Each author constructs an antinomy between Gregory and “Eunomius” (who equals “Origen”) each author understands Gregory’s opponent “Eunomius/Origen” to be the personification of rationalism, evacuating Christian theology of its distinct religious content each author takes Gregory’s relationship to philosophy to represent an exemplary Christian doctrinal and hermeneutical engagement with philosophy. The trope is that Gregory of Nyssa’s polemic against Eunomius of Cyzicus represents Gregory’s rejection of Origen’s hermeneutic for Christian philosophy and for “knowing God”. This article examines the literary appearance of a theological trope across three scholars in Francophone texts written at approximately the same time: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Daniélou, and Vladimir Lossky. The argument shows that the differing styles reveal a larger set of questions concerned with theological hermeneutics: what is distinctly theological about theological readings of poetry? I argue that Taylor’s method is to be preferred to Balthasar’s, but only because the former is already uniquely situated to benefit from and encompass the latter. My piece, in contrast, is concerned first with the styles of reading Hopkins proper to both Taylor and Balthasar and only secondarily with Hopkins. More (though not much) is available on von Balthasar’s interpretation of Hopkins, but this work is typically about Hopkins himself and whether Balthasar’s exegesis is accurate. Much has been written in response to Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age, but relatively little has considered his use of poets in general or Hopkins in particular.
The article assays theological strategies for deploying poetry by narrowly focusing on the recruitment of Hopkins’s poetics in the thought of Charles Taylor and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
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