Hope

The patient endurance of trouble, or longsuffering, at the beginning can be mixed with the consciousness that it can’t be otherwise. But in time hope grows out of it, which then accompanies it steadfastly and gives it strength, making it seem completely voluntary. When man sees how much he has to endure, he begins to see that it is impossible for him not to have comfort from God, if not in this world, at least, in the next. This hope becomes for him with time very sure. Thus we can define hope as a certitude of the future things which appears in the person who hopes. If faith is a certitude of various present unseen realities and if when it is powerful it gives even a communion of those realities to the one who believes, hope is the certitude of which one has in certain future realities and of the participation which he will have in them. So hope is faith oriented to the future for the one who has it. Hope is faith in an advanced stage, a power which gives transparency to time, which penetrates through time, as faith penetrates space and visible nature. In hope there is a plus of evidence, a plus of knowledge. Where does it come from? Is it real, or only an illusion? Does it come from a will which habitually insists that it knows that the future will be such, under pressure from the present which doesn’t meet his expectations? The answers to these questions will be found in the discussion which follows.

Hope is an advance, a leap over time. As by care [Staniloae uses this word in the sense of a state of anxiety or worry] man is continually bent over toward the future, so is he also by hope, but in another way: By care he has a foreboding of an unpleasant future, which he takes measures to avert; by hope he senses a favorable future which he reaches with difficulty. Heidegger didn’t see in man this opposite care, this “existential” which is just as much a part of human nature as care. So, just as a gnoseological [gnoseology as science of cognition, the act or process of knowing including both awareness and judgment. Staniloae frequently uses this word; epistemology may be preferred in English.] virtue is recognized in care in relationship to the future (Heidegger, Scheler), in the same way, it must also be recognized in hope.

But when we say that hope belongs just as much to human nature as care, we don’t mean that they actually coexist at every moment in the soul. At least religious hope, the hope of blessedness in the future life is present in the soul in direct proportion to the absence of care, and vice versa. In regard to hope in an earthly future the same thing can’t be said except to a lesser degree, but this only because such hope doesn’t contain the same certitude as the religious. So it could be said that hope and care have a single root in human nature: preoccupation with the future. But when the fruit of hope grows from this root, in other words the certainty in the anticipated future, the fruit of care no longer does, or at least worldly care, but only the care to not compromise the winning of something sure. And the fruit of worldly care grows big where the fruit of hope doesn’t.

If we closely compare hope and care we realize that the reason for the impossibility of their coexistence is the fact that in the same measure in which hope contains proof, care contains uncertainty. So the uncertainty of care is present where the proof and quiet of hope are lacking. Because the care which serves hope isn’t the nourished uncertainty of worldly care, but it is just cautious not to lose something of sure hope.

The certainty of hope in the future blessings which God will give us and the uncertainty of worldly care are shown by the peace which the first gives and the continual fragmentation which is included in the second. Putting the contrast between them in other terms, St. Mark the Ascetic says: “Largeness of heart means hope in God; constriction means bodily care” (No Righteousness by Works 114).

You have the experience of the congestion of the heart when you are disturbed, and “ample room” when you are peaceful. But uneasiness, in regard to the future is the fruit of uncertainty, just as peace is the fruit of certainty. Care is the offspring of the fear of the future, thus of uncertainty, of the timidity that it won’t be just the way we want it.

In the treatise On Baptism Mark the Ascetic repeats many times that the heart where Christ dwells from Baptism can’t be opened but “by Christ Himself and by intelligent hope,” in other words by the hope that sees the unseen, or the things in the other life. Then the heart is really opened, no longer being ruled by care itself. And only when hope gains control of us and by it the heart is opened, do we escape the thoughts of the world, or thoughts of care.

Thus the opening of the heart coincides with the victory of hope in us and with an escape from care and its thoughts. This opening of the heart is one of the proofs of things beyond the world. Hope is vision with the heart, with the deepest part of our spirit, thus it is an intimate mystical conviction, a state of the transparency of our nature to the things beyond this world.

Truly, if care is existential, if it pertains to life, and is structurally related to human nature after the fall, what a miracle it is that man can escape it, better said that it can be transformed into the “existential” of hope. How could the foreboding of an unseen future be changed into the presentiment of a blessed, sure future, or uncertainty into certainty? The process of this transformation could only be explained by the intervention of a power distinct from the power of human nature, or by the coming into contact somehow of the depths of this being with the reality hoped for. Thus hope can’t be only an illusion. In hope we experience a certainty, which doesn’t depend only on our will, which doesn’t have only the strength which we give it. The strength of hope has grown in us from somewhere else and it is imposed on our will, or as in addition to what we can will. We previously had no hope, we didn’t feel it in us, although maybe we weren’t in despair either. But after a while we noticed that hope in the things to come had grown stronger in us, as a certainty which filled us with more and more peace. Along with this, the poisoned sap of the weeds of care which had grown over our hearts, which were growing on the hard ground under which our heart was hidden, dried up; and it seems that as hard as we, too, want to take the cares of life as seriously as our neighbors around us, we can’t do it any longer.

The problems which make people around us lose sleep have lost all their meaning in our eyes.

*From Staniloae, Orthodox Spirituality: A Practical Guide for the Faithful and a Definitive Manual for the Scholar, translated by Archimandrite Jerome and Otilia Kloos (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon's Seminary Press, 2003), pp. 177-179. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.