Tomorrow night at 8 …

… Film on Hopkins introduces 19th-century Jesuit priest and poet to wider audience.

… there was also a theological insight of Scotus’ which gave even greater depth to Hopkins’ Christocentric view of nature and of human beings. Scotus (who is now a Doctor of the Church and so we can be sure his theology is orthodox) taught that God did not become incarnate in Jesus Christ just as a sort of divine rescue mission because of Man’s sin. Rather, as the early Greek Fathers of the Church had taught (and which is implicit in St. Paul), God always intended, before the Fall, to become incarnate, to share human nature so that humans could come to share God’s nature. Human beings are modeled on Christ and they are for Christ. And so we can see Christ in human beings. As Hopkins put it in one poem: “Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”