Every year during Eastertide I find myself thinking about the virtue of hope, which, more than any of the others, can only make sense when understood in the light of Our Lord’s glorious Resurrection. This year in particular we’ve been subjected to a lot of talk about “hope”, most of which could only serve to confuse and discourage us. So I thought this might be a good year to offer a reflection on the virtue of hope.

The rhetoric of Barack Obama was instructive in some ways in showing what the virtue of hope isn’t. In the first place, of course, Barack Obama could not offer real hope because the end he sought was earthly, and no earthly end will ever fully satisfy our immortal souls. (The fact that the social order he envisioned was neither just nor virtuous is another complication which I will leave aside for the present purposes.) But Obama’s version of “hope” was deficient in another way — it gave no serious consideration to the arduous nature of the journey towards its desired end. In the campaign phase of his rise to power, Obama spoke very little of sacrifice or struggle or hard choices. His starry-eyed supporters seemed almost under the impression that the sick would rise up and walk, ethnic and nationalistic rivalries would evaporate, and flowers would spring up in the earth’s most desolate places on the day of the great man’s inauguration. In his more euphoric moments, he almost promised this. In theological terms, what Obama was offering was an earthly corollary, not to hope, but rather to presumption. He enticed his followers with a shining chimera of a happy new order, and no realistic appraisal of the struggles that would have to be overcome to reach it.

Understanding this, we should not be surprised that the immediate aftermath of the inauguration saw, not fields of blooms, but rather a dramatic change of rhetoric from “Yes We Can!” to “Our country may fall into a pit so deep we can never get out!” The latter warning is almost as absurdly hyperbolic as his earlier statements about healing the sick and stopping the oceans from rising. Recessions happen. They bring real and serious hardships, but unless the Apocalypse descends on us sooner, I’m pretty sure America will still be here fifty or a hundred years hence. Still, looking at Obama’s career through the lens of “hope”, the sudden transition is easily explicable. As theologians have long recognized, presumption is always a very near cousin to despair. When its infantile facade is destroyed, the arduous nature of life becomes plain, and the presumptuous person is quickly inclined towards the opposite extreme. Wrapped in his cocoon of self-deception, he has failed to develop the fortitude necessary to face up to the struggles of life, and so when their true nature is revealed to him he quails and despairs. Watching the development of Obama’s political career was almost like watching this process using the fast-forward button. So, if nothing else, we can at least thank our president for providing us with such an instructive object lesson concerning the virtue of hope.

But enough on such gloomy topics. This is Eastertide, the season for celebrating Our Lord’s Resurrection! And through contemplation of this glorious event, we can gain some appreciation of the real nature of hope, which so fully eluded the hapless Democrats this past year.

Hope is a confusing virtue, because it combines two dispositions that, initially, seem to be in tension. On the one hand, it rests in confident expectation of attaining its end. And yet, at the same time, it is fully cognizant of the arduous nature of the journey, and even of the fact that the prize could potentially be lost through sin. But this seems almost contradictory. How can such perfect confidence be possible in light of a realistic appraisal of the difficult journey that lies before us (as well as the frailty of our own natures)?

When I teach this virtue to my students, I draw a contrast between intellectual beliefs and a kind of practical expectation, or perhaps we might even say “gut feeling”, that actively affects our life and behavior. An instructive example is the expression, sometimes said of teenagers behaving rashly, that they “think they’re never going to die.” Now, presumably the young people in question don’t literally think that they are immortal. On a written questionnaire they would likely estimate at near 100% the probability that they will die some day. But at the same time, the expression isn’t meaningless, because it seems true that, for most healthy young people, death is mainly an abstract concept. The truth of human mortality hasn’t really touched their lives yet, and so, on the level of practical expectation, they really do regard themselves as immortal, even while knowing intellectually that they are not.

Now a further observation is in order. There are some times in life when ordering our practical expectations in a particular way actually serves to change the course of our lives. A simple example is the sort of advice sometimes given to job seekers to “visualize yourself getting the job” when psyching themselves up for an interview; the poise and confidence gained in this exercise is more likely to impress potential employers than a hangdog, apologetic demeanor.

