On the Nature of Christian Hope
– a reality that empowers in the face of adversity and transcends mere utopia
It was with some gratification that I learned of an academic Society and journal entirely devoted to Utopian Studies. The members have been laboring at the cutting edge of this field for over thirty years focusing, as they explain, upon “literary and experimental utopias.” This seems to imply that there might be other kinds of utopia, not excluding an actual one we may suppose (in which case its existence has certainly been kept very quiet, so if you should happen upon it do let us know).
Tradition has it that the original term was coined by Thomas More in his book of that name in 15161. Literally it means “nowhere,” which entails an irony neither mentioned nor explored in Utopian Studies. This tension lies in the curious intersection of Utopia as a place of the absurd on the one hand, while being in consequence a pointer to alternatives, and thus towards hope, on the other. Hence, one of the many papers the journal has published informs us that, “two recent studies identify twenty-six theories of hope and fifty-four definitions.” 2 So we may deduce that, as a field of research, the subject is expanding wonderfully – which is more than can be said for modernity as a whole, whatever the influence that visions of utopia have had in shaping it.
The subject of hope was central to this year’s Atlantic Theological Conference which I have been attending in New Brunswick. This drew inspiration for its theme of “Hope that does not disappoint” from Romans 5, 5: “…hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
However, it is the preceding words of St. Paul which offer a framing that is very important in times when our faith seems to be challenged and in travail:
Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
What is immediately apparent, is that hope, and more specifically Christian hope, is a concept of great richness, as the course of later reflection rapidly brings out.
It is not merely an attitude, for it also has a cognitive component. It involves our response to putative facts that are themselves related to the possibility and probability of future events – and most especially that of a world made good in Christ. Furthermore, these expectations are held in relation to our desires.
We can usefully consider two related early Christian approaches:
Augustine of Hippo famously discusses hope in his Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love (c. 420). He argues there, that while faith and hope are alike in that both are based on incomplete evidence, they are nonetheless to be distinguished by virtue of two features, first, because hope is necessarily directed to future events, whereas faith can also relate to past events (such as Christ’s resurrection). Then secondly, they are distinct because hope only relates to what is good for the hopeful person, whereas faith can also relate to what is bad for them in at least immediate terms (as in the case punishment for one’s sins).
Nonetheless, hope, faith and love are all seen as interconnected. It is only if one loves the future fulfilment of God’s will and thus hopes for it, that one can arrive at the correct form of faith (Enchiridion, II.7). However, because love provides the normative outlook that underlies hope and faith (and thus the desire component of hope), love is a more central virtue than hope (Enchiridion, XXX.114).
But there is a yet further and practical (indeed political and even interfaith) aspect here to which Christian eschatology and hope for a life after death (that was made possible as part of the redemption affected by Christ’s sacrifice) points us.
In the City of God, Augustine distinguishes the actual earthly city from the heavenly city that only exists now for us in the hope placed in God (City of God, book XV, §XXI, 1966: 541). This latter nonetheless provides a reference point for a specifically Christian view on contemporary society and culture .
This understanding of hope invites us to develop a perspective on this life and how society should be ordered (i.e. politics) which surpasses the narrow perspective of classical and purely secular politics, as indeed of the purely individual too. It does this by inviting an understanding and application of hope that can redirect traditional political virtues by reference, not merely to a telos of the earthly “city” of the present, but also to the heavenly city and eschaton.
By way of illustration of the potential for current impact, we can see this in the domain of the application of justice, when viewed within this perspective, for it invites the goal of punishment to be moved away from that of mere retribution to include reform as well. (Op cit, Book V, XXIV: 263).
Hence, Augustine emphasizes that it is the hope for a future life that underlies all true human happiness, both at the level of the individual and of the state. This follows when the true virtue of citizens and the common good is enabled to emerge optimally, as is the case in his view, when the polis and its constitution are informed by this very specifically Christian eschatological hope. 3
Turning next to a mediaeval perspective, we can see that while Augustine is more or less exclusively concerned with the significance of hope for our pursuit of a good Christian life, the discussion by St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae, contains a yet more systematic analysis of (ordinary) hope as both a passion (ST I-II, q. 40) and a theological virtue (ST II-II, qq. 17–22).
As a passion it is directed to finite, earthly goods, whereas, when considered as a theological virtue, hope is understood as directed to ultimate happiness in the union with God.
It thus under the heading of hope as among “the passions common to man and other animals,” that Aquinas offers his famous definition that “hope is a movement of the appetitive power ensuing from the apprehension of a future good, difficult but possible to obtain” (II: q.40 a.2).
By contrast, in his second discussion of hope – as one of the theological virtues – Aquinas argues that it possesses three characteristics: namely that its object is God, that it is “infused” in us by God, and that it is revealed to us through the Scriptures (II: q.62 a.1).
This twofold understanding of hope is related to Aquinas’s further twofold understanding of human happiness as a state which can be attained by means of human powers and yet also that which can be attained by the power of God alone.
As the principal “irascible” emotion4, to use the Thomist categories, hope leads in our struggle to obtain difficult but possible future goods. As a theological virtue, hope is infused in us so that our will may be directed toward a supernatural happiness which, however in itself, lies beyond our present capacity to understand (II: q.62 a.3); and as such, it is to be understood by analogy.
