Jeffrey S. Metcalfe notes that for Augustine the supreme happiness in temporal life is never achieved, so love and hope are also required. Love cannot exist without hope.
For Augustine, without the hope that a future good will result from one’s love and faith, faith sets up a happiness that excludes its beholder: faith becomes terror.
Without hope, love ceases to produce any happiness in the present, for one’s failure to love completely will always remain a source of misery.
Without hope, the believers faith will be miserable, there will be no happiness in the present, and thus, his love will not move him into action. Without love moving him into action, his hope is pointless, and his faith empty.
However, for consolation St Augustine says that “though human life is compelled to be wretched by all the grievous evils of this world…so we do not enjoy a present happiness, but look forward to happiness in the future.”
For the Black Theologian Vincent Lloyd this hope is the textbook definition of classical psychoanalytical melancholia.“In both, an object is lost, it is mourning without end, the bereaved individual feels the loss not in the external world but in herself, thereby securing a present identity in an eternal loss.”
The only difference between Augustinian hope and mourning, he says, is that,
“In hope, that object is projected into the future, in melancholia, it is projected into the past.”
In this light, Lloyd claims that the virtue of hope serves as a tactic to avoid tragedy. “When one object is pushed so far forward that it is no longer part of our time, It is just hope.” This serves as a threat to ordinary life precisely because this hope is not of our time: the eternal future is always in the future.
Lloyd believes that hope obfuscates this process. “Thus, the effect associated with hopefulness, the cheery disposition for which no cause can be found, is in fact the affect produced by a most profound melancholia.”
This leads Lloyd to conclude that “hope is not a virtue, it is a rhetorical technique.” He recommends Joy.
Unlike hope, joy can delight and move the hearer, and since it does not intend any future object, it eludes the problematic of hope by refusing to bypass the tragedies of real situations. “It begins in the ordinary and stays in the ordinary.”
Of course, one may ask - “Whence joy? In what exactly?”
This is in contrast with the philosopher of love Gillian Rose who does believe in hope, only for her, unlike Augustine, hope’s object is not an eternal future, but an eternal present.
Hope allows this speculative identity to be thought by suspending any secured links in the present to the future and the past, which allows for a present identity to be projected into the future without a priori confirming it.
That this identity might be negated in the future, as the future will be negated in the present, does not adversely affect hope.
Thus Rose writes, “If I am to stay alive, I am bound to get love wrong, all the time, but not to cease wooing, for that is my love affair, love’s work.”
Here love’s work is made possible by Rose’s refusal to cease wooing which is faith: a commitment to persevere even in the prospect of certain failure.
This seems like an awfully shaky proposition, hoping some future imagined identity, which may never be, will withstand the bloody vicissitudes of life.
Oddly, all these writers leave out the Christian response, at least in Eastern Orthodoxy. The Early Fathers will say that we have been given a foretaste of heaven, this we experience primarily through Grace or the working of the Holy Spirit. Also, we have, at present, a gift that acts as some kind of assurance - the gift of Faith. In fact, for the apostles, faith and hope were practically interchangeable.
There is a problem though.
Since we can only know God through analogy, the Saints speak of this joy as a great wedding feast, a marriage consummation, the care of a loving father, the wooing of young lovers, or the wonder when witnessing the birth of a child.
Indeed, even the experience of beauty itself, or perhaps a glimpse of paradise breaks through when we are carried away during liturgy or in prayer.
Is this enough? That depends on ones internal disorder, the external stresses one suffers, and what barriers to those stressors one has - friends, community, work, a partner etc Perhaps an experience of divine rescue, from addiction, loneliness, or ill health…
What of the rejected? The ones who know no good father, or security in this life, who’ve never married, whose every earthly hope has been shattered and betrayed? Is a pretty liturgy enough?
For these, where is their hope?
Hope is often treated as if it were exclusively a private resource that individuals develop from within and sustain apart from others.
Yet this ignores the enormous role of loving friends and family or a caring community.
On their essay Hope, Attachment and LovevAnthony Scioli and Henry Biller note that,
“…. to experience a full measure of hope, an individual must perceive a living presence that can give as well as receive….attachments are crucial for its development. .bonds with others serve as both a basis for generalized hopefulness as well as grounding for specific hopes and dreams.”
