The question that animates my reflections on David Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age is whether his emphasis on the uncertainty of hope is the answer to rendering more irenic that shared journey we are all on as citizens who are religious and secular to varying degrees, who hold different kinds of commitments, whether they be explicitly acknowledged or tacitly held. Part of Newheiser’s goal in appealing to Dionysius is to show that Christians should not be as certain and triumphal about their ultimate hope, or the source of their ultimate hope, and this is an important point, with which I agree, that he makes about Christian hope.
Newheiser, however, also wants to show that a Dionysian way of engendering hope is to practice a radical, constant self-critique that balances the interplay of negation and affirmation. Doing so, Newheiser suggests, compels us to remain humble in our claims about God and our nearness to God. In making this claim, I worry that Newheiser is idolizing uncertainty and self-critique. This work, I would contend, is more effectively carried out within the context of faith and practices of prayer. Such prayer is to a God who is a “both-and,” a dialectically apophatic and a cataphatic God, a God whom I want to say confidently is Love, is Good, while also acknowledging all the time that God is a mystery whom I will never comprehend completely but can only apprehend “through a glass darkly.” In praying to a God whom we can say with confidence is Love, we do not necessarily proclaim in a definitive way that we know God; rather, we acknowledge that we are known by God and wish to know God better. Sarah Coakley has articulated with great eloquence how prayer, contemplative prayer in particular, is indeed a form of vulnerability and involves the risk of laying ourselves bare before the divine (see Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender). I believe there is something in giving oneself over to a real relationship with a real being that is more chastening than constantly policing oneself for signs of a too hopeful confidence. Prayer can engender what Newheiser is seeking, namely an openness to a risky and vulnerable hope. Of course, there are also forms of prayer that fail to show such humility and risk. The challenge as I see it, however, is to become better at praying and practicing true reverence rather than hunkering down in the practice of self-critique.
God, Humility, and Self-Critique
While I can appreciate the way in which there ought to be some chastening of religionists who seem triumphalist and complacent in their hope, and an exhortation to those schooled in a certain form of deconstruction to move beyond what are effectively postures of despair, I want to challenge Newheiser on his account of persons of faith who may hold belief in a God in a way that is informed dialectically by both Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius. According to Thomas, it is licit to describe God as good or as wise, if, when we do so, we recognize that we are speaking analogically only. God’s true nature is eminently more than what we humans mean or understand by “good” and “wise.” Built into the Catholic cataphatic tradition, then, as I like to think of Thomas being a part of, is a sense that God is always more than the names we use to describe God, though it is nonetheless reasonable to state that there is some capacity in humans to know God, if only partially. For a Christian to hold onto the cataphasis of Thomas and the apophasis of Dionysius at once seems to generate the kind of humble awareness of the stammering nature of Christian speech about God that I think David affirms. To put it more starkly, I do not see why it is only Dionysius who gets us to a place of humble faith that recognizes the fragility and fundamental precariousness of our hope. Indeed, to believe in the God of revelation and to be in relationship with that God, who has names, does not mean automatically that a person falls into the category of complacent hoping. In the Catholic context, for example, the journey to God is often described as a process of metanoia or ongoing conversion, and there is no “guarantee” of union with God, only a kind of roadmap and an encouragement to work on a relationship of love, trust, and hope in the divine in a constant way.
In praying to a God whom we can say with confidence is Love, we do not necessarily proclaim in a definitive way that we know God; rather, we acknowledge that we are known by God and wish to know God better.
If I may use an analogy from human experience (which I know has modal problems, certainly, but here I am speaking analogically), we risk more when we live in relationship with a concrete other who is and whom we cannot completely know, but whom we can say in a manner fitting to love—that is, through a personal relationship involving vulnerability and self-gift—that we “know,” than when we do when we live in a state of constant self-critique that walls of the ability to say anything at all about the other. To me, there is something foreclosed in the negativity of negative theology as purely Dionysian, some risk of intimacy with the divine mitigated, actually by the Dionysian path as Newheiser describes it. I find myself imagining two scenarios: (1) In this situation we find a person on their knees, who, in faith and hope places themself in the presence of a loving God, knowing that they do not and cannot know this God perfectly, and will at times—perhaps often—be challenged by this God, but opens themself in attentive listening and speaking to this God, and, (2) a situation in which a person stands with their eyes closed shaking their head saying repeatedly, “I do not know you.” “I can say this about you, but I also cannot say this about you,” “You are great, but you are beyond anything I can say.” I would contend that the former case involves more risk and more openness to the future because it involves more openness to relationship with the Other, even as it also involves confession of a greater knowledge-claim about God. In the other case the person seems stopped in the tracks and constantly focused on constraining their own knowledge-claims. I would argue for a more dialectically charged Thomistic-Dionysian account of knowing God and hoping in God than Newheiser proposes.
I would propose, for example, that a more distinctively confessional approach à la Karl Barth or Hans Urs von Balthasar does not take away from God’s mysteriousness or the discipline of hope required for it even as it is more cataphatic than Dionysius would prefer. Indeed, Balthasar’s account of holy intimacy includes an explicit reference to the paradox of nearness and distance, and, correlatively, of knowing and unknowing, at play in the human-divine relationship e.g.
