November 2005

Cultivating Hope in Troubled Times: Catholic Colleges

By: M. Cathleen Kaveny (Catholic News Service article)

"In these very troubled times in our church and in our world, each and every human being lives by hope. Each and every human being ... is waiting for hope," M. Cathleen Kaveny, professor of law and of theology at the University of Notre Dame, said in a speech in Baltimore Oct. 21. She spoke at the inauguration of Loyola College in Maryland's new president, Jesuit Father Brian Linnane. In discussing what hope is and what it entails, Kaveny told why she believes a Catholic college's most urgent task today is to nurture this virtue. "Hope is not to be equated with a sunny, cockeyed optimism. Hope does not pertain to easy or certain things," she said. Thus, hope requires hard work. And hope "is not solitary. The fulfillment of my hope frequently requires activity or assistance from others." Solidarity and imagination are needed to cultivate hope, she commented. Kaveny noted that two vices, according to Thomas Aquinas, are opposed to hope: presumption and despair; she related each to current concerns in higher education. For example, she said, in the context of discussions of intelligent design and evolution "presumption results in attempting to harmonize the truths of faith and the truths of reason too quickly so that all tension is dissolved here and now." She said, "The virtue of hope gives us the strength to be patient and to pursue knowledge confidently with integrity and humility. We don't need to know everything right now." Kaveny's text follows.

It is a great honor - and a great joy - for me to be asked to participate in this inauguration of Father Brian Linnane as the 24th president of Loyola College in Maryland. An inauguration is inherently oriented toward the future. The word inauguration actually has its root in the Latin verb augurare, which means to divine or to foretell future events in the manner of a soothsayer.

All college presidents must wish at times that they were soothsayers or at least that they had reliable soothsayers in their employ. But all in all, that would not be an appropriate position on the staff of a Catholic institution of higher education.

Attempts to interpret signs and omens tend to presuppose that the ultimate power in the universe is an inexorable, impersonal and distant fate - not a God who created, redeemed and sustains us in freedom and in love, a mysterious God who is at the same time so near to each and every one of us that even the hairs on our heads are numbered. But the Gospels proclaim to us the good news that there is such a God (Mt.10:29-31).

Confidence in the existence of such a God elicits from us a very different way of relating to the future, which is summed up in the virtue of hope. A better term for the inauguration of the president of a Jesuit college is expectation, which has its root in the Latin word for hope, spes.

In my view, the most urgent task of a Catholic college - and especially of a Jesuit college in our time and place - is to nurture the virtue of hope in each and every person living and working in its midst and to serve as a beacon of hope to the broader community. In these very troubled times in our church and in our world, each and every human being lives by hope. Each and every human being expects hope - is waiting for hope, is hoping for hope. It is the task of a Jesuit college to educate for hope.

In the remainder of my remarks I would like to do two things: First, drawing upon the reflections of Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, I would like to say a bit more about what the virtue of hope is and what it entails. Second, I would like to offer a few reflections on the meaning of hope for the life of Loyola College.

Loyola, in the Jesuit tradition, aims to educate the whole person - mind and heart. With respect to the life of the mind - the academic life - Loyola as a Catholic institution proclaims the ultimate harmony of faith and reason; it offers the possibility of faith seeking understanding.

With respect to the life of the heart - the moral life - Loyola as a Jesuit institution aims to combine the service of faith with the promotion of justice, as Father General Kolvenbach said so eloquently in his address to Jesuit educators at Santa Clara in the year 2000. I would like to suggest that cultivating the virtue of hope is urgently necessary to both of these tasks.

Hope in Thomas Aquinas' Thought

What is hope? According to Thomas Aquinas, hope takes as its object "a future good, difficult but possible to obtain."(1) Fundamentally, then, hope is a way of relating to the future, a way of moving beyond and transcending the limitations, the darkness, the injustice of the present day. But it is a particular way of doing so.

First, hope is not to be equated with a sunny, cockeyed optimism. Hope does not pertain to easy or certain things, no matter how good they may seem and how much we miss them right now. Hope is tough: Hope knows there are difficulties and realizes what it will cost to deal with them.

Second, precisely because hope deals with difficulties, it requires hard work. The process of pursuing the object of hope is arduous. Hope demands engagement, not just bare acquiescence. And in fact, hope enables action in difficult times. We do not embark upon a difficult course of action unless we have the hope that we will succeed.

Third, hope is not solitary. The fulfillment of my hope frequently requires activity or assistance from others. Think of those trapped by Hurricane Katrina, hoping for safety, depending for safety upon the rescuers coming in time. Furthermore, I can hope for the good of someone else - provided, according to Thomas, that I am united to them in love and so will their good as my own.(2) By expanding our hearts in love, we also expand the scope for our hope.