Relationship expert John Gottman describes how success in marriage depends on “encouraging one another’s dreams and aspirations”.
Gina O'Connell Higgins’ book, Resilient Adults, deals with survivors of severe childhood abuse. Conceptualizing hope as a gift imparted by a special provider, she quotes survivors’ experiences of friends or caring adults in terms suggestive of received “light”, a “safe harbor” or a “safe haven”.
Erikson linked hope to basic trust and receiving adequate care in the earliest years of life. For Erikson, hope was the bedrock on which the other human virtues might be established. It was “a very basic human strength without which we couldn't stay alive.”
The theologian William Lynch stated that hopeful attitude is grounded in affirmation and acceptance. Lynch also noted, “the wholly interior hope is a romantic fiction”. It is derived in large part from external provisions such as"liberating relationships.”
Essentially, such development as an adequate attachment system (level 1) facilitates basic trust (level 2) which spawns greater differentiated trust (Level 3), leading to stronger faith development (level 4), which translates into adaptive daily hope responses (level 5).
For those who have been denied these developmental stages of trust, only the cross of Christ remains, and, as such, it is not humanly possible to wish for one's own crucifixion.
This is why the Dark Night of the Soul requires perfect passivity for God’s action, man can never will their own deconstruction. Man can only wish for God’s peace, or His love, or His Grace, but only God can desire God for Himself.
When man is utterly undone, decentered, beyond human help, and begins the threefold reduction; pinned to existence and helpless, he finally abandons understanding for faith, memory for hope, and willing to love.
Even the former Pope Razinger, in his essay On Hope, admits the needs for a kind of secure base of human love first:
“Being is not good, especially if you have not experienced it as welcome, have not had “Yes” said to you, that is, if you have not been loved. This indicates that the fear which transcends all fears is the fear of losing love altogether, fear of an existence in which the little daily disturbances fill everything, without anything large and reassuring coming along to keep the balance. Then these little fears, if they constitute everything that can be expected of the future, will pass over into the great fear—fear of an unbearable life—because hope no longer dwells in it. In this case, death, which is the end of all hopes, becomes the only hope
If the fear that transcends all fears is in the last resort fear of losing love, then the hope which transcends all hopes is the assurance of being showered with the gift of a great love.
One could then say that simple objects become hopes by taking on the coloration of love, by more or less resembling it, each according to its uniqueness. Inversely, in fears one always finds the feeling of not being loved, a hope of love, but a trampled one."
What kind of love does the hope that transcends all hopes await? This is the genuine hope which Dr. Herbert Plugge of Heidelberg, on the basis of his contacts with the terminally ill and the suicidal, calls the “fundamental hope.” Without any doubt man wants to be loved by others.
We need the answer of a human love, but this response reaches farther out of itself toward the infinite, toward a world redeemed.”
To achieve this is no mean thing. It’s common knowledge where poverty reigns so does belief in God. Suffering is a nessasary feature of Christian spirituality. Pope Benedict XVI continues,
“that for the sake of their faith Christians have lost “ta hyparchonta,” that is, their money, their possessions, and what appears in ordinary life to be the “substance” upon which a life can be constructed.
…it is precisely through the loss of what ordinarily constitutes “substance,” the basis of daily living, thatChristians are shown that in fact they have a better “hyparxis.”
However, modern American Christians surely fool themselves when they speak of any thick faith in God; they who can relay on 401k’s, medical science, the Government, and live in tiny fiefdoms where casual desires are instantly gratified at a whim.
For these Ratzinger says,
“…what develops is a pseudo-hope that can only deceive man in the end. The law of possession constrains him to “hypostole,” to the game of hide and seek, of compromises by which one tries to assure oneself of the sympathy of the powers that be, by hanging on to one’s “substance.”
He recommends a Franciscan spirituality, saying,
“Francis is the witness and guardian of hope because he has helped us “accept with joy” (Heb 10:34) the loss of rank, of position, of possessions, and has made visible, behind the false hopes, the true, the genuine hope—the one that no one can confiscate or destroy.”
