Hope is embarrassing. It’s associated with simplicity and ignorance. If you have hope, say the lovers of doom, you must not know how bad things really are.
That’s rich, since knowing how bad things really are is in fact a necessary premise of hope. If you hope for something then by definition you know it hasn’t happened yet, or at least you don’t know for sure that it has. This makes hope the opposite of wishful thinking, with which it is often confused. Wishful thinking is when you insist you have a foolproof system for choosing the winning lottery ticket. Hope is when you know you don’t, but you buy one anyway.
So hope is also high-stakes and painful, especially when misdirected. That’s why people defend themselves by taunting hope with names like “childish” and “unrealistic.” It guards them against the sting of disappointment. It’s also why the gates to Dante’s hell advise their entrants to “abandon all hope.” It’s hard to tell whether that advice is a small mercy or a crowning sorrow. At least the souls that take it won’t compound their agony with false dreams of rescue. But it’s a dark night indeed that can’t even be lit by dreams.
On earth, at least, hope always comes at the cost of vulnerability, just as love comes at the cost of grief. You can’t allow yourself one without exposing yourself to the other. Anyone who hopes for a bliss beyond this life can be made to look a fool in this one.
David Hume shielded himself against that fate by arguing that the sporadic blessings of our ramshackle world hardly justify believing in a better one to come. There’s at least as much confusion and suffering in evidence as there is beauty and order. If you can take stock of it all and still maintain that the beauty will endure when the suffering is spent, you’re braver than Hume was.
And that’s what it comes down to. As a virtue, hope is the twin sister of courage, the steeliest and strongest of the graces. The old Greek saying goes that after every horror and affliction was let loose from Pandora’s jar, hope stayed put. No one quite knows why. But I like to think it was because she looked each monster in the face as it passed by, stared down every dark disease until she had endured them all. And when they fled away exhausted she was still rooted in place, slender but unmovable. She alone held out to see how the story ends.
Image: Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
...and she is something I am in need of just now. Perfect timing, and gracious thanks!
I had been thinking about the virtues of faith, hope and charity for a while now. The nuns admonished that we have them, but never quite got around to describing what they meant. It was assumed that each person should understand what they meant for each individual, and much ink has been spilled in order to define these theologically. I am aware that all analogies limp, including this one, but indulge me.
Our life’s journey, speaking on a metaphysical/religious plane, is a journey to the Summum Bonum, or the greatest good, the Almighty to believers, and who knows what to athiests. In any case, restricting to believers only, as atheism is it’s own religion, and I have little enough time to understand my own journey, let alone other ones, the proverbial storm-tossed sea is apt. Jews in the time of Christ had a great fear of the sea, and for good reason. The question is how to get to that Bonum and by using what tools. Floating in a stormy sea unaided will soon overwhelm any person. One needs a vessel. That vessel is faith, the belief that one must float above these troubles and survive. As such, faith looks to the present, and must be constantly tended to. Ben Franklin’s admonition of embarking on a skiff made of paper is a great one, but instead of the Declaration of Independence, ours is something even more fragile, and must be constantly renewed. Hope is the driving force, that looks to the goal, the future, and provides the reason to keep repairing that skiff. As such, the virtues are intertwined and must rely upon one another. The opposite of faith is disbelief or cynicism, and the opposite of hope is despair. EIther is enough to plunge one into the sea and be overwhelmed. Charity, or love, is the driving force without which the entire exercise is futile. It is the grace which is overflowing from that Summum Bonum which is freely given, but must be freely accepted, that is the spark which keeps each of us in that leaky boat and looking to the horizon. When we reach that shore, as in time we all will, faith is no longer needed, as we have arrived and may safely step onto the shore, and hope is fulfilled. Love alone survives, as St. Paul has taught. Bishop Barron stated that in one of his DW+ interviews, and was revelatory enough for me to steal it here.
Thank you, Spencer for these essays. Beautifully written. I wanted to share my perceptions from one who had a religious upbringing just to show that we know little more that you did, and perhaps it was to your advantage ultimately, as you had the hunger to delve far more deeply than I ever will.