Fourth, while the object hoped for has to be in the future, not the past or the present, it doesn't have to be achieved at any specified or certain date. Eschatological hope is hope for those things that will only be accomplished at the end of time with the inauguration of God's kingdom.

For Thomas, hope is along with faith and charity a theological virtue. From that perspective, the focus is on one's salvation and perfect happiness with God, which can only be made possible through God's grace. In the past some theologians have focused too much on the salvation of each individual as the object of theological hope rather than the coming of the kingdom of God in all its fullness, all its glory.

But that need not be the case. Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, presents the kingdom of God in all its lively fullness as an object of theological hope, making clear its arduousness and our need for God's transforming grace. "For after we have obeyed the Lord, and in his Spirit nurtured on earth the values of human dignity, brotherhood and freedom, and indeed all the good fruits of our nature and enterprise, we will find them again but freed of stain, burnished and transfigured when Christ hands over to the Father: 'a kingdom eternal and universal, a kingdom of truth and life, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace.'"(3)

And if hope is a theological virtue with application for both the individual and the community as a whole, it must strengthen and support the intellectual virtues and moral virtues nurtured by this community of study and solidarity in concrete ways. Let me explain.

Faith, Understanding and Hope

In Loyola's mission statement the idea of integration of knowledge plays a prominent role: "Integration ... represents one expression of Loyola's Catholic character; the college seeks that 'higher synthesis of knowledge in which alone lies the possibility of satisfying that thirst for truth which is profoundly inscribed on the heart of the human person."(4)

The integration that is necessary has both a horizontal and a vertical dimension. Horizontally, there must be a dedication to interdisciplinary work in the hopes of ever expanding the adequacy of our understandings of things. We strive toward wholeness. Vertically, if you will, there must be a struggle to relate the truths known by faith and the truths known by human intellect. The God who created the world and the God who redeemed it are one and the same God. Consequently, there can be no ultimate contradiction between the truths of faith and the truths that come from the best sources of human wisdom, including science.

By virtue of its own metaphysical and epistemological commitments, a Catholic university must stand for the ultimate unity and consistency of truth, whatever its sources, whatever the methods of getting there. This does not mean that human beings are going to transcend the limitations of culture and language and will know things from a God's-eye point of view. Nor does it mean that any one person or group at any one time can possess the truth or even be absolutely sure that they know how some of the pieces fit together.

That type of utter coherence in truth is not only in the future, it is in the eschatological future. It is something that can be achieved but only at the end of time as we know it, not in time. Along with true peace and perfect justice, it is part of the kingdom of God, toward which we all are called to work but which we can never fully instantiate.

According to Aquinas, there are two vices opposed to the virtue of hope: presumption, which doesn't give enough deference to the fact that the object of hope is difficult to obtain,(5) and despair, which doesn't pay enough attention to the fact that although difficult, the object of hope is in an important sense possible.(6) In my judgment, it is the particular challenge of a Catholic college to help the members of its community avoid presumption and despair.

It seems to me that the dangers of presumption lie in attempting to achieve integration too quickly and cheaply. Horizontally, presumption results in reductionist ways of relating disciplines to one another. In the discipline of law, for example, some have tried to argue that the whole point of the legal system is to achieve economic efficiency; law is treated as a tool of economics. The thesis is simple; it has a surface plausibility, but in the end it reduces the entire point of one discipline to serving as a handmaiden of another. Interdisciplinary work requires respect for the complexity of each discipline; the voice of each must be heard.

Vertically, presumption results in attempting to harmonize the truths of faith and the truths of reason too quickly so that all tension is dissolved here and now. We are all familiar with the controversy over intelligent design. Some people think that a scientific understanding of evolution threatens the biblical affirmation of God as creator. Some are tempted to resolve that tension too quickly, either by denying that God has any relationship to the world or calling into question evolution. In so doing, they are missing the opportunity to probe more deeply what it means - and what it does not mean - to call God the "creator," on the one hand, and to investigate more fully the workings of that creation on its own terms.

By orienting us in expectation toward the source of all truth, whether known by faith or by reason, the virtue of hope gives us the strength to be patient and to pursue knowledge confidently with integrity and humility. We don't need to know everything right now. We can take our time, secure that the basis for our hope - God - is inviting us to probe ever deeper.

Despair can also be a temptation in the academic life. Many theologians, including Pope John Paul II(7) and Pope Benedict XVI,(8) have pointed to relativism, skepticism and nihilism as the key symptoms of a widespread contemporary despair about the possibility of progressing toward the wholeness of knowledge or the relationship between faith and reason.

But in my own experience as a teacher, I see despair more immediately and starkly in the instrumentalization and compartmentalization of the human capacity for knowledge. For some students, "faith" is a matter of Sunday morning and maybe dorm Mass; it is the realm of campus ministry. Faith claims their morality and piety. But it does not claim their intellect. In contrast, "reason" is what they do in the classroom Monday through Friday, or maybe Monday through Thursday lunch. Each class is its own autonomous universe; when in that universe, they abide by its rules, trying to do well on its terms. But they don't think about the big picture.

