No, 2.2 was not required. Off to graphics. We’ll just count this post as version 2.2.
When I clicked on the text of Spe Salvi Friday morning at 7am and glanced over it with echoes of Max and Ruby and early-morning complaints echoing in my ears and the pressure of a deadline looming with no babysitter and a medical appointment in the middle of it all, I was initially ticked off.
For even a cursory survey alerted me to the fact that condensing this into 1500 words suitable for a popular audience was going to be much more of a challenge than Deus Caritas Est was.
And it was – it required much more sitting and staring into space than the first encyclical, although the odd thing is that once I sort of “got it” and was able to start going, I looked back at my first reaction (which was essentially one of feeling very much at sea) and wondered what had been wrong with me. It’s not that hard, I thought. In fact, this is a pretty clear-cut job I’ve got here.
(My problem is, in essence, that my brain is not cut out for theology or philosophy, even when it is as clearly articulated as it is by Pope Benedict, excellent teacher that he is. I learned this taking philosophy in college, when I had a terrible time simply following arguments, and keeping what, say, Descartes had presented in one paragraph in my head long enough to tie it to what he concludes in the next paragraph. I felt like the knots I was tying to keep me tethered to one stage of an argument kept coming loose. I’d look back, and have no idea where I’d been. Even something that veers close to concreteness like my Christology seminar at Vanderbilt gave me huge headaches. I don’t know what it is – I just must be an absolute, bottom line concrete thinker. Abstractions give me fits. Or maybe I’m just stupid. Always a possibility.)
With that confidence-building introduction, you are now adequately prepared to run shaking your heads from my take on Benedict’s second encyclical. Probably a good idea – before I get started, you might want to simply jump over to what Archbishop Chaput has to say about it –
The source of the word virtue is revealing; it comes from the Latin noun virtus, meaning “strength.” The virtue that Christians call hope is not a warm feeling, or a sunny mood, or a habit of optimism. Optimism, as the great Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos once wrote, has nothing to do with hope. Optimism is often foolish and naive–a preference to see good where the evidence is undeniably bad. In fact, Bernanos called optimism a “sly form of selfishness, a method of isolating oneself from the unhappiness of others.”
Hope is a very different creature. It’s a choice–a self-imposed discipline to trust in God while judging ourselves and the world with unblinkered, unsentimental clarity. In effect, it’s a form of self-mastery inspired and reinforced by God’s grace. “The highest form of hope,” Georges Bernanos said, “is despair, overcome.” Jesus Christ was born in a filthy stable and died brutally on a cross not to make a good world even better but to save a fallen and broken world from itself at the cost of his own blood. Such is the real world, our daily world, the world of Christian hope–the world that Pope Benedict speaks to when he writes in his new encyclical that “all serious and upright human conduct is hope in action” and “the true measure of humanity is [determined by our] relationship to suffering and to the sufferer.”
In the words of Benedict: “To suffer with the other and for others; to suffer for the sake of truth and justice; to suffer out of love, and in order to become a person who truly loves–these are fundamental elements of humanity, and to abandon them would destroy man himself.”
There is nothing that the unbeliever has thought that Benedict has not also thought and, indeed, spelled out in terms at least as clear as any unbeliever himself has set down. He is like Aquinas in this sense. The atheist has nothing to teach him that he has not already thought about and analyzed. His thought has that Germanic thoroughness and clarity that make us aware that he has seen issues in their whole sweep.
This encyclical cites words in Greek, Latin, French, and German, usually words he needs to spell out in technical terms to make a point. In addition to St. Paul and Scripture, it cites—by no means at random—Dostoyevsky, Francis Bacon, Marx, Kant, de Lubac, Horkheimer, Gregory Nazianzen, Adorno, Luther, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas, the Fourth Lateran Council, Saint Hilary, Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Paul Le-Bao-Tinh, pseudo-Rufinus, St. Benedict, Frederick Engels, St Ambrose, Plato, and Josephine Bakhita, a former slave from the Sudan. He already cited Aristotle in the “Regensburg Lecture,” so he can be excused. He manages to touch on the history of slavery, the notion of modernity, the importance of prayer, and the revitalization of the teachings on Purgatory and Hell, all in one relatively brief document.
snip
The burden of this encyclical is on restoring order to the mind of our kind in thinking about its own destiny.
