Is there a 'Christian' Existentialism? I answer only for myself in preferring an experience that speaks directly of 'noche obscura', "Dark night of the soul", in the poetry of the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross (1542-91). Or in the poetry of that ailing, derelict being in a Jesuit's cassock, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), whose gaze on nature rewarded him with two words of astonishment: inscape - a sensation of "oneness" in the design of things which by piercing blaze of instress reveals them shining forth in Being. Is it an immanent force in nature he describes or a transcendent supra-evidence of God? Does it matter so long as i could see with his instructed eye?
In a diary entry of 18 May 1872, Hopkins sketches the inscaped head of a blue bell; "..arched down like a cutwater drawing itself back from the line of the keel. The lines of the bell strike and overlie this, rayed but not symmetrically, some lie parallel...." 25 August 1872; "....this skeleton inscape of a spray-end of ash tree I broke at Wimbledon that summer is worth noticing for the suggested globe: it is leaf on the left and keys on the right.
8 Sept. 1872; "I took my vows."
I think this is phenomenology. Even, or particularly, in that laconic entry - "I took my vows." - Those of a novice Jesuit. A lifelong vocation to witnessing Being.
What good besides to mention that Hopkins preferred the subtler theologian Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) to the Jesuits' officially "Thomist" one, St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74)? That in Scotus he found the "principle of individuation", haecceitas, "Thisness", which confirmed his sense of inscape and instress? And that Heidegger, product of a Jesuit-founded seminary, wrote his doctoral thesis on Duns Scotus?
Does it say, by accident, there is Christian Existentialism?
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