ENCYCLICAL LETTER
SPE SALVI
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
BENEDICT XVI
TO THE BISHOPS
PRIESTS AND DEACONS
MEN AND WOMEN RELIGIOUS
AND ALL THE LAY FAITHFUL
ON CHRISTIAN HOPE
Introduction
1. “SPE SALVI facti sumus”—in
hope we were saved, says Saint Paul to the Romans, and likewise to
us (Rom
8:24). According to the Christian faith,
“redemption”—salvation—is not simply a given. Redemption is offered
to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope,
by virtue of which we can face our present: the present, even if it
is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if
we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to
justify the effort of the journey. Now the question immediately
arises: what sort of hope could ever justify the statement that, on
the basis of that hope and simply because it exists, we are
redeemed? And what sort of certainty is involved here?
Faith is
Hope
2. Before turning our
attention to these timely questions, we must listen a little more
closely to the Bible's testimony on hope. “Hope”, in fact, is a key
word in Biblical faith—so much so that in several passages the words
“faith” and “hope” seem interchangeable. Thus the Letter to the
Hebrews closely links the “fullness of faith” (10:22) to “the
confession of our hope without wavering” (10:23). Likewise, when the
First Letter of Peter exhorts Christians to be always ready to give
an answer concerning the logos—the meaning and the reason—of their
hope (cf. 3:15), “hope” is equivalent to “faith”. We see how
decisively the self-understanding of the early Christians was shaped
by their having received the gift of a trustworthy hope, when we
compare the Christian life with life prior to faith, or with the
situation of the followers of other religions. Paul reminds the
Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were “without
hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). Of course he knew
they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods
had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their
contradictory myths. Notwithstanding their gods, they were “without
God” and consequently found themselves in a dark world, facing a
dark future. In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recidimus (How quickly we
fall back from nothing to nothing)[1]:
so says an epitaph of that period. In this phrase we see in no
uncertain terms the point Paul was making. In the same vein he says
to the Thessalonians: you must not “grieve as others do who have no
hope” (1 Th 4:13). 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.
3. Yet at this point a
question arises: in what does this hope consist which, as hope, is
“redemption”? The essence of the answer is given in the phrase from
the Letter to the Ephesians quoted above: the Ephesians, before
their encounter with Christ, were without hope because they were
“without God in the world”. To come to know God—the true God—means
to receive hope. We who have always lived with the Christian concept
of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to
notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter
with this God. The example of a saint of our time can to some degree
help us understand what it means to have a real encounter with this
God for the first time. I am thinking of the African Josephine
Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul II. She was born around
1869—she herself did not know the precise date—in Darfur in Sudan.
At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till
she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan.
Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and
the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she
bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life.
Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the
Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the
Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying “masters” who had
owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different
kind of “master”—in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning,
she used the name “paron” for the living God, the God of Jesus
Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and
maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now,
however, she heard that there is a “paron” above all masters, the
Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person.
She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created
her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other
than the supreme “Paron”, before whom all other masters are
themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and
she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the
destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her “at the
Father's right hand”. Now she had “hope” —no longer simply the
modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the
great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am
awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” Through the knowledge
of this hope she was “redeemed”, no longer a slave, but a free child
of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the
Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in
the world—without hope because without God. Hence, when she was
about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish
to be separated again from her “Paron”. On 9 January 1890, she was
baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from
the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona,
she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and
from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the
porter's lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy
in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had
received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she
felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the
greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had
“redeemed” her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach
many, to reach everybody.
The concept of faith-based
hope in the New Testament and the early Church
4. We have raised the
question: can our encounter with the God who in Christ has shown us
his face and opened his heart be for us too not just “informative”
but “performative”—that is to say, can it change our lives, so that
we know we are redeemed through the hope that it expresses? Before
attempting to answer the question, let us return once more to the
early Church. It is not difficult to realize that the experience of
the African slave-girl Bakhita was also the experience of many in
the period of nascent Christianity who were beaten and condemned to
slavery. Christianity did not bring a message of social revolution
like that of the ill-fated Spartacus, whose struggle led to so much
bloodshed. Jesus was not Spartacus, he was not engaged in a fight
for political liberation like Barabbas or Bar- Kochba. Jesus, who
himself died on the Cross, brought something totally different: an
encounter with the Lord of all lords, an encounter with the living
God and thus an encounter with a hope stronger than the sufferings
of slavery, a hope which therefore transformed life and the world
from within. What was new here can be seen with the utmost clarity
in Saint Paul's Letter to Philemon. This is a very personal letter,
which Paul wrote from prison and entrusted to the runaway slave
Onesimus for his master, Philemon. Yes, Paul is sending the slave
back to the master from whom he had fled, not ordering but asking:
“I appeal to you for my child ... whose father I have become in my
imprisonment ... I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart
... perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while, that you
might have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but more than a
slave, as a beloved brother ...” (Philem 10-16). Those who, as far
as their civil status is concerned, stand in relation to one an
other as masters and slaves, inasmuch as they are members of the one
Church have become brothers and sisters—this is how Christians
addressed one another. By virtue of their Baptism they had been
reborn, they had been given to drink of the same Spirit and they
received the Body of the Lord together, alongside one another. Even
if external structures remained unaltered, this changed society from
within. When the Letter to the Hebrews says that Christians here on
earth do not have a permanent homeland, but seek one which lies in
the future (cf. Heb 11:13-16; Phil 3:20), this does not mean for one
moment that they live only for the future: present society is
recognized by Christians as an exile; they belong to a new society
which is the goal of their common pilgrimage and which is
anticipated in the course of that pilgrimage.
5. We must add a further
point of view. The First Letter to the Corinthians (1:18-31) tells
us that many of the early Christians belonged to the lower social
strata, and precisely for this reason were open to the experience of
new hope, as we saw in the example of Bakhita. Yet from the
beginning there were also conversions in the aristocratic and
cultured circles, since they too were living “without hope and
without God in the world”. Myth had lost its credibility; the Roman
State religion had become fossilized into simple ceremony which was
scrupulously carried out, but by then it was merely “political
religion”. Philosophical rationalism had confined the gods within
the realm of unreality. The Divine was seen in various ways in
cosmic forces, but a God to whom one could pray did not exist. Paul
illustrates the essential problem of the religion of that time quite
accurately when he contrasts life “according to Christ” with life
under the dominion of the “elemental spirits of the universe” (Col
2:8). In this regard a text by Saint Gregory Nazianzen is
enlightening. He says that at the very moment when the Magi, guided
by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end,
because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ[2].
This scene, in fact, overturns the world-view of that time, which in
a different way has become fashionable once again today. 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[3].
6. The sarcophagi of the
early Christian era illustrate this concept visually—in the context
of death, in the face of which the question concerning life's
meaning becomes unavoidable. The figure of Christ is interpreted on
ancient sarcophagi principally by two images: the philosopher and
the shepherd. Philosophy at that time was not generally seen as a
difficult academic discipline, as it is today. Rather, the
philosopher was someone who knew how to teach the essential art: the
art of being authentically human—the art of living and dying. To be
sure, it had long since been realized that many of the people who
went around pretending to be philosophers, teachers of life, were
just charlatans who made money through their words, while having
nothing to say about real life. All the more, then, the true
philosopher who really did know how to point out the path of life
was highly sought after. Towards the end of the third century, on
the sarcophagus of a child in Rome, we find for the first time, in
the context of the resurrection of Lazarus, the figure of Christ as
the true philosopher, holding the Gospel in one hand and the
philosopher's travelling staff in the other. With his staff, he
conquers death; the Gospel brings the truth that itinerant
philosophers had searched for in vain. In this image, which then
became a common feature of sarcophagus art for a long time, we see
clearly what both educated and simple people found in Christ: he
tells us who man truly is and what a man must do in order to be
truly human. He shows us the way, and this way is the truth. He
himself is both the way and the truth, and therefore he is also the
life which all of us are seeking. He also shows us the way beyond
death; only someone able to do this is a true teacher of life. The
same thing becomes visible in the image of the shepherd. As in the
representation of the philosopher, so too through the figure of the
shepherd the early Church could identify with existing models of
Roman art. There the shepherd was generally an expression of the
dream of a tranquil and simple life, for which the people, amid the
confusion of the big cities, felt a certain longing. Now the image
was read as part of a new scenario which gave it a deeper content:
“The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want ... Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, because
you are with me ...” (Ps 23 [22]:1, 4). 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.