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What this encyclical is about, in part, then, is the untenableness of other versions of what man can hope for, particularly modern versions supposedly deriving from science. This “future,” I believe, was what Kant asked about. And Benedict in this encyclical pretty much shows the impossibility of Kant’s version of an inner worldly alternative to eternal life as the destiny of man. (#19-20)
In a remarkable analysis of both Horkheimer and Adorno, the two famous Frankfurt school thinkers whom the popes treats with great attention, Benedict shows how they, in a way, reinvent Christian concepts of God and eternal life. They even recognize the need for the resurrection of the body, yet in a specifically un-Christian context (#22, 42-43). The pope suggests that modern thinkers could not get rid of Christianity except by reinventing it in some odd and contorted manner. The result was never superior to the original. It is time to look again at the original. This is what this encyclical is about.
Now, lest you think that this encyclical is of interest only to the theologians among us, reconsider. It is, of course, addressed to all of us, a gift to us. It is filled with sentences and paragraphs that bring you to full stop and demand contemplation and prompt self-examination. Further, it has a very practical dimension to it.
What is hope? As the Catechism says, hope is the virtue which involves having eternal life with God as our ultimate goal in life, and trusting in his grace and mercy, not our own strength, to reach that goal.
In the first part of the encyclical, Benedict contrasts Christian hope with both the small hopes that fill our days and the false hopes which tempt us. We are invited to place our hope for own salvation and ultimate happiness in our own achievements, in our relationships with others, and with what the world calls “progress.” All will fail us.
Benedict spends a great deal of time unpacking modernity, as he is wont to do, teasing out the origins of material and scientific progress as an object of hope, and pointing to the inadequacies of such hopes.
(Insert routine “Augustinian pessimism” allusion here, if you want to. As for me, I simply call it realism. Many, many elements – countless elements of human life have materially improved over the centuries. I doubt even the most devoted member of the Society for Creative Anachronisms would really prefer to be living six hundred years ago. However, technology brings its own set of problems, makes it possible to hurt other people more efficiently and on a broader scale, and undercuts certain important elements of human life. Moreover, even in the midst of this prosperity and progress, hope can still be mighty hard to come by. Go into a high school classroom and look into their eyes. You’ll see.)
In Christ, though, we have real, lasting hope.
Here too we see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness. Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well. So now we can say: Christianity was not only “good news”—the communication of a hitherto unknown content. In our language we would say: the Christian message was not only “informative” but “performative”. That means: the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known—it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life. (2)
And
It is not the elemental spirits of the universe, the laws of matter, which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the stars, that is, the universe; it is not the laws of matter and of evolution that have the final say, but reason, will, love—a Person. And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we are free. In ancient times, honest enquiring minds were aware of this. Heaven is not empty. Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love (5)
And
The true shepherd is one who knows even the path that passes through the valley of death; one who walks with me even on the path of final solitude, where no one can accompany me, guiding me through: he himself has walked this path, he has descended into the kingdom of death, he has conquered death, and he has returned to accompany us now and to give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through. The realization that there is One who even in death accompanies me, and with his “rod and his staff comforts me”, so that “I fear no evil” (cf. Ps 23 [22]:4)—this was the new “hope” that arose over the life of believers.
One of the aspects of hope that Benedict emphasizes time and again through the encyclical is the unity with others to which true hope calls us.
This comes up time and time again. He writes that hope unites us to others in Christ, because as we are in Communion with Christ, we are in Communion with all whom Christ pours out his love. He writes that hope compels us to a missional stance on every level. He emphasizes that salvation, as articulated in the New Testament, has an individual dimension, of course, but is profoundly more than that, for it involves the redemption of all of all creation. Our hope is not just for our own salvation, but for the salvation of all the world, remade in Christ:
It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain. In this way we further clarify an important element of the Christian concept of hope. Our hope is always essentially also hope for others; only thus is it truly hope for me too[40]. As Christians we should never limit ourselves to asking: how can I save myself? We should also ask: what can I do in order that others may be saved and that for them too the star of hope may rise? Then I will have done my utmost for my own personal salvation as well. (48)
And how do we learn and practice hope? After all, hope, as a virtue is a gift, but it is a gift that must be accepted by us and practiced in order to nourish us in holiness, just like all the virtues. Benedict outlines three areas of life in which we can learn and practice hope.
