreolus, a “strict Thomist” in the nomencla-ture, denied the teaching of Scotus on both predestination and whetherthe Word would have become incarnate had Adam not sinned but madeone very important and lasting concession to Scotus’s method by devising aThomist account of the signa rationis. Cajetan and Silvester Ferrariensis,“mitigated Thomists” in the nomenclature, conceded Scotus’s point onChrist’s predestination, but denied that it is fitting to think that the Wordwould have become incarnate independent of the Fall. This gives us ourfirst set of distinctions in the scholastic checkerboard: in the sixteenthcentury, there were Scotists and Thomists, with the latter being dividedinto “strict Thomists” and “mitigated Thomists” depending on how theyresponded to Scotus’s innovations.In the first great generation of Jesuit theologians, Francisco Toletus

ðd. 1596Þ, Gregory Valencia ðd. 1603Þ, and Gabriel Vasquez ðd. 1604Þ werestrict Thomists, whereas Alfonso Salmeron ðd. 1595Þ and Pedro Fonsecaðd. 1599Þ were Scotists.77 Of these four, Vasquez would come to enjoy a long

75 Capreolus, Defensiones theologiae Divi Thomae Aquinatis, tom. 5, dist. 1, qu. 1 ðTournon:Sumptibus Alfred Cattier, 1904Þ, 7: “Intelligimus enim primo, quod Deus voluit gloriam suamet bonitatem suam manifestari generaliter in prodcutione perfecti universi; secundo, quod inillo universo voluit esse aliquas creaturas intellectuales et rationales beatas; tertio, quodpraevidit casum aliquarum creaturum rationalium, quas praedestinaverat; quarto, quod de-crevit lapsas reparare per incarnationem Filii sui; quinto, quod voluit animam Christi essepriorem caeteris in gratia et gloria, et omnes alias, et beatitudinem, et gratiam, et re-demptionem earum ordinari in gloriam animae Christi.”

76 Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, Commentarium in tertiam partem summae theologiae, qu. 1, art. 3, inSancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici opera omnia ðRome: Ex Typogaphia Polyglotta S. C. dePropaganda Fide, 1903Þ, 11:15–16. Franciscus Silvester Ferrariensis, Summa contra gentiles liberquartus cum commentariis, cap. 55, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici opera omnia ðRome:Ex Typogaphia Polyglotta S. C. de Propaganda Fide, 1930Þ, 12:178–88. Silvester and Cajetandid not respond to Scotus in the same way, but their differences are not important for tracingthe diversity of Jesuit views on this topic.

77 Toletus, In summam theologiae S. Thomae Aquinatis enarratio; in III partem, tom. 3. q. 1, art. 3ðRome: Typis S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1847Þ, 47; Valencia, Commetariorum theo-logicorum, tom. 4, disp. 1, qu. 1, punct. 7 ðIngolstadt: Excudebat Adam Sartorius, 1597Þ,cols. 70–92; Gabriel Vasquez, Commentariorum ac disputationum in tertiam partem S. Thomae, tomusprimus, disp. 10, cap. 4 ðIngolstadt: Andreas Angermarius, 1610Þ, 205–44, esp. 211–14; Sal-


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infamy in the literature, as there is hardly a Scotist of the last four hundredyears who has not been haunted by the arguments of Vasquez against theScotist notion of an Incarnation in impassible flesh. Francisco Suarez andLuis de Molina ðd. 1600Þ, on the other hand, took rather independentapproaches to the topic, and would come to have much more influence inthe Jesuit literature. Suarez and Molina each added one very importantquestion to the larger whole. Suarez, for his part, devoted a considerableamount of time to the question of whether Christ could have been pre-destined as a passible redeemer before the prevision of the Fall. Althoughthe Doctor eximius answered this question in the negative, it would come toexercise a considerable influence on later discussions, as we shall seepresently.78 Molina, on the other hand, attempted to do away with anydiscussion of the signa rationis altogether through a characteristic analysis ofthe scientia simplicis intelligentiae, scientia visionis, and scientia media.79 Whetherthe attempt to “banish” the Scotist instantia was quixotic or not, Molina didsucceed in influencing a number of Jesuit theologians to abandon signa ra-tionis when addressing this particular scholastic quaestio.In the secondgenerationof Jesuit theologians,GiuseppeRagusa ðd. 1624Þ,

Augustine Bernal ðd. 1642Þ, and Gaspar Hurtado ðd. 1647Þ took the strictThomist line against Suarez and Molina, while a new group of Jesuit theolo-gians including Francesco Albertini ðd. 1619Þ, Franz Amicus ðd. 1651Þ, Juande Lugo ðd. 1660Þ, and Juan Arriaga ðd. 1667Þ conceded elements to Scotuswhile expanding the mitigated Thomism of Cajetan and other Dominicantheologians.80 Other theologians of this second generation, such as Diego

78 Francisco Suarez, SJ, De Incarnatione, qu. 1, art. 4, disp. 5, in Opera omnia, 26 vols. ðParis:Apud Ludovicum Vives, 1860Þ, 17:197–266, esp. 233–39.

