Legion
of Mary
Catholic
Faith
SPE SALVI
Benedict XVI, Issued in
2007
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
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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
contradiction that your Son would be in this world. Then, when Jesus
began his public ministry, you had to step aside, so that a new family
could grow, the family which it was his mission to establish and which
would be made up of those who heard his word and kept it (cf. Lk
11:27f). Notwithstanding the great joy that marked the beginning of
Jesus's ministry, in the synagogue of Nazareth you must already have
experienced the truth of the saying about the “sign of
contradiction” (cf. Lk 4:28ff). In this way you saw the growing
power of hostility and rejection which built up around Jesus until the
hour of the Cross, when you had to look upon the Saviour of the world,
the heir of David, the Son of God dying like a failure, exposed to
mockery, between criminals. Then you received the word of Jesus:
“Woman, behold, your Son!” (Jn 19:26). From the Cross you
received a new mission. From the Cross you became a mother in a new
way: the mother of all those who believe in your Son Jesus and wish to
follow him. The sword of sorrow pierced your heart. Did hope die? Did
the world remain definitively without light, and life without purpose?
At that moment, deep down, you probably listened again to the word
spoken by the angel in answer to your fear at the time of the
Annunciation: “Do not be afraid, Mary!” (Lk 1:30). How many
times had the Lord, your Son, said the same thing to his disciples: do
not be afraid! In your heart, you heard this word again during the
night of Golgotha. Before the hour of his betrayal he had said to his
disciples: “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world”
(Jn 16:33). “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be
afraid” (Jn 14:27). “Do not be afraid, Mary!” In that
hour at Nazareth the angel had also said to you: “Of his kingdom
there will be no end” (Lk 1:33). Could it have ended before it
began? No, at the foot of the Cross, on the strength of Jesus's own
word, you became the mother of believers. In this faith, which even in
the darkness of Holy Saturday bore the certitude of hope, you made your
way towards Easter morning. The joy of the Resurrection touched your
heart and united you in a new way to the disciples, destined to become
the family of Jesus through faith. In this way you were in the midst of
the community of believers, who in the days following the Ascension
prayed with one voice for the gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14)
and then received that gift on the day of Pentecost. The
“Kingdom” of Jesus was not as might have been imagined. It
began in that hour, and of this “Kingdom” there will be no
end. Thus you remain in the midst of the disciples as their Mother, as
the Mother of hope. Holy Mary, Mother of God, our Mother, teach us to
believe, to hope, to love with you. Show us the way to his Kingdom!
Star of the Sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way!
Given in Rome, at Saint Peter's, on 30 November, the Feast of Saint
Andrew the Apostle, in the year 2007, the third of my Pontificate.
BENEDICTUS PP. XVI
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[1] Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VI, no. 26003.
[2] Cf. Dogmatic Poems, V, 53-64: PG 37, 428-429.
[3] Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1817-1821.
[4] Summa Theologiae, II-IIae, q.4, a.1.
[5] H. Köster in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament VIII (1972), p.586.
[6] De excessu fratris sui Satyri, II, 47: CSEL 73, 274.
[7] Ibid., II, 46: CSEL 73, 273.
[8] Cf. Ep. 130 Ad Probam 14, 25-15, 28: CSEL 44, 68-73.
[9] Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1025.
[10] Jean Giono, Les vraies richesses (1936), Preface, Paris 1992,
pp.18-20; quoted in Henri de Lubac, Catholicisme. Aspects sociaux du
dogme, Paris 1983, p.VII.
[11] Ep. 130 Ad Probam 13, 24: CSEL 44, 67.
[12] Sententiae III, 118: CCL 6/2, 215.
[13] Cf. ibid. III, 71: CCL 6/2, 107-108.
[14] Novum Organum I, 117.
[15] Cf. ibid. I, 129.
[16] Cf. New Atlantis.
[17] In Werke IV, ed. W. Weischedel (1956), p.777.
[18] I. Kant, Das Ende aller Dinge, in Werke VI, ed. W.Weischedel (1964), p.190.
[19] Chapters on charity, Centuria 1, ch. 1: PG 90, 965.
[20] Cf. ibid.: PG 90, 962-966.
[21] Conf. X 43, 70: CSEL 33, 279.
[22] Sermo 340, 3: PL 38, 1484; cf. F. Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop, London and New York 1961, p.268.
[23] Sermo 339, 4: PL 38, 1481.
[24] Conf. X 43, 69: CSEL 33, 279.
[25] Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2657.
[26] Cf. In 1 Ioannis 4, 6: PL 35, 2008f.
[27] Testimony of Hope, Boston 2000, pp.121ff.
[28] The Liturgy of the Hours, Office of Readings, 24 November.
[29] Sermones in Cant., Sermo 26, 5: PL 183, 906.
[30] Negative Dialektik (1966), Third part, III, 11, in Gesammelte Schriften VI, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p.395.
[31] Ibid., Second part, p.207.
[32] DS 806.
[33] Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 988-1004.
[34] Cf. ibid., 1040.
[35] Cf. Tractatus super Psalmos, Ps 127, 1-3: CSEL 22, 628-630.
[36] Gorgias 525a-526c.
[37] Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1033-1037.
[38] Cf. ibid., 1023-1029.
[39] Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1030-1032.
[40] Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1032.