In this way of viewing life the intellect is instrumentalized; it is a tool (albeit a powerful tool) that one uses to get a good job, to live a successful life. But a Catholic college, a Jesuit college, cannot allow its students to rest content with such an impoverished view of their own minds. As a Catholic liberal arts college, Loyola sees the development of the intellect as intrinsically valuable, not merely instrumentally valuable. In educating our students we contribute to who students become, not merely to what they have.

We are also enriching them spiritually in ways that they - and we - may not fully understand. From a Catholic perspective, because God is the source and ground and guarantor of truth, in coming to know truth we ultimately come to know God. And in coming to know God, we hope to be joined to God in an intimate and mysterious way.(9)Hope, then, is a theological virtue which shapes and influences our intellectual life. In the words of St. Paul: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known" (1 Cor. 13:12).

Faith, Hope and the Moral Life

In his address on the "The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education," delivered at Santa Clara University in October 2000,(10) Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, superior general of the Society of Jesus, reflected upon the way in which Jesuit higher education has dedicated itself to faith and justice. More specifically, every Jesuit institution of higher education must be committed to the service of faith (diakonia fidei) and the promotion of justice. He noted that the precise components of each term are ambiguous, but maintained that the ambiguity is a fruitful one, to be pondered by individual Jesuits and institutions in the context of the concrete demands of the Gospel.

It is clear, however, that the relationship between faith and justice must be intimate. Father General Kolvenbach quoted Father General Arrupe's description of the service of faith: "Today our prime educational objective must be to form men (and women) for others; who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ - for the God-man who lived and died for all of the world; men (and women) who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors; men(and women) who are completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for human beings is a farce."(11)

In my view this task of Jesuit universities is even more urgent today than when Father Arrupe spoke these words in 1973. But in order to sustain the relationship between faith and justice/charity in this very broken world, we desperately need to cultivate the virtue of hope. Despite the dangers and the difficulties of the times, the 1960s (and even until the early 1970s) were a time of optimism in both the secular society and in the church. Think of the situation in the United States at that time:

John F. Kennedy had been elected president. He successfully averted the Cuban missile crisis and nuclear destruction. While the Cold War was deeply threatening, it seemed also to provide an opportunity to convince people to outlaw war on a global basis.
Scientific breakthroughs seemed to be happening every day. We had cured polio. For a moment, it seemed possible that we would bring hunger and disease to an end. The possibility for progress seemed endless.
The prospect for an energetic, renewed, mutually respectful relationship between the church and the world was opened wide by the Second Vatican Council.

Now, consider the present situation:

The idea of "outlawing war" seems more remote than ever. Terrorism has replaced the Cold War as the horrifying object of our political fears.
The dark and potentially dehumanizing side of science has become apparent. The prospect of human cloning is now a concrete possibility, not the stuff of science fiction. Questions have been raised about genetically altered foods and chemical additives. More than once drugs thought to help people have turned out to be seriously harmful. And a new dreadful disease has appeared on the face of the Earth - AIDS - which threatens our confidence that we can ameliorate human suffering by medical means. And wave upon wave of natural disasters, killing thousands of people: tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes can suggest that creation itself is hostile to us.
Within the American Catholic Church, the sexual abuse crisis has shaken the faith in the institutional church and threatened its capacity to provide moral leadership to the broader society.

How should we think about the radical shift in mood from optimism to despair that has characterized American society in general and the American Catholic Church in particular? Perhaps the optimism of an earlier era was just that: optimism based on an assumption of automatic progress, rather than hope rooted in a God whose ways are mysterious as well as loving. And when disappointed, optimism can turn quickly into despair.

Only the cultivation of a true hope, a tough hope rooted in God's promises is strong enough to withstand the vicissitudes of history. But how do we cultivate a true, tough hope? I haven't found a solution. But I have found a strategy. The best recent work on hope that I have read is a book written by a Jesuit, William F. Lynch, and titled Images of Hope.(12) In a nutshell Lynch argues that cultivating hope requires two characteristics: It requires imagination, and it requires solidarity.

Lynch gives the following example: "A man is in trouble. There is a way out. What is it? He does not yield. He imagines and hypothesizes. He waits. He continues to imagine and hypothesize."(13)

In Lynch's view, imagination is the key to sustaining hope in difficult times. It is not a flight of fancy, a spurt of wistful thinking or a Walter Mitty daydream. It is practical, can-do creativity in the face of adversity. The major threat to hope, according to Lynch, comes from the individual's failure of imagination. "[W]hat happens in despair is that the private imagination, of which we are so enamored, reaches the point of the end of inward resource and must put on the imagination of another if it is to find a way out."(14)

Cultivating hope has always required us to provide one another with practical assistance in our respective distress - the fruits of our hearts and hands. But we learn from Lynch that it also requires providing one another with the fruits of our hearts and minds - the fruits of our imagination. Practical imagination is a collective project, a fundamental act of human solidarity.

