“The Just Man Justices”

Do you like poetry? I do (to some extent), but I find it hard to read. That is, poetry needs to be read slowly, and I don’t often take the time necessary to do so. And much poetry demands imagination and deep thought, often more than I have or am willing to exert. But I like the poem that sparked this post. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an Oxford University student when he came under the influence of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement, which sought to reconnect the Anglican Church with its Catholic roots.​ At age 22, Hopkins was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Newman himself.*

Hopkins (b. 1844) took the Jesuit vows in 1870, four years after converting to Catholicism, embracing the Jesuit ideals of poverty, chastity, and obedience. For the next seven years, he wrote no poetry, thinking it was contrary to his vows.

In the two years following the 1875 shipwreck of the SS Deutschland, though, Hopkins wrote a long, innovative ode titled "The Wreck of the Deutschland." A 2008 novel by Ron Hansen blends historical elements of that disaster with biographical elements of Hopkins’s life and a detailed narrative of his ode.**

Hopkins died of typhoid fever at the age of 44 in 1889.

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” one of Hopkins’s most celebrated poems, was written around 1877, but it was first published posthumously, in 1918. Here are the last six lines of that noteworthy sonnet:

I say more: the just man justices;

         Keeps grace: that keeps all his going graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –

Christ. For 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.

Eugene Peterson, the esteemed author of The Message (the popular paraphrase of the Bible), has also written Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, a weighty book whose title comes from Hopkins’s sonnet.

Peterson claims that Hopkins’s poem presents the perceptive reader with a helpful view of the “end” of life: “The vigor and spontaneity, the God-revealing Christian getting us and everything around us in on it, the playful freedom and exuberance, the total rendering of our lives as play, as worship before God.”

But this essay is primarily about the words in the first line cited above: “the just man justices.” What does that mean?

Hopkins creatively uses “justice” as a verb. That word is generally a noun, of course, although the phrase “doing justice” has a similar meaning. And the latter harks back to Micah in the Old Testament. Verse eight of the sixth chapter of the book that bears the prophet’s name says,

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice?

It is quite certain that the kind of justice Micah (and Hopkins) is talking about is not what is usually called retributive justice. Rather, it is social justice, seeking shalom for all people. As such, doing justice is something that cannot be done alone or by just us. We must work with other people.

This past Sunday, the worship leader at Rainbow Mennonite Church began by talking briefly about the Justice Together meeting she and her husband had recently attended in Wichita. That organization is “a multi-faith, grassroots coalition of faith communities in Sedgwick County, Kansas.”

Citing Micah 6:8, on their website (here), Justice Together states, “Doing justice … addresses systems rather than individuals. No single congregation has enough power to effectively do justice. Thus, we act together as justice in action.”

Further, if it is true that “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” as I think it is, doing justice is often done also by multitudes of people who do not claim to embrace any religious faith, such as many among the millions of people who joined the No Kings protest on October 18.

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  * Here is a link to the blog article I posted about Newman in March 2020, which was a few months after he was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint.

** Hansen’s novel is titled Exiles, which I enjoyed reading many months ago, and it also includes imagined backstories of the five drowned Franciscan nuns. It culminates in exploring themes of faith, exile, and divine mystery in the storm. Hansen (b. 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and interestingly (especially for those of us who live in west central Missouri), he is also the author of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (1983).