The Charge of God: Laudato Si’ read through Chesterton, Wordsworth, and Hopkins

Abstract G. K. Chesterton, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are set in conversation with Pope Francis’s Laudato Si (2015), to show how far those writers anticipate its animus against technocratic capitalism, but also, more surprisingly, how far Laudato Si challenges the progressive assumptions of contemporary eco-activism. Chesterton, Wordsworth, and Hopkins do not merely foreshadow and clarify the theological stakes of a papal document. By making even single words expressive of a whole worldview (achieving what William Empson called a ‘compacted doctrine’), their writings prove more imaginatively affective, as well as–this essay’s boldest gambit–more theologically adequate than the communicative formalities available to the theological treatise as a genre.