79 Luis deMolina, SJ,Commentaria in primamDivi Thomae partem, tom. 1, qu. 23, art. 4–5, disp. 1ðVenice: Apud Minimam Societatem, 1602Þ, 271–317, quote at 291: “Denique cum unicosimplicissimo actu suae voluntatis, praeviaque plenissima deliberatione, seu cognitione circares omnes voluerit ex aeternitate quicquid voluit, sane exterminanda omnino videntur in-stantia Scoti et aliorum, in quibus in statuenda incarnatione, praedestinando Christo cumcaeteris beatis, aut reprobandis caeteris hominibus, Deus unum voluerit ante aliud, aut perscientiam liberam praeviderit unum ante aliud: quae certe instantia adeo obscutam redduntquaestionuem hanc, ut vix, aut ne vix quidem intelligi queat.”

80 GiuseppeRagusa,Commentariorum ac disputationum in tertiam partemD. Thomae, tom. 1, qu. 2,art. 1, disp. 28–30 ðLyons: Sumptibus Horatij Cardon, 1619Þ, cols. 201–86; Augustine Bernal,Disputationes de Divini Verbi Incarnatione, disp. 16, secs. 1–3 ðZaragosa: Sumptibus Regii Noso-comii, 1639Þ, 125–29; Gaspar Hurtado, Tractatus de Incarnatione Verbi, disp. 1, diff. 25 ðAlcala: ExOfficina Ioannis de Villodas, 1628Þ, 62–78; Francesco Albertini, Corollaria seu quaestiones theo-logicae praecipue in primam et tertiam partem Sancti Thomae, corr. 6, qu. 1 ðLyons: Sumptibus HoratijCardon, 1610Þ, 344–53; Franz Amicus, Cursus theologici juxta scholasticam hujus temporis SocietatisJesu methodum de augustissimo Incarnationis mysterio, disp. 7, sec. 2 ðVienna: Balthasar Belleri,1640Þ, 146–47; Juan de Lugo, Disputationes scholasticae de Incarnatione Dominica, disp. 7 ðLyons:Sumptibus Philippi Borde, 1663Þ, 124–38; Roderico deArriaga,Disputationes theologicae in tertiampartem D. Thomae de Incarnatione Divini Verbi, tract. 2, disp. 14–17 ðAntwerp: Ex Officina Plan-tiniana Balthasaris Moreti, 1650Þ, 149–212.

meron, Opera omnia ðCologne: Apud Antonium Hierat, 1615Þ, 15:416–34; Pedro Fonseca, Inmetaphysicam Aristotelis, lib. 6, cap. 2, qu. 6, secs. 2–3 ðCologne: Zetzner, 1615Þ, 186–93.


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Ruiz de Montoya ðd. 1632Þ, Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza ðd. 1651Þ, and JeanMartinon ðd. 1661Þ advocated the Scotist position, while Diego Granadoðd. 1632Þ and Bernard Aldrete ðd. 1657Þ struck their own paths.81 DionysiusPetavius ðd. 1652Þ, who often served as the quarry for would-be patristicscholars in the nineteenth century—witness his use above by Newman,Ullathorne,Oxenham, and JohnBrandeMorris—listed a number of ends forthe Incarnation apart from redemption.82 Petavius implied,much like Suarezbefore him, that these various ends could be integrated into one total cause,although he did not take a side in the celebrated debate. A number of thingsmight be said about this generation of Jesuits: First, in many respects theyrepresent the first wholly Tridentine generation of theologians. When Sua-rez opened his question about the Incarnation in 1590, he still felt obligatedto discuss the views of Ockham and Biel in addition to Thomas, Scotus,Capreolus, and Cajetan. When Giuseppe Ragusa addresses the question in1619, no one tainted by association with nominalism merited a discussion.For truly Tridentine theologians—pace later Catholic historians—nominal-ism was a spirit already exorcised and cast from the Church: the remainingplayers are all metaphysical realists, Thomists and Scotists mostly, with ascattering of Albertists, Aegidians, Bonaventureans, and disciples of Henryof Ghent. Second, the Jesuits of this generation, for good or for ill, begin thelong tradition of treating other Jesuits far more extensively than they treatany Augustinian, Dominican, or Franciscan authors, including Aquinas andScotus. They do not always do so kindly; Molina, Ragusa, Hurtado, Granado,Martinon, Aldrete, Lugo, and Arriaga each subjects Suarez to witheringcriticism.83 Third, not only didmany theologians in this generation adopt thenew distinctions introduced by Dominican theologians in their own con-troversies with Scotists, but this generation of Jesuits also represent the firsttheologians outside the Franciscan andMercedarian orders to be influencedby the hyper-Scotist readings of the Immaculate Conception and the infa-

81 Didacus Ruiz de Montoya, Commentarii ac disputationes ad quaestiones XXIII & XXIV ex primaparte S. Thomae de praedestinatione, ac reprobatione hominum et angelorum, art. 8, disp. 57, sec. 1ðLyons: Sumptibus Iacobi Cardon, 1628Þ, 623–40. Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza, Disputationes deDeo homine sive de Incarnatione Filii Dei, disp. 13 ðAntwerp: Apud MartinumNutium, 1634Þ, 129–77; Jean Martinon, Disputationes theologicae quibus universa theologia scholastica clare, breviter, etaccurate explicatur, tom. 4, disp. 3 ðBordeaux: Apud Guillelmum Millangium, 1645Þ, 71–102;Iacob Granado, Commentarios in priores 65 quaestiones tertiae partis Sancti Thomae Aquinatis deIncarnatione, cont. 1, disp. 1, sec. 1 ðGranada: Antonii Rene de Lazcano, 1633Þ, 62–76; BernardAldrete, Commentariorum a disputationum in tertiam partem S. Thomae de mysterio Incarnationis VerbiDivini, tom. 1, contr. 5, disp. 17–22 ðLyons: Sumptibus Philip. Borde, 1652Þ, 161–265.

