Hope and Its Banishment

This post continues the series of excerpts from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006) with Chapter Eleven.

Man doth seek a triple perfection: first a sensual . . . . then an intellectual. . . . Man doth not seem to rest satisfied . . . but doth further covet . . . somewhat divine and heavenly, which with hidden exultation. . . [such desire] rather surmiseth than conceiveth. . . . For although the beauties, riches, honors, sciences, virtues, and perfections of all men living, were in the present possession of one; yet somewhat beyond and above all this there would still be sought and earnestly thirsted for.

Richard Hooker,

Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593),

First Book, XI, 4 (pp. 205-206.)

Hope is by contrast forward-looking, the virtue of the energetic saint or entrepreneur who seeks “a future, difficult, but attainable good.”[1] It is the opposite of acedia, spiritual sloth, despair, hopelessness, the “desperation” (< de + sperare, to be separated from hoping) that the 17^th of the Church of England’s 39 Articles warns against, “a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust [curious and carnal persons] into desperation.”

Hope is of course essential for eternal life, and for humdrum life, too, as one can see in the lethargy that comes over a human who, as we say, “has nothing to look forward to.” Carol Shields, the modern novelist of psychological health, calls hope “the slender handrail.”[2] Richard Wilbur, the modern poet of psychological health, repeatedly surprised by joy, puts it this way: “Joy for a moment floods into the mind/ Blurting that all things shall be brought/ To the full state and stature of their kind.”[3] The secular, or “natural,” version of hope is an egalitarian version of Aristotle’s aristocratic and favorite virtue, “great-souledness,” megalopsychia, translated literally into Latin as “magnanimity.”[4]

Christian doctrine and so-called “Austrian” economics agree in stressing that hope is about that ever-unseen future. It cannot be reduced to a mechanical prediction in the style of positivism, or to some easy dream of fey or elf, the assurance of indulgences purchased or chantries financed. “By hope we are saved,” says St. Paul in Romans 8:24, “But a hope seen is not a hope, for why hope for something you already see?” It is a notable oddity of non-Austrian, “neoclassical,” Samuelsonian economics that it imagines that we already have the information to make accurate judgments about the future. In such a case we would be in heaven, or hell, and hope would not exist: “Neither the blessed nor the damned can possess hope,” as the theologian Romanus Cessario puts it. Hope is a virtue, Aquinas said, of the wayfarer, not of a person in command of all he is ever going to get.[5] It is, he said elsewhere, “the movement of a spirit aiming at great things.”[6]

I am thinking, to change the image, of backward-looking Faith as the rootedness of humans, in their identity as Dutch or female or psychologists or mothers. Then Hope is the forward-looking flower growing from the roots. Lacking roots, one is faithless, having no place from which to grow. Rootlessness is the characteristic American failing, at any rate by comparison with the heavy rootedness of much of the rest of the world. But without the flower one is stuck in the soil. That is the characteristic failing of Asia and Europe, an excess of Faith, at any rate by comparison with the crazy, uprooted Hopefulness of America.[7]

Globalization has put Faith and Hope out of balance. The Marxist geographer David Harvey has noted that the “time-space compression” of modernity has eroded identity.[8] Or at any rate it can. It happened in the Europe of old. One can watch the cozy world of self-satisfied and rooted Franks being challenged by successive Others in the Crusades, the age of discovery, the confrontation with the Primitive, the shocks to European provincialism administered by Atlantic capitalism, imperialism, world wars, and finally globalization. Marshall Berman writes: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and at the same time threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”[9] Hope can erode Faith.

Ceaseless travel, made cheap to moderns, is exhilarating. But it is disturbing, too. Dilip Gaonkar points out to me that the dream of “retirement” in modern America has become a parody of the word. The oldsters do not “retire” to Innisfree. They change residences compulsively, looking for a new life, indulging a Hope at the sacrifice of Faith. The ultimate in such itinerant retirees is someone who owns a condo of the latest kind—on a cruise ship. “Wake up in a new harbor every couple of days” says the teaser in the E-Bay ad for a $70,000 ocean-going condo on the Norwegian Star. “Living on a ship circumnavigating the globe or catching your ship for a few days when it reaches your selected vacation spots, will raise a few eyebrows. You can hear it now: `You live where?’ It is a well deserved opportunity, but not for everyone. You have to love travel, be adventuresome, accept challenges with aplomb and enjoy exploring new places and meeting interesting people.”[10]

Yet the European gazing at other cultures as a conqueror or anthropologist, or for that matter a condo owner on a cruise-ship, presents a pathway for non-Europeans out of the tribe or village. Move to Metropolitan France, as Ho Chi Minh did after working on a French ocean liner, living in London and the United States. Work as a pastry chef in Boston’s Parker House—baking, one supposes, Parker-House rolls. Then use the capitalist economy of Paris to remake yourself into a founding French communist.

