Between Hope and Hubris: The Slender Geometry of Christian Optimism
Visit with me for a moment about the ragged seam where hope and hubris are stitched together, not by careful hands but by fumbling, giddy, battered souls, like yours and mine, probably. Most days, if we’re honest, we teeter barefoot across the sharp ridge between singing hallelujah and muttering, “Oh, Lord, how long?” Optimism sashays in like a rugby player or a toddler, brimming, too much sometimes, occasionally beautiful, frequently bruising. Pessimism arrives gray and patient, like November rain on a Tuesday morning, or the dread that comes with a loud noise somewhere in the night and the dog is growling and you cannot remember when the furnace filter was last replaced.
“Optimism,” an old friend said to me once over coffee stained with cream and sadness, “is just denial in a fancier suit.” But I think that’s far too simple. Look at the Gospels. The apostles are not optimists exactly, nor are they pessimists, at least not in the neat philosophical sense. They are, in all their sputtering humanity, realists startled by hope, ruined by the joy of a man who will not stay buried. Isn’t that the template? Christianity is not a religion for the cheery or the doomstruck but for the startled realists who keep getting back up, blinking, and joining the parade.
Let’s entertain Chesterton for a bit, he of the bottomless mug and the chestnut wit, who wrote that hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it’s not virtue at all. This is the veined gold in the gravel of Christian realism: Hope as not-the-same-thing as optimism. Optimism is a sincere smile in the face of disaster, yes, but hope is the syllable uttered through tears, the word that cannot not be spoken. “There are only two rational attitudes to life,” Chesterton said somewhere: “absolute optimism and absolute despair,” but he nimbly pirouetted to this: “The Cross is the point at which despair and hope meet and mix and never can be separated again.”
St. Augustine, as he hunched over his parchments in the embers of Empire, drew this crooked line too. Rome’s burning; pagans are howling about the Christians ruining everything with their so-called love, and Augustine simply will not agree that either the world is ending or the City of God is finally arriving on noon trains. The world, he wrote, is neither Eden nor Hell, but the rocky middle: a theater for grace, stocked with saints, sinners, and holy fools. In other words, optimism uncoupled from realism tends toward hubris, building Babels, manufacturing utopias, writing histories in which suffering is a statistical inconvenience, and pessimism as practiced by cynics clots the arteries of hope, a sin against the Holy Spirit, says the Catechism.
Oh, history. Let’s try not to be too clever, but the Enlightenment, God bless its love of libraries, its faith in the lamp of Reason, brims with a kind of optimism that sometimes forgets the crookedness of the human timber. Condorcet declared that all ignorance would soon melt away, and Rousseau, in fits, conjured blank-slate souls and perfectible societies. But anyone who has watched a playground fight, or taught sixth grade, suspects otherwise.
Contrast this with the honeyed optimism of John XXIII when he threw open the windows of Vatican II: “We are not on the brink of a disaster,” said the round, merry Pope, “but a new era!” Aggiornamento, bring in the air, let in the wind. This hope changed the Church, nudged it toward mercy, even as later things, confusion, schism, real pain, came in with the fresh air. Yet it was a hope that did not promise safety or predict outcomes, only that the breath of the Spirit was real and worth risking everything for.
And then see Blaise Pascal hunched by candlelight, scribbling his Pensées. He warned us against earthly utopias, “Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.” Pope Benedict XVI, dour to some, merely honest to others, warned in Spe Salvi that “progress” is not salvation, and joy comes only through the Cross, where God refuses to erase suffering but transfigures it.
Christian leaders, school heads yes, and also harried dads, and the gal who runs the soup kitchen, and the guy who reads the readings even though his knees shake, are called to walk terribly small cracks between summoning hope and admitting defeat. “Cheer up!” we say, sometimes meaningfully, sometimes feebly. I’ve seen optimism do wonders: like the time that ragamuffin Catholic school decided to try for a grant so preposterous that even the finance chair snorted but got it, and the after-school choir was born, and a lonely kid found the music of God’s laughter. Yet unchecked optimism can wound. The teacher who promises every student will be a saint by June is painting a gospel not found in any canon but her own wild wishes; when the inevitable failures arrive, children and adults alike feel the spiritual whiplash of disappointment.
Pessimism, for its part, can be mistaken for wisdom, but if it stops us from risking goodness, what then? If, for fear of pain or futility, we never reach for the next student, never dare to update the curriculum, never trust in the possibility of reconciliation, what else is that but another name for despair?
So, what is realism for the Christian, especially the leader, the lover, the person knee-deep in the world’s mud and glory? It is to see things as they are, sin, laughter, dented angels, and not as marketing brochures promise. It is to work as if building for eternity, knowing the bricks may tumble anyway. It is to believe, to hope, against hope, even when knuckles are white with effort.
One hopes, not because statistics favor the miracle, but because a tomb was empty. One fears, not because disaster is certain, but because the Cross is both agony and doorway. To lead with realism is not to stand blandly between optimism and pessimism but to practice, daily and tremblingly, that virtue of hope which knows, as Augustine and Chesterton and even sour old Pascal knew, that the world is neither finished nor forsaken. Love is at work here, and the ending has not been written. Every morning we teeter again toward joy, tracing, with every step, the slender geometry between hubris and hope.
Endnotes:
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Company, 1908), 160.
Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Book XIX, 4–7.
Pope John XXIII, Opening Address, Second Vatican Council, October 11, 1962.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 144.
Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (Encyclical Letter on Christian Hope), November 30, 2007, sections 22–27.