7. We must return once more
to the New Testament. In the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the
Hebrews (v. 1) we find a kind of definition of faith which closely
links this virtue with hope. Ever since the Reformation there has
been a dispute among exegetes over the central word of this phrase,
but today a way towards a common interpretation seems to be opening
up once more. For the time being I shall leave this central word
untranslated. The sentence therefore reads as follows: “Faith is the
hypostasis of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen”. For
the Fathers and for the theologians of the Middle Ages, it was clear
that the Greek word hypostasis was to be rendered in Latin with the
term substantia. The Latin translation of the text produced at the
time of the early Church therefore reads: Est autem fides
sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium—faith is
the “substance” of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.
Saint Thomas Aquinas[4],
using the terminology of the philosophical tradition to which he
belonged, explains it as follows: faith is a habitus, that is, a
stable disposition of the spirit, through which eternal life takes
root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see. The
concept of “substance” is therefore modified in the sense that
through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say “in
embryo”—and thus according to the “substance”—there are already
present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life.
And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this
presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this “thing”
which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does
not “appear”), but because of the fact that, as an initial and
dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it
has even now come into existence. To Luther, who was not
particularly fond of the Letter to the Hebrews, the concept of
“substance”, in the context of his view of faith, meant nothing. For
this reason he understood the term hypostasis/substance not in the
objective sense (of a reality present within us), but in the
subjective sense, as an expression of an interior attitude, and so,
naturally, he also had to understand the term argumentum as a
disposition of the subject. In the twentieth century this
interpretation became prevalent—at least in Germany—in Catholic
exegesis too, so that the ecumenical translation into German of the
New Testament, approved by the Bishops, reads as follows: Glaube
aber ist: Feststehen in dem, was man erhofft, Überzeugtsein von dem,
was man nicht sieht (faith is: standing firm in what one hopes,
being convinced of what one does not see). This in itself is not
incorrect, but it is not the meaning of the text, because the Greek
term used (elenchos) does not have the subjective sense of
“conviction” but the objective sense of “proof”. Rightly, therefore,
recent Prot- estant exegesis has arrived at a different
interpretation: “Yet there can be no question but that this
classical Protestant understanding is untenable”[5].
Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come
that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us
even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this
present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are
still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is
no longer simply a “not yet”. The fact that this future exists
changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality,
and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the
present and those of the present into those of the future.
8. This explanation is
further strengthened and related to daily life if we consider verse
34 of the tenth chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, which is
linked by vocabulary and content to this definition of hope-filled
faith and prepares the way for it. Here the author speaks to
believers who have undergone the experience of persecution and he
says to them: “you had compassion on the prisoners, and you joyfully
accepted the plundering of your property (hyparchonton—Vg. bonorum),
since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession (hyparxin—Vg.
substantiam) and an abiding one.” Hyparchonta refers to property, to
what in earthly life constitutes the means of support, indeed the
basis, the “substance” for life, what we depend upon. This
“substance”, life's normal source of security, has been taken away
from Christians in the course of persecution. They have stood firm,
though, because they considered this material substance to be of
little account. They could abandon it because they had found a
better “basis” for their existence—a basis that abides, that no one
can take away. We must not overlook the link between these two types
of “substance”, between means of support or material basis and the
word of faith as the “basis”, the “substance” that endures. Faith
gives life a new basis, a new foundation on which we can stand, one
which relativizes the habitual foundation, the reliability of
material income. A new freedom is created with regard to this
habitual foundation of life, which only appears to be capable of
providing support, although this is obviously not to deny its normal
meaning. This new freedom, the awareness of the new “substance”
which we have been given, is revealed not only in martyrdom, in
which people resist the overbearing power of ideology and its
political organs and, by their death, renew the world. Above all, it
is seen in the great acts of renunciation, from the monks of ancient
times to Saint Francis of Assisi and those of our contemporaries who
enter modern religious Institutes and movements and leave everything
for love of Christ, so as to bring to men and women the faith and
love of Christ, and to help those who are suffering in body and
spirit. In their case, the new “substance” has proved to be a
genuine “substance”; from the hope of these people who have been
touched by Christ, hope has arisen for others who were living in
darkness and without hope. In their case, it has been demonstrated
that this new life truly possesses and is “substance” that calls
forth life for others. For us who contemplate these figures, their
way of acting and living is de facto a “proof” that the things to
come, the promise of Christ, are not only a reality that we await,
but a real presence: he is truly the “philosopher” and the
“shepherd” who shows us what life is and where it is to be found.
9. In order to understand
more deeply this reflection on the two types of substance—hypostasis
and hyparchonta—and on the two approaches to life expressed by these
terms, we must continue with a brief consideration of two words
pertinent to the discussion which can be found in the tenth chapter
of the Letter to the Hebrews. I refer to the words hypomone (10:36)
and hypostole (10:39). Hypo- mone is normally translated as
“patience”—perseverance, constancy. Knowing how to wait, while
patiently enduring trials, is necessary for the believer to be able
to “receive what is promised” (10:36). In the religious context of
ancient Judaism, this word was used expressly for the expectation of
God which was characteristic of Israel, for their persevering
faithfulness to God on the basis of the certainty of the Covenant in
a world which contradicts God. Thus the word indicates a lived hope,
a life based on the certainty of hope. In the New Testament this
expectation of God, this standing with God, takes on a new
significance: in Christ, God has revealed himself. He has already
communicated to us the “substance” of things to come, and thus the
expectation of God acquires a new certainty.
It is the expectation of
things to come from the perspective of a present that is already
given. It is a looking-forward in Christ's presence, with Christ who
is present, to the perfecting of his Body, to his definitive coming.
The word hypostole, on the other hand, means shrinking back through
lack of courage to speak openly and frankly a truth that may be
dangerous. Hiding through a spirit of fear leads to “destruction”
(Heb 10:39). “God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit
of power and love and self-control”—that, by contrast, is the
beautiful way in which the Second Letter to Timothy (1:7) describes
the fundamental attitude of the Christian.
Eternal life – what is it?
10. We have spoken thus far
of faith and hope in the New Testament and in early Christianity;
yet it has always been clear that we are referring not only to the
past: the entire reflection concerns living and dying in general,
and therefore it also concerns us here and now. So now we must ask
explicitly: is the Christian faith also for us today a life-changing
and life-sustaining hope?
Is it “performative” for
us—is it a message which shapes our life in a new way, or is it just
“information” which, in the meantime, we have set aside and which
now seems to us to have been superseded by more recent information?
In the search for an answer, I would like to begin with the
classical form of the dialogue with which the rite of Baptism
expressed the reception of an infant into the community of believers
and the infant's rebirth in Christ. First of all the priest asked
what name the parents had chosen for the child, and then he
continued with the question: “What do you ask of the Church?”
Answer: “Faith”. “And what does faith give you?” “Eternal life”.
According to this dialogue, the parents were seeking access to the
faith for their child, communion with believers, because they saw in
faith the key to “eternal life”. Today as in the past, this is what
being baptized, becoming Christians, is all about: it is not just an
act of socialization within the community, not simply a welcome into
the Church. The parents expect more for the one to be baptized: they
expect that faith, which includes the corporeal nature of the Church
and her sacraments, will give life to their child—eternal life.
Faith is the substance of hope. But then the question arises: do we
really want this—to live eternally? Perhaps many people reject the
faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal
life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but
this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something
of an impediment. To continue living for ever —endlessly—appears
more like a curse than a gift. Death, admittedly, one would wish to
postpone for as long as possible. But to live always, without
end—this, all things considered, can only be monotonous and
ultimately unbearable. This is precisely the point made, for
example, by Saint Ambrose, one of the Church Fathers, in the funeral
discourse for his deceased brother Satyrus: “Death was not part of
nature; it became part of nature. God did not decree death from the
beginning; he prescribed it as a remedy. Human life, because of sin
... began to experience the burden of wretchedness in unremitting
labour and unbearable sorrow. There had to be a limit to its evils;
death had to restore what life had forfeited. Without the assistance
of grace, immortality is more of a burden than a blessing”[6].
A little earlier, Ambrose had said: “Death is, then, no cause for
mourning, for it is the cause of mankind's salvation”[7].