Mobility in space, in other words, offers Hope of a new identity. An American folk song from the early 19^th century asked, “Oh, what was your name in the States?/ Was it Thompson, or Johnson, or Bates?/ Did you murder your wife and fly for your life?/ Say, what was your name in the States?”—that is, the organized States admitted to the Union, as against the territories. Lighting out for the territories, of course, is the American myth of freedom through movement away from the faith-based oppressions of one’s born class or region. It is Ben Franklin moving from fraternal domination in Boston to autonomy in Philadelphia, disembarking at the Market Street wharf carrying three great puffy rolls under his arm, the Frontier Hypothesis, the road movie. It is the blissful literalization of freedom.

Mobility does make for freedom. That’s why Adam Smith the egalitarian advocate for freedom{,} was so outraged by British and in particular English restrictions on the mobility of workers. A sharecropper who can move to another Southern county, or North to Bronzeville, cannot be exploited in situ by the country store. He’s not in place. He’s in the wider world. He can yet hope.

The rise of a secular Hope and the fall of a spiritual Faith, in other words, is nothing like always bad. A Faith rooted in the economic importance of land made elders and imagined ancestors powerful, for good or ill. You can see it in the twists of 18^th-century plays and novels right through Jane Austen, in which the elders control inheritance and therefore the hopeful young. The displacing of land by human capital as the main source of wealth sharply devalued Faith, the past, the dead hand, the mort-gage, the family line, the ancestors. And it upvalued Hope, the future, the children, the individual.

* * * *

Religious versions of faith and hope and love have been banished from the list of virtues in the West twice, during two waves of anti-Christian revision, what William Schweiker calls the “banishment of religious resources.”[11] Or if you wish there was one long banishment interrupted in the late 18^th century by a surprising revival of religious enthusiasm, at any rate in Protestant Europe.

The First Banishment happened among the clerisy of Europe in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. The New Philosophers reaped the harvest of 17^th-century natural philosophy. Having learned that comets were not portents and tides were not miraculous, they generalized to a rejection of “particular providence”: a rejection of God’s restless agency in the world. Prayer for example has no efficacy if God is a remote prime mover.

A founding figure is Pierre Bayle (1647-1707), a French Protestant heretic and skeptic who found refuge in Rotterdam to write his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696, 1702), the “arsenal of the Enlightenment.”[12] Bayle and other deistic or even atheistic theoreticians culminating with Voltaire, Holbach, and Hume were reacting to excessive faith and hope in the wars of religion.

The deists and neo-stoics of the age of equanimity were therefore eager to banish the transcendent. The words ‘taste’ and ‘politeness’,” J. G. A. Pocock notes, “for most of the eighteenth century, were freighted with a heavy ideological load. To latitudinarians and philosophes they connoted that reasonable and civic [faith] . . . with which it was hoped to replace the enthusiasms and fanaticisms of Puritanism or Christianity.”[13] And for a time it did.

Take England, for example. The political settlement in 1660 and especially in 1689 had parallels in arts and manners. “After the Restoration the time had come,” Matthew Arnold observed,

when our nation felt the imperious need of a fit prose, . . . . of freeing itself from the absorbing preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had exercised. . . . The needful qualities for a fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. . . . But an almost exclusive attention to these qualities involves some repressing and silencing of poetry.[14]

“Regularity, uniformity, precision, balance”: he might as well have said “literary Prudence and Temperance in their bourgeois expressions.” It is no surprise to find Arnold the 19^th-century Hellenist commending poetry for an aristocratic expressions of the virtues, its “glory, the eternal honor, . . . this noble sphere.”[15] Arnold is not exactly contemptuous of the literally prosaic virtues of the bourgeoisie. He is not a proud aristocrat, not actually. But in judging poetry he takes his stand on the plains of Ilium or in the courts of Shakespeare’s imagined age of Lancaster and York, not in the coffee houses of Addison’s London, or the London of Chaucer, either, that hive of the bourgeoisie before its greater time.

The Second Banishment of religious faith and hope gathers force among secularizing intellectuals around the middle of the 19^th century. A. N. Wilson attributes the odd hiccup in the Banishment—on in the 18^th century, then off, then on again in the mid-19^th—to “Hume’s time bomb,” that is, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, three years safely after his death and three years, too, after the publication of another anti-Christian bomb with a long fuse, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In Wilson’s view these sat on library shelves until the new seriousness of religiosity in England in the 1820s and 1830s caused them to be taken down and examined. In their own time Hume could logic-chop and Gibbon sneer and the cosmopolites of 1776-79 could laugh along with them. Not the sober and intellectually serious Victorians.[16]

Arnold himself, though a deist, and a devout student of the Bible, said it (“Dover Beach” was composed about 1851):

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a great girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. . . .

Or Edward FitzGerald (1859), though the sentiments are of course also ancient and Epicurean and indeed secularly Persian of the early 12^th century:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument

About it and about; but evermore

Came out by the same Door as I went in. . . .

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing

Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;

And out of it, and Wind along the Waste.

