THE FORGOTTEN VIRTUE?

I’ve been thinking about hope. It is curious that there are two great commandments but three theological virtues. Faith, obviously, corresponds to the first great commandment; charity to the second. So where does hope come in?

French has two words for hope: espoir and espérance. The former is the more common, and applies to simple things as well as to profound ones. J’espère gagner à la loterie: I hope I win in the lottery. I hope my kid passes his exams. I hope there won’t be another jihadist attack in Paris. In this sense of the word, “hope” is close kin to “wish”. It implies goodwill but no sense of personal empowerment or responsibility.

So what about espérance? The verb it is linked to, nominally, is also espérer; in fact, it is almost never used. Espérance is the noun used for the theological virtue (and also for the Cape of Good Hope, incidentally). And just as in English, one doesn’t use the verb much in this sense, probably because of its association with the more trivial meanings.

Then, in this morning’s reading in my little monthly booklet Prions en église, I was struck by its version of Hebrews 11:1: Frères, la foi est une façon de posséder ce que l’on espère, un moyen de connaître des réalités qu’on ne voit pas. “Brothers, faith is a way of possesseing what one hopes, a means of knowing the realities one does not see.” And, as the commentator, the Hellenist Roselyne Dupont-Roc, noted: this shows us faith as the hypo-stasis, the basement and foundation, of hope.

If this is true, then true hope is inseparable from faith, and presupposes it. This sense of hope is not (only), as I have written before, the force that lets us get up for the forty-seventh time after we have fallen forty-six: it is rather the projecting of faith upon our life in the world. Abraham had faith in God; when he was told to sacrifice Isaac, it was hope in this sense that allowed him to obey. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had faith in God; it was hope in this sense that empowered him, and the rest of the Bekennende Kirche, the “Confessing Church”, to speak up in the furnace of Nazism.

One of the curious things about spirituality is that, negatively put, you need faith in order to have faith; but positively put, once you feel your lack of faith, you in fact have faith. Perhaps this is what it means to possess what one hopes. Contrary to what many people say, faith is not something arbitrarily given to some, withheld from others. It’s a great deal more complex than that. It’s a reality that has many more dimensions than four or five. But it is also the surprising force that allows us to enter that reality and then to live in it; and when we do, hope – espérance -- takes over. We possess what we hope; we know the reality that is unseen. Dazzling.