11. Whatever precisely Saint
Ambrose may have meant by these words, it is true that to eliminate
death or to postpone it more or less indefinitely would place the
earth and humanity in an impossible situation, and even for the
individual would bring no benefit. Obviously there is a
contradiction in our attitude, which points to an inner
contradiction in our very existence. On the one hand, we do not want
to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on
the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely,
nor was the earth created with that in view. So what do we really
want? Our paradoxical attitude gives rise to a deeper question: what
in fact is “life”? And what does “eternity” really mean? There are
moments when it suddenly seems clear to us: yes, this is what true
“life” is—this is what it should be like. Besides, what we call
“life” in our everyday language is not real “life” at all. Saint
Augustine, in the extended letter on prayer which he addressed to
Proba, a wealthy Roman widow and mother of three consuls, once wrote
this: ultimately we want only one thing—”the blessed life”, the life
which is simply life, simply “happiness”. In the final analysis,
there is nothing else that we ask for in prayer. Our journey has no
other goal—it is about this alone. But then Augustine also says:
looking more closely, we have no idea what we ultimately desire,
what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even
in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it
eludes us. “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought,” he
says, quoting Saint Paul (Rom 8:26). All we know is that it is not
this. Yet in not knowing, we know that this reality must exist.
“There is therefore in us a certain learned ignorance (docta
ignorantia), so to speak”, he writes. We do not know what we would
really like; we do not know this “true life”; and yet we know that
there must be something we do not know towards which we feel driven[8].
12. I think that in this
very precise and permanently valid way, Augustine is describing
man's essential situation, the situation that gives rise to all his
contradictions and hopes. In some way we want life itself, true
life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know
the thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out
for it, and yet we know that all we can experience or accomplish is
not what we yearn for. This unknown “thing” is the true “hope” which
drives us, and at the same time the fact that it is unknown is the
cause of all forms of despair and also of all efforts, whether
positive or destructive, directed towards worldly authenticity and
human authenticity. The term “eternal life” is intended to give a
name to this known “unknown”. Inevitably it is an inadequate term
that creates confusion. “Eternal”, in fact, suggests to us the idea
of something interminable, and this frightens us; “life” makes us
think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose,
even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so
that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not
want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons
us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending
succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the
supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we
embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging
into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before
and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea
that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew
into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with
joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John's Gospel: “I will
see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take
your joy from you” (16:22). We must think along these lines if we
want to understand the object of Christian hope, to understand what
it is that our faith, our being with Christ, leads us to expect[9].
Is Christian hope
individualistic?
13. In the course of their
history, Christians have tried to express this “knowing without
knowing” by means of figures that can be represented, and they have
developed images of “Heaven” which remain far removed from what,
after all, can only be known negatively, via unknowing. All these
attempts at the representation of hope have given to many people,
down the centuries, the incentive to live by faith and hence also to
abandon their hyparchonta, the material substance for their lives.
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, in the eleventh chapter,
outlined a kind of history of those who live in hope and of their
journeying, a history which stretches from the time of Abel into the
author's own day. This type of hope has been subjected to an
increasingly harsh critique in modern times: it is dismissed as pure
individualism, a way of abandoning the world to its misery and
taking refuge in a private form of eternal salvation. Henri de Lubac,
in the introduction to his seminal book Catholicisme. Aspects
sociaux du dogme, assembled some characteristic articulations of
this viewpoint, one of which is worth quoting: “Should I have found
joy? No ... only my joy, and that is something wildly different ...
The joy of Jesus can be personal. It can belong to a single man and
he is saved. He is at peace ... now and always, but he is alone. The
isolation of this joy does not trouble him. On the contrary: he is
the chosen one! In his blessedness he passes through the
battlefields with a rose in his hand”[10].
14. Against this, drawing
upon the vast range of patristic theology, de Lubac was able to
demonstrate that salvation has always been considered a “social”
reality. Indeed, the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of a “city” (cf.
11:10, 16; 12:22; 13:14) and therefore of communal salvation.
Consistently with this view, sin is understood by the Fathers as the
destruction of the unity of the human race, as fragmentation and
division. Babel, the place where languages were confused, the place
of separation, is seen to be an expression of what sin fundamentally
is. Hence “redemption” appears as the reestablishment of unity, in
which we come together once more in a union that begins to take
shape in the world community of believers. We need not concern
ourselves here with all the texts in which the social character of
hope appears. Let us concentrate on the Letter to Proba in which
Augustine tries to illustrate to some degree this “known unknown”
that we seek. His point of departure is simply the expression
“blessed life”. Then he quotes Psalm 144 [143]:15: “Blessed is the
people whose God is the Lord.” And he continues: “In order to be
numbered among this people and attain to ... everlasting life with
God, ‘the end of the commandment is charity that issues from a pure
heart and a good conscience and sincere faith' (1 Tim 1:5)”[11].
This real life, towards which we try to reach out again and again,
is linked to a lived union with a “people”, and for each individual
it can only be attained within this “we”. It presupposes that we
escape from the prison of our “I”, because only in the openness of
this universal subject does our gaze open out to the source of joy,
to love itself—to God.
15. While this
community-oriented vision of the “blessed life” is certainly
directed beyond the present world, as such it also has to do with
the building up of this world—in very different ways, according to
the historical context and the possibilities offered or excluded
thereby. At the time of Augustine, the incursions of new peoples
were threatening the cohesion of the world, where hitherto there had
been a certain guarantee of law and of living in a juridically
ordered society; at that time, then, it was a matter of
strengthening the basic foundations of this peaceful societal
existence, in order to survive in a changed world. Let us now
consider a more or less randomly chosen episode from the Middle
Ages, that serves in many respects to illustrate what we have been
saying. It was commonly thought that monasteries were places of
flight from the world (contemptus mundi) and of withdrawal from
responsibility for the world, in search of private salvation.
Bernard of Clairvaux, who inspired a multitude of young people to
enter the monasteries of his reformed Order, had quite a different
perspective on this. In his view, monks perform a task for the whole
Church and hence also for the world. He uses many images to
illustrate the responsibility that monks have towards the entire
body of the Church, and indeed towards humanity; he applies to them
the words of pseudo-Rufinus: “The human race lives thanks to a few;
were it not for them, the world would perish ...”[12].
Contemplatives—contemplantes—must become agricultural labourers—laborantes—he
says. The nobility of work, which Christianity inherited from
Judaism, had already been expressed in the monastic rules of
Augustine and Benedict. Bernard takes up this idea again. The young
noblemen who flocked to his monasteries had to engage in manual
labour. In fact Bernard explicitly states that not even the
monastery can restore Paradise, but he maintains that, as a place of
practical and spiritual “tilling the soil”, it must prepare the new
Paradise. A wild plot of forest land is rendered fertile—and in the
process, the trees of pride are felled, whatever weeds may be
growing inside souls are pulled up, and the ground is thereby
prepared so that bread for body and soul can flourish[13].
Are we not perhaps seeing once again, in the light of current
history, that no positive world order can prosper where souls are
overgrown?
The transformation of
Christian faith-hope in the modern age
16. How could the idea have
developed that Jesus's message is narrowly individualistic and aimed
only at each person singly? How did we arrive at this interpretation
of the “salvation of the soul” as a flight from responsibility for
the whole, and how did we come to conceive the Christian project as
a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving
others? In order to find an answer to this we must take a look at
the foundations of the modern age. These appear with particular
clarity in the thought of Francis Bacon. That a new era
emerged—through the discovery of America and the new technical
achievements that had made this development possible—is undeniable.
But what is the basis of this new era? It is the new correlation of
experiment and method that enables man to arrive at an
interpretation of nature in conformity with its laws and thus
finally to achieve “the triumph of art over nature” (victoria cursus
artis super naturam)[14].
The novelty—according to Bacon's vision—lies in a new correlation
between science and praxis. This is also given a theological
application: the new correlation between science and praxis would
mean that the dominion over creation —given to man by God and lost
through original sin—would be reestablished[15].
17. Anyone who reads and
reflects on these statements attentively will recognize that a
disturbing step has been taken: up to that time, the recovery of
what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected
from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay “redemption”. Now, this
“redemption”, the restoration of the lost “Paradise” is no longer
expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between
science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it
is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and
other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow
irrelevant for the world. This programmatic vision has determined
the trajectory of modern times and it also shapes the present-day
crisis of faith which is essentially a crisis of Christian hope.
Thus hope too, in Bacon, acquires a new form. Now it is called:
faith in progress. For Bacon, it is clear that the recent spate of
discoveries and inventions is just the beginning; through the
interplay of science and praxis, totally new discoveries will
follow, a totally new world will emerge, the kingdom of man[16].