So an essential task of a Jesuit college, if it is to serve faith and justice by nurturing hope in this day and age, must be to nourish the imagination of our students. Art and music and drama and literature from cultures around the world cannot be treated as mere frills. They are the essential wellsprings of human imagination out of which Loyola's students will provide hope to all those they encounter.

These disciplines offer resources which can combine in the human heart and mind, allowing us to take a fresh look at old problems. Nourished by imagination and solidarity, hope has so much to work with: We see the unprecedented generosity on a global scale in the face of global disasters.
We see the deep love that American Catholics continue to have for their faith, their church and their priests.
We see the selfless dedication of scientists to finding a cure for AIDS and other causes of human misery.
And we see the longing in the hearts of men and women all over the world of every creed and color for a deep, abiding and just peace.

While sin and sorrow will always be with us, there are solutions to problems which we - and our students - will yet imagine in a tough, realistic and creative hope. In the words of St. Paul, from the epistle lesson for the inaugural Mass yesterday:

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly.... For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience" (Rom. 8:22-25).

And I would add, with solidarity and imagination.

I have known Father Brian Linnane for nearly 20 years now; we were graduate students together at Yale. He is a man of tremendous intelligence, deep faith, a strong commitment to social justice - and a creative, practical imagination in service of God and every human being created in God's image and likeness. I have tremendous hope for the flourishing of Loyola College Maryland under his leadership and for the service of faith, wisdom and justice on the part of the entire community gathered together here.

Notes

(1)Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 17, art. 1 (emphasis mine).

(2)Ibid., II-II, q. 17, art. 2.

(3)Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modern World)(1965), No. 39, citing the Preface of Christ the King.

(4)Loyola College Maryland, Core Values Statement, available online at www.loyola.edu/about/visionvalues/values.html.

(5)Aquinas, ST, II-II, Q. 21.

(6)Ibid., Q. 20.

(7)Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998).

(8)Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, homily at the Mass for the election of the Roman pontiff, April 18, 2005, available online at www.Vatican.va.

(9)Aquinas, ST, I-II, q.3, art. 2: "In the state of happiness, man's mind will be united to God by one continual everlasting operation."

(10)Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, SJ, "The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education," available online at www.scu.edu/news/attachments/kolvenbach_speech.

(11)Pedro Arrupe, SJ, address to European Jesuit alumni congress, Valencia, Spain, August 1973, in Hombres para los dem s, Barcelona: Diafora, 1983, p. 159.

(12)William F. Lynch, Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless (University of Notre Dame Press, 1965).

(13)Ibid., p. 23.

(14)Ibid.

MARGIN NOTES:

Hope "is not an attitude but a virtue that faces reality head-on," and perseverance always is part of hope, Doris Donnelly, a professor of theology at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, said in a text that appeared in Origins, Vol. 28, pp. 397ff (the edition dated Nov. 19, 1998). She said that hope often is misunderstood as optimism. Furthermore, this virtue's mistaken identities often lead people to misuse the term "hope" when what they really mean is "hopelessness," as in "There's nothing left for us to do but hope."

The virtue of hope is characterized by "energy and extraordinary power," Donnelly suggested. She spoke of how suffering and depression test hope, while indicating that "only when the chips are down ... do we truly get to know what it's all about." And she described how hope is related to wishing ("the way the imagination exercises itself to find a way out of a predicament") and to friendship and waiting.

"Hope gives us a particular sustained moral and spiritual vision. In addition, it is the transcendent virtue that animates and informs the virtues which follow," Ursuline Sister Maria Cimperman said in a text that appeared in the current volume of Origins on pp. 220ff in the edition dated Sept. 8, 2005.

Cimperman said: "Hope not only gives us the vision, it sanctions and sustains the vision. Christian hope tells us what type of vision we have. Hope is also a prime Christian resource of the imagination. Hope offers a horizon for our expectations in both tangible and nontangible ways. Hope allows us to reshape our reality in a particular way. Hope imagines the real and animates the other virtues to enflesh the real that is imagined.

"In addition to providing a horizon for our expectations, five other points underlie the virtue of Christian hope: (1) hope is communal; (2) it includes the dead as well as the living; (3) hope is connected to help; (4) it is linked to the paschal imagination; and (5) hope has a fundamentally eschatological dimension."

Lumen Magazine

November 2005

Cultivating Hope in Troubled Times: Catholic Colleges

By: M. Cathleen Kaveny (Catholic News Service article)

In This Issue: