Abstract
The animating impulse of David Elliot’s elegant book about hope is a desire to show why and how, in the words of Gaudium et Spes, ‘The expectation of a new earth must not weaken but rather stimulate our concern for cultivating this one’ (quoted on p. 178). Elliot argues that Aquinas was right to think ‘hope does not detach us from earthly goods, but consciously refers them to our eternal end’ (p. 139); and he sees this as overcoming the old accusation that theological hope undermines this-worldly moral and affective investment. In relation to our motivations for action, our concern for others, and our commitment to our earthly identities, traditional eschatological hope is not a hindrance, but a help. For Elliot, indeed, it is the much-needed antidote to the moral and spiritual torpor of the modern West.
Elliot executes his argument with decisiveness and poise, but also evident moral and spiritual concern. The work embodies the convictions it articulates: confidence in the face of despair, solicitude rather than presumption, and a genuine commitment to our earthly identities. This last point gives the book an unmistakably English character. It is filled with references to the likes of Blake, Shakespeare, and Orwell, and prefaced by a quotation from Bede. Elliot, who is Canadian with English ancestry and was living in the UK while working on the book, dedicates it to England. Although this aspect may at times tip towards a certain sort of prejudice—many of the book’s villains seem to come from North America—on the whole, it gives the book a rich, anchored texture. It exemplifies Elliot’s conviction that Christian theology demands a recognition of ‘full embodiment and consequent entanglement in the social world’ (p. 180).
In broad terms, the book moves from an argument for and description of Aquinas’s understanding of hope to an exploration of its value and significance for moral life. A tidy introduction summarises the purposes and shape of the book, before the first chapter explores what Elliot calls ‘The Eudaimonia Gap’. By this Elliot means the way in which our desire for happiness outstrips the possibilities for happiness available to us in this life. Elliot argues that such a gap is attested across a range of philosophical perspectives. In Aristotle’s thought, and in that of neo-Aristotelians such as Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse, we see a more-or-less troubled awareness of the problem. Similarly, Kant, and utilitarian philosophers such as Sidgwick and Mill also struggle with ‘something like the eudaimonia gap’ (p. 37). These philosophical discussions reveal, not a minor, ignorable problem, but a ‘massively burdensome crisis’ (p. 40). They project us into the orbit of theology, and of hope, for the philosophers are, ‘self-consciously nibbling around the edges of a theological virtue they keep in soft focus’ (p. 43). They indicate that theological hope, if justified, would indeed be good news.
Chapter 2 outlines Aquinas’s understanding of hope as a theological virtue. This is prefaced by a discussion of Moltmann’s theology of hope. The way is open to a return to Aquinas’s thought about hope, because, as Elliot says earlier, Moltmann’s theology ‘is implicated in a lot of Hegelian and Marxist baggage that has dated rather badly’ (p. 6). The description of Aquinas’s account of hope begins from his understanding of grace, which in Elliot’s view allows Aquinas to maintain the goodness of nature without either falling into Pelagianism or undermining moral responsibility. All hope, for Aquinas, aims at ‘a future good possible but arduous to attain’ (p. 62; Summa Theologiae II-II 17.1); theological hope locates this future good as the perfect happiness that is the enjoyment of God. Hope is a virtue of the will, a ‘needy love’ that relies on God’s help to ‘complete the journey’ (p. 63). Though having a social dimension, hope is unashamedly self-referential: it seeks God as one’s own good. Elliot carefully notes Aquinas’s account of hope’s ‘moral entourage’: the vices of despair and presumption, the gift of fear, and the beatitude of poverty of spirit. These are important resources in later chapters. The final part of the chapter begins to face some of the main lines of critique the book aims to overcome. Elliot glances first at suspicions of hope’s self-regard in French Quietism, before considering at more length Timothy Jackson’s critique of theological hope in Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Jackson, Elliot thinks, makes a strong case against hope for future beatitude on the grounds of its effect on love in the present. But his characterisation of hope does not do justice to the ‘rich, interpersonal character of Christian eschatology’ (p. 78). In fact, Elliot argues, hope assists love, through the promise that charity will finally transcend the eudaimonia gap.
The third chapter, entitled ‘Rejoicing in Hope’, explains how hope lends gladness to the present time, even in the midst of difficulty. By permitting us to affirm the restless human longing for happiness, which Elliot argues is ‘a living, widespread, and recognisable reality’ (p. 92), hope fills the present with a new joy. This joy is not fuelled by resentment, nor does it require disdain for earthly goods. Rather, by chastening our desires, hope allows us to admire created things rightly. Hope evokes a disciplined, liturgical celebration that is ‘morally crucial’ (p. 104) because it inhibits demoralisation—in striking contrast with the despairing malaise of ‘technological hedonism’ (p. 99).
The next three chapters consider key threats to hope: presumption (chapter 4), despair (chapter 5), and worldliness (chapter 6). The consolation of hope may be distorted, firstly, into presumption. Following Aquinas, Elliot maintains that this happens through a lost grip on grace, which may take two forms. On the one hand, it may involve a denial of need of grace. Elliot sees this exemplified in the work of Jeffrey Stout, whose idea of ‘Emersonian self-reliance encourages the vice of presumption born of vainglory’ (p. 118). On the other hand, presumption may reflect a misperception that grace means moral effort is no longer needed: ‘the compliment which laziness pays to heavenly rectification in the effort to excuse an absence of earthly exertion’ (p. 122). Elliot sees this kind of presumption at work in the ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’ of the late modern West (p. 125). The solution lies in an understanding of grace that has room, as Aquinas’s does, for merit and the necessity of repentance. The key to such an understanding, Elliot suggests, lies in a retrieval of the moral significance of fear, namely, the gift that corresponds to hope in Aquinas’s thought.
