The Theological Virtue of Hope and the Art of Dying

Introduction

A praiseworthy goal of the medieval Ars moriendi tradition was to validate the agency of the dying: to say that dying is something you do, not just something that happens to you. Obviously death might not be obliging. You might die suddenly, deliriously, or in dotage; but the ideal was for the dying to be agents who consciously enacted dying as a role instead of just enduring it as an event. The astonishing notion of dying as an ‘art’ validates agency but also makes demands on it, since it takes skill to practice any art. In the Ars moriendi tradition, the skills needed for the art of dying are the virtues, which are stable character traits that perfect their possessors through inclining them to act well and by directing them to happiness. The virtue of hope has a major but neglected role here that I wish to reassert and refurbish.

The Theological Virtue of Hope

Unsurprisingly, Christians see theological hope as essential to dying well. But why is such hope relevant? In answering this question, my account of hope here as elsewhere draws generously on Aquinas. ¹ Unlike Augustine, Aquinas thought we could be happy in this world through a virtuous life that is characteristically enjoyable (ST I-II.3.2). This strikes me as both sound and as rhetorically deft since it preserves hope from a sour grapes attitude to the world. Nevertheless, in this life we cannot be fully, securely and permanently happy. Our share in the good life is limited by bad fortune and moral evils: by sickness, suffering, injustice, broken relationships, failures, tragedy, sin and death. Since these frustrate not just idle whims but important and good priorities, the result is that we cannot be as happy in this life as we reasonably wish. I call this melancholy consequence the ‘eudaimonia gap’. Hope appeals to the restless heart with the promise of future beatitude in which we will cross this gap and attain perfect happiness through loving union with God in the heavenly city. By such hope Christians receive an added identity: that of homo viator or the ‘human wayfarer’ on a journey to the heavenly patria.

Aquinas specifies the object of hope as ‘a future good possible but arduous to attain’ (ST II-II.17.1). A mean between the vices of despair and presumption, theological hope is not a feeling but a virtue—specifically, a virtue of the will which braces us to persevere in the Christian journey. Hope does this in two ways, making its object two-fold. First, hope’s end, or ‘final cause’, is ‘eternal life, which consists in the enjoyment of God’. Second, hope’s means or ‘efficient cause’ is ‘the divine [grace] … on whose help (hope) relies’ (ST II-II.17.5). By hope’s ‘final cause’ we committedly seek and confidently expect to find perfect beatitude in God, which preserves from despair. By hope’s ‘efficient cause’ we trust in God’s promises and rely upon grace to reach that end, which fends off presumption. As this suggests, God is the direct ‘object’ of hope, making it a ‘theological’ virtue along with faith and charity. In contrast to the natural or ‘acquired’ virtues won through habituation, hope is also a supernatural or ‘infused’ virtue gratuitously poured out in grace.

A Hopeful Dying

Such hope subverts the meaning of death and it is distinctly Christian. ² It is founded resolutely on Jesus Christ, especially on the Nicene Creed profession that ‘on the third day he rose again’ and that we may therefore ‘look forward to the life of the world to come’. From this perspective, vague afterlife notions of simply ‘going into the light’ are mere eschatological smudge and blur, and may bespeak the vice of presumption.

Christ’s subversion of death is nowhere better put than in The Exsultet proclamation of the Easter Vigil. There the candle-lit assembly, liturgically brokenhearted since Good Friday’s ‘pitch of grief’, suddenly hears the joyous reversal: ‘exalt, let them exalt’ and ‘be glad, let earth be glad’, for Christ ‘broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld’! This crescendo of the liturgical year announces an epistemology of the resurrection according to which the Easter mystery alters the meaning of death itself, demoting it from conqueror to conquered. The Pauline taunting of death, unforgettably set to music in Handel’s Messiah, captures hope’s hermeneutic of dying: ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ Only through hope in the risen Christ can such audacity manage not to be ridiculous. Yet hope’s rejoicing never turns into a cheap levity which forgets the tragedy of sin or costliness of redemption. The fact that Christ still bears his wounds even when raised—that even in apocalyptic imagery he is the ‘lamb standing as if slain’ (Rev. 5:6)—suggests that the resurrection does not require forgetting or trivializing the forces of sin and death which mar human life until the eschaton and which Christ took on in his Passion.

Hope ultimately looks to the resurrection and meanwhile trusts in God’s grace to help one complete the journey and be received into ‘those heavenly habitations, where the souls of them that sleep in the Lord Jesus enjoy perpetual rest and felicity’. ³ What this will look like matters less for present purposes than the immense hope implied. Mortality raises questions of ultimate meaning, such as whether we were purposed or are the product of blind chance, whether everything we do has any permanent significance, or whether when I, my children and my loved ones die and rot, will everything precious and lovable about us be blotted out forever after a few brief years? Hope addresses such nagging anxieties by ascribing a transcendent meaning and dignity to our lives, and by assuring us that we were created by love and for love, and are bound not for annihilation but for glory. Crucially, such hope is not just for the flourishing, but for those whose lives are tragically lost or ruined, such as victims of horrific abuse, injustice, tragedy, famine or natural disaster. Though they may have no chance of healing in this world, we refuse to despair of them as ciphers or write-offs, hoping in their future redemption.