In his last years Francis had lost everything—health, possessions, his own foundation “ta hyparch-onta.” And it is precisely from this man that the most delightfully joyous words issue. With all his hopes taken away, all his disappointments, there shines forth the “fundamental hope” in its invincible grandeur. Francis had truly left the “accidental” to enter into “substance.” Free of the multiplicity of hopes, he has become the great witness that man has hope, that he is a being of hope.”
Yes, even for a Saint, it took near complete disposition for him to finally relay exclusively on God, hence the former Pope concludes,
“We can remain people of hope only if our life is not contentedly grounded in the everyday but is solidly rooted in “substance.”
I cannot say the same for most other Christians.
So, is it possible to have a hope without a future in the present?
I’ll end with a catchy phrase by St Silouan the Athonite:
“Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.”
This is why the Dark Night of the Soul requires perfect passivity for God’s action, man can never will their own deconstruction. Man can only wish for God’s peace, or His love, or His Grace, but only God can desire God for Himself.
When man is utterly undone, decentered, beyond human help, and begins the threefold reduction; pinned to existence and helpless, he finally abandons understanding for faith, memory for hope, and willing to love.
Even the former Pope Razinger, in his essay On Hope, admits the needs for a kind of secure base of human love first:
“Being is not good, especially if you have not experienced it as welcome, have not had “Yes” said to you, that is, if you have not been loved. This indicates that the fear which transcends all fears is the fear of losing love altogether, fear of an existence in which the little daily disturbances fill everything, without anything large and reassuring coming along to keep the balance. Then these little fears, if they constitute everything that can be expected of the future, will pass over into the great fear—fear of an unbearable life—because hope no longer dwells in it. In this case, death, which is the end of all hopes, becomes the only hope
If the fear that transcends all fears is in the last resort fear of losing love, then the hope which transcends all hopes is the assurance of being showered with the gift of a great love.
One could then say that simple objects become hopes by taking on the coloration of love, by more or less resembling it, each according to its uniqueness. Inversely, in fears one always finds the feeling of not being loved, a hope of love, but a trampled one."
What kind of love does the hope that transcends all hopes await? This is the genuine hope which Dr. Herbert Plugge of Heidelberg, on the basis of his contacts with the terminally ill and the suicidal, calls the “fundamental hope.” Without any doubt man wants to be loved by others.
We need the answer of a human love, but this response reaches farther out of itself toward the infinite, toward a world redeemed.”
To achieve this is no mean thing. It’s common knowledge where poverty reigns so does belief in God. Suffering is a nessasary feature of Christian spirituality. Pope Benedict XVI continues,
“that for the sake of their faith Christians have lost “ta hyparchonta,” that is, their money, their possessions, and what appears in ordinary life to be the “substance” upon which a life can be constructed.
…it is precisely through the loss of what ordinarily constitutes “substance,” the basis of daily living, thatChristians are shown that in fact they have a better “hyparxis.”
However, modern American Christians surely fool themselves when they speak of any thick faith in God; they who can relay on 401k’s, medical science, the Government, and live in tiny fiefdoms where casual desires are instantly gratified at a whim.
For these Ratzinger says,
“…what develops is a pseudo-hope that can only deceive man in the end. The law of possession constrains him to “hypostole,” to the game of hide and seek, of compromises by which one tries to assure oneself of the sympathy of the powers that be, by hanging on to one’s “substance.”
He recommends a Franciscan spirituality, saying,
“Francis is the witness and guardian of hope because he has helped us “accept with joy” (Heb 10:34) the loss of rank, of position, of possessions, and has made visible, behind the false hopes, the true, the genuine hope—the one that no one can confiscate or destroy.”
In his last years Francis had lost everything—health, possessions, his own foundation “ta hyparch-onta.” And it is precisely from this man that the most delightfully joyous words issue. With all his hopes taken away, all his disappointments, there shines forth the “fundamental hope” in its invincible grandeur. Francis had truly left the “accidental” to enter into “substance.” Free of the multiplicity of hopes, he has become the great witness that man has hope, that he is a being of hope.”
Yes, even for a Saint, it took near complete disposition for him to finally relay exclusively on God, hence the former Pope concludes,
“We can remain people of hope only if our life is not contentedly grounded in the everyday but is solidly rooted in “substance.”
I cannot say the same for most other Christians.
So, is it possible to have a hope without a future in the present?
I’ll end with a catchy phrase by St Silouan the Athonite:
“Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.”
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