‘Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.’
So said Friedrich Nietzche. But was he right?
Many of us, particular in these days of international conflict, economic hardship, and neighbourhood violence, want things to be better than they currently are. We want someone to change our future because our present is not to our liking. We want to believe those who promise a better tomorrow but find those who offer such assurances powerless to bring about any meaningful change and so unable to deliver what they claim to be able to.
Even so, we all need hope.
Because hope keeps us going in the face of problems which seem insurmountable. Without it we become resigned to never ending difficulty and tend, as a result, towards depression and passivity – just as Nietzsche himself did.
Theologian Jurgen Moltmann helps us understand more fully what hope is. ‘Present and future, experience and hope, stand in contradiction to each other’, he says, adding that ‘hope is directed to what is not yet visible… and brands the visible realm of present experience…as a transient reality that is to be left behind’
But some, considering it no more than wishful thinking, are uncomfortable with the notion of always living in hope of a better tomorrow.
Instead, ‘mindfulness’ the psychological process of bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present, is increasingly advocated as the answer to all our problems. But whilst mindfulness may have its place when we are overwhelmed by unnecessary anxiety concerning the future, grounding us, as it does, in the here and now and helping us appreciate what we have and can currently enjoy, if we imagine that we can sort out our very real problems by considering the intricacies of a tree, then surely we are mistaken.
T.S.Eliot penned, ‘The knowledge derived from experience…imposes a pattern, and falsifies’ – by which, if I understand him rightly, he meant that what we know from what we encounter is not enough to understand fully. Instead, if we are not to be misled, we need to draw from outside of ourselves, from something beyond our own finite observations.
Furthermore, what we experience in the present requires the context given it by the past and is tempered by what is expected in the future. A powerful illustration of this is provided by John Piper. He asks us to imagine that, whilst walking through a hospital, we hear the screams of somebody in pain. He suggests that how we feel about what we hear will differ greatly depending on whether we are on an oncology ward or a labour ward.
The future then matters – it changes our present.
When I worked as doctor, there was a sense in which I was in the business of changing the future for my patients. And, by offering them a promise of a better tomorrow, I was able to change their present too.
So for example, imagine somebody coming to see me with a very nasty chest infection. They feel horribly unwell and are genuinely concerned that their illness will or prove fatal.
But then I give them a prescription for some antibiotics and promise them that, if they take them, they will soon be restored to health.
Immediately they feel better – even though they aren’t – simply by believing my promise that better is what they will one day be.
As such, for those with whom I consulted, I sought to envisage a future that couldn’t be seen and then endeavoured to bring that reality into existence.
Or as Moltmann put it, ‘Hope’s statements of promise…stand in contradiction to the reality which can at present be experienced. They do not result from experiences, but are the condition for the possibility of new experiences. They do not seek to illuminate the reality which exists, but the reality that is coming.”
My prescription for an antibiotic, is the proffering of a hope, that the infection will come to an end. It’s a promise that what is not true now, will shortly be so.
But really changing the future is an act solely of the divine. Although doctors can help us with an irritating cough, or an uncomfortable throat, we need more than such trivial matters resolved.
In particular, we can strive all we like to live in the moment but, as temporal creatures, we cannot escape the future. Not least, we cannot deny what we are all aware of though frequently chose to ignore – that is that we will all one day die.
Death then is our ultimate problem – the one we will all have to face and one which medicine, despite its best efforts, will never solve.
To quote Moltmann once more, ‘The pain of despair surely lies in the fact that a hope is there – but no way opens up towards its fulfilment.’
What then can we do when faced with the problem of death. Must we, if we are to carry on at all, agree with L.M. Montgomery that ‘life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes’? Should we, with Dylan Thomas, ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’, or comfort ourselves with mere mindfulness as we ‘go gentle into that good night’?
Death is not the only future problem we face that medicine cannot solve. We live in an increasingly anxiety ridden society in where many people have lost all hope of things ever being better. Henry Thoreau once wrote that ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.’ But he was wrong – because the desperation is deafening.
Many of us will know what it is to have a difficulty which appears beyond us, which wears us down and threatens both our present happiness and the happiness we hope for tomorrow. If then we are to solve the problem of the future, we must either limit its importance and be content to be satisfied by the joy we can muster in the present, or search instead for the antidote to despair.
But where might that hope of something better be found?
Surely not in medicine. Because whilst there is much that medical science can help us with, ultimately our hope would be better placed elsewhere – because a misplaced hope is a false hope, and a false hope is, in the end, no hope at all.
Instead we need to be directed towards a real hope that can lift us above the suffering of the here and now, something we can look forward to and which, despite everything, will keep us going; something which, even if it can’t immediately get us to the top of the mountain we face, manages to draw us up a little higher and puts us in a place where we are able to at least imagine what the view from the top might look like.
When life is hard we all want things to be better – it’s then, more than ever, that we need a hope for the future to enable us to keep us keeping on. And for that we need someone who can make, and keep, bigger promises than those even the best physicians can make.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German born philosopher best known for ‘The Human Condition’ (1958) She identified two key behaviours for bringing about change – those of forgiveness and the making and keeping of promises. Forgiveness, she said, is the behaviour by which it is possible to nullify past actions, releasing others from what they have done and enabling them to change their minds and start again. ‘Forgiveness’, she writes, ‘is the key to action and freedom’ and ‘the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history’.
In contrast, the ability to make and keep promises is the key to make the future different from the past. ‘Promises are the…way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable’.
I think Arendt was right, but though she would have felt that these behaviours were possible for humans, the truth is that even our best efforts will prove insufficient.
That’s why we need a God who cannot only fully forgive, but one who can also make and keep promises big enough to change our future in ways in which we cannot. Promises that can assure us that our biggest problems can be solved.
And that is exactly the kind of God we do have.
Because God is a God who, from the early chapters of Genesis, has been making promises he keeps. And it is because of his faithfulness in the past that we can be sure that the promises he continues to make, he will also keep. And that includes the one that is made still more credible by the resurrection of Jesus Christ – the most significant event in history that confirms the promise that assures us that in Christ we are forgiven and can therefore look forward to an eternity with God ‘in whose presence there is both fullness of joy and pleasures for evermore [Psalm 16:11].
And it is by believing this promise that will ensure that we will not lose hope, no matter our current circumstances.
Nietzsche then was wrong. Because, in reality, hope does not prolong the torments of man, rather it sustains us through them.
So then, promised forgiveness changes our past, promises believed change our present, and promises made change our future .
Promises change things – they give us hope. And when that hope is based on promises we can absolutely trust, then our hope is one that is absolutely certain.
Some musings 