8 “I Have Wounded My Soul with the Instrument of Salvation”: The Threefold Spiritual Development of Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J.

In this article I focus on the threefold ‘conversion’ of the famous Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manly Hopkins: his conversion as an Anglican to the Roman Catholic Church in 1866, his decision to enter the Society of Jesus two years later, and the transformation of his theological and aesthetic view under the influence of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, roughly from 1868 onwards. As we will see, in all these stages the highly sensitive Hopkins was struggling with conflicting ideas which were equally important to him: Victorian temper versus Catholic world view, his opinion on the inseparability of art and religion, his asceticism and the disciplining of the senses versus his admiration of nature’s beauty as a means to praise God, and, of course, his poetry as a way of expressing his deepest religious feelings. These ‘stages’ of conversion, or shifting religious mindsets, should not be mistaken for isolated events in his life, pinned exactly on the given years. Hopkins’s religious ideas and spirituality were continually developing, as his diaries, notes and correspondence clearly show.