82 Dionysius Petavius, Dogmata theologica, tom. 5, lib. 2, cap. 5–9 ðParis: Apud LudovicumVives, 1866Þ, 286–322.

83 For examples of Jesuit theologians of this generation merrily controverting with Suarez,see Molina, Commentaria, 216–22; Ragusa, Commentariorum ac disputationum, 216–21; Hurtadode Mendoza, De Incarnatione, 63–69; Granado, De Incarnatione, 69–70; Martinon, Disputationestheologicae, 96; Aldrete,De mysterio Incarnationis, 164–65; Lugo,De Incarnatione Dominica, 124–25;and Arriaga, De Incarnatione Divini Verbi, 154, 167.


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mous debate about Mary’s alleged “debt of sin” ðdebitum peccati Þ that eruptedin Seville and Toledo in the first decade of the seventeenth century.84 Thedebate over the debitum peccati is older, of course, dating to the earlier debatebetween Juan de Segovia and Juan Torquemada in the fifteenth century, butthese sources remained in manuscript and did not come to influence Mar-iological debates until later. The impetus for this debate in the modern age,certainly among Jesuits, can be traced to the widely discussed Mariologicalspeculations of Chirinus Ferdinand de Salazar.85 With Granado and PedroHurtado de Mendoza, Jesuit theologians began to feel the need to addressMary’s place in the signa rationis; with Aldrete and Arriaga, her place at thetable was guaranteed.86

By the eighteenth century, most of the great Jesuit theologians wereScotists. When Didacus Quadros ðd. 1747Þ addressed the status quaestionis in1734, he mentioned four other Jesuit theologians, Juan de Ulloa ðd. 1719Þ,Vicente Ramırez ðd. 1721Þ, Juan Marın ðd. 1725Þ, and Juan Campoverdeðd. 1737Þ, among recentiores who had extended the arguments of Scotuswell beyond anything up to that date.87 Martın Esparza Artieda ðd. 1689Þ,Filippo Aranda ðd. 1695Þ, Tomas Muniessa ðd. 1696Þ, and Tirso Gonzalezðd. 1705Þ were also Jesuit “Scotists.”88 This generation was all too happy tocriticize Suarez.89 Its Mariological speculations are truly baroque.90 At this

84 Juniper Carol, A History of the Controversy over the “Debitum Peccati” ðSt. Bonaventure, NY:Franciscan Institute Publications, 1978Þ.

85 Chirinus de Salazar, Pro Immaculata Deiparae Virginis Conceptione defensio ðAlcala: Ex Offi-cina Ioannis Gratiani, 1618Þ.

86 Granado, for his part, devoted a separate treatise to the Virgin: Didacus ½Iacobo�Granado,SJ, De Immaculata B. V. Dei Genetricis Mariae Conceptione ðSeville: Apud Franciscum de Lyra,1617Þ. Hurtado de Mendoza ðDe Incarnatione, 177Þ takes Salazar into account. For extensivetreatments of Mary in light of the signa rationis, see Aldrete, De mysterio Incarnationis, 233–65,and Arriaga, De Incarnatione Divini Verbi, 178–91.

87 Didacus de Quadros, Tractatus theologicus de Incarnatione Verbi Divini, disp. 5–6 ðMadrid: ExTypographia Emmanuelis Fernandez, 1734Þ, 212–351, quote at 223–24. Quadros seems to haveconsulted Vicente Ramırez’s De Incarnatione in manuscript. Ramırez’s only printed works arethe Tractatus de divina praedestinatione ðAlcala: Apud Iulianum Franciscum Garcia Briones,1702Þ and Tractatus de scientia Dei ðMadrid: Apud Ioannem Garcia Infancon, 1708Þ. For theother figures Quadros mentions, see Ulloa, Theologiae scholasticae, tom. 5, disp. 1, 5–52; JuanMarın, Theologiae speculativae et moralis, tom. 2, tract. 17, disp. 6 ðVenice: Ex Typographia Bal-leoniana, 1720Þ, 538–47; and Juan Campoverde, Tractatus de Incarnatione Verbi Divini, tom. 2,disp. 9 ðAlcala: Apud Iulianum Franciscum Garcia Briones, 1712Þ, 133–226.

88 Martın de Esparza Artieda, Cursus theologicus, tom. 2, lib. 9, qu. 17 ðLyons: Sumptibus PretiBordi, 1685Þ, 243–45; Filippo Aranda, De Divini Incarnatione et redemptione generis humani, lib. 3,disp. 1–2 ðZaragoza: Sumptibus Regii Nosocomii, 1691Þ, 261–340; Tomas Muniessa, Disputa-tiones scholasticae de mysteriis Incarnationis et Eucharistiae, disp. 6 ðBarcelona: Ex Typis IosephiLlopis, 1682Þ, 133–74; Tirso Gonzalez, Tractatus theologicus de certitudinis gradu quem infra fidemnunc habet sententia pia de Immaculata B. Virginis Conceptione, disp. 8 ðDillingen an der Donau:Sumptibus Ionnis Caspari Bencard, 1690Þ, 220–27.

89 Compare Viva, Cursus theologicus, 222, 244, 250, Campoverde, De Incarnatione Verbi Divini,138, 141, Ulloa, Theologiae scholasticae, 5:10, and Marın, Theologiae speculativae et moralis, 2:541.