He even put forward a vision of foreseeable inventions—including the
aeroplane and the submarine. As the ideology of progress developed
further, joy at visible advances in human potential remained a
continuing confirmation of faith in progress as such.
18. At the same time, two
categories become increasingly central to the idea of progress:
reason and freedom. Progress is primarily associated with the
growing dominion of reason, and this reason is obviously considered
to be a force of good and a force for good. Progress is the
overcoming of all forms of dependency—it is progress towards perfect
freedom. Likewise freedom is seen purely as a promise, in which man
becomes more and more fully himself. In both concepts—freedom and
reason—there is a political aspect. The kingdom of reason, in fact,
is expected as the new condition of the human race once it has
attained total freedom. The political conditions of such a kingdom
of reason and freedom, however, appear at first sight somewhat ill
defined. Reason and freedom seem to guarantee by themselves, by
virtue of their intrinsic goodness, a new and perfect human
community. The two key concepts of “reason” and “freedom”, however,
were tacitly interpreted as being in conflict with the shackles of
faith and of the Church as well as those of the political structures
of the period. Both concepts therefore contain a revolutionary
potential of enormous explosive force.
19. We must look briefly at
the two essential stages in the political realization of this hope,
because they are of great importance for the development of
Christian hope, for a proper understanding of it and of the reasons
for its persistence. First there is the French Revolution—an attempt
to establish the rule of reason and freedom as a political reality.
To begin with, the Europe of the Enlightenment looked on with
fascination at these events, but then, as they developed, had cause
to reflect anew on reason and freedom. A good illustration of these
two phases in the reception of events in France is found in two
essays by Immanuel Kant in which he reflects on what had taken
place. In 1792 he wrote Der Sieg des guten Prinzips über das böse
und die Gründung eines Reiches Gottes auf Erden (“The Victory of the
Good over the Evil Principle and the Founding of a Kingdom of God on
Earth”). In this text he says the following: “The gradual transition
of ecclesiastical faith to the exclusive sovereignty of pure
religious faith is the coming of the Kingdom of God”[17].
He also tells us that revolutions can accelerate this transition
from ecclesiastical faith to rational faith. The “Kingdom of God”
proclaimed by Jesus receives a new definition here and takes on a
new mode of presence; a new “imminent expectation”, so to speak,
comes into existence: the “Kingdom of God” arrives where
“ecclesiastical faith” is vanquished and superseded by “religious
faith”, that is to say, by simple rational faith. In 1795, in the
text Das Ende aller Dinge (“The End of All Things”) a changed image
appears. Now Kant considers the possibility that as well as the
natural end of all things there may be another that is unnatural, a
perverse end. He writes in this connection: “If Christianity should
one day cease to be worthy of love ... then the prevailing mode in
human thought would be rejection and opposition to it; and the
Antichrist ... would begin his—albeit short—regime (presumably based
on fear and self-interest); but then, because Christianity, though
destined to be the world religion, would not in fact be favoured by
destiny to become so, then, in a moral respect, this could lead to
the (perverted) end of all things”[18].
20. The nineteenth century
held fast to its faith in progress as the new form of human hope,
and it continued to consider reason and freedom as the guiding stars
to be followed along the path of hope. Nevertheless, the
increasingly rapid advance of technical development and the
industrialization connected with it soon gave rise to an entirely
new social situation: there emerged a class of industrial workers
and the so-called “industrial proletariat”, whose dreadful living
conditions Friedrich Engels described alarmingly in 1845. For his
readers, the conclusion is clear: this cannot continue; a change is
necessary. Yet the change would shake up and overturn the entire
structure of bourgeois society. After the bourgeois revolution of
1789, the time had come for a new, proletarian revolution: progress
could not simply continue in small, linear steps. A revolutionary
leap was needed. Karl Marx took up the rallying call, and applied
his incisive language and intellect to the task of launching this
major new and, as he thought, definitive step in history towards
salvation—towards what Kant had described as the “Kingdom of God”.
Once the truth of the hereafter had been rejected, it would then be
a question of establishing the truth of the here and now. The
critique of Heaven is transformed into the critique of earth, the
critique of theology into the critique of politics. Progress towards
the better, towards the definitively good world, no longer comes
simply from science but from politics—from a scientifically
conceived politics that recognizes the structure of history and
society and thus points out the road towards revolution, towards
all-encompassing change. With great precision, albeit with a certain
onesided bias, Marx described the situation of his time, and with
great analytical skill he spelled out the paths leading to
revolution—and not only theoretically: by means of the Communist
Party that came into being from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, he
set it in motion. His promise, owing to the acuteness of his
analysis and his clear indication of the means for radical change,
was and still remains an endless source of fascination. Real
revolution followed, in the most radical way in Russia.
21. Together with the
victory of the revolution, though, Marx's fundamental error also
became evident. He showed precisely how to overthrow the existing
order, but he did not say how matters should proceed thereafter. He
simply presumed that with the expropriation of the ruling class,
with the fall of political power and the socialization of means of
production, the new Jerusalem would be realized. Then, indeed, all
contradictions would be resolved, man and the world would finally
sort themselves out. Then everything would be able to proceed by
itself along the right path, because everything would belong to
everyone and all would desire the best for one another. Thus, having
accomplished the revolution, Lenin must have realized that the
writings of the master gave no indication as to how to proceed.
True, Marx had spoken of the interim phase of the dictatorship of
the proletariat as a necessity which in time would automatically
become redundant. This “intermediate phase” we know all too well,
and we also know how it then developed, not ushering in a perfect
world, but leaving behind a trail of appalling destruction. Marx not
only omitted to work out how this new world would be organized—which
should, of course, have been unnecessary. His silence on this matter
follows logically from his chosen approach. His error lay deeper. He
forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot
man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom
for evil. He thought that once the economy had been put right,
everything would automatically be put right. His real error is
materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic
conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the
outside by creating a favourable economic environment.
22. Again, we find ourselves
facing the question: what may we hope? A self-critique of modernity
is needed in dialogue with Christianity and its concept of hope. In
this dialogue Christians too, in the context of their knowledge and
experience, must learn anew in what their hope truly consists, what
they have to offer to the world and what they cannot offer. Flowing
into this self-critique of the modern age there also has to be a
self-critique of modern Christianity, which must constantly renew
its self-understanding setting out from its roots. On this subject,
all we can attempt here are a few brief observations. First we must
ask ourselves: what does “progress” really mean; what does it
promise and what does it not promise? In the nineteenth century,
faith in progress was already subject to critique. In the twentieth
century, Theodor W. Adorno formulated the problem of faith in
progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately,
is progress from the sling to the atom bomb. Now this is certainly
an aspect of progress that must not be concealed. To put it another
way: the ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it
offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling
possibilities for evil—possibilities that formerly did not exist. We
have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands,
can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If
technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's
ethical formation, in man's inner growth (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16),
then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the
world.
23. As far as the two great
themes of “reason” and “freedom” are concerned, here we can only
touch upon the issues connected with them. Yes indeed, reason is
God's great gift to man, and the victory of reason over unreason is
also a goal of the Christian life. But when does reason truly
triumph? When it is detached from God? When it has become blind to
God? Is the reason behind action and capacity for action the whole
of reason? If progress, in order to be progress, needs moral growth
on the part of humanity, then the reason behind action and capacity
for action is likewise urgently in need of integration through
reason's openness to the saving forces of faith, to the
differentiation between good and evil. Only thus does reason become
truly human. It becomes human only if it is capable of directing the
will along the right path, and it is capable of this only if it
looks beyond itself. Otherwise, man's situation, in view of the
imbalance between his material capacity and the lack of judgement in
his heart, becomes a threat for him and for creation. Thus where
freedom is concerned, we must remember that human freedom always
requires a convergence of various freedoms. Yet this convergence
cannot succeed unless it is determined by a common intrinsic
criterion of measurement, which is the foundation and goal of our
freedom. Let us put it very simply: man needs God, otherwise he
remains without hope. Given the developments of the modern age, the
quotation from Saint Paul with which I began (Eph 2:12) proves to be
thoroughly realistic and plainly true. There is no doubt, therefore,
that a “Kingdom of God” accomplished without God—a kingdom therefore
of man alone—inevitably ends up as the “perverse end” of all things
as described by Kant: we have seen it, and we see it over and over
again. Yet neither is there any doubt that God truly enters into
human affairs only when, rather than being present merely in our
thinking, he himself comes towards us and speaks to us. Reason
therefore needs faith if it is to be completely itself: reason and
faith need one another in order to fulfil their true nature and
their mission.
