Hope for the World
Easter is the season of hope. Hope, one of the three theological virtues along with faith and love, is (as all three are) a gift of God’s grace. But there is another hope that we more typically hold in our hearts and minds. In the stories told in the Gospels of the reactions of Jesus’ disciples to his gruesome death we see what becomes of this earthly and human hope. On the road out of Jerusalem a few days following the crucifixion two of the disciples are glumly making their way home to Emmaus and conversing with a fellow traveler on the road – the unrecognized risen Lord. They find it hard to believe this stranger could be ignorant of what had recently transpired, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know of… the things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene?” they ask, “…we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel.” It is the fate of such hope to be dashed on the rocks of Reality.
Fortunately for the two disciples, and for the rest of us, Reality in the person of the risen Lord began conveying a new unearthly hope by means of an instructed tour of the Tanakh (the Hebrew bible), “…beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the Scriptures.” The disciples, upon recognizing Jesus as they shared a meal, at “the breaking of bread”, say, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” It was such Pentecostal burning hearts within generations of subsequent disciples of Jesus that opened the way to a new hope that overcomes the fear of death and even survives death itself.
It has been the work of The Cornerstone Forum to assist in the effort to point the way from earthly hope to the source of a hope that can never be disappointed. (See our many weblog posts referencing ‘hope’ in the link below). In the coming months and years, we will be working to expand our educational outreach through the ongoing renewal of Catholic and Christian classical schools and programs and so attempt to continue the pedagogical ‘opening of the Scriptures’ begun on the road to Emmaus.
One way to appreciate the contribution René Girard has made to our understanding of hope is to view the effort made in human social arrangements to contain our mimetic propensity for catastrophic intraspecies violence via the scapegoat mechanism and the myths, rituals, and prohibitions generated from it. It was Girard’s positing of the sacrificial center of human cultural institutions from our earliest prehistoric human groupings through historical societies demonstrating how the episodic scapegoating/sacrifice of one victim enabled the many to live peaceably. This became the basis of sacrificial religion and the worldly hope for human survival. This earthly hope, whose source and power is death itself, was powerless in the face of death, as the two disciples on the road to Emmaus discovered.
From stories in Western literature influenced by the Gospels Girard discovered both the dynamic of mimetic desire and the transvaluation of sacrifice that Christ effected on the cross. It was on Golgotha that the sacrificial victim was disclosed as innocent, one who forgives his victimizers, and who offers himself as a self-sacrifice for the sins of the world resulting in the gradual unraveling of the old gathering principle of human cultures and the dawning reality of a new deathless hope through the bodily resurrection of Jesus. This revelation, however, came with a sobering apocalyptic either/or; either we undergo the repentance and conversion required in the movement from sacrifice to self-sacrifice, or the increasing enervation of the old sacrificial systems will eventually erode all the barriers to uncontrolled mimetic conflict and violence.
In this world our sense of hope for the future, that somehow things will get better, will always be subject to the gravitational pull of (metaphorically speaking) earth’s center of gravity – our mortality. It is only by the gracious gifts of God that our faith enflamed by divine love gives birth to a deathless hope, a hope that we must nurture all the days of our life.
Gil Bailie in his notes below offers examples from his recent reading that provide perspective.
According to a recently published book by the Australian theologian Tracey Rowland, the influential German writer in the first half of the twentieth century, Carl Muth, insisted that “the future of democracy will be Christian or it will not be at all.” For Muth, Rowland adds: “Democracy would need to be undergirded by a Christian cultural foundation, otherwise it could degenerate to rule by a mob.”1 That seems to me to be a pretty timely and sobering insight.
Not long ago, Victor Davis Hanson, not known for hyperbole, wrote: “We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.”
Inasmuch as those drawn to René Girard’s analysis of the seductive scandal of mimetic, reciprocal violence almost instinctively seek compromise with the political or religious adversaries of the faith and traditions that Christians defend and preserve, the dangers involved in this reflexive response should be highlighted. The distinguished Catholic theologian, Tracey Rowland, might have easily compared our predicament, as Hanson did, with the years leading to the French Revolution, but the parallel Rowland chose was no less shocking: The Weimar Republic and the Nazi tyranny that followed it.
Early in her study of the Catholic response to German Idealism, Rowland cited Henri de Lubac’s warning that stands as a bracing reminder for us at this moment in cultural history. A Christian, de Lubac warned, must be wary of an over-hasty desire for compromise, “since that will leave him defeated before he begins. He should be especially alert to reject the compromise formulas easily accepted unconsciously or half-consciously, that this atheistic hermeneutic puts out as bait, since through them he may slip into apostasy.”2
We are today surrounded by evidence of just such an apostasy, confessional and cultural.
Rowland’s slim volume was written “to help those born so recently that the Weimar Republic and the twelve years of Nazi tyranny that followed it are almost ancient history, [and to give these readers] a window into the neo-atheistic attempts to…transvalue [Christian] values and thereby present the world with a mutant form of Christianity.”3
Sincerely,
1. Tracey Rowland, Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: The Munich Defense of Christian Humanism, London: T&T Clark, 2023), 32.
2. Henri de Lubac, “Nature and Grace” in The Word in History: The St. Xavier Symposium, T. Patrick Burke (ed.) (London: Colliins, 1968), 29: Quoted: Tracey Rowland, Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: The Munich Defense of Christian Humanism, London: T&T Clark, 2023), 13.
3. Rowland, Beyond Kant and Nietzsche, 2023, 13