Overall, therefore, hope offers a very different vision and experience of dying. It provides what Kenneth Burke calls a ‘structure of encouragement’: one which assures those in an end-of-life battle of attrition that ‘a personal tomorrow still exists’ for them and their loved ones in contrast to ‘the disastrous feeling of “not worth while”’ that fosters despair. ⁴ A growing body of evidence in empirical psychology suggests much the same, pointing out the beneficial effects of religious hope on the mental and even physical health of terminally ill patients. ⁵

Challenges to a Hopeful Dying

Maintaining the virtue of hope is not guaranteed or easy. As a virtue of the will which seeks an arduous good, hope empowers agents to persevere amid the challenges of the journey to God. But just as courage, honesty or justice can be vitiated by their opposing vices, so hope can be vitiated by despair. ⁶ Sudden tragedy, crushed dreams, mounting disappointments, and the weary slog of the years all test our hope. As a rational rather than a physical appetite, the will knowingly regards these troubles which frustrate the yearning for happiness and whose configuration over time is fraught with bewildering uncertainties. Hope therefore remains vulnerable, and without renewed commitments it may wither in trials. The Ars moriendi tradition, with some plausibility, held that we are especially prone to despair as death approaches and we face what Newman calls ‘That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain / That masterful negation and collapse / Of all that makes me man’. ⁷

Dying was never easy, to put it mildly. But today’s social and medical context poses particular challenges. Death and dying are routinely ignored, hidden, or denied in our youth, entertainment, and consumer culture. The spiritual geography charted by traditional eschatology has blurred for most, making death an impenetrable enigma at whose approach there seem few options beyond melancholy resignation or outright despair. Death has gone from an inevitability prepared for beforehand and given public liturgical meaning afterward to a monstrosity we can make no sense of.

Moreover, with ‘the triumph of medicalised death’ the site of dying moved from the security and familiarity of the home to the mechanised and alien hospital. In a trade-off of agency the main actor in death is no longer the dying but the doctor, who as William May puts it, goes from being a ‘caretaker of the sick’ to ‘the enemy of death’: ‘The patient’, he writes, lies ‘helpless between two rival powers [death and medicine] that fight out their battle across relatively defenceless terrain’. ⁸ That inarticulate helplessness sums up countless people’s experience of dying today. However unintentionally and mingled with saving care we gratefully acknowledge, this social and medical context often makes dying not just traumatic but, what’s worse, unintelligible: a landscape without signposts, an event without meaning, in which bewildered agency often frays. This setting can reinforce the demoralisation and brooding that tempt to acedia and the horror of despair. ⁹

Towards an Ascesis of Hope

Ours is not an auspicious context in which to leave hope weak and undeveloped. But in practice hope gets only trifling lip-service. Even many Christians regard hope in the afterlife the way a pilot regards a parachute: as a morbid thought best avoided until disaster threatens. But this is a costly error. True, the example of ‘the good thief’ crucified with Jesus stresses that grace can overcome existing vice with a good death. But it is not hope—it is sinful presumption—to complacently expect heavenly glory while refusing to develop a hopeful character. The Ars moriendi functions best not as a last-minute spiritual ambulance but as the flip-side of a hope-filled ars vivendi or ‘art of living’.

The Ars moriendi claimed that dying could be an ‘art’. It takes skill to practice any art, and practice to develop a skill. Hence our best guides here, such as Erasmus and Jeremy Taylor, focus less on the deathbed as the make-or-break moment and more on the lifelong cultivation of the skills necessary to practice an art of dying. ¹⁰ This is asceticism in the original sense of spiritual and moral exercises analogous to an athlete’s training. ¹¹ The skills, of course, are the virtues, which render characteristically excellent our modes of acting, perceiving, feeling, willing and interacting with the world. Like all virtues, hope requires practice to develop. Preparation for a hopeful death should therefore begin well before dying; ideally by young adulthood.

In underscoring human agency, I am not clothing hope in Pelagian garb. From start to finish hope is a gift of grace. But as our virtue, its retention and growth are works of cooperative grace. Hope’s maintenance depends upon a delicate balance of attitudes and habits formed through acquiescence in and response to God’s initiative. As such, a hopeful character will be cultivated by types of education and practices which encourage the modes of perception and stock responses proper to hope. To effect this we require an ascesis of hope which at present we lack. Sustained and given meaning in the Church, this ascesis would consist in regular spiritual practices and forms of education which cultivate a vision and way of life that take death and the eschaton seriously.

Such practices would correspond to hope’s twofold causality: its ‘final cause’ or end of eternal happiness in God, and its ‘efficient cause’ or means of divine grace. Some practices would specialise in hope. For example, liturgical celebrations of the Resurrection, prayers for the dead, meditation on death and last things, self-examination with a view to the coming judgment, recollection of divine mercies, ‘rejoicing in hope’ through divine praises and spiritual hymns, and entrusting oneself to God for strength. But many would be familiar practices done in a new way. For instance, reading Scripture, liturgical participation, listening to preaching, intercessory prayer, observing feast and fast days, receiving the Eucharist, and so forth. Countless Christians do these already, but not necessarily in a hope-shaped way. To make these part of an ascesis of hope one would attend to those eschatological elements within them which exercise awareness and attachment to eternal life (hope’s ‘final cause’), and which express trust and reliance upon divine grace to reach it (hope’s ‘efficient cause’). To paraphrase Jeremy Taylor, the best way to enable a ‘hopeful dying’ is by a ‘hopeful living’. Hence our need for a renewed ascesis of hope in the Church. ¹²

Reaffirming Hope