Chan Hellman, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, has developed a body of scientific research that argues that for those who experience trauma and suffering, hope is a leading factor indicating recovery. This has led Hellman to found the Hope Institute, which offers training, especially to poor and adversely affected communities, that promotes the development of practices that cultivate hope. This contemporary “science of hope”, however, also has its skeptics. Vincent Lloyd, for example, has argued in The Problem with Grace (Stanford, 2011) that Christian hope, especially as voiced by Augustine, is more of an avoidance strategy which ignores the existential and moral challenges of suffering. Here, he recalls a favorite dictum of Gillian Rose, a 20th century philosopher and writer who, while suffering through terminal cancer, was fond of an epigraph from the Russian monk Staretz Silouan—"keep your mind in hell and despair not”—as a better strategy for facing the challenges and struggles of life head-on. Given this mixed reception of the virtue—or vice—of hope and of Augustine’s views on it, I would like to contemplate his thoughts further so we might glimpse how the Bishop of Hippo drew on hope to counsel those within his community and beyond who sought answers amidst life’s suffering.
We can begin with Augustine’s short treatise, the Enchiridion, which is a short handbook on Christian education. He opens with the claim that wisdom is the aim of Christian education. This leads to a refrain common in his writings that wisdom is piety and piety is the worship of God (Job 28:28). Augustine grounds worship in faith, hope, and love (often translated charity), thereby connecting the triad of virtues to wisdom and to Christian worship: “faith believes, hope and charity pray. But hope and charity cannot be without faith, and so faith prays as well [...]. What is there that we can hope for without believing in it?” In this, Augustine anchors Christian worship to faith, hope, and love.
However, would sober Christians be better off jettisoning hope, especially in times of suffering, to avoid unhealthy forms of escapism? Faith and love may be necessary, but is hope merely a morphine drip that feeds into a naïve panacea of peaceful delusion? Can Augustinian hope voice deep human anguish and not crumble in despair or retreat into delusion? I think the answer is yes, but we must be careful not to mistake hope with anodyne elevator music that blissfully carries us upward out of misery. The good things hope seeks are ultimately connected to the Good (God), which renders hope’s vision more akin to Moses on Sinai than a child on Santa’s lap. Hope shakes, challenges, and convicts us to the core, but it does so through our inclusion within divine love, which allows us to face and endure suffering. Augustine drives this point home when he turns to the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew as a guide to understanding Christian hope. He argues that the first three petitions refer to eternal goods but are also temporal in the sense that they begin in the present and are perfected in the future. For example, in the second petition— hallowed be thy name—we honor God’s name now, but this comes to perfection in eternity. In the third petition—thy kingdom come—God begins to establish his kingdom through the historical church, but this also comes to perfection in eternity. The final four petitions refer to temporal goods because they are problems that concern us now that will not be present in heaven. For example, the fifth petition seeks forgiveness for sins, a problem that will not exist in heaven. Augustine also argues that these petitions strike a balance between, on the one hand, the material and spiritual, and on the other hand, the individual and communal. For example, the fourth petition— give us today our daily bread—can be taken literally to refer to the material needs of the body— ours and others—or spiritually to the Eucharist.
Within the seven petitions, the hard work of hope emerges at a complex intersection that looks within the anguish of suffering to voice the desire for healing. The Lord’s Prayer acknowledges the hardships of physical and spiritual life and guides us to hope and seek after the material well-being of adequate food and shelter while also pursuing the spiritual well-being of forgiveness and renewal. The Lord’s Prayer also recognizes that such forgiveness and renewal involve the individual, community, and God. It is the hope of every individual to be reconciled to God— forgive us our sins—even as there is a communal hope for reconciliation with others—as we forgive those who sin against us. This is the hope of every individual who prays, but it is also the prayer of the church. The Lord’s Prayer acknowledges such layers of suffering and renewal within an overarching and anchoring voice of optimism. We pray and hope for a future, one that represents material and spiritual betterment within historical life, but one that is also oriented toward the eschatological future when suffering and sin will be no more.
In other writings Augustine addresses how hope intersects, guides, and transforms human life. In a letter to a fellow Christian, Augustine takes up Matthew 19:21 and Jesus’ command to the rich man: Go, sell all that you have, and give it to the poor, and you will have a treasure in heaven, and come follow me. Augustine rejects a literal reading of the passage that would have Christians sell their material possessions in hope of attaining salvation. Such a reading would suggest that one must be materially poor in order to be spiritually rich. Instead, Augustine interprets Jesus’ command as a demonstration that the rich man was dishonest in his prior claim that he had kept all of God’s commandments (Matthew 19:20). The point of Matthew 19:21 is to set a broad spiritual principle that God must be honored above all other things. To underscore this claim, Augustine raises the example of the patriarchs who did not sell all they owned to follow God, but rather were people of wealth and faith. Augustine drives this point home by reading the passage from Matthew 19 in conjunction with 1 Timothy 6:17— do not place hope in the uncertainty of riches. He argues that the rich man’s failure was not in his refusal to sell all that he had, but rather in a prior, more fundamental failure, in placing his hopes in his wealth rather than in God. The point is not to reject the material world but rather to embrace God as the center of one’s life. In this, Augustine draws on hope to moderate a strong anti-material reading of Matthew 19, intimating that hope offers an inclusive vision of spiritual life in the world and does not reduce to an exclusivist, either/or account of God and world. Stated differently, hope signals that we are not to despise the world but rather to love God—hope is about love, not fear. We might see the example of the rich man as a failure in love and hope grounded in the fear that he has not fulfilled the requirements of the spiritual life.
