This year I’ve made what Michelle Obama calls a ‘swerve’, veering from a career as a barrister to studying for a diploma in the conservation of ceramics. One of the key skills in my new role is looking hard at an object, gleaning through observation whatever can be discovered about its unique properties, its materials, and its history. Last week I was working on a small flagon found in a Roman grave in Chichester. The exterior is smooth and simply decorated. But, plucked out of its resting place, the flagon is now broken into several shards, revealing on the inside what the potter never intended to be seen: it is a coil pot, not thrown on the wheel, and the potter made no attempt to blend the rough internal coils or to glaze the interior. This flagon was never destined to contain wine or oil: it was made for the grave.
Looking hard at someone or something can reveal what the medieval Scottish philosopher and priest Duns Scotus called haecceity, the irreducible qualities of thisness of a person or object that make it this particular person or object rather than someone or something else. Gerard Manley Hopkins developed that concept in his poetry, believing not only that every thing has a unique core of individuality that he called inscape, but that inscape is dynamic and capable of being recognised by others in a snap-shot moment of empathetic realisation that Hopkins described as instress.
For Hopkins, looking hard at a person or object invariably leads one to Christ: the individuality of every person and every object is an expression of divine creation. Perfection is not about conformity. Hopkins saw perfection in the uniqueness of every person and object, individuality being a mark of that perfection.
Duncan McCall