90 Jesuit theologians of the late baroque era regularly argued that Mary’s grace exceeded thegraces of all angels and other human beings combined, save Christ alone. Juan Marın, for


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point, too, Jesuit theology achieved a peacock-like variety by combiningbroadly Scotistic concerns about the predestination of Christ andMary withmore typically Jesuit discussions of passibility and possible worlds. Takingstock of the full development of Jesuit Christology during the Tridentineperiod, we find Jesuit “Scotists,” such as Aranda, Muniessa, Quadros, andCampoverde, who affirm that God predestined Christ to be a passible re-deemer before the absolute prevision of sin; we find Jesuit “Scotists” whodeny it, such as Suarez, Gonzalez, and Marın; we find “mitigated Thomists”who affirm it ðas I think they mustÞ. Here we count Amicus and Arriaga. Wealso find “strict Thomists” who deny it ðas I also think they mustÞ, such asVasquez, Ragusa, and Bernal.91 We find Molinists—here we can includeGranado and Ruiz de Montoya—who adopted their master’s teaching onthe simplicity of the divine decree precisely to bypass the Thomist-Scotistdivide, but also some Jesuits, such as Esparza, Domenico Viva, and Juan deUlloa, who considered themselves “single decree” Scotists.92 Ulloa, if I mayadd a final twist to this scholastic kaleidoscope, actually adopted a medi-ating position between Thomism and Scotism, on the one hand, and Mo-linism, on the other.93 He argued that God’s decree is single insofar as theIncarnation is concerned and multiple in respect to everything else. Inother words, he affirmed that we cannot reasonably enumerate any signarationis apart from the absolute predestination of Jesus Christ.It might be worth noting here that the theologies of other orders also

show similar generational trends during the same time period. The majorDominican theologians of the sixteenth century, such as Bartolome Medinaðd. 1580Þ and Domino Banez ðd. 1604Þ, tended to be mitigated Thomistsafter the example of Cajetan.94 At the same time, a second generation

91 For a list and discussion of these Jesuits, see Quadros, De Incarnatione Verbi Divini, 274–90.Compare Aranda, De Divini Incarnatione, 311–15, Muniessa, De mysteriis Incarnationis, 142–50,Viva, Cursus theologicus, 238–72, and Ulloa, Theologiae scholasticae, 5:43–52. For other prominenttreatments, see Suarez, De Incarnatione, 233–39, Vasquez, Commentariorum ac disputationum,233–40, Aldrete, De mysterio Incarnationis, 203–25, and Marın, Theologiae speculativae et moralis,2:556–62.

92 Here, see Quadros, De Incarnatione Verbi Divini, 291–316. Compare Suarez, De Incarnatione,197–233, Molina, Commentaria, 271–317, Ragusa, Commentariorum ac disputationum, 248–78,Arriaga, De Incarnatione Divini Verbi, 178–91, Viva, Cursus theologicus, 241–50, Campoverde, DeIncarnatione Verbi Divini, 228–71, Ulloa, Theologiae scholasticae, 5:7–10, and Marın, Theologiaespeculativae et moralis, 2:549–50.

93 Ulloa, Theologiae scholasticae, 5:34.

example, not only argues that Mary was free from any debt of sin, he does not hesitate to styleher the Reparatrix omnium in Theologiae speculativae et moralis, 2:549–55. For the state of the arton debates about the grace of Mary’s absolute predestination and primacy, see Quadros, DeIncarnatione Verbi Divini, 317–51. If one does not find the extent of these questions baroqueenough for one’s taste, one might wish to look into the Franciscan sources of this generation;see n. 99 below.

94 Bartolome Medina, Expositio in tertiam D. Thomae partem, qu. 1, art. 3 ðSalamanca: TypisHaeredum Mathiae Gastij, 1680Þ, 74–83; Domingo Banez, Comentarios ineditos a la tercera parteda Santo Tomas, tom 1, qu. 1, art. 3 ðMadrid: Instituto Francisco Suarez, 1951Þ, 65–73.


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emerged around the turn of the century, led by Juan Vicente de Asturiaðd. 1595Þ and Giovanni Paulo Nazario ðd. 1646Þ, which adapted the modalmethods more typical of the Jesuits of the same period to produce new,dynamic forms of mitigated Thomism. Still, the next generation, exem-plified by Jean-Baptiste Gonet ðd. 1681Þ and Pedro Godoy ðd. 1687Þ, beganto argue that the best form of mitigated Thomism required one to arguethat God predestined Christ as a passible redeemer before the previsionof sin.95 By the end of the seventeenth century, strict Thomism madea comeback in Dominicans such as Victor Contenson ðd. 1674Þ and be-came the dominant position during the eighteenth with Bonfacio Grandiðd. 1692Þ, Vincenzo Gotti ðd. 1742Þ, and Pietro Maria Gazzaniga ðd. 1799Þ.96Franciscan theology shows a similar development. Its first great generation,with Juan de Rada ðd. 1608Þ and Filippo Fabri ðd. 1630Þ, engaged the issuesraised by Capreolus, Cajetan, Suarez, and Vasquez.97 Its greatest commen-tators of the middle of the century, Hieronymous Galli ðd. 1640Þ, AngeloVolpi ðd. 1647Þ, John Punch ðd. 1660Þ, Bartolomeo Mastri ðd. 1673Þ, andBonaventure Belluti ðd. 1676Þ, each provided detailed accounts of the signarationis that incorporated the newly expanded theologies of Mary’s absolutepredestination and set their sights on distinguishing Scotus from Suarez.98