To many a modern eye, from Nietzsche forward, such a vision of hope might seem deeply misguided. Within a secular model, it is sometimes viewed as a tragic, even cowardly, vision that sacrifices the only real opportunity for happiness in this world for the false promise of eternal happiness. Critics worry that in seeking the good as Augustine would have it, hope’s vision becomes a grand, ephemeral illusion of human wish-fulfillment to avoid suffering. Such a vision is not of the true God but rather of the God we would wish to exist. Consequently, this vision deconstructs itself in ironic fashion, falling into idolatry as we become beholden to it in an ever-vainer and more vigorous attempt to avoid and ignore suffering with misguided gusto.
In addressing such concerns, it is important to keep a few things in mind. Foremost, it bears repeating that hope seeks the good; it is not a form of wish-fulfillment that beckons toward some trivial, superficial good like that hocked by contemporary televangelists and prosperity gospel gurus who proclaim that we should try to feel good and avoid bad feelings, or that the spiritual good amounts to little more than material goods. Hope’s vision for the good is ultimately a call to seek the universal good, namely God, and thereby it is one that resists the reduction to any limited, temporal pleasure. In seeking this good, hope does not propagate a grand avoidance strategy that refuses to take suffering and evil seriously. Rather, the opposite is the case. Hope refuses to trivialize suffering by covering it over with false illusions of pleasure, as if we could and should be happy amidst suffering if we just tried harder. Rather, hope acknowledges the profound depth of suffering in maintaining that it is irreconcilable with the achievement of true happiness in this life while offering a vision of the transcendent good (i.e., God).
Hope lives in this tension between present and future, standing against both the flight of fantasy from the suffering in the world and an idolatrous reduction of happiness to this world. Here, we might think about the role of the sacraments, especially baptism, and how it elevates one to the spiritual through the material, by taking the element of water to signify the spiritual forgiveness for sins and the promise of eternal life. In Sermon 20, Augustine turns to the question of how Christians, having been baptized, should live in hope while surrounded by suffering and sin. He argues that there are two basic dangers, one of a deficient and the other of an excessive hope. The former weighs sin and suffering too strongly, the latter too lightly. The former is trapped in the past, the latter in the future. To return to Rose’s epigraph, the former is unable to “despair not” and the latter does not take seriously the need to “keep your mind in hell”.
The first type of false hope in Augustine’s argument is a deficient hope, or a lack of hope. It leads to despair because one thinks there is nothing that can be done about sin or a life filled with suffering. This causes one to give into sin and embrace suffering in nihilistic fashion. Augustine calls this the “gladiator mentality” and argues that it breeds false courage that is nothing more than a primitive hedonism of living for the moment because one is unable to see beyond the immediacy of suffering and death. This puts on tragic and vivid display Augustine’s warning against “materialist understandings” that have reduced the transcendental good (i.e., God) to temporal goods, casting Romans 8:6—to have a materialist understanding is death— as a harbinger of spiritual and moral ruin. Against this, Augustine contrasts the gladiator with the Christian martyr who also faces imminent death but lives in hope and exhibits genuine courage.
The second type of false hope Augustine details is an excessive hope that cuts in two directions. Excessive hope can lead one to expect that the promise and pardon for sin means that heaven is at hand and that there will be no more suffering and temptation. Alternatively, excessive hope can lead one to expect that God will easily and totally forgive sin whenever one desires it. Hope makes sin light here; repentance is put off into the indefinite future. Both versions of excessive hope are false in their failure to weigh properly sin and suffering. While they constitute a hope in the good, they are bad forms of hope because they are visions of a false good. Augustine cautions that one can perish from such hope, underscoring again that hope’s vision of the good does not reduce to psychological wish-fulfillment, but rather opens one to the difficult road of reconciliation with God.
One of the signs along this road, indicating the direction we ought to go, may be seen in Cicero’s lament that “this life is indeed a death that I could lament if I wanted”. In the contemporary parlance of a terminal cancer patient, we might return to Rose’s epigraph to “keep your mind in hell and despair not” and recognize in the symbolism of hell the irreconcilable conflict between true happiness and suffering in this life. The latter half of the epigraph—“despair not”—reminds us that we cannot give suffering too much power or it will overwhelm us. Recalling Paul’s exhortation in Romans 12:12—Rejoice in hope; be patient in tribulation— and Christ’s death and resurrection, we see in his suffering a patience and endurance and in his resurrection a hope for the new life to come. Hope calls us to a patience and endurance that does not passively accept or blissfully ignore the reality of suffering. Rather, true hope must grapple with the evil, injustice, and tragedy in suffering as part of the path to salvation. Christ’s patience in suffering informs and transforms our understanding of the world as it prepares us for the promise of happiness glimpsed in hope’s vision, even as Christ’s resurrection gives hope a vision of this promise that lends us the courage to confront the reality of suffering and not despair. It is such hope that, in Rose’s words, allows us to dwell within the hell of life’s suffering, despair not, and seek a virtuous engagement with and transformation of the world. Finally, we experience this vision and its transformative effects in rejoicing, that is, within the worship and liturgy of the church. This returns us to the Enchiridion and Augustine’s claims that hope connects with wisdom and the worship of God, even as it reminds us that true hope, like true worship, is always of the good because it is the worship of God.