Although deconstructed by ideologies, hope is not lost. It is a perennial possibility, even in the midst of the most horrible persecutions.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 5 of 5. Read article 1, article 2, article 3, and article 4.
Benedict XVI often described the crisis of Europe and the West, but he did not do so to summon to a funeral. Instead, he wanted to show how, when the bottom is touched, the possibility of rising and re-emerging also arises. But from the bottom of the modern revolutionary process also arises for Christians themselves the duty of self-criticism. In the final act of what I am reconstructing as the “theatrical” architecture of his 2007 encyclical on hope, “Spe salvi,” Benedict noted that, “Flowing into this self-critique of the modern age there also has to be a self-critique of modern Christianity” (no. 22).
The drama is more complex than a simple division between “us” and “them,” between the ideologies of modernity that have demolished hope and the Christians who have tried to preserve it. Sometimes Christians themselves, according to a famous expression of Pope Paul VI (1897–1976), have unfortunately offered their own contribution to a work of “self-demolition.”
There are, first of all, Christians who sided with the “others” and became fellow-travelers of the Enlightenment or Marxism. After the thunderous fall of the ideologies of the 20th century, the critique of these theologies seem to be easy and may almost be taken for granted on the doctrinal level. However, the German Pope notes that in the concrete reality of history we are dealing with currents and characters that have by no means disappeared. But the encyclical mostly focuses on what Benedict regards as a more subtle error, one that finds its roots in the penetration into the Catholic Church of Luther’s transformation of hope from objective to subjective discussed in the previous article of this series.
According to Benedict, the Lutheran conception in the 20th century “became prevalent—at least in Germany—in Catholic exegesis too,” paradoxically, while “recent Protestant exegesis has arrived at a different interpretation,” persuading itself that Luther’s interpretation of the “Epistle to the Hebrews” was philologically “untenable” (no. 7). And it is precisely here that Christians risk falling under Marxist critiques, challenging that once reduced to its subjective dimension, the beautiful Christian hope does not change the world nor create justice.
Benedict shows, first of all, that in this critique lies a deception, so that the response cannot be merely defensive. The ideologues worked, through a centuries-old process, to drive Christians out of the public square where they thought they could joyfully build their “kingdom of man” (no. 30) without being disturbed by God. When the square fills with ruins, they go on to rebuke Christians for not taking care of the reconstruction and only focusing on their eternal salvation at home or in church—where, however, they had confined them in the first place.
Yet, the German Pope notes, the need for Christian “self-criticism” remains. Christians have sometimes allowed themselves to be excluded from the public square without reacting, almost smugly leaving it to others who they thought would take better care of it (in Italy, this has long been called the “religious choice” of certain Catholic intellectuals and movements). There is indeed a Christianity that—in the critical expression of the French novelist Jean Giono (1895–1970), whom Benedict quotes from a work by Cardinal Henri de Lubac, S.J. (1896–1991)—has reduced “the joy of Jesus” to a merely “individual” experience that, heedless of the dramas of society and history, “in his blessedness passes through the battlefields with a rose in [its] hand” (no. 13).
Addressing the issue in a way that may appear surprising at first glance, the Pope insists that these Christians started by getting their eschatology wrong. “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” (no. 42). Of course, Benedict agrees that there is nothing wrong for a Christian in being concerned about the salvation of one’s soul. But the ancients knew better than we do that we are not saved alone. The Christian expression that there is no salvation that does not pass through the Church also means that there is no salvation that does not have a social dimension. To be reminded of this dimension, we need to look at the Last Judgment, not just the “particular judgment” that Christians believe awaits every soul after death.
Indeed, according to Benedict XVI, without the Last Judgment neither the Marxist objection nor the demand for justice that rises from all of human history is truly answered. “I am convinced,” the Pope confides, “that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favour of faith in eternal life” (no. 43). If we open our windows and look at the drama of the world, we do not have to be incurable pessimists to conclude that it does indeed often seem that the villains are winning. If this injustice were the last word, history itself would ultimately be meaningless. Instead, there must be a “reparation that sets things aright” toward which to direct a hope “the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries” (no. 43).