A weightier example can be seen in the argument against pre-nuptial agreements for engaged couples. Of course for Catholics divorce is not a possibility, but there are some cases when legal separations can be approved, in which case a pre-nuptial agreement might be useful. Nonetheless, I would argue that making such an arrangement would be a big mistake for most couples (which is really to say: anyone who ought to be getting married in the first place.) Intellectually, an engaged person might feel bashful about predicting with absolute certainty that his approaching marriage will be a raging success. We are, after all, sinners, and it’s hard to be certain of succeeding at something you’ve yet to attempt. But it seems entirely appropriate to enter into marriage with a confident expectation of a happy and successful union. If both spouses live from the outset with the pragmatic assumption that of course they will be together for life, their chances of attaining marital bliss will be greatly improved. A pre-nuptial agreement, by its very nature, forces couples to think from the outset about what happens if it doesn’t work?! And that, by undermining the trust and confidence that is required for a happy marriage, can only increase the odds that the legal fallback will actually be needed. Expectations can be more potent than cold percentages when it comes to actually shaping our lives. And sometimes the tension between the two (that is, an intellectual realization that a goal might not be reached, and an affective decision that it has to be) can be the most formative of all.

But what does this have to do with Easter? In fact, it has everything to do with it, though this is the point where I have to break off in my philosophy classes. (I have to leave something for the theologians to cover!) Theological hope is the ultimate example of confidently expecting something (union with God in Heaven) that is seemingly near-impossible to achieve. Although an absurd percentage of Americans are willing to predict their salvation with breezy unconcern, the fact remains that a morally serious person (that is, one with a realistic appreciation of both his own frailty and the demands of the virtuous life) may find it quite challenging to believe that salvation is more than a remote possibility for him personally. Accepting the truth of one’s mortality is child’s play in comparison. Day in and day out we have to live with our own pathetic weaknesses — the petty jealousies and ill tempers and absurd points of vanity that for most of us are practically part of the air we breathe. With that as a backdrop, how plausible does it seem that those same souls could one day be unified with God in a blissful life in Heaven? Intellectually you might be able to whip out a catechism and convince me that it must be so, but incorporating this practically into my life as a confident expectation is a different story entirely. As a test case, consider the reaction of the Little Flower, as recorded in Story of a Soul, when she suspects for the first time that she may be terminally ill. She reports that she was so filled with joyful anticipation that she lay awake all night in blissful excitement! Now, most of us surely hope that we will be able, when our time comes, to accept our deaths with patient resignation and maybe even some relief. But blissful excitement? Well, I have to say frankly that that would not be my immediate reaction if I were to be diagnosed suddenly with a terminal illness. Which probably means that a confident expectation of posthumous bliss has not become a complete reality for me.

So, it turns out that hope is not as easy as it might initially seem. Once we’ve really come to grips with our sinfulness, with the strictness of Christ’s demands and with the arduous nature of our earthly life, it seems much more natural to quail in terror, to throw ourselves to the ground, and to cry (as St. Peter once did), “Lord, save me!”

In a way, that’s exactly what we do on Good Friday. At Easter we get our response. As He once did for St. Peter, Christ stretches forth His hand, and a way is opened to us. It isn’t that the journey ceases to be hard, or that our deficiencies become any less glaring. Our situation is lowlier even than we have been able to appreciate. Yet even so, we can confidently expect our salvation, because we have a glorious Redeemer who has loosed us from our bonds! By rights the gates of paradise should have been closed tight to us, but His superabundant grace has opened them. God Himself has descended to the depths of Hell to save us. In the wonder of that realization, every good thing seems possible, and, indeed, likely.

In the course of my Baltimore Catechism catechesis, I was taught that the Passion and Resurrection were not strictly necessary to satisfy the demands of justice. Any amount of divine suffering (even, say, a scrape on the Holy Child’s knee) would have been adequate to fill the bill. A more dramatic gesture was chosen, not to satisfy justice per se, but to demonstrate in a more visible way to the children of men God’s love for them. Now, to be frank, I’ve never known quite how to think about this whole reparation/justice aspect of soteriology, so I won’t comment on that. But the latter part of this theory seems to me profoundly true. That is: we needed a concrete demonstration of God’s love for us in order to overcome our natural propensity to despair. Only something as powerful as a God who died for men, and then rose again, could truly persuade us that our cause was not lost. Before such a mighty Savior as this, my pitiful little soul can’t pose too much of a challenge!

Note that this is by no means an invitation to adopt a Protestant “once saved always saved” mentality. That kind of confident expectation (wherein intellectual certainty and affective confidence are united) would spell the death of hope just as surely as succumbing to despair. Hope is not a lazy, comfortable dismissal of the possibility of not reaching one’s desired end. Hope is a dynamic, spirited embrace of the almost-contradictory truths that the journey before us is impossibly hard and at the same time that in God, all things are possible. Only an event as wonderful as Christ’s Resurrection could hold these two truths together in our minds and hearts. And that glorious pairing becomes the source from which our Easter joy flows forth.

Rejoice! For He is risen, as He said!