The true shape of
Christian hope
24. Let us ask once again:
what may we hope? And what may we not hope? First of all, we must
acknowledge that incremental progress is possible only in the
material sphere. Here, amid our growing knowledge of the structure
of matter and in the light of ever more advanced inventions, we
clearly see continuous progress towards an ever greater mastery of
nature. Yet in the field of ethical awareness and moral
decision-making, there is no similar possibility of accumulation for
the simple reason that man's freedom is always new and he must
always make his decisions anew. These decisions can never simply be
made for us in advance by others—if that were the case, we would no
longer be free. Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions,
every person and every generation is a new beginning. Naturally, new
generations can build on the knowledge and experience of those who
went before, and they can draw upon the moral treasury of the whole
of humanity. But they can also reject it, because it can never be
self-evident in the same way as material inventions. The moral
treasury of humanity is not readily at hand like tools that we use;
it is present as an appeal to freedom and a possibility for it.
This, however, means that:
a) The right state of human
affairs, the moral well-being of the world can never be guaranteed
simply through structures alone, however good they are. Such
structures are not only important, but necessary; yet they cannot
and must not marginalize human freedom. Even the best structures
function only when the community is animated by convictions capable
of motivating people to assent freely to the social order. Freedom
requires conviction; conviction does not exist on its own, but must
always be gained anew by the community.
b) Since man always remains
free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good
will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who
promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is
making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom
must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to
the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures
which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the
world, man's freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be
good structures at all.
25. What this means is that
every generation has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search
for the right way to order human affairs; this task is never simply
completed. Yet every generation must also make its own contribution
to establishing convincing structures of freedom and of good, which
can help the following generation as a guideline for the proper use
of human freedom; hence, always within human limits, they provide a
certain guarantee also for the future. In other words: good
structures help, but of themselves they are not enough. Man can
never be redeemed simply from outside. Francis Bacon and those who
followed in the intellectual current of modernity that he inspired
were wrong to believe that man would be redeemed through science.
Such an expectation asks too much of science; this kind of hope is
deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the world and
mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world
unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it. On the other
hand, we must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with
the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has
to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his
salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and
has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task—even
if it has continued to achieve great things in the formation of man
and in care for the weak and the suffering.
26. It is not science that
redeems man: man is redeemed by love. This applies even in terms of
this present world. When someone has the experience of a great love
in his life, this is a moment of “redemption” which gives a new
meaning to his life. But soon he will also realize that the love
bestowed upon him cannot by itself resolve the question of his life.
It is a love that remains fragile. It can be destroyed by death. The
human being needs unconditional love. He needs the certainty which
makes him say: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be
able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”
(Rom 8:38- 39). If this absolute love exists, with its absolute
certainty, then—only then—is man “redeemed”, whatever should happen
to him in his particular circumstances. This is what it means to
say: Jesus Christ has “redeemed” us. Through him we have become
certain of God, a God who is not a remote “first cause” of the
world, because his only-begotten Son has become man and of him
everyone can say: “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me
and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).
27. In this sense it is true
that anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all
kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope
that sustains the whole of life (cf. Eph 2:12). Man's great, true
hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be
God—God who has loved us and who continues to love us “to the end,”
until all “is accomplished” (cf. Jn 13:1 and 19:30). Whoever is
moved by love begins to perceive what “life” really is. He begins to
perceive the meaning of the word of hope that we encountered in the
Baptismal Rite: from faith I await “eternal life”—the true life
which, whole and unthreatened, in all its fullness, is simply life.
Jesus, who said that he had come so that we might have life and have
it in its fullness, in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10), has also explained
to us what “life” means: “this is eternal life, that they know you
the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn 17:3).
Life in its true sense is not something we have exclusively in or
from ourselves: it is a relationship. And life in its totality is a
relationship with him who is the source of life. If we are in
relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love
itself, then we are in life. Then we “live”.
28. Yet now the question
arises: are we not in this way falling back once again into an
individualistic understanding of salvation, into hope for myself
alone, which is not true hope since it forgets and overlooks others?
Indeed we are not! Our relationship with God is established through
communion with Jesus—we cannot achieve it alone or from our own
resources alone. The relationship with Jesus, however, is a
relationship with the one who gave himself as a ransom for all (cf.
1 Tim 2:6). Being in communion with Jesus Christ draws us into his
“being for all”; it makes it our own way of being. He commits us to
live for others, but only through communion with him does it become
possible truly to be there for others, for the whole. In this regard
I would like to quote the great Greek Doctor of the Church, Maximus
the Confessor († 662), who begins by exhorting us to prefer nothing
to the knowledge and love of God, but then quickly moves on to
practicalities: “The one who loves God cannot hold on to money but
rather gives it out in God's fashion ... in the same manner in
accordance with the measure of justice”[19].
Love of God leads to participation in the justice and generosity of
God towards others. Loving God requires an interior freedom from all
possessions and all material goods: the love of God is revealed in
responsibility for others[20].
This same connection between love of God and responsibility for
others can be seen in a striking way in the life of Saint Augustine.
After his conversion to the Christian faith, he decided, together
with some like-minded friends, to lead a life totally dedicated to
the word of God and to things eternal. His intention was to practise
a Christian version of the ideal of the contemplative life expressed
in the great tradition of Greek philosophy, choosing in this way the
“better part” (cf. Lk 10:42). Things turned out differently,
however. While attending the Sunday liturgy at the port city of
Hippo, he was called out from the assembly by the Bishop and
constrained to receive ordination for the exercise of the priestly
ministry in that city. Looking back on that moment, he writes in his
Confessions: “Terrified by my sins and the weight of my misery, I
had resolved in my heart, and meditated flight into the wilderness;
but you forbade me and gave me strength, by saying: ‘Christ died for
all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for
him who for their sake died' (cf. 2 Cor 5:15)”[21].
Christ died for all. To live for him means allowing oneself to be
drawn into his being for others.
29. For Augustine this meant
a totally new life. He once described his daily life in the
following terms: “The turbulent have to be corrected, the
faint-hearted cheered up, the weak supported; the Gospel's opponents
need to be refuted, its insidious enemies guarded against; the
unlearned need to be taught, the indolent stirred up, the
argumentative checked; the proud must be put in their place, the
desperate set on their feet, those engaged in quarrels reconciled;
the needy have to be helped, the oppressed to be liberated, the good
to be encouraged, the bad to be tolerated; all must be loved”[22].
“The Gospel terrifies me”[23]—producing
that healthy fear which prevents us from living for ourselves alone
and compels us to pass on the hope we hold in common. Amid the
serious difficulties facing the Roman Empire—and also posing a
serious threat to Roman Africa, which was actually destroyed at the
end of Augustine's life—this was what he set out to do: to transmit
hope, the hope which came to him from faith and which, in complete
contrast with his introverted temperament, enabled him to take part
decisively and with all his strength in the task of building up the
city. In the same chapter of the Confessions in which we have just
noted the decisive reason for his commitment “for all”, he says that
Christ “intercedes for us, otherwise I should despair. My weaknesses
are many and grave, many and grave indeed, but more abundant still
is your medicine. We might have thought that your word was far
distant from union with man, and so we might have despaired of
ourselves, if this Word had not become flesh and dwelt among us”[24].
On the strength of his hope, Augustine dedicated himself completely
to the ordinary people and to his city—renouncing his spiritual
nobility, he preached and acted in a simple way for simple people.
30. Let us summarize what
has emerged so far in the course of our reflections. Day by day, man
experiences many greater or lesser hopes, different in kind
according to the different periods of his life. Sometimes one of
these hopes may appear to be totally satisfying without any need for
other hopes. Young people can have the hope of a great and fully
satisfying love; the hope of a certain position in their profession,
or of some success that will prove decisive for the rest of their
lives. When these hopes are fulfilled, however, it becomes clear
that they were not, in reality, the whole. It becomes evident that
man has need of a hope that goes further. It becomes clear that only
something infinite will suffice for him, something that will always
be more than he can ever attain. In this regard our contemporary age
has developed the hope of creating a perfect world that, thanks to
scientific knowledge and to scientifically based politics, seemed to
be achievable. Thus Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been
displaced by hope in the kingdom of man, the hope of a better world
which would be the real “Kingdom of God”. This seemed at last to be
the great and realistic hope that man needs. It was capable of
galvanizing—for a time—all man's energies. The great objective
seemed worthy of full commitment. In the course of time, however, it
has become clear that this hope is constantly receding. Above all it
has become apparent that this may be a hope for a future generation,
but not for me.