Although a few Scotists adopted Jesuit modal methods and thus broke fromthe Scotist ranks in asserting that God predestined Christ as a passibleredeemer, by the eighteenth century Scotists were, by and large, proponents

95 Juan Vicente Asturiensis, Relectio de habituali Christi Salvatoris nostri, qu. 6 ðNaples: ExTypographia Lazari Scorigij, 1625 ½1591�Þ, 273–381; Ionnes Paulus Nazarius, Commentaria etcontroversiae in tertiam partem summae D. Thomae Aquinatis, qu. 1, art. 3 ðBologna: ApudHaeredesIoannis Rossij, 1620Þ, 116–56; Jean-Baptiste Gonet, Clypeus theologiae Thomisticae contra novos ejusimpugnatores, tom. 5, tract. 11, disp. 5 ðParis: Apud Ludovicum Vives, 1876 ½1671�Þ, 472–88;Pedro Godoy, Disputationes theologicae in tertiam partem Divi Thomae, tom. 1, tract. 1, disp. 8ðExcudebat Didacus Garcia, 1666Þ, 301–87.

96 Vincent Contenson, OP, Theologia mentis et cordis, tom. 3, diss. 2, chap. 2 ðParis: ApudLudovicum Vives, 1875 ½1675�Þ, 29–38; Bonifacio Grandi, Cursus theologicus in quo principalestheologici tractatus discutiuntur juxta mentem Ang. Doct. D. Thomae Aquinatis, tom. 3, qu. 1, art. 2,dub. 8 ðVenice: Ex Typographia Bosij, 1697Þ, 31–40; Vincenzo Gotti, Theologia scholastico-dogmatica juxta mentem Divi Thomae Aquinatis, tom. 3, tract. 1, qu. 4 ðVenice: Ex TypographiaBalleoniana, 1786 ½1732�Þ, 30–38; Pietro Maria Gazzaniga, Praelectiones theologicae de Incarnationismysterio, sec. 2, diss. 1 ðVenice: Ex Typographia Balleoniana, 1797Þ, 50–68.

97 Juan de Rada, Controversiarum theologicarum inter S. Thomam et Scotum super tertium senten-tiarum librum, controv. 5–6 ðVenice: Apud Ioannem Guerilium, 1618Þ, 184–20; Filippo Fabri,Disputationes theologicae in tertium sententiarum, dist. 7, qu. 3, disp. 19–20 ðVenice: Ex OfficinaBartholomaei Ginami, 1613Þ, 100–112.

98 Hieronymus Galli, Tomus prior in tertium sententiarum Subtillissimi Doctoris Ioannis Duns Scotiopus de ineffabili Incarnationis mysterio, qu. 3, dist. 7, contr. 3 ðMilan: Apud Io. AmbrosiumSirturum, 1645Þ, 170–77; Angelo Volpi, Sacrae theologiae summa Ioannis Duns Scoti Doctoris Sub-tilissimi, tom. 1, part 4, disp. 5 ðNaples: Apud Lazarum Scorigium, 1642Þ, 62–85; John Punch,Commentarii theologici quibus Ioannis Duns Scoti quaestiones in libros Sententiarum, tom. 3, dist. 7,qu. 3 ðParis: Sumptibus Simeonis Piget, 1661Þ, 216–35; Bartolomeo Mastri, Disputationes theo-logicae in tertium librum sententiarum, disp. 4, qu. 1–2 ðVenice: Apud Valuasensem, 1661Þ, 300–325; Bonaventura Belluti, Disputationes de Incarnatione Dominica ad mentem Doctoris Subtilis,disp. 7, qu. 1–3 ðCatania: Apud Ioannem Rossi, 1645Þ, 100–118.


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of what can only be styled “hyperbaroque” theologies of the absolute pre-destination of both Christ and Mary, such as one finds in Tomas FrancesUrrutigoyti ðd. 1682Þ, Salvator Montalbanus de Sambuca ðd. 1726Þ, or Car-olus del Moral ðd. 1731Þ.99We need not delve into every nook and cranny of this convoluted scho-

lastic history. Is there anything among these scholastic thickets that mighthelp us better understand Hopkins? I think so. First and foremost, thisshort history allows us to see that Hopkins’s speculations were neitherunique nor sui generis. In fact, no individual element in his theology of theGreat Sacrifice is unique, and indeed every single element can be traced tobaroque precursors. Hopkins’s dazzling theology of the absolute predes-tination of Christ and Mary turns out to be a feature of the entire baroqueFranciscan school. A case could be made that Hopkins’s order of the signarationis represents the natural Scotistic order once disciples of the SubtleDoctor integrated their Mariological speculations into their larger Chris-tological project. Although this process began shortly after Scotus’s death,its classical form arrives with the great Scotist commentators of the seven-teenth century mentioned above. In any event, the Franciscans AngeloVolpi and Salvator Montalbanus de Sambuca give the exact same order asHopkins, as do the early eighteenth-century Jesuits Juan Campoverde andDidacus Quadros.100 In this respect, Hopkins seems to have ridden thegeneral Scotistic drift of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theology. Ofcourse, we need not demonstrate a strict influence of any of these figureson Hopkins. It is sufficient to show that Hopkins’s theological speculationsare not so unique as twentieth-century commentators have imagined; infact, in terms of this bygone baroque theology, especially in the Jesuit andFranciscan orders, they are fairly typical. Even when Hopkins engages thecontroverted questions more generally associated with the Society of Jesus,such as whether Christ was predestined as a passible redeemer or whetherGod’s decree was one or many, he appears to approach them much in thesame way that Jesuits of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuriesdo. Although we might be tempted to hear echoes of the classical Scotistposition in Hopkins’s notion of an “aeonian” Incarnation, we should keepin mind that in Hopkins’s reckoning, Christ takes on the humble, evenhumiliating, appearance of the Eucharistic species before the Fall. At anyrate, Hopkins’s account of Christ’s presence to the angels, even if he ex-

