Kinds and Contents of Hope

There is a commonplace kind of hope that aims at a very clear object. For instance, I might hope that tomorrow is a sunny day or that a particular candidate wins an upcoming election. If these events seem unlikely to happen based on available evidence (a storm front is moving in or polling numbers are low), I might persist in hoping “against hope” for an unexpected outcome. What is unknown, in these cases, is not the thing hoped-for (the “content” of the hope) but whether it will occur. David Newheiser’s book is about a different kind of hope—I am tempted to call it a deeper or more fundamental kind—in which the content or object of the hope is in some sense unknown, whether because it is God, as in (Pseudo-)Dionysius’s mystical theology, or because it is some other elusive thing such as democracy or justice, as in Jacques Derrida’s later writings. One knows neither whether or when this satisfying unknown will come nor fully what it is or means. One knows only that it exceeds the corruptible structures of the world.

Newheiser defines this kind of hope, which is distinguished by having an unknown content that grounds a critique of the present order of things, as “a disciplined resilience that enables desire to endure without denying its vulnerability” (2) and again as “a disciplined resilience that allows us to admit that our cherished assumptions may be misguided and that familiar institutions may be unjust” (16). This kind of hope is not a wishful thought about a discrete object but rather a way of living while accepting that the assumptions and institutions that structure our daily lives are highly questionable and, therefore, that our efforts are always provisional and precarious. It is an “ethics of uncertainty” (19). It is a virtue, or habitual practice, whereby we maximize both our critical interrogation of the conditions of the world and our striving for whatever unknown good may yet come to, or from, it.

Newheiser marks the gap between Derrida’s Jewish form of deconstructive atheism and Dionysius’s apophatic Neo-Platonic Christianity by arguing that these thinkers “share a hope that is identical in kind though not in content” (74; see also 63 and 85). This kind/content distinction allows Newheiser to concede that there are many concrete differences between Derrida’s and Dionysius’s projects (their “content”) while employing both of them to represent the unified type (or “kind”) of hope that he wants to recommend as a form of ethics in our secular age. The great advantage of this way of life is that it remains accessible to people who not only inhabit diverse religious traditions (Jewish, Christian, and more) but who do so with varying degrees of affirmation and negation. It empowers this multitude to fight for a better future without letting any party feel comfortable enough to rest on its laurels. Practitioners of this kind of hope do not know with certainty what they are aiming at, though they know they must aim at it, critique whatever does not rise to its level, and persist in this struggle regardless of expected or unexpected outcomes. This kind of hope is well-suited to a secular age that is characterized not so much by hegemonic atheism as by a plurality of traditions subject to a dynamic interplay of mutual critique and fragilization (as Charles Taylor might say).

The Kind/Content Distinction

Although one could potentially object to Newheiser’s promotion of this kind of hope, I will not do that because I think that it is likely to have broad appeal, and for good reasons. Moreover, although one could raise questions about his exegesis of Derrida, Dionysius, or the many other sources he cites, since such questions are always possible, I would not like to make any particular quibbles at this level. The open question I have is about the meaning and limits of the kind/content distinction. Just as the content of Derrida’s and Dionysius’s writings supports Newheiser’s argument that these thinkers exemplify a structurally similar disposition of hope in the midst of uncertainty, this same content necessitates distinctions between their approaches, which he also makes throughout his book, though he regards these as differences in content not kind. This provokes the question: Which pieces of content are most important for determining the kind of hope that a thinker represents and which are, by contrast, mere content, mere material which, though perhaps worth knowing, does not constitute the kind (form, ideal, essence, structure, type, model, norm, standard, etc.) of life that is to be recommended? For Newheiser, those pieces of content that Derrida and Dionysius hold in common rise to this prescriptive top. Commonality with Derrida is one of Newheiser’s principles of selection for reading Dionysius as a teacher of a certain kind of hope, and vice versa. There is nothing illegitimate about this, only something particular, just as Derrida and Dionysius are particular.