Already one of the leading exponents of Greek philosophy, so often evoked in “Spe salvi,” Plato (427–347 B.C.) in his dialogue “Gorgias” had intuited that to make sense of history there had to be, in the end, a judge who would send some to prison, where “they undergo the appropriate punishment,” and others “to the isles of the blessed” (no. 44).
Jesus seemingly goes further, with the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), where the rich who refused to help the poor is immediately sentenced to what we may interpret as eternal Hell. Benedict, however, emphasizes that in the 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.” (no. 44).
Already Old Testament Judaism sensed—going beyond Plato—that there is more than just the “prison” and the “isles of the blessed.” Benedict XVI reiterates that according to orthodox Catholic theology, Hell does exist and it is not empty as some theologians would have it. It is the condition prepared for those “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’” (no. 45).
Just as, fortunately, we encounter “people who are utterly pure,” whom we have no difficulty imagining as destined immediately for Heaven (no. 45). But “we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life.” In the majority of people “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” (no. 46). According to Benedict, this makes the prospect of Purgatory, rejected by Protestants and increasing unpopular among liberal Catholic theologians as well, not only scripturally and theologically grounded but eminently reasonable.
God’s love, Benedict insists, is both justice and mercy. If it were only mercy, which would save everyone without looking at the good or evil they have done, “a sponge which wipes everything away” (no. 44) that one has done in life, God’s attitude would expose itself to the protest to which, among others, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) gave voice in “The Brothers Karamazov,” a novel explicitly cited by the encyclical. No: “Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had happened.” “If [he] were only grace that makes all that is earthly irrelevant, God would remain indebted to us for the answer to the question about justice—a question decisive for us before history and God himself” (no. 44).
On the other hand, if God were “merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all” (no. 47). The Catholic perspective presented by Benedict keeps its gaze fixed on the Last Judgment and in the particular judgment discerns Hell, Purgatory and Heaven as possibilities. It regards justice and mercy as closely linked, as eminently happens in the very person of Jesus Christ. Benedict acknowledges that prayers of suffrage for the souls of the departed and the offering of one’s own sufferings for others are practices that in the past in the Catholic Church might have included “some exaggerations and perhaps unhealthy applications” (no. 40). Yet he asks the question “whether there may not after all have been something essential and helpful contained” in these old practices (no. 40). They expressed hope in their own and sometimes naïve way.
“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?” (no. 28). The Marxist critique would press on: is not the Last Judgment merely a remote frame to justify our concern for individual salvation alone? On a superficial reading, the objection could be strengthened by the two paths Benedict indicates as priorities for restoring hope: prayer and the ability to accept suffering as an opportunity for holiness. For the German Pope, this obviously does not exclude the value of any human effort that aims at alleviating suffering. However, it is equally obvious that the total elimination of suffering is impossible and pursuing it would cause us to fall back into the ruinous utopias of God’s kingdom on Earth.
The choice of witnesses whom Benedict summons to illustrate the value of prayer and suffering deserves attention: Cardinal François Xavier (Phanxicô Xaviê) Nguyễn Văn Thuận (1928-2002), who meditated on prayer during his thirteen years of hard imprisonment in communist Vietnam, and Vietnamese martyr Paul (Phaolô) Lê Bảo Tịnh (1793–1857), canonized by John Paul II in 1988, whose reflections on suffering in the midst of harassment and torture truly look like a “letter from Hell” (no. 37).
These dramatic experiences may appear as individualistic only to a truly superficial and crude reading. In reality, lived in the communion of the Church and the saints and in the eschatological perspective of the Judgment, they change the world and restore hope. This was, after all, the experience of the first disciples and of Mary the Mother of Jesus on the Calvary. Some might have said that on that night of darkness the reign of Jesus Christ had “ended before it began.” For the believers, Benedict notes, it was quite the opposite: Christ’s kingdom “began in that hour, and of this ‘Kingdom’ there will be no end” (no. 50).
Restoring hope, thus, remains always possible. As long as we do not just complain and remember, as Benedict XVI said in another occasion, that “to light a candle is worth more than to curse the darkness.”