1) Prayer (33-34), in which he reminds us that prayer itself is an act of hope. Further, real, honest prayer, acts as a purifier, particularly when our own yearnings are expressed through the prayer of the Church:
When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well. In prayer we must learn what we can truly ask of God—what is worthy of God. We must learn that we cannot pray against others. We must learn that we cannot ask for the superficial and comfortable things that we desire at this moment—that meagre, misplaced hope that leads us away from God. We must learn to purify our desires and our hopes. We must free ourselves from the hidden lies with which we deceive ourselves. God sees through them, and when we come before God, we too are forced to recognize them. “But who can discern his errors? Clear me from hidden faults” prays the Psalmist (Ps 19:12 [18:13]). Failure to recognize my guilt, the illusion of my innocence, does not justify me and does not save me, because I am culpable for the numbness of my conscience and my incapacity to recognize the evil in me for what it is. If God does not exist, perhaps I have to seek refuge in these lies, because there is no one who can forgive me; no one who is the true criterion. Yet my encounter with God awakens my conscience in such a way that it no longer aims at self-justification, and is no longer a mere reflection of me and those of my contemporaries who shape my thinking, but it becomes a capacity for listening to the Good itself.
34. For prayer to develop this power of purification, it must on the one hand be something very personal, an encounter between my intimate self and God, the living God. On the other hand it must be constantly guided and enlightened by the great prayers of the Church and of the saints, by liturgical prayer, in which the Lord teaches us again and again how to pray properly. Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, in his book of spiritual exercises, tells us that during his life there were long periods when he was unable to pray and that he would hold fast to the texts of the Church’s prayer: the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the prayers of the liturgy[27]. Praying must always involve this intermingling of public and personal prayer. This is how we can speak to God and how God speaks to us. In this way we undergo those purifications by which we become open to God and are prepared for the service of our fellow human beings. We become capable of the great hope, and thus we become ministers of hope for others. Hope in a Christian sense is always hope for others as well. It is an active hope, in which we struggle to prevent things moving towards the “perverse end”. It is an active hope also in the sense that we keep the world open to God. Only in this way does it continue to be a truly human hope.
2. Action and suffering. As we serve others with courage, we practice the virtue of hope – and we share hope with others. In our suffering, because it is joined to Christ, we learn of the ultimate meaning – mysterious but powerful – in the pain of this world. It is in this section that he suggests looking again at the practice of “offering up” our daily troubles.
3. Final Judgment. This is a powerful and important section in which Benedict acknowledges that while the spectre of a Final Judgment might prompt fear in some, it is actually a reason for hope. Why? Because in the reality of Christ’s judgment, we will find the justice that seems so terribly absent from this world.
Just a couple of notes on some other aspects of the encyclical:
1. The Pope uses several individuals as examples of hope: St. Josephine Bhakita, a Sudanese woman brought to Italy as a slave, Vietnames martyr St. Paul Le_Bao-Tinh, Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan and St. Augustine. The passage on St. Augustine seems almost autobiographical, in a sense.
2. As he often does, Benedict presents various aspects of Catholic life and practice in ways which acknowledge the ways in which these practices might have been misunderstood or misused in the past, but highlight the truths which they embody. The suggestion of retrieving “offering it up” is one example (“…there were some exaggerations and perhaps unhealthy applications of this devotion….) as is the passage on Purgatory, already one of the more frequently-cited passages from the encyclical, in which the act of praying for the dead is offered as a deep sign of hope for ourselves and for others, with the gentle reminder that “…there is no need to convert earthly time into God’s time: in the communion of souls simple terrestrial time is superseded.” Hermeneutic of Continuity in action.
…the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known—it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.
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