God’s Grandeur in the (Not Entirely) Immanent Frame

 “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” proclaims Gerard Manley Hopkins’s famous sonnet. Hopkins does not write that it once was so charged. The great “I AM” is not a “He was.” Why, then, do we not heed God’s startling presence everywhere in the world: “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” Hopkins answers with a half-octave history of forgetfulness, a mini-genealogy:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
             And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
             And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Hopkins joins the most bracing critics of modernity in describing how we have effaced God’s grandeur by trampling, dirtying, and stinking up everything. We instrumentalize, quantify, commodify. We deplete the soil by treating it as “standing reserve.”

That said, the critique in this four-line history extends beyond modernity. In doing so, it offers a double caution to Christian genealogists. First, Hopkins suggests that while these ills may be particularly pronounced and pernicious in modernity, they also have a history as old as Adam. Hopkins echoes the Fall narrative of Genesis 3: Generations have “trod” since their exile from the garden, cursed to “toil” and scrape a living from the bare or barren soil. Second, the sonnet’s sestet warns against treating the modern world as entirely disenchanted. The grandeur is still there, even if many are oblivious to it. There still “lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” When it comes to disenchantment, Hopkins suggests, Christian genealogists should not overstate the case.

It is unsurprising that both Charles Taylor, perhaps the greatest living Christian genealogist, and William Desmond, perhaps the greatest living Christian metaphysician, find inspiration in Hopkins. In A Secular Age (2007), Taylor offers his 900-page version of Hopkins’s four-line history. Taylor ends his magisterial account by pointing to several figures, including Hopkins himself, who find new ways to God in our secular age. William Desmond’s trilogy—Being and the Between (1995), Ethics and the Between (2001), and God and the Between (2008)—offers a provocative account of the “too-muchness” of being, including how being’s “grandeur” and “dearest freshness” can point us to the origin of being, to God. Desmond offers several deep bows to Hopkins along the way.  

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Ryan Duns, S.J. shows how Desmond’s metaphysics complements Taylor’s genealogy in Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age: Desmond and the Quest for God (2020), which recently received the College Theology Society’s Best Book Award. (Duns’s study ends with a winsomely imagined conversation between the two philosophers in a pub in Desmond’s hometown of Cork, Ireland.) Duns says that Desmond can provide one of the new (or, perhaps better, renewed) “itineraries” to belief that Taylor calls for at the end of A Secular Age. Desmond can also address one of the most incisive criticisms of Taylor’s volume: While Taylor claims that such itineraries are possible, he does not offer any arguments for why one might presume that there is a God in which to believe.

At the heart of Duns’s book is an excellent chapter on Desmond’s approach to God. Desmond does not offer determinate proofs of God’s existence. He instead starts within common experience, pointing to “hyperbolic” dimensions of being that provide “indirect ways” to God. The most fundamental of these dimensions is the astonishing strangeness that anything exists. To use Desmond’s language, this strangeness gets at something deeper than the “becoming” of physics and biology. It gets at the “coming-to-be” of anything at all. “Rekindled astonishment [at this coming-to-be] does not prove God’s existence,” Duns notes, but “it can purge our senses and permit us to perceive a halo of gratuity surrounding finite being.” It can be a first pointer toward a God who is not a demiurge or divine engineer or intelligent designer—a super-being among other beings, a manipulator of matter—but a transcendent origin of being itself. “Creatio ex nihilo,” Duns explains, “is not an arid statement of fact but a condensed exclamation of wonder at being at all.” Duns surveys a number of Desmond’s other hyperbolic dimensions of being. Desmond points (with Aquinas and Einstein) to the intelligibility of being. He points to its beauty. He points to our own self-transcendence, including the strangeness that we can be wonder-struck by the strangeness of being. He points to our capacity for “agapeic service” to others, service that goes beyond any calculation of self-interest.

Howard Russel Butler from Triptych of an Eclipse

Duns tactfully suggests that Desmond does more than complement Taylor’s genealogy. A Secular Age is not a “subtraction story” in which secularism straightforwardly equates to the absence of faith. For Taylor, secularism involves a proliferation of options: atheist, agnostic, theistic, and much between and beyond. Taylor’s language, however, can suggest that we live in a world closed off from transcendence. We are “buffered selves” living in an “immanent frame,” in a “Closed World Structure.” The implication at times is that we must get “beyond” the frame or the structure to experience transcendence.

Desmond’s “hyperboles,” however, are transcendent happenings within immanence. They are an “inbreaking of the Transcendent.” Desmond agrees that the modern self tends to be buffered, but it cannot be fully buffered. He prefers the metaphor of porosity. We are constitutively receptive, constitutively porous, and this porosity can never be completely closed off. Duns borrows an apt line from Emerson: “There is a crack in every thing God has made.” We always remain at least somewhat receptive.

This means that hyperbolic happenings can always strike us anew. We might be stunned by the sublimity of a waterfall or the fragile beauty of a bird’s egg. We might be wonderstruck by a symphony or a stranger’s gratuitous kindness. Our reigning cultural ethos may discourage us from seeing these as instances of strong transcendence, but they are nonetheless the transcendent moments of many a life, and they have led not a few to God. Taylor would not disagree—he has written at length on epiphanies in modernity, for instance—but his imagery and language at times seem to reify immanence in a way that Desmond avoids. Indeed, Desmond has explicitly raised this concern.

In rectifying these limits of Taylor’s approach, Duns argues, Desmond’s writings help us to recognize transcendent moments, to unclog our pores. His works should be seen not so much as conceptual treatises but as a set of “spiritual exercises” that cultivate an “epiphanic attunement” and encourage us to cultivate receptivity to the “too-muchness” of being and to the divine. Duns explains that “Desmond is trying to lead a skeptical generation back toward the mystery of existence to show how it is not something to be solved, or resolved, but celebrated.” The ideal reader of Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age, then, is someone who finishes Taylor’s magnum opus and yearns for a fuller existence within the “immanent frame” of modernity.

Desmond returns us once more to Hopkins’s two cautions for Christian genealogists: Clogged porosity is a perennial human danger, for pre-moderns and moderns alike. And while clogged porosity may be more prevalent in western modernity than it was in the past, hyperbolic grandeur is still here. As Duns so ably shows in this insightful study, Desmond searches for “‘cracks’ and passageways between the immanent and transcendent realms.” He points to where grandeur flames through the frame.

Steven Knepper is an associate professor in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. His book ‘Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond’ is forthcoming from SUNY Press.