Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Spell of John Duns Scotus

160 Pages·2015·0.504 MB·English

by  John Llewelyn

LLEWELYN_01.qxp_Layout 1 29/04/2015 12:19 Page 1
Gerard Manley Hopkins
and the Spell of
John Duns Scotus
John Llewelyn

Gerard Manley Hopkins
and the Spell of
John Duns Scotus
To Margaret
Gerard Manley Hopkins
and the Spell of
John Duns Scotus
JOHN LLEWELYN
© John Llewelyn, 2015
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun - Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 11/13pt Monotype Ehrhardt by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 0894 3 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0895 0 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0896 7 (epub)
The right of John Llewelyn to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Part I
1 The Crux 3
2 Instress Scaped and Inscape Stressed 10
3 Parsing the Poem of Parmenides 19
4 Hopkins’ Double Discovery, of Scotus and of Himself 30
5 Some Transcendentals 43
6 Another Transcendental? 54
Part II
7 Seeming, Observing and Observance 69
8 Peirce’s Post-Kantian Categories 79
9 Ecceity, Ipseity and Existents 90
10 Being as Doing 99
11 From Method of Ignorance to Way of Love 108
12 Categories and Transcendentals Transcended 117
Afterword 127
Notes 132
Selective Bibliography 143
Index 147
Acknowledgements
Approximately a quarter of Chapter 11 is adapted with kind permission
from my ‘Educated Ignorance’, in Gavin Morrison and Sigrid Sandström
(eds), Ignorance: Between Knowing and Not Knowing (Stockholm: Axl
Books, 2015). I thank Channel 4, the estate of Dennis Potter and Faber &
Faber for permission to cite the sentences from Dennis Potter reproduced
in Chapter 2. The sentences cited in Chapter 7 from The Peregrine, The
Hill of Summer & Diaries are reprinted by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd ©1967, 1969, 2010, J. A. Baker. For permission to use on
the cover of this book a photograph of the sculpture at Duns by Frank
Tritschler representing Scotus I thank the Franciscan Order, which com-
missioned the effigy to mark the seventh centenary of the philosopher’s
birth. I am especially grateful to Fr Boniface Kruger, OFM, and to
Andrew Tulloch of the Scottish Borders Council for helping me toward
an answer to the question whether Frank Tritschler is still living. For
the photograph of the bust of Scotus on the cover I am indebted to Colin
Brydon. For permission to use on the cover a photograph of the sculpture
at Regis University, Denver, Colorado, representing Hopkins I thank
the sculptor Rowan Gillespie. He suggested I get in touch with Professor
Victoria MaCabe of that university. I am indebted to her for broadening
the field of photographs from which to choose. I thank all those at or asso-
ciated with Edinburgh University Press who have cooperated in the pro-
duction of my study, in particular Carol Macdonald, James Dale, Rebecca
Mackenzie, Holly Roberts and Anthony Mercer. I am grateful to the staff
of the National Library of Scotland, of the libraries of the University of
Edinburgh and of New College on the Mound for their assistance. For the
encouragement conveyed by their interest in my endeavour notwithstand-
ing in some cases our disagreement over some of its presuppositions, I
vi
Acknowledgements
thank Gareth Davies, Percy Jack, Donald Maciver, Basil O’Neill, Adriaan
Peperzak and certain other generously supportive good friends who in the
arcane conventions of book publication are supposed to remain unpublic
and unthanked. For hauling me out of technological quagmires or the
slough of despondent morale I am indebted to my brothers David and
Howard, to my nephews Simon and Steven, and to the Morningside Caffè
Nero.
With gratitude for her sustained and sustaining dedication to me, I
dedicate this book to my wife Margaret who, birdwatcher like Hopkins
and wordwatcher like him and Duns Scotus, is proof of their teaching that
loveliness is a noun with a verb at its heart dancing like she does in mine.
vii
What becomes of my verses I care little, but about things like this, what I write
or could write on philosophical matters, I do; and the reason of the difference
is that the verses stand or fall by their simple selves and, though being read
they might do good, by being unread they do no harm; but if the other things
are unsaid right they will be said by somebody else wrong, and that is what will
not let me rest.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
writing to Richard Watson Dixon
from Dublin
27 January 1887
Yet ah! this air I gather and release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirit to peace
Gerard Manley Hopkins
in ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’
composed at Oxford
March 1879