A road not taken, at least not directly, in Newheiser’s book is an examination of how Derrida and Dionysius might symbolize not only one unified kind of hope but also two importantly different kinds of hope. Borrowing categories from scholastic philosophy, one might suggest that although their ways of hoping belong to the same genus, they constitute two significantly different species. In particular, Derrida’s and Dionysius’s dissimilar forms of political imagination (hierarchical vs. democratic) and divergent relations to God (doxological vs. atheistic) shape their models of disciplined resilience, perhaps to the degree that these models begin to drift apart and form two meaningfully different kinds of hope, even while remaining instances of the same kind of hope, the same disciplined resilience. Since there are political and theological stakes not only to the features these thinkers share in common but also to those they do not, a choice about whether to see one kind of hope between them or two seems to reflect a contestable belief about which political theological stakes are most needful of attention.

Such stakes—namely, those associated with drawing a distinction between Dionysius and Derrida that rises to the level of kind and is not reducible to mere content—deserve a closer look. First, let us consider the political stakes. Aware that Dionysius’s hierarchical political imagination—his view that God is hidden and revealed in the ranked order of cosmic, angelic, and ecclesial beings—comes with serious liabilities, Newheiser makes sure to state his distance from Dionysius on this score: “I do not intend to endorse the political positions that Dionysius himself held” (148). According to Newheiser, these positions, which seem authoritarian at times (147), neither overdetermine nor undermine the kind of hope that Dionysius represents. They remain mere, revisable or bracketable content. Arguing against Giorgio Agamben’s thesis that “Dionysius’s mysticism strengthens governmental power by investing it with glory” (137), Newheiser contends that Dionysius’s mysticism provides the basis for a critique of his hierarchical political imagination. Newheiser shows that Dionysius’s praise of divine darkness renders his imagined vertical structure of cosmic, angelic, and ecclesial positions highly provisional and uncertain, and that Dionysius sometimes recognizes this (140).

Although the possibility of such a self-critique is present in Dionysius’s texts, it takes the sort of modern or postmodern democratization of mysticism that Derrida exemplifies to make this critique fully operative. Without assistance from a source such as Derrida, Dionysius appears perfectly willing to blunt the disruptive force of his mysticism by assigning it a fixed place in his hierarchy, namely as the privileged knowledge of bishops and monks alone, a secret of the elite. Newheiser acknowledges but minimizes this point. In Derrida, the secret is everywhere or anywhere. The esoteric is the exoteric. Democracy and justice happen, if they do, through a rigorous repudiation of anything that resembles Dionysian hierarchy. Whereas Dionysius’s hope is mediated by such a structure, Derrida’s hope is mediated by the thought of its unraveling. Apart, then, they seem to hope in dramatically different ways, at least at the level of political imagination. The diversity of content suggests a diversity of kinds. However, together, using Derrida to democratize the hidden potential in Dionysius, their hope becomes one.

Although Newheiser clearly favors Derrida’s democratic, justice-oriented politics over Dionysius’s system of divinely established ranks, it is more difficult to determine which of these two sources is more determinative of Newheiser’s approach to theology or the question of God. Newheiser resists the most atheistic possible interpretation of Derrida, namely Martin Hägglund’s (121–27), and highlights certain passages in which Derrida discusses his at once childlike and philosophical practice of prayer (145–46). Is Derrida’s prayerfulness necessary to shore up Newheiser’s claim that he and Dionysius represent the same kind of hope? If Derrida were the strict atheist Hägglund thinks he is, would this position, this “content,” remove him too far from the orbit of Dionysius for them to signify the same kind of hope?

Newheiser draws Derrida and Dionysius close together theologically, not only by challenging one-sided secular readings of Derrida, but also by opposing Christian theological readings of Dionysius, like Kevin Hughes’s, which emphasize the dogmatic content of Dionysius’s theology and argue that Dionysius has “confidence concerning the presence of God” (76). According to Hughes, the difference between Derrida and Dionysius goes to the question of what kind of hope they represent. For Hughes, whereas Derrida offers an empty and indeterminate hope, Dionysius’s hope is assured by certain Christian beliefs and experiences. If Hughes is right, Dionysius represents a kind of hope that is closer to David Elliot’s Thomistic account of hope as a “confident expectation that is grounded in the promises of God” (5) than it is to Derrida’s “avenir,” an unknown that is to-come (26).