And however much “for all”
may be part of the great hope—since I cannot be happy without others
or in opposition to them—it remains true that a hope that does not
concern me personally is not a real hope. It has also become clear
that this hope is opposed to freedom, since human affairs depend in
each generation on the free decisions of those concerned. If this
freedom were to be taken away, as a result of certain conditions or
structures, then ultimately this world would not be good, since a
world without freedom can by no means be a good world. Hence, while
we must always be committed to the improvement of the world,
tomorrow's better world cannot be the proper and sufficient content
of our hope. And in this regard the question always arises: when is
the world “better”? What makes it good? By what standard are we to
judge its goodness? What are the paths that lead to this “goodness”?
31. Let us say once again:
we need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day.
But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass
everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses
the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by
ourselves, cannot attain. The fact that it comes to us as a gift is
actually part of hope. God is the foundation of hope: not any god,
but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end,
each one of us and humanity in its entirety. His Kingdom is not an
imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive;
his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love
reaches us. His love alone gives us the possibility of soberly
persevering day by day, without ceasing to be spurred on by hope, in
a world which by its very nature is imperfect. His love is at the
same time our guarantee of the existence of what we only vaguely
sense and which nevertheless, in our deepest self, we await: a life
that is “truly” life. Let us now, in the final section, develop this
idea in more detail as we focus our attention on some of the
“settings” in which we can learn in practice about hope and its
exercise.
“Settings” for learning
and practising hope
I. Prayer as
a school of hope
32. A first essential
setting for learning hope is prayer. When no one listens to me any
more, God still listens to me. When I can no longer talk to anyone
or call upon anyone, I can always talk to God. When there is no
longer anyone to help me deal with a need or expectation that goes
beyond the human capacity for hope, he can help me[25].
When I have been plunged into complete solitude ...; if I pray I am
never totally alone. The late Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, a prisoner
for thirteen years, nine of them spent in solitary confinement, has
left us a precious little book: Prayers of Hope. During thirteen
years in jail, in a situation of seemingly utter hopelessness, the
fact that he could listen and speak to God became for him an
increasing power of hope, which enabled him, after his release, to
become for people all over the world a witness to hope—to that great
hope which does not wane even in the nights of solitude.
33. Saint Augustine, in a
homily on the First Letter of John, describes very beautifully the
intimate relationship between prayer and hope. He defines prayer as
an exercise of desire. Man was created for greatness—for God
himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too
small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be
stretched. “By delaying [his gift], God strengthens our desire;
through desire he enlarges our soul and by expanding it he increases
its capacity [for receiving him]”. Augustine refers to Saint Paul,
who speaks of himself as straining forward to the things that are to
come (cf. Phil 3:13). He then uses a very beautiful image to
describe this process of enlargement and preparation of the human
heart. “Suppose that God wishes to fill you with honey [a symbol of
God's tenderness and goodness]; but if you are full of vinegar,
where will you put the honey?” The vessel, that is your heart, must
first be enlarged and then cleansed, freed from the vinegar and its
taste. This requires hard work and is painful, but in this way alone
do we become suited to that for which we are destined[26].
Even if Augustine speaks directly only of our capacity for God, it
is nevertheless clear that through this effort by which we are freed
from vinegar and the taste of vinegar, not only are we made free for
God, but we also become open to others. It is only by becoming
children of God, that we can be with our common Father. To pray is
not to step outside history and withdraw to our own private corner
of happiness. 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.
II. Action and suffering as
settings for learning hope
35. All serious and upright
human conduct is hope in action. This is so first of all in the
sense that we thereby strive to realize our lesser and greater
hopes, to complete this or that task which is important for our
onward journey, or we work towards a brighter and more humane world
so as to open doors into the future. Yet our daily efforts in
pursuing our own lives and in working for the world's future either
tire us or turn into fanaticism, unless we are enlightened by the
radiance of the great hope that cannot be destroyed even by
small-scale failures or by a breakdown in matters of historic
importance. If we cannot hope for more than is effectively
attainable at any given time, or more than is promised by political
or economic authorities, our lives will soon be without hope. It is
important to know that I can always continue to hope, even if in my
own life, or the historical period in which I am living, there seems
to be nothing left to hope for. Only the great certitude of hope
that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are
held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives
them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then
give the courage to act and to persevere. Certainly we cannot
“build” the Kingdom of God by our own efforts—what we build will
always be the kingdom of man with all the limitations proper to our
human nature. The Kingdom of God is a gift, and precisely because of
this, it is great and beautiful, and constitutes the response to our
hope. And we cannot—to use the classical expression—”merit” Heaven
through our works. Heaven is always more than we could merit, just
as being loved is never something “merited”, but always a gift.
However, even when we are fully aware that Heaven far exceeds what
we can merit, it will always be true that our behaviour is not
indifferent before God and therefore is not indifferent for the
unfolding of history. We can open ourselves and the world and allow
God to enter: we can open ourselves to truth, to love, to what is
good. This is what the saints did, those who, as “God's fellow
workers”, contributed to the world's salvation (cf. 1 Cor 3:9; 1 Th
3:2). We can free our life and the world from the poisons and
contaminations that could destroy the present and the future. We can
uncover the sources of creation and keep them unsullied, and in this
way we can make a right use of creation, which comes to us as a
gift, according to its intrinsic requirements and ultimate purpose.
This makes sense even if outwardly we achieve nothing or seem
powerless in the face of overwhelming hostile forces. So on the one
hand, our actions engender hope for us and for others; but at the
same time, it is the great hope based upon God's promises that gives
us courage and directs our action in good times and bad.
36. Like action, suffering
is a part of our human existence. Suffering stems partly from our
finitude, and partly from the mass of sin which has accumulated over
the course of history, and continues to grow unabated today.
Certainly we must do whatever we can to reduce suffering: to avoid
as far as possible the suffering of the innocent; to soothe pain; to
give assistance in overcoming mental suffering. These are
obligations both in justice and in love, and they are included among
the fundamental requirements of the Christian life and every truly
human life. Great progress has been made in the battle against
physical pain; yet the sufferings of the innocent and mental
suffering have, if anything, increased in recent decades. Indeed, we
must do all we can to overcome suffering, but to banish it from the
world altogether is not in our power. This is simply because we are
unable to shake off our finitude and because none of us is capable
of eliminating the power of evil, of sin which, as we plainly see,
is a constant source of suffering. Only God is able to do this: only
a God who personally enters history by making himself man and
suffering within history. We know that this God exists, and hence
that this power to “take away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29) is
present in the world. Through faith in the existence of this power,
hope for the world's healing has emerged in history. It is, however,
hope—not yet fulfilment; hope that gives us the courage to place
ourselves on the side of good even in seemingly hopeless situations,
aware that, as far as the external course of history is concerned,
the power of sin will continue to be a terrible presence.
37. Let us return to our
topic. We can try to limit suffering, to fight against it, but we
cannot eliminate it. It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by
withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to
spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and
goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may
be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and
abandonment is all the greater. It is not by sidestepping or fleeing
from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for
accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union
with Christ, who suffered with infinite love. In this context, I
would like to quote a passage from a letter written by the
Vietnamese martyr Paul Le-Bao-Tinh († 1857) which illustrates this
transformation of suffering through the power of hope springing from
faith. “I, Paul, in chains for the name of Christ, wish to relate to
you the trials besetting me daily, in order that you may be inflamed
with love for God and join with me in his praises, for his mercy is
for ever (Ps 136 [135]). The prison here is a true image of
everlasting Hell: to cruel tortures of every kind—shackles, iron
chains, manacles—are added hatred, vengeance, calumnies, obscene
speech, quarrels, evil acts, swearing, curses, as well as anguish
and grief. But the God who once freed the three children from the
fiery furnace is with me always; he has delivered me from these
tribulations and made them sweet, for his mercy is for ever. In the
midst of these torments, which usually terrify others, I am, by the
grace of God, full of joy and gladness, because I am not alone
—Christ is with me ... How am I to bear with the spectacle, as each
day I see emperors, mandarins, and their retinue blaspheming your
holy name, O Lord, who are enthroned above the Cherubim and
Seraphim? (cf. Ps 80:1 [79:2]). Behold, the pagans have trodden your
Cross underfoot! Where is your glory? As I see all this, I would, in
the ardent love I have for you, prefer to be torn limb from limb and
to die as a witness to your love. O Lord, show your power, save me,
sustain me, that in my infirmity your power may be shown and may be
glorified before the nations ... Beloved brothers, as you hear all
these things may you give endless thanks in joy to God, from whom
every good proceeds; bless the Lord with me, for his mercy is for
ever ... I write these things to you in order that your faith and
mine may be united. In the midst of this storm I cast my anchor
towards the throne of God, the anchor that is the lively hope in my
heart”[28].