Amidst the many and various later discussions (many of which rather lacked comparable depth), we might notice Kant’s prominent placement of hope in saying that “The whole interest of reason, speculative as well as practical, is centred in the three following questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?” (Critique of Pure Reason). While his answer to the third question, by reference to the immortality of the soul, has generally been found wanting, the prominence he gives to hope is appropriate.
But what is most important for us as Christians is to see the distinctiveness of Christian hope.
To sloganize, it may be said that hope, when understood as a merely human desire, may point to the patria in which it can be authentically and fully realized, but it does not know the via, for that can only be found in the media Dei uniquely made available through Christ – much indeed as the Ancient Israelites in the dessert wandered in expectation of the Promised Land but found it hard to discern the way to it.
The invitational aspect here is important, since it qualifies the exclusivity of Christianity through inviting all (be they secular, pagan or of other faiths) to explore what a world made good (i.e. redeemed) in the manner that the Christian eschaton anticipates, would look like, when realized in the here and now, as well as in the life to come.
Within this Christian perspective, the natural pre-Christian desire of hope is thus not negated, but rather invitationally taken up into the theological virtue, where alone it can be realized in God – who is the object of our hope and within whom alone our lives can be truly fulfilled.
The late Fr. R. Crouse, whose thought did so much to inform the proceedings of this week’s conference, in one of his own treatments of hope and its mutual relation to faith and love, highlighted the work of the Franciscan theologian St Bonaventure – with his trinitarian framing of the Christian perspective in all this.
Building on the thought of St Augustine’s doctrine of the created image of the Holy Trinity (in the threefold powers of memory, understanding and will within the unity of human personality), Bonaventura argued that:
Just as in man’s creation, the image of God was created in a trinity of powers with a unity of essence, so in man’s re-creation the image of God consists in a trinity of virtues with a unity of grace. Through these virtues, the soul is borne upward to the supreme Trinity in a way which corresponds to the attributes of the three Persons.
Thus, faith, by believing and assenting, leads to the highest Truth; hope, by trust and expectation, leads to the loftiest Height; charity, by loving and desiring, leads to the highest Good’
Breviloquium, Pt. 5, c.4, n.4; (cf. J.-G. Bougerol, La theologie de la esperance aux xiie et xiiie siecles (Paris, 1985), vol. 1, p. 267; on the doctrine in Augustine’s Theory of Personality in Blumethal and Markus, Neoplatonism and Early Christian Thought, London 1981, p 180-185
But the last word, for the moment, can perhaps be left to the great Anglican Divine, Richard Hooker who speaks of faith, hope and love – with a profound brevity as:
…concerning Faith, the principal object whereof is that eternal Verity which hath discovered the treasures of hidden wisdom in Christ; concerning Hope, the highest object whereof is that everlasting Goodness which in Christ doth quicken the dead; concerning Charity, the final object whereof is that incomprehensible Beauty which shineth in the countenance of Christ the Son of the Living God….
(Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1, xi, 6.)
Thus do the good, the true and the beautiful in the Christian vision, in a unity of grace, lead us up through “the hope that does not disappoint,” this that grounds our perseverance in the love of God, to the summum bonum of the Triune God.
1 Erasmus it is thought suggested use of a Greek name for More’s original Latin title of Nusquama, (See, Smith D, Reading Utopia, in Logan G.M. (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 201 p 143). Both words meant ‘Nowhere’ or ‘No place’, ouk-topos. The first Italian translation by Ortensio Lando in Venice in 1548, referred to Eutopia (eutopos). However, there seems to have emerged quite rapidly the alternative understanding of utopia as a place of perfection and well-being. (See Greengrass Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648. London, 2015, p179) thus yielding a concept with a tensive polarity of both critique and of promise with an implicit condemnation of what is and promise of what might be which in Christian terms is framed in the context of repentance—metanoia, (re)turning to God and redemption.
2Lopez, Shane et al. “Hope: Many Definitions, Many Measures” in Positive Psychological Assessment. Eds. Shane Lopez and C. R. Snyder. Washington DC, APA, 2003. 91-107.
3Letter 155 to Macedonius, in his Political Writings, 4–8, pp. 91–94. See also Dodaro, Robert, “Augustine on the Statesman and the Two Cities”, in Mark Vesey (ed.), A Companion to Augustine, Blackwell, 2007, pp. 386–397; and Chignell, Andrew, “Rational Hope, Moral Order, and the Revolution of the Will”, in Eric Watkins (ed.), Divine Order, Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 197–218.
4 For Aquinas (in rather extreme summary), emotions are reactions, which is to say changes of the state of the subject initiated by the presence of an object. And he locates emotions in the lower level of the soul, which is to say in the sensory appetite Emotions are then considered to have a hylomorphic structure where the appetitive reaction is the formal, and the physical reaction is the material element. Aquinas then divides emotions into irascible and concuscible sub-kinds and identifies eleven of them. Namely, (as concuscible) Love versus hate; desire versus aversion; pleasure versus pain, and then (as irascible) hope versus despair, courage versus fear and then, on its own, anger.