While the creature is elevated into kinship with God, he is never substantially divinized by it. Rather, he lives in the paradox of nearness and distance at the same time. The more the creature is found worthy of intimacy with God, the more deeply he becomes aware of God’s uniqueness and incomparability, without his reverence turning into an inhibiting fear which would refuse the proffered intimacy. (TD II, p. 401)
Herein lies the difference, I think, between Newheiser’s approach to a chastened hope that can bring about some friendship between religionists and secularists working for the common good in a secular age and that of Balthasar. Newheiser argues that relentless self-critique maintains the proper balance of affirmation and negation in our speech about God and in doing so forms us ethically for a practice of hoping well. I would aver that it is in allowing ourselves to contemplate the mystery of divine being, who gives itself over to us in contemplative prayer (à la Sarah Coakley, whom I realize has lauded Newheiser’s work, as do I), that we are truly alive to our contingency and our belovedness. It is a matter of the object qualifying the subject and not the subject qualifying the object, if I may put the matter that way. As Barth Church Dogmatics, Vol. 2 , Balthasar (Prayer), and others, including Stanley Hauerwas (in The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics) have noted, it is letting God be God and recognizing that I to the marrow of my being am not God. I believe that affirming the profound objectivity of God who relativizes all else is more potent at dissolving our complacency or triumphalism than any practice of constant self-critique that I can devise. I am not closed, certainly, to the value of ongoing self-critique and self-questioning, but I see God as better able to bring me to the place of true humility and awareness of my most authentic self, than I am able to do for myself.
The Politics of Hope
A different concern is that Newheiser does not problematize the political in contemporary western polities: his interest seems to be in getting persons across the sacred-secular divide together in the middle to work together for good. Again, I appreciate the intention, but am also sympathetic to William Cavanaugh’s argument that our situation is made more difficulty by how the nation-state has been made into the secular “savior” of the modern world, and in being placed as such, overrides and marginalizes traditional religion. Cavanaugh has written powerfully and consistently about how the state masquerades as savior from religion, when what it does in fact is co-opt the powers previously ascribed to religion for itself. How should we respond to this troubling claim by the state to hold our deepest loyalties? This is not a disinterested public square wherein the way to reach common ground is to attenuate the kinds of hoping that those on different ends of the religion/secular spectrum are in the habit of practicing.
As Cavanaugh notes in Migrations of the Holy and elsewhere, the nation-state has never been in the business of the common good, despite its outward posturings. On the contrary, the nation-state is interested in the expanding power of the universal over and against the particular and the local. If Cavanaugh is right about this, then it matters deeply that there is a different way of construing power that does attend to the common good. Some would say that the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching is one such possible way forward; and while it is certainly more cataphatic about God and justice than Newheiser might approve, it is also a tradition that is quite open and involves necessarily work in the grey zones of prudential reasoning to realize.
It is in allowing ourselves to contemplate the mystery of divine being, who gives itself over to us in contemplative prayer…that we are truly alive to our contingency and our belovedness.
Newheiser is aware of the power of common action for good and religion-inspired or sacral sources of common action for good, but he fails to see—because, it seems, he fails to see the Church as anything more than hierarchical institution—that religions can be powerful agents of social transformation in a way that the nation-state cannot. And this is not because of the righteousness of religious adherents, but because of the God in whom persons of faith believe (again, see Cavanaugh). However, lest one think that Cavanaugh ascribes to political quietism and deferred Messianism, or a triumphalist account of the Church, to the contrary, Cavanaugh’s account of the Church sees the Church, at its best, as bearing the possibility of witnessing to a different conception of power, a different conception of life together rooted in the Eucharist, rooted in Communion. While the ground of faith in such a vision is God, the challenge is one for humans to realize, and, in this sense, there is the uncertainty that Newheiser thinks is so important to build into hope to guard against despair or complacency. I want to challenge Newheiser to consider how a more substantive treatment of hope in relation to faith and love might open up the possibility of an authentic hope that doesn’t find its source in ongoing self-policing of claims about God for the sake of ethics. Instead, it gives itself over to the presence of God in time, in faithful community, so that one can join others in the work of redeeming time.
Conclusion: Hope as Struggle and Gift
Commenting critically on David Elliot’s conception of hope as one that “offers the guarantee of eternal life,” Newheiser indicates a preferable alternative: “This suggests that rather than representing triumphal confidence, Christian hope is a discipline that endures the pain of incompletion” (6). Without agreeing about whether or not Newheiser gets Elliot right on his conception of hope—I’m not sure that Newheiser reads Elliot as charitably as he might—I want to ask: might it not be both? Christian hope can indeed be a struggle, but it is also a gift that yields confidence now and again: we experience moments in life where we are consoled by love, communion, friendship, solidarity, triumph, and this buoys our hope. Newheiser seems to think that we must either recognize the radical uncertainty of our hope, or be triumphalists in our hoping. I think it is possible to recognize that on this side of paradise our hope is indeed risky, and as such requires discipline and can be experienced as a striving. But it is also a gift that we can receive in the present that feels an awful lot like the confidence of trust, and the humbling of joy, through love.