99 Tomas Frances de Urrutigoyti, Certamen scholasticum, expostivum argumentum pro deipara,2 vols. ðLyons: Petrus Borde, 1660–73Þ; Salvator Montalbanus de Sambuca, Opus theologicumtribus disinctum tomis in quibus efficacissime ostenditur Immaculatam Dei Genitricem utpote prae-servative redemptam, fuisse prorsus immune ab omni debito tum contrahendi originale peccatum, tumipsius fomitem incurrendi, 3 vols. ðPalermo: Typis Gasparis Bayona, 1723Þ; Carolus del Moral, Fonsillimis theologiae Scoticae Marianae, 2 vols. ðMadrid: Ex Typographia Thomae Rodriguez, 1730Þ.

100 Volpi, Sacrae theologiae summa Scoti, 1:70–72; Montalbanus, Opus theologicum, 2:445–46;Campoverde, De Incarnatione Verbi Divini, 228–71 ðquite an extended discussion!Þ; Quadros, DeIncarnatione Verbi Divini, 326–28.


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plains it by means of sacramental adduction or Scotus’s arguments aboutthe Eucharist ante incarnationem, seems to assert what the larger Scotisttradition denies, namely, that Christ’s humiliation is independent of theFall as such. This seems to suggest that Hopkins falls among those Jesuits,such as Aranda, Muniessa, Viva, Campoverde, Ulloa, and Quadros, whoargued that God predestined Christ to be a passible redeemer independentof his prevision of sin. That Hopkins does so with a succinct but scintillatingaccount of God’s knowledge of possible worlds draws him into the tighterorbit of the Jesuit theologians who affirmed this position by means of acongruistic interpretation of the scientia media, namely, Viva, Campoverde,Ulloa, and Quadros—in other words, into the orbit of the leading Jesuittheologians of the eighteenth century.This brings me to a second point. No theologian among those listed

above was satisfied with Suarez’s “third way” of approaching Incarnation: asit turns out, Thomists accused him of being Scotist, and Scotists accusedhim of being Thomist. In fact, I think it fair to say that no Catholic theo-logian, save perhaps Cajetan, came in for greater criticism during the sev-enteenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries than Suarez.101 Nor did theDoctor eximius undergo any special revival during Hopkins’s day. If anything,the late nineteenth century saw a return to the strict Thomist position bymany theologians of the Society of Jesus: Ferdinand Stentrup ðd. 1898Þ andJean Baptiste Terrien ðd. 1908Þ, for example, both rejected Suarez’sapproach to the predestination of Christ.102 Hopkins’s own professor ofdogmatic theology at St. Beuno’s, Bernard Tepe, criticized Suarez on thetwo points on which Hopkins built his theology of the Great Sacrifice: histheology of the Incarnation and his understanding of the nature of theEucharistic sacrifice. In the first case, Tepe took a strict Thomist stanceagainst Scotus and Scotists, but also against Jesuits such as Salmeron andSuarez, whom he identifies as Scotists.103 Tepe also explicitly rejectedSuarez’s theory that a “mystical slaying” is sufficient to guarantee the sym-bolic “destruction” of the Eucharistic victim, even if said “destruction” is

101 J. Derek Holmes, ed, The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Biblical Inspiration andInfallibility ðOxford: Clarendon, 1979Þ, 11: “Cajetan is a name of offence to almost all theo-logians since his time.” Morris ð Jesus Son of Mary, 1:121Þ, after discussing Cajetan’s views onpredestination, more discretely defends Thomas da Vio: “Caietan upon other subjects held, Iam aware, some strange opinions. But as no proof is offered that he was not in them, as in this,ready to obey the Church, to call so devout, acute, and learned dignitary heretic, as some havealmost done, is intolerable.” For criticisms of Suarez in the seventeenth century, see thereferences in n. 95, above. For eighteenth-century critics, see n. 101. Many prominent critics ofthe nineteenth century will follow presently in the body of the text.

102 Ferdinand A. Stentrup, SJ, Praelectiones dogmaticae de Verbo Incarnato: Soteriologia, c. 1ðInnsbruck: Rauch, 1889Þ, 21–22; J. B. Terrien, SJ, La Mere de Dieu et la Mere des hommes, pt. 1,vol. 1, bk. 2, chap. 1 ðParis: Lethielleux, 1900Þ, 123–31.

103 Bernard Tepe, Institutiones theologicae in usum scholarum, tom. 3, prop. 89, schol. 1 ðParis:Lethielleux, 1896Þ, 663: “Quaerunt Theologi, utrum si Adam non peccasset, Verbum divinumhumanamnaturam assumpsisset. Affirmant Scotus et Scotistae, Alphonsus Salmeron et Suarez.”


