“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” says the psalmist, “I shall not fear.” He puts no trust in his own strength. He does not look to a prince or warlord to save him. Do you want to invite despair into your heart? Hope in man. Hope in woman. Hope in a political system. Hope in machines, to save us from ourselves, and relieve us of the need to reason, or to restrain our desires. Hope in some fantasy that you have made into a god, calling it History, perhaps, and lending it an inevitable aim, as if it were divine providence and not the record of foolish, short-sighted, and sinful mankind.
Optimism is a confidence-man, got up in the garb of hope. Pay him no mind. Some ages are more gullible that way than others, but surely anyone now who believes that we have cause for optimism must be the most self-deceived creature ever to wander across the face of the earth. Our schools do worse than fail to educate; they produce people who are ineducable, and proud in their ignorance. The arts are either dead and forgotten, in free fall, or in the stews, sweating. Our political elites are as tyrannical as Caesar, but nowhere near as capable or patriotic. Our churches are havens of heresy, and the more our leaders err and fail, the more committed they are to the same errors and failures, as witness those incorrigible sorts who wish to emulate every folly that has gutted the liberal churches, as if arsenic would be sugar if only we pretended hard enough.
There is no reason for optimism. There is every reason for hope.
Hope, as we understand the word, builds upon nature, but is not itself a natural virtue. Faith rests upon a bedrock of reason, though reason can never reach the objects of faith. Charity rests upon a bedrock of natural affection and love, but shines out beyond them as the sun does a candle. So too hope, resting upon our sense that the world is good, not evil, can rest in our hearts when optimism-the-confidence-man has been driven out into the darkness where he belongs. For hope, the theological virtue, rests upon what God has promised, and what God has done. His rod, His staff are there to comfort us.
Asaph the psalmist may cry out to God in times of trouble, remembering when all of Israel was in bondage, but “you led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron” (Ps. 77:20). Do we not have far more to recall than he did? Our Church has died many a death. What optimism was there, on that dread Friday, when Christ our Savior cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk. 15:34)? What happy-talk, when Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple, laid the Lord’s body in the tomb?
Think of Peter, crucified upside down in Rome, in the first wave of terrible persecutions, and Paul, beheaded. Think of the times of the bloodthirsty Domitian, and Decius, and the cold politician Diocletian, who had himself called
Dominus et Deus [Lord and God] and probably rolled his eyes when he heard it. Think of Jerome, writing that the world awoke one day and groaned to find itself Arian. Think of that most persistent heresy, still a force to be reckoned with two hundred years later, when the honest scholar Boethius was falsely accused of treachery by Arian Goths, and, though he was a Roman citizen, sentenced to death by head-crushing, slowly—a vinegar-soaked thong strapped round his head, shrinking, taking a day and more to penetrate the brain. Think of Augustine, dying, while the Vandals were at the gates of Hippo.
I could go on. Ancient Rome is no more. Someday the United States will be no more. All things human pass away. The Church endures, not because she is intelligent and powerful and pure, but because God has promised it, despite her folly and weakness and filth.
We know this, you may say, but still we need to hear what will get us up in the morning. Consider, then. Satan may be endowed with a prodigious intelligence, but he is also stupid, as evil is stupid. The enemies of the Church are rich and powerful, ensconced in every great political, educational, and economic institution in the world. But stupidity and evil undo themselves. Our enemies can hardly provide the good for men and women, because they have forgotten what men and women are; we have not forgotten, and in our commitment to the truth and the natural goodness of the sexes, we have a chance to shine a bright warm light in darkness and confusion. We can revive marriage in our midst, and we must do it, for ourselves and for the world.
Our enemies have abandoned what is called a classical education, but what really used to be considered as education without any modifier, whether or not the students were reading Latin and Greek. We have a chance then to bring to the world almost the only well-read people around; to save great works of art and human thought, not by drying and freezing them or pinning them to a wall in a museum, but by loving the unloved and keeping their memory alive. Someone must inevitably notice it, and say, “Whatever those Christians are reading, or listening to, or singing, it is more interesting than anything the rest of the world has to offer.”
The world in our time makes little art worthy the name. Whose heart warms to go to a museum full of abstraction, confusion, and offense? Any little village in Europe, from A.D. 1200 to 1600, had a usually unknown painter or carver or goldsmith whose work would in our time gain for him a wide reputation. It is not the case now. But that means that the field is clear and open! There is no competition. We must recover the virtuosity of the arts, to be sure, but we have tools at our disposal that no one when I was a boy could begin to imagine.
Am I here indulging in optimism I have decried, or at least opportunism, rather than seizing upon the hope that Christ has offered to us? I do not think so. Because man has been made in the image of the Trinity, he is by nature and not by necessity a social being; made in the image of the Creator, he is by nature inclined to beauty; made in the image of Christ who offers praise to the Father, he is by nature inclined to worship. Satan hates our nature, and many of our contemporaries deny that there is even a nature to hate. That way lies madness—and sorrow, and sloth, and despair.
Remember then that we are made for praise of God, as Saint Augustine says. Each one of us is so; your neighbor whose knees are nearly locked from never bending, he too is made to rejoice in the praise of God. He may not know it, but is that not also a rare chance for us? He is blind, and we, without any special talent for it, can throw open to him a world of light and color, a world whose existence he has not suspected. Tell me then that we are not blessed to live in these times!
It is said that the warlord Clovis, upon first hearing of the crucifixion of Christ, cried out in his barbarian innocence, “Would I had been there with my Franks!” Well, we are there. Time to fight, and sing. The end has been written, and Christ has opened the way.
*Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor at Crisis and senior editor of Touchstone, is a professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts. He is the author many books, most recently of
Sex and the Unreal City (Ignatius Press, 2020).
