Index Hopkins LiteraryFestival Lectures 2016
“My Hyde is Worse.” Reflections on Hopkins’s Conversion
Eamon KiernanMagdeburg University
Germany
In a lecture at this Festival in 2013, Duc Dau described Hopkins's turn to Roman Catholicism as “one of his most romantic acts.” His conversion, she claimed, was a conversion to Love, understood primarily as Eros. While Dr. Dau was able to offer supporting evidence from Hopkins's poetry and from the spiritual traditions of Catholicism, her findings remain unsatisfying. It is hard to imagine a religious conversion that is not also a conversion to Love, erotic or otherwise. Nor would the all-importance of Love ever have been denied by the Anglican Church which Hopkins left behind him when he converted. Love, therefore, the telos, no doubt, of all Christian endeavour, does not name anything specific in the context of Hopkins’s conversion.