The truth will win, often more quickly than we expected. This is an optimistic view, often maintained by the Catholic Church, especially when she is put to the test.
Hope itself is not an argument for complacency, but rather, against despair. But it is not easily understandable in our present, unorthodox “woke” environment. We should be hoping for what? they say.
Hope is a theological virtue, higher than any of the cardinal virtues. The “cardinals” are “reasonable” virtues, easy to defend.
Whereas, the “theological” virtues – Faith, Hope, Charity – cannot make sense to the man formed on the ideal of “pure” science, shaking off religion. Such a person is a pure sceptic, and may follow that route to pure cynicism.
His hopes can be placed only in naturalist or material things, encountered by chance. He is a tourist in this world, as are all humans. Without the theological virtues, he cannot hope to “write home” through prayer. His hopes for himself must always depend upon his human knowledge. He knows that he will die. Nothing can end well.
We must instead give our answer to the question, “Hope for what?” – based on the divine promise. “Thy kingdom come” is the phrase in the Lord’s Prayer. It is in the coming of His Kingdom that our individual hope is vested, and for the Christian, it is Hope writ large.
This isn’t a “scientific” hope that God’s kingdom will prove to have been real, and authentic. We are in no position even to speculate about that. We are TOLD it is reality, and we accept or reject what we have been told.
To imagine that this kingdom MIGHT exist, is like imagining that the earth might be; that in spite of every reservation, the appearances of the here and now are NOT illusion.
Instead, we wish to be saved, for real. The Kingdom of God is, as it were, at hand.
We entertain the notion that a human has a body, that he has memory, that he has the power and the calling to be a saint – we take for real, because that is how things are in the here and now.
Hence: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is another phrase, expressing our theological Hope – not to be confused with an expression of expectation. Our task, in the approach to Heaven, must begin here, and now. Our work “is cut out for us.”
Faith, hope, and charity go beyond reason, lighting the way to Heaven. These are not things to “believe,” merely, but things to do. By complement, such cardinal virtues as that of Prudence offer rational checks on our “journey,” or “pilgrimage,” but would be useful wherever we were going.
But by contrast, the theological virtues are mere words to the man on the naturalist path.
“Woke” is the current lunacy, the current phase. But it can be defeated, by a genuine Christian virtue. By Hope.
From David Warren, Against the Woke Heresy. Illustration: Our Lady of Hope (Seville).
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