Hope is the main resource religions provide, and one unfortunately becoming scarce. A proposal: reading again “Spe salvi,” the 2007 treatise on hope by the German Pope.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 1 of 5.
Perhaps the summer may be a time for reflecting on what is really important in religion, freedom—and our life. One of the main social functions of religion is to provide a rare but crucial resource, hope. An East Asian spiritual teacher I count as a friend, Taiwan’s qigong master Dr. Hong Tao-Tze, is even asking the United Nations to include among their days of observance a World Day of the Power of Hope.
Hoping to promote a broader reflection on hope, which would also be relevant for religious liberty where there are situations that seem at first sight hopeless, I am returning to an old and almost forgotten text, Pope Benedict XVI’s (1927–2022) encyclical “Spe salvi” of November 30, 2007. The title, translated in English as “Saved in Hope,” refers to Romans 8:24, “Spe salvi facti sumus,” “It is in hope that we are saved.”
The German Pope is more often remembered today for some controversial choices of his difficult pontificate, which unfortunately obfuscate the fact that, as his friend Jürgen Habermas once said (while disagreeing with him on almost everything), Benedict was one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century.
“Spe salvi” is rich in references to an extensive bibliography. It does not, however, cite two texts, which were certainly present to the Pontiff when he wrote the encyclical. They act, so to speak, as the scenario against which the drama of hope then unfolds, I would say, in four acts as if it were a theatrical play.
The first feature of the scenario is constituted by the best-known philosophical work of the 20th century where hope is put on the subject, “The Principle of Hope,” published in three volumes between 1954 and 1959 by the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977).
Even Bloch is less read today than when I was a young philosophy student in the 1970s. Never mentioned, but always presupposed, in the encyclical, Ernst Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, Palatinate, on July 8, 1885, into a family of practicing Jews. His philosophical studies, however, led him toward atheism and Marxism. With the advent of the Nazi regime, he fled Germany and began a peregrination through various European countries, eventually settling in the United States, where he wrote his major work, “The Principle of Hope”. After the war, the new communist regime in East Germany invited him to return to Germany and to take up the chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig in 1948.
After the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Bloch, too, fell victim in 1957 to an East German “purge” on professors whose absolute loyalty to the regime and the Soviet Union was questioned, and he was excluded from the university. In 1961, paradoxically, this scholar who remained a Marxist escaped to West Germany where he resumed teaching at the University of Tübingen. He died in Tübingen on August 4, 1977. His philosophical apologia for atheism as an appropriate form of Biblical hope for modern times has seduced many Christians, but remains firmly rooted in Marxism.
In “The Principle of Hope,” Bloch—Jewish by birth and culture—acknowledges that the philosophical and theological notion of hope arises properly with the Bible. But he asserts that Jewish and Christian hope remains incurably subjective, individualistic, private. When it seeks to change society and establish justice, religious hope becomes myth or fable, so much so that it can be compared to the search for lost cities such as Eldorado or for the fountain of eternal youth. Only Marxism would be able to transform this illusory hope into a real hope: and not so much the Marxism of Karl Marx (1818–1883), which still remains theory, but the practical communism of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin (1870–1924). For Bloch finally “an end of the tunnel is in sight that comes not from Palestine but from Moscow: ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem,” “where Lenin is, there is the Heavenly Jerusalem.”
Of course, today we know that in communist Moscow there was no Heavenly Jerusalem. There is no Leninist regime surviving in Moscow either, although Putin does maintain some of the worst elements of Soviet times. And yet “The Principle of Hope” played a fundamental role in post-Vatican-II Catholic theology. Many have attempted to transform back into Christian the hope that Bloch had turned into communist. Perhaps the results they obtained were different from the starting point, that is, from the original Christian hope. Their efforts happened in the 1960s and 1970s within the context of the sympathy for Marxism of a certain Catholic theology. Indeed, Benedict XVI reported in his autobiography his encounters with and criticism of theologians fascinated by Bloch when he was a professor in Germany.
The second feature of the scenario is the famous, or perhaps infamous. speech given in Regensburg by Benedict XVI himself on September 12, 2006. Although widely criticized for what appeared as a derogatory reference to Muslims, the lecture was not, as many think, a speech on Islam. The Muslim world was evoked initially, as a contrasting element, to introduce an analysis of what for centuries Europe and the West should have been but unfortunately were not. In Islam—at the time when the Pope fixes it in a snapshot in Regensburg, the end of the 14th century—the fear of drifts toward atheism had led to the abandonment of Greek philosophy, with which previously Muslim thought had maintained deep and fruitful relations. But even in Europe the synthesis of Greece and Christianity, which happened with the mediation of Roman culture, was attacked and severely wounded by successive “dehellenizations,” which most Protestant thought regards as positive developments but the Pontiff condemned.
The problem, according to Benedict XVI, was not the renunciation of a Greek style—as if he were simply nostalgic of the Ionic, Doric, or Corinthian columns—but the abandonment of the Greek idea of reason. The main Greek legacy the German Pope cherished was its idea of reason as an instrument intended to (and, albeit with limitations, capable of) knowing the truth. This Greek concept was replaced first with Martin Luther (1483–1546) by a devaluation of reason in general, then with the Enlightenment and Marxism by what the Pope regarded as a false notion of reason. This “reason” was no longer aimed at the truth, but at what is technically or politically useful or is capable of proving its superiority in history through violence.
Yet, hope was not destroyed, as I will discuss in the next installment of this series by presenting “Spe salvi” as a theatrical drama in four acts.