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simply a change from a lower state to a higher one.104 Hopkins’s teacherwas, all in all, quite satisfied to controvert with Francisco Suarez on anynumber of theological issues.I think we can now offer a few conclusions about Hopkins’s theology that

have not previously been noted. First, Hopkins was not only familiar withScotus’s texts, he was most likely familiar with the arguments ðif not thetextsÞ of Scotus’s baroque commentators, probably through Jesuit sourcesthat adopted and expanded them. Second, Hopkins gleaned this knowl-edge along with a larger knowledge of baroque theology in general, whichwas better known in England than many surmise, either through reading orhearsay. Third, Hopkins’s theology of the Great Sacrifice combined a broadlyScotist view of the Incarnation with an interpretation of the Eucharistic sac-rifice taken from Juan de Lugo by way of his teacher Bernard Tepe. Fourth,Hopkins’s “Scotism,” while something of an avocation for him, was neithercontroversial nor so easily separated from “Suarezianism,” at least with re-gards to the issues that influenced Hopkins’s theology of the Great Sacrifice.And fifth, Hopkins’s teachers were not, as commonly reported, Suarezians,nor was such a system generally in force when Hopkins wrote.Can we establish anything more than this? Not without difficulty. At the

very least, we can speculate. If Hopkins’s theology seems to have beeninfluenced by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theological trends, arethere any leading candidates for influence? The four Jesuit theologiansthat are closest to Hopkins’s Christological speculations are Viva, Campo-verde, Ulloa, and Quadros, each of whom combines broadly Scotistic andMolinist concerns in their theologies of Christ’s predestination. Amongthese theologians, it bears noting that Tepe identifies both Viva and Ulloaas defenders of Lugo’s theology of Eucharistic humiliation that Hopkinshimself adopted. The single printing of Ulloa’s Theologia scholastica wasfairly well read in its day, but Viva’s Cursus theologicus had a much widerdistribution, with at least seven printings ð1712, 1716, 1719, 1723, 1726,1739, 1755Þ in three cities ðPadua, Prague, and CologneÞ. As we have seen,JohnHenry Newman consulted Viva with some frequency, and a copy of the1716 edition is now housed at the Heythrop College Library with the verycopy of Scotus that Hopkins first read in 1872. If Hopkins himself read Viva,the Cursus theologicus would be the missing link in a genealogy that readsScotus, Suarez, Viva, Tepe, Hopkins. At the very least, I do not think that

104 Ibid., tom 4, prop. 46, schol. 3, 326–28. Tepe, for his part, thinks that one must dulyseparate Christ’s heavenly state from his Eucharistic state, in which his body is immobile andindeed “useless.” Cf. tom 4, prop. 46, schol. 4, 329: “Christus in triplici statu considerari potestet debet. Primo quidem in statu, in quo aliquando fuit hic in terris; secundo in statu, in quonunc est in coelo; tertio in statu, in quo est in Eucharistia. In primo illo statu Christus habuitcorpus passible quidem et mortale, sed expeditum ad operandum, quinque sensibus ornatum.In secundo statu habet corpus gloriosum dotibus impassibilitatis, subtilitatis, claritatis, in-structum. In tertio statu habet corpus inutile ad usus humanos, in extenso quidem modoexistens, sed sub speciebus panis, ita et vere rationem cibi habeat.”


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one needs any more sources to account for the allegedly “original” or“breathtaking” theological views expressed in Hopkins’s “Creation andRedemption: The Great Sacrifice.”105

This evidence, of course, is merely circumstantial. Nothing would havekept Hopkins from developing his own synthesis independently of any ofthese authors; after all, almost anyone who has worked with baroquescholastic materials has had the experience of thinking he has discoveredsome unrecognized nuance of Aquinas or Scotus only to find that twodozen or so theologians had beaten the poor question to death over a fewdecades in the late seventeenth century. Our conclusions should, however,help us reconsider our notions of Hopkins’s theological training and his so-called failure in 1877. As Joseph Feeney, SJ, has shown, Hopkins narrowlymissed being able to continue in theology, receiving one each of the fourpossible evaluations: one examiner judged Hopkins to have surpassed theaverage; one judged him to have barely done so; one judged him to haveonly done so; and one judged him to have failed to do so. In the scoring ofthe day, this counted as two positive votes and two negative votes, with threepositive votes necessary to continue on to the fourth year of theologicalstudies. As a result, Hopkins was dropped from the long four-year courseof theology to the short three-year course, which he had just completed,thereby completing his theology training. We do not know who failed Hop-kins in his theological exam. We do know that one of his examiners, Ber-nard Tepe, was among the first of the neo-Thomists imported from thecontinent in order to teach Thomistic theology. As we have just seen, Tepetaught a version of Cardinal de Lugo’s account of the Eucharistic sacri-fice. Tepe is also the most likely source for the connections Hopkins drewbetween the Incarnation and the Eucharist. Tepe, however, might very welltake credit for having one of the most tepid defenses of the Thomistposition on the motive of the Incarnation in the entire nineteenth century.Content to ignore four centuries of vigorous debate on both sides of theissue, debates that deployed increasingly vast stores of patristic and medie-val texts, Tepe simply asserted that the Thomist position better conformedto the witness of Scripture and the Fathers of the Church and left it at

105 Pace Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 3, Studies in Theological Style: LayStyles, trans. Andrew Louth, John Saward, Martin Simon, and Rowan Williams ðSan Francisco:Ignatius, 1986Þ, 383; Maria R. Lichtmann, “The Incarnational Aesthetic of Gerard ManleyHopkins,” Religion and Literature 23, no. 1 ð1991Þ: 38; Cotter, Inscape, 122; Ballinger, Poem asSacrament, 107, 110. Devlin, for his part, did his best not to exaggerate Hopkins’s originality. Helimited “Hopkins’s most startling and original theological innovation” to his Christologicaldistinction between ensarkosis and enanthropesis, a distinction he left “to the theologians tojudge” ðS, 114Þ. Still, Devlin rightly noted that similar speculations could be found in earlypatristic writers who saw Christ in the Old Testament theophanies, but Devlin wrongly judgesthese speculations to be “materially heterodox.”


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that.106 Tepe also buttressed his stolid neo-Thomism with a particularlyuninspiring classroom manner. A history of St. Beuno’s tells us, “The dawnof the twentieth century did not dissipate the growing gloom of St. Beuno’sacademic condition. Rather it highlighted the fact that the province wasagain dependent on lectures from the continent, that its physical isolationwas paralleled by the scholastic remoteness of its courses from the theo-logical issues of the day. In 1900 consultors complain that Fr. Tepe is not upto date and rouses no enthusiasm.”107 Reading Tepe’s Institutiones theologicaein usum scholarum, one can understand his students’ feelings. One can un-derstand especially the lack of enthusiasm of a student as quick as GerardManley Hopkins. If we take Father Lahey’s notes at face value and assumethat Hopkins “substituted some of his own studies on Scotus for the regularprogramme of his professor” such that his marks “were not as high as theyotherwise wouldhave been,” we nowhave a very plausible explanationofwhatmight have happened in Hopkins’s examination.108 Taking Tepe’s sugges-tions about the state of victimhood in the Eucharist seriously, even devoutly,Hopkins probably thought the view a natural consequence of the Scotist-Suarezian theology of the Incarnation that Tepe himself denied. WhetherHopkins, who was known to tweak a teacher or two in his day, advanced thisthesis against Tepe in his examination I cannot say. Perhaps Hopkins madethe honest mistake of thinking that Tepe would agree with him—or ofthinking that Tepe already had.We are left only with conjecture on this point. In light of the vigorous and

healthy debate about Scotism leading up to Hopkins’s ill-fated examina-tion, we can conclude, however, that the course at St. Beuno’s was “remote”from the issues of the day not because it was “scholastic,” but because it wasneoscholastic. As we have seen, Anglican and Roman Catholics alike drankdeeply at the wells of the baroque scholastics, whose treatises they con-sulted with some frequency to address the great theological issues ofthe nineteenth century. If Hopkins indeed rebelled, the course of studyagainst which he did was rather a radical novelty imported from the Con-tinent, namely, the strident neo-Thomism of Leo XIII, which would haveblindsided the young Jesuit before he was even aware of the need to takenote of it. If so, however, it was not a Suarezian Thomism, for the rathersimple fact that Hopkins’s teacher of dogmatic theology was not a Suar-ezian at all. Indeed, it is more likely that Hopkins failed his exam becausehis views on the Incarnation were too Suarezian for his examiners. Again,

106 Bernard Tepe, Institutiones theologicae in usum scholarum, tom. 3, prop. 89, schol. 1 ðParis:Lethielleux, 1896Þ, 663–64: “Multi putant, sententiam S. Thomae esse fontbus revelationisconformiorem. Sane huic sententiae et Scripturae et Patres et Concilia favere videntur.”

107 Paul Edwards, Canute’s Tower: St. Beuno’s 1848–1989 ðClwyd: Gracewing, 1990Þ, 101.108 For Lahey’s full assessment, see Feeney, “Hopkins ‘Failure,’” 108.


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I offer this only as one plausible account of the limited historical data wehave. At the very least, my account has one advantage over the standardnarrative: it does not rest on the false supposition that Suarez was the norm,or on the demonstrably false claim that “Suarez and Suarez only was taughtat St. Beuno’s” during Hopkins’s day.109

The loss of Hopkins the theologian must be considered a great tragedy.Even if his theological creativity manifests itself not so much in originality,but in synthesis, even if not one of his views was novel, but in fact all werewell known in his day, Hopkins’s genius was to express these views with suchpoetic force that they took on, by the beauty of his expression, the featuresof necessity. If his theological career was lost in the first incursion of neo-Thomism into England, we need not let the later victory of neo-Thomismerase the evidence of a prior Scotism. Indeed, its record stands in thewritings of Hopkins and his greatest contemporaries, and it only needs beread to be resurrected.

109 S, 292. The lone dissenting voice seems to have been John Pick, SJ, Gerard Manley Hopkins:Priest and Poet ðLondon: Oxford University Press, 1942Þ, 157: “In general, we must rememberthat there is little daringly different from the general tradition of scholastic thought in any-thing that Hopkins wrote. Scotus himself was but a current in the large stream of the scholastictradition, which was very flexible within its limits. . . . While the professors of the Society ofJesus had advised its members to follow St. Thomas generally, they left considerable freedomfor departing from his teaching.” Pick concluded, “There is no reason, then, why Hopkins’admiration for Scotus should have brought him into any trouble with his fellow Jesuits.” It isperhaps time that we returned to this eminently sensible view.


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“the theology of gerard manley hopkins: from john duns scotus to the baroque,” the journal of...

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