Hope in Season

What does it mean to have hope? I keep returning to this question in my many musings. There are, in a sense, two mistakes which we often make about hope, namely that any optimist is a hopeful person and that no pessimist may be. A hopeful optimist is not a tautology, nor is a hopeful pessimist an oxymoron. Chesterton begins the third chapter of Orthodoxy by discussing the optimist and the pessimist:

“When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea of what they meant…It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl: ‘A optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist is a man who looks after your feet.’ I am not sure that this is not the best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it. For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice of road….

The world is not a lodging house at Brighton, which we are free to leave because it is miserable. It s the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness is a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.”

One conclusion which may be drawn from Chesterton, then, is that pessimism about the world and optimism about it are alike reasons for hope. The optimist may only see what he wants to see: but sometimes he does in fact see it, and should be grateful for that, and so should respond by trying to preserve what he knows is good in the world. The pessimist may see mostly things which he does not want to see: but he does in fact see, and so should be grateful for that, and so respond respond by trying to correct what he knows is wrong in the world.

Neither of these things is hope, or hopelessness. The world may go to hell in a handbasket, as the pessimist sees things, and yet there is no earthly golden age in history: his yearning is for something which exists in another world. The world may progress, and some wrongs may be righted, as the optimist sees things, and yet there never will be a utopia: that yearning too is for something which exists outside of this life.

Pope Francis pointed to this late last year in one of his Wednesday audiences:

“Hope is not optimism; it is not that ability to look at things with good cheer and move on. No, that is optimism, that is not hope….Nor is hope a positive attitude in front of things….It is not easy to understand what hope is….we can say firstly that hope is a risk, it is a risky virtue, it is a virtue – like Saint Paul says – ‘of an ardent expectation towards the revelation of the Son of God.’ It is not an illusion….[The LORD] builds and He rebuilds. And that is precisely the reason of our hope….Christ is the one who renews every wonderful thing of the Creation. He’s the reason of our hope. And this hope does not delude because He is faithful. He can’t renounce Himself. This is the virtue of hope.”

The world which is ever-improving in the eyes of the optimist is the world of nature upon which God’s grace builds. The error of the optimist here is in supposing that this world is the foundation, and so he looks at a foundation of sand rather than of rock. There is a saying on the Right that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. Unfortunately, when the world fails him (as it inevitably will), the optimist who has no hope will discover that his optimism is but a mask for despair. The pessimist may seem outwardly despairing, but he may be the most hopeful of all people: he does not place his trust in this world and so is more ale to place his trust in God. Yet, the pessimist is not without the risk of error–he may conclude that because things are going so badly here, that therefore the Lord has turned His back on the world, that while there is no reason to trust in the world, there is not any reason to trust in God, either. He may be afraid of the world, or afraid for it, and thus may forget that above all he should have a holy fear of the Lord.

Hope is a paradoxical thing: it overcomes fear, that is, fear of the world; yet with wisdom it is rooted in fear, that is, fear of the Lord. It is this holy fear which allows us, ultimately, to be not afraid. It drives out anxiety, whilst preserving anxious anticipation.

What do we anticipate, or in other words, what do we ultimately hope for? In his Summa of the Christian Life, Ven. Louis of Grenada, O.P., explains that

“There are four principles about which hope is concerned. The first is the happiness of the life to come; the second is the pardon of sins, which are impediments to the fruit of hope; the third is the granting of our petitions; and the fourth is the assistance of God in the midst of our labors and temptations. The virtue of hope pertains to all of these matters and to those things which are related to them, and all of these objects of hope have their foundation in the tree of the Holy Cross.

But the principle object of our hope is the eternal happiness of the beatific vision… [In the beatific vision] the human intellect is rendered sufficiently strong to be able to see God as He is in His divine beauty and as he is seen by the angels.  It is one of the most ineffable unions imaginable and from a human point of view it would seem incredible, because of the infinite distance between the divine and the human natures and by reason of the weakness of our human intellect, which cannot understand spiritual things except through images taken from bodily things.

St. Thomas teaches that it is only with the greatest difficulty that man can hope for so lofty and remarkable a union. Yet God has elected another union which is even more remarkable–the union of the divine Word with human nature. As a result, the Christian need never doubt that he can become one with God through grace, for he sees that God Himself has become man.”

Thus, in the end, our hope is in God, and our hope is for heaven, meaning union with God. It is the hope for Christ’s return, and more importantly for his reign. But it is founded in His Incarnation. We are even now in the advent season, a season of preparation for Christmas [1], but even more so it is a season of preparation for Christ’s coming into our hearts and for His return at the end of the age. The four weeks of advent ultimately point us back to this hope by what they signify. Another Dominican, Bl. Jacobus de Voragine, tells us that “The Lord’s advent is celebrated for four weeks to signify that his coming is fourfold: he came in the flesh, he comes into our hearts, he comes to us at death, and he will come to judge us. The fourth week is seldom completed, because the glory of the saints, which will be bestowed at the last coming, will never end.”

Advent is therefore a season of hope, since we do not prepare for what we do not expect.

—-Notes—-
[1] On the other hand, Christmas is the celebration of Christ’s birth—so that the Incarnation itself happened 9 months prior within the liturgical year, as noted by Fr. Jaki in his excellent essay “Christ, Catholics, and Abortion.” Nevertheless, Christmas—Christ’s birth—does represent that time at which man finally sees God face-to-face.