The other vice opposed to hope in Aquinas’s thought is despair. This is the focus of chapter 5. Hope, Elliot argues, conduces to greater happiness in this life, not by turning our eyes wholly away from earthly goods, but by referring them to an eternal end. This produces an ‘attitude of zealous patience’ (p. 142), in which the imperfections of the present are continually opposed. Importantly, Elliot argues, the hopeful are not ‘morally and spiritually invincible’ (p. 146), an idea Elliot finds in John Bowlin’s Stoic construal of Aquinas. Hope is a matter of consolation rather than invulnerability.
The sixth chapter examines what Elliot thinks to be a third threat to hope, namely, worldliness. Against modern incredulity before traditional fears about worldliness, Elliot argues that the tradition—which here goes beyond Aquinas—‘identified subtle problems we have neglected to our own loss’ (p. 162). The ‘gentle despair’ of worldliness may, as it does in the modern West, ‘wear a trendy and smiling demeanour’, yet it is ‘a sepulchre none the better for being whited’ (p. 171). The antidote is found in poverty of spirit, the association of which with hope ‘was a brilliant insight of Augustine and Aquinas’ (p. 176). This beatitude holds the key to a stance contra mundum in certain, critical respects, which allows the hopeful to become pro mundo in deeper, richer ways (p. 162).
The final chapter of the book explores this point with reference to Christian commitment to ‘The Earthly City’. Aquinas’s thinking about pietas, which involves honour of one’s homeland, reflects a right Christian rejection of dualism and commitment to fully social embodiment. The social alienation of hopeful Christians should not be exaggerated and can itself become an act of committed communication. Elliot sees these ideas partly reflected in Dominic Doyle’s ‘Christian Humanism’, though he thinks Doyle misses some of the key contributions of Aquinas’s account, and loads it up with unnecessary metaphysical innovations. The book concludes with a discussion of how hope enriches love for homeland. ‘Since the social body may be referred by hope to our ultimate end’, Elliot writes, ‘society is part of hope’s interests’ (p. 195). Such referral has sustained a ‘tenacious social hope’ (p. 199) in ‘countless saints and reformers’ (p. 195). The beatific vision will encompass our admiration for earthly goods, including the honour of the nations that will be brought into the heavenly city (p. 200; cf. Rev. 21:26).
Beautifully written and flawlessly presented, Elliot’s Hope and Christian Ethics is a fine work of theological ethics. Its greatest strengths lie in its faithful attention to the dynamics of spiritual motivation and its imaginative searching-out of the ethical potential of robust, theological hope. Its argument is greatly enriched by Elliot’s perceptive worries about the spiritually corrosive aspects of modern life, as well as by his ranging engagement with literary and poetic sources, such as his discussions of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (p. 151) and Jim Crace’s Harvest (p. 134). In the end, Elliot’s contention, that the virtue of hope, when rightly formed, does not promote withdrawal from the world but the opposite, is highly persuasive. At a time when there is much talk of hopelessness, it is refreshing to encounter such a strong and graceful defence of the reasonableness and importance of theological hope.
There is, perhaps, something of a mismatch between the book’s focused attention to Aquinas’s account of the virtue of hope and its expansive title. Certain things that might be said under the heading of Hope and Christian Ethics receive little attention, such as the impact of hope on moral deliberation, or the significance of distinctive features of Christian eschatology. There is no mention, for example, of the Parousia, and little is said about topics such as the last judgment or the resurrection of the body. (This makes a striking contrast with another recent treatment of ‘hope and Christian ethics’, Oliver O’Donovan’s Ethics as Theology trilogy (Eerdmans, 2013, 2014, 2017), in which the key question about hope is how the coming of the Son of Man shapes moral deliberation.) On the whole, Elliot takes the content of eschatological hope as given, and focuses attention on the subjective side of hope as a virtue. As noted, this focus has real value; yet at some points one feels that questions lurk near at hand that have the potential to unsettle the book’s buoyancy. For instance, Elliot argues in his critique of Jackson that hope enriches love, because it allows us to will the good of others in the confidence that they are ‘bound for glory’ (p. 82); and he notes that the prospect of ultimate annihilation is disturbing to ‘the perspective of a loving charity’ (p. 85). But of course, some such prospect has been a fairly constant part of Christian eschatology. In a footnote, Elliot claims that the problem he is discussing differs from the question of damnation, because Jackson does not attempt to distinguish between the fate of the righteous and the wicked (p. 223, n. 192). That may be true, but it is also the case that this question might significantly weaken Elliot’s argument against Jackson. It seems to me that at this point, Elliot has not sufficiently allowed the difficult features of the tradition he wishes to retrieve to appear within his argument.
This reservation notwithstanding, Hope and Christian Ethics is an excellent book, which succeeds in highlighting the great value of Aquinas’s treatment of hope, and ought to provoke serious reconsideration of the moral value of traditional, eschatological, Christian hope.