I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.

Or Thomas Hardy (1866):

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From out the sky, and laugh . . . .

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,

And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?

—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain.

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan . . . .

Wilson has given a lively and touching portrait of the European and especially British men and women of the clerisy—and often enough of the clergy—who lost their faith then. John Maynard Keynes, writing in the 1920s, portrayed the late 1860s as “the critical moment at which the Christian dogma fell away from the serious philosophical world of England, or at any rate of Cambridge.”[17] Early in the 1860s the soon-to-be economist Alfred Marshall was preparing for holy orders; by the end of the decade he and his fellows could not, Keynes writes, be called Christians. In praising the passage, Joseph Schumpeter notes that in the 1860s “Christian belief, gently and without any acerbities, was dropped by the English intelligentsia.”[18]

Wilson takes his title, “God’s Funeral,” from another poem by Hardy, a poem written fifty years after “Hap.” Hardy in 1908-10 envisions Christians, as Feuerbach had some 70 years before, projecting their anxieties into their God:

I saw a slow-stepping train—

Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar—

Following in files across a twilit plain

A strange mystic form the foremost bore. . . .

Yet throughout all it symbolized none the less

Potency vast and loving-kindness strong. . . .

“O man-projected Figure, of late

Imagined as we, thy knell who shall survive?”

This was a quarter century after the sad doubt in England had begun to spread beyond the clerisy. In the 1880s “the loss of faith which had hitherto tormented only a few of the better-informed,” Wilson reports, “had reached the suburbs” through among other routes a best-selling novel Robert Elsmere (1888), by Mrs. Humphrey Ward—neé Mary Augusta Arnold: her uncle was Matthew Arnold; her nephew Aldous Huxley.[19] Not that everyone became a skeptic. The Great War was still on the British and the German sides a religious crusade. By the Second World War, though, religion had been squeezed out of war.

Also in the middle of the 19^th century one sees the sharper French turn of the clerisy against the clergy in, say, Flaubert, or in Baudelaire. Progressive thought in France was from the time of Voltaire and Helvétius anti-clerical, reinforced by the reactionary stance of the Church during the Revolution. It was therefore anti-Christian and in the end anti-theist. Progressives in France were and are dismally existentialist in their celebration of Crass Casualty. Wilson attributes the harsher anti-clerical turn in Catholic Europe also in part to the reaction of former seminarians, “kept in genuine ignorance of biblical scholarship or of the developments of modern philosophy. . . who therefore suffered easily explicable crises when, in later life, they started to read books.”[20] Compare Catholic Ireland, as in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

In Britain, as in Germany and the United States, advanced thinkers often kept a worshipfully Christian tone even in their plans for the new society. Schumpeter attributes the tone to the Englishmen “having started their intellectual travels with a thorough grounding in Anglican theology (and, owing to the constitutions of Cambridge and Oxford colleges, with definite obligations towards it).” In consequence they “arrived at their final positions by way of conscious wrestling rather than by a growing agnosticism through indifference.”[21] Note the contrast with Wilson’s hypothesis of crisis in Catholic countries. In any event, there is a quasi-Christian cheerfulness about, say, George Bernard Shaw’s English socialism which one does not find in Bertold Brecht’s Continental version.

The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.

[1] Cessario, “The Theological Virtue of Hope,” 2002, in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, p. 234.

[2] Shields, Dressing Up, 2000, pp. 46, 50, 53.

[3] Wilbur, “On the Marginal Way,” 1969, in New and Collected Poems, 1988, p. 122.

[4] Aristotle, Nich. Ethics 1123a35 ff.

[5] Cessario, “The Theological Virtue of Hope,” 2002, p. 238.

[6] Aquinas, Summa Theologia, c. 1270, IIa IIae, c. 1270, q. 161, art. 4. The citation is in the usual form. It means the second [Secunda] half of the Second [Secundae] Part—note the Latin case endings, -a and -ae. Aquinas organized his inquiry around Questions (”q.”) and broke down his dialectic answers into a few or a half dozen articles (art.). I general{ly} use the New Advent website for the translation.

[7] I am indebted to Marijke Prins for these ideas.

[8] Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 1990.

[9] Berman, All That is Solid, 1982, p. 15.

[10] Item 2359006705, category 15897.

[11] Schweiker, Theological Ethics, 2004, p. x.

[12] An amazing reproduction of the actual French text of the 1740 Amsterdam edition is available at http://www.lib. uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/ dicos/BAYLE/search.fulltext.form.html

[13] Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms,” 1983, p. 241.

[14] Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 1880, pp. 320-21.

[15] Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 1880, p. 301.

[16] A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 25.

[17] Keynes, “Marshall,” 1924, p. 134.

[18] Schumpeter, History, 1954, p. 772 n 2.

[19] A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 125. Compare Novak, Catholic Social Thought, 1989, p. 64.

[20] A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 9.

[21] Schumpeter, History, 1954, p. 772 n 2.