This is a letter from “Hell”. It lays bare all the horror of a
concentration camp, where to the torments inflicted by tyrants upon
their victims is added the outbreak of evil in the victims
themselves, such that they in turn become further instruments of
their persecutors' cruelty. This is indeed a letter from Hell, but
it also reveals the truth of the Psalm text: “If I go up to the
heavens, you are there; if I sink to the nether world, you are
present there ... If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall hide me, and
night shall be my light' —for you darkness itself is not dark, and
night shines as the day; darkness and light are the same” (Ps 139
[138]:8-12; cf. also Ps 23 [22]:4). Christ descended into “Hell” and
is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their
darkness into light. Suffering and torment is still terrible and
well- nigh unbearable. Yet the star of hope has risen—the anchor of
the heart reaches the very throne of God. Instead of evil being
unleashed within man, the light shines victorious: suffering—without
ceasing to be suffering—becomes, despite everything, a hymn of
praise.
38. The true measure of
humanity is essentially determined in relationship to suffering and
to the sufferer. This holds true both for the individual and for
society. A society unable to accept its suffering members and
incapable of helping to share their suffering and to bear it
inwardly through “com-passion” is a cruel and inhuman society. Yet
society cannot accept its suffering members and support them in
their trials unless individuals are capable of doing so themselves;
moreover, the individual cannot accept another's suffering unless he
personally is able to find meaning in suffering, a path of
purification and growth in maturity, a journey of hope. Indeed, to
accept the “other” who suffers, means that I take up his suffering
in such a way that it becomes mine also. Because it has now become a
shared suffering, though, in which another person is present, this
suffering is penetrated by the light of love. The Latin word
con-solatio, “consolation”, expresses this beautifully. It suggests
being with the other in his solitude, so that it ceases to be
solitude. Furthermore, the capacity to accept suffering for the sake
of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of
humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately
more important than truth and justice, then the power of the
stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reign supreme. Truth
and justice must stand above my comfort and physical well-being, or
else my life itself becomes a lie. In the end, even the “yes” to
love is a source of suffering, because love always requires
expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and
wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation
of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby
ceases to be love.
39. 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. Yet once again the question arises:
are we capable of this? Is the other important enough to warrant my
becoming, on his account, a person who suffers? Does truth matter to
me enough to make suffering worthwhile? Is the promise of love so
great that it justifies the gift of myself? In the history of
humanity, it was the Christian faith that had the particular merit
of bringing forth within man a new and deeper capacity for these
kinds of suffering that are decisive for his humanity. The Christian
faith has shown us that truth, justice and love are not simply
ideals, but enormously weighty realities. It has shown us that God
—Truth and Love in person—desired to suffer for us and with us.
Bernard of Clairvaux coined the marvellous expression: Impassibilis
est Deus, sed non incompassibilis[29]—God
cannot suffer, but he can suffer with. Man is worth so much to God
that he himself became man in order to suffer with man in an utterly
real way—in flesh and blood—as is revealed to us in the account of
Jesus's Passion. Hence in all human suffering we are joined by one
who experiences and carries that suffering with us; hence con-solatio
is present in all suffering, the consolation of God's compassionate
love—and so the star of hope rises. Certainly, in our many different
sufferings and trials we always need the lesser and greater hopes
too—a kind visit, the healing of internal and external wounds, a
favourable resolution of a crisis, and so on. In our lesser trials
these kinds of hope may even be sufficient. But in truly great
trials, where I must make a definitive decision to place the truth
before my own welfare, career and possessions, I need the certitude
of that true, great hope of which we have spoken here. For this too
we need witnesses—martyrs—who have given themselves totally, so as
to show us the way—day after day. We need them if we are to prefer
goodness to comfort, even in the little choices we face each
day—knowing that this is how we live life to the full. Let us say it
once again: the capacity to suffer for the sake of the truth is the
measure of humanity. Yet this capacity to suffer depends on the type
and extent of the hope that we bear within us and build upon. The
saints were able to make the great journey of human existence in the
way that Christ had done before them, because they were brimming
with great hope.
40. I would like to add here
another brief comment with some relevance for everyday living. There
used to be a form of devotion—perhaps less practised today but quite
widespread not long ago—that included the idea of “offering up” the
minor daily hardships that continually strike at us like irritating
“jabs”, thereby giving them a meaning. Of course, there were some
exaggerations and perhaps unhealthy applications of this devotion,
but we need to ask ourselves whether there may not after all have
been something essential and helpful contained within it. What does
it mean to offer something up? Those who did so were convinced that
they could insert these little annoyances into Christ's great
“com-passion” so that they somehow became part of the treasury of
compassion so greatly needed by the human race. In this way, even
the small inconveniences of daily life could acquire meaning and
contribute to the economy of good and of human love. Maybe we should
consider whether it might be judicious to revive this practice
ourselves.
III. Judgement as a setting
for learning and practising hope
41. At the conclusion of the
central section of the Church's great Credo—the part that recounts
the mystery of Christ, from his eternal birth of the Father and his
temporal birth of the Virgin Mary, through his Cross and
Resurrection to the second coming—we find the phrase: “he will come
again in glory to judge the living and the dead”. From the earliest
times, the prospect of the Judgement has influenced Christians in
their daily living as a criterion by which to order their present
life, as a summons to their conscience, and at the same time as hope
in God's justice. Faith in Christ has never looked merely backwards
or merely upwards, but always also forwards to the hour of justice
that the Lord repeatedly proclaimed. This looking ahead has given
Christianity its importance for the present moment. In the
arrangement of Christian sacred buildings, which were intended to
make visible the historic and cosmic breadth of faith in Christ, it
became customary to depict the Lord returning as a king—the symbol
of hope—at the east end; while the west wall normally portrayed the
Last Judgement as a symbol of our responsibility for our lives—a
scene which followed and accompanied the faithful as they went out
to resume their daily routine. As the iconography of the Last
Judgement developed, however, more and more prominence was given to
its ominous and frightening aspects, which obviously held more
fascination for artists than the splendour of hope, often all too
well concealed beneath the horrors.
42. In the modern era, the
idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian
faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the
salvation of the believer's own soul, while reflection on world
history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The
fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not
disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The
atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins
and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the
world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice,
innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a
good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a
just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that
this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create
justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If
in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God is
understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God
actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and
intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the
greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is
grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to
create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing
can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can
guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling ideological
mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world. This is why the
great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor
W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer
radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly
substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of
a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the Old
Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a “longing for the
totally Other” that remains inaccessible—a cry of yearning directed
at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of
images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any “image” of a
loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this
“negative” dialectic and asserted that justice —true justice—would
require a world “where not only present suffering would be wiped
out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone”[30].
This, would mean, however—to express it with positive and hence, for
him, inadequate symbols—that there can be no justice without a
resurrection of the dead. Yet this would have to involve “the
resurrection of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to
idealism and the realm of Absolute spirit”[31].
43. Christians likewise can
and must constantly learn from the strict rejection of images that
is contained in God's first commandment (cf. Ex 20:4). The truth of
negative theology was highlighted by the Fourth Lateran Council,
which explicitly stated that however great the similarity that may
be established between Creator and creature, the dissimilarity
between them is always greater[32].
In any case, for the believer the rejection of images cannot be
carried so far that one ends up, as Horkheimer and Adorno would
like, by saying “no” to both theses—theism and atheism. God has
given himself an “image”: in Christ who was made man. In him who was
crucified, the denial of false images of God is taken to an extreme.