Newheiser argues that Derrida and Dionysius are much closer than Hughes suggests. Both work out of traditions (Jewish, Christian, and philosophical) which they push to a breaking point of unknowing and uncertainty. Although their traditions differ to some degree—though not absolutely, since Dionysius is an explicit part of what Derrida inherits from antiquity, and since Derrida’s religion, Judaism, is in the inescapable background of Dionysius’s Christianity—both use language to communicate a sophisticated sense of cataphatic-apophatic tension. According to Newheiser, the dogmatic content is just as under erasure in Dionysius’s mysticism as both it and Derrida’s Judaism are in Derrida’s deconstruction. Or, at least, if the level of erasure of religion differs between them, what matters for the kind of hope they represent is that “they both affirm particular hopes that are informed by the traditions that have formed them while also insisting that every affirmation remains subject to revision” (77). Yet if Newheiser conceded Hughes’ point that there is a robust cataphatic, dogmatic, Christian-specific content animating Dionysius’s hope in a way that distinguishes it from Derrida’s, would this concession be devastating to Newheiser’s argument? How much hangs on deemphasizing their differences?

Newheiser wants to avoid making a theological choice between Derrida’s and Dionysius’s tradition-supported practices of unknowing. He wants to bracket their differences in theological content because enough is gained, for the ethical crises of contemporary society, by embracing the type of disciplined resilience that Derrida and Dionysius jointly support. This is why he resists both Hägglund and Hughes and presents a more-theological-than-expected Derrida and a less-theological-than-expected Dionysius. Newheiser’s “negative political theology” takes place at the center of a Dionysius-Derrida Venn diagram but perhaps is also a third category between them—something new, something constructive.

Christian Hope among the Oppressed

To a large extent, I am inclined to agree that this is a good model of hope for our secular age. However, as a Christian living in this age, I want to say more. I want to affirm that the kind of hope that I am called to practice by my religious tradition rests on particular claims that are more or less established for this tradition, though of course not established by reason as such. These claims are treated as given, even though they remain open to new interpretations and are never fully comprehended. I am thinking of certain core Christian teachings such as those that hold that the Word of God was made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, that Jesus broke bread with the poor and rejected members of his community while speaking out prophetically against the violence of the Roman empire, that he was crucified and rose from the dead in a mysterious salvific event that in some unknown way ushers in the age to come, that the Holy Spirit was sent to form a people and sanctify them with gifts of wisdom and love, and so on. I would like to distinguish these teachings from any necessarily futile effort to capture the essence of God in words. One can believe that all of the foregoing doctrines are true while recognizing that the divine is far beyond every assertion and denial. Although both of these might be considered efforts to know God, acts of theology, they occur on different registers. Whereas the latter quest for conceptual mastery can and must fail, this does not directly call the former body of doctrine into question.

The politics that I would associate with this Christian content is not the hierarchical politics of Dionysius, which has more to do with his Neo-Platonism and his Byzantine imperial context than with the gospel. Rather, I see true Christian politics in the grassroots struggles for survival and liberation among the world’s “crucified people” (as Ignacio Ellacuría calls them). What I want is something like justice and democracy, in the Derridean sense, but I want to approach these with an openness to the modes of divine presence that Christ and the Holy Spirit bring into history, and into these struggles. Is this Newheiser’s aim too? The kind of hope he recommends in his book neither rules out such a Christian political theology nor endorses it. In this sense, his public way of thinking remains more indeterminate, more Derridean, and more secular than mine—but perhaps also more idealist, more committed to the value of the idea that synthesizes: the “same kind.” There is more than one way to borrow from both Dionysius and Derrida without submitting entirely to either. Despite our many similarities, Newheiser and I do not bring these thinkers together in quite the same way.

Writing not merely as a Christian but as one who values the plurality of cultures in this secular age, I would like to make a final plea for difference. Letting differences in content generate a more differentiated account of kinds of hope, with their various critical yet specific unknowns, might bring us closer to Derrida’s desired future of radical democracy and justice, while honoring certain details of religious and philosophical traditions that, even for critically minded adherents, remain indispensable and life-affirming. Because Newheiser introduces this genus of possibilities, and does so with such care and creativity, it is only right that my last word be gratitude.