God now reveals his true face in the figure of the sufferer who
shares man's God-forsaken condition by taking it upon himself. This
innocent sufferer has attained the certitude of hope: there is a
God, and God can create justice in a way that we cannot conceive,
yet we can begin to grasp it through faith. Yes, there is a
resurrection of the flesh[33].
There is justice[34].
There is an “undoing” of past suffering, a reparation that sets
things aright. For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first
and foremost hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in
the upheavals of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question
of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the
strongest argument, in favour of faith in eternal life. The purely
individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in this life,
for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an important
motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but only in
connection with the impossibility that the injustice of history
should be the final word does the necessity for Christ's return and
for new life become fully convincing.
44. To protest against God
in the name of justice is not helpful. A world without God is a
world without hope (cf. Eph 2:12). Only God can create justice. And
faith gives us the certainty that he does so. The image of the Last
Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope;
for us it may even be the decisive image of hope. Is it not also a
frightening image? I would say: it is an image that evokes
responsibility, an image, therefore, of that fear of which Saint
Hilary spoke when he said that all our fear has its place in love[35].
God is justice and creates justice. This is our consolation and our
hope. And in his justice there is also grace. This we know by
turning our gaze to the crucified and risen Christ. Both these
things—justice and grace—must be seen in their correct inner
relationship. Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make
wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything away, so
that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of equal
value. Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this
kind of Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel The Brothers
Karamazov. Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal
banquet beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing
had happened. Here I would like to quote a passage from Plato which
expresses a premonition of just judgement that in many respects
remains true and salutary for Christians too. Albeit using
mythological images, he expresses the truth with an unambiguous
clarity, saying that in the end souls will stand naked before the
judge. It no longer matters what they once were in history, but only
what they are in truth: “Often, when it is the king or some other
monarch or potentate that he (the judge) has to deal with, he finds
that there is no soundness in the soul whatever; he finds it
scourged and scarred by the various acts of perjury and wrong-doing
...; it is twisted and warped by lies and vanity, and nothing is
straight because truth has had no part in its development. Power,
luxury, pride, and debauchery have left it so full of disproportion
and ugliness that when he has inspected it (he) sends it straight to
prison, where on its arrival it will undergo the appropriate
punishment ... Sometimes, though, the eye of the judge lights on a
different soul which has lived in purity and truth ... then he is
struck with admiration and sends him to the isles of the blessed”[36].
In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (cf. Lk 16:19-31), Jesus
admonishes us through the image of a soul destroyed by arrogance and
opulence, who has created an impassable chasm between himself and
the poor man; the chasm of being trapped within material pleasures;
the chasm of forgetting the other, of incapacity to love, which then
becomes a burning and unquenchable thirst. We must note that in this
parable Jesus is not referring to the final destiny after the Last
Judgement, but is taking up a notion found, inter alia, in early
Judaism, namely that of an intermediate state between death and
resurrection, a state in which the final sentence is yet to be
pronounced.
45. This early Jewish idea
of an intermediate state includes the view that these souls are not
simply in a sort of temporary custody but, as the parable of the
rich man illustrates, are already being punished or are experiencing
a provisional form of bliss. There is also the idea that this state
can involve purification and healing which mature the soul for
communion with God. The early Church took up these concepts, and in
the Western Church they gradually developed into the doctrine of
Purgatory. We do not need to examine here the complex historical
paths of this development; it is enough to ask what it actually
means. With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life
stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an
entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms.
There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for
truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a
lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love
within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming
profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own
history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the
destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by
the word Hell[37].
On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure,
completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their
neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives
direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only
brings to fulfilment what they already are[38].
46. Yet we know from
experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great
majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of
their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God.
In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever
new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst
for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that
is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such
individuals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity
they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else
might occur? Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians,
gives us an idea of the differing impact of God's judgement
according to each person's particular circumstances. He does this
using images which in some way try to express the invisible, without
it being possible for us to conceptualize these images—simply
because we can neither see into the world beyond death nor do we
have any experience of it. Paul begins by saying that Christian life
is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This foundation
endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and built our life
upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us even in death.
Then Paul continues: “Now if any one builds on the foundation with
gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will
become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be
revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each
one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation
survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up,
he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as
through fire” (1 Cor 3:12-15). In this text, it is in any case
evident that our salvation can take different forms, that some of
what is built may be burned down, that in order to be saved we
personally have to pass through “fire” so as to become fully open to
receiving God and able to take our place at the table of the eternal
marriage-feast.
47. Some recent theologians
are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is
Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the
decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away.
This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us,
allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our
lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses.
Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of
our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the
touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful
transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which
the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling
us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way
the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the
way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not
stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards
Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been
burned away through Christ's Passion. At the moment of judgement we
experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all
the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our
salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the
“duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the
chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment”
of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart's
time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body
of Christ[39].
The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because
it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things
cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question
about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of
God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear
to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked
the two together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly
established: we all work out our salvation “with fear and trembling”
(Phil 2:12). Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go
trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our “advocate”, or
parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1).
48. A further point must be
mentioned here, because it is important for the practice of
Christian hope. Early Jewish thought includes the idea that one can
help the deceased in their intermediate state through prayer (see
for example 2 Macc 12:38-45; first century BC). The equivalent
practice was readily adopted by Christians and is common to the
Eastern and Western Church. The East does not recognize the
purifying and expiatory suffering of souls in the afterlife, but it
does acknowledge various levels of beatitude and of suffering in the
intermediate state. The souls of the departed can, however, receive
“solace and refreshment” through the Eucharist, prayer and
almsgiving. The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that
reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection
for one another continues beyond the limits of death—this has been a
fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it
remains a source of comfort today. Who would not feel the need to
convey to their departed loved ones a sign of kindness, a gesture of
gratitude or even a request for pardon? Now a further question
arises: if “Purgatory” is simply purification through fire in the
encounter with the Lord, Judge and Saviour, how can a third person
intervene, even if he or she is particularly close to the other?
When we ask such a question, we should recall that no man is an
island, entire of itself. Our lives are involved with one another,
through innumerable interactions they are linked together. No one
lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone. The lives of
others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, do
and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of
others: for better and for worse. So my prayer for another is not
something extraneous to that person, something external, not even
after death. In the interconnectedness of Being, my gratitude to the
other—my prayer for him—can play a small part in his purification.
And for that there is no need to convert earthly time into God's
time: in the communion of souls simple terrestrial time is
superseded. 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.
Mary, Star
of Hope
49. With a hymn composed in
the eighth or ninth century, thus for over a thousand years, the
Church has greeted Mary, the Mother of God, as “Star of the Sea”:
Ave maris stella. Human life is a journey. Towards what destination?
How do we find the way? Life is like a voyage on the sea of history,
often dark and stormy, a voyage in which we watch for the stars that
indicate the route. The true stars of our life are the people who
have lived good lives. They are lights of hope. Certainly, Jesus
Christ is the true light, the sun that has risen above all the
shadows of history. But to reach him we also need lights close
by—people who shine with his light and so guide us along our way.
Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her “yes”
she opened the door of our world to God himself; she became the
living Ark of the Covenant, in whom God took flesh, became one of
us, and pitched his tent among us (cf. Jn 1:14).
50. So we cry to her: Holy
Mary, you belonged to the humble and great souls of Israel who, like
Simeon, were “looking for the consolation of Israel” (Lk 2:25) and
hoping, like Anna, “for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Lk 2:38). Your
life was thoroughly imbued with the sacred scriptures of Israel
which spoke of hope, of the promise made to Abraham and his
descendants (cf. Lk 1:55). In this way we can appreciate the holy
fear that overcame you when the angel of the Lord appeared to you
and told you that you would give birth to the One who was the hope
of Israel, the One awaited by the world. Through you, through your
“yes”, the hope of the ages became reality, entering this world and
its history. You bowed low before the greatness of this task and
gave your consent: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be
to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). When you hastened with holy
joy across the mountains of Judea to see your cousin Elizabeth, you
became the image of the Church to come, which carries the hope of
the world in her womb across the mountains of history. But alongside
the joy which, with your Magnificat, you proclaimed in word and song
for all the centuries to hear, you also knew the dark sayings of the
prophets about the suffering of the servant of God in this world.
Shining over his birth in the stable at Bethlehem, there were angels
in splendour who brought the good news to the shepherds, but at the
same time the lowliness of God in this world was all too palpable.
The old man Simeon spoke to you of the sword which would pierce your
soul (cf. Lk 2:35), of the sign of |