Schall on "Spe Salvi"

The Encyclical on Hope: On the "De-immanentizing" of the Christian Eschaton | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | December 3, 2007

"Perhaps many people reject the faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something of an impediment. To continue living forever—endlessly—appears more like a curse than a gift. Death, admittedly, one would wish to postpone for as long as possible. But to live always, without end—this, all things considered, can only be monotonous and ultimately unbearable." -- Benedict XVI, Spes Salvi, #10.

"Good structures (of society) help, but of themselves they are not enough. Man can never be redeemed simply from outside. Francis Bacon and those who followed in the intellectual current of modernity that he inspired were wrong to believe that man would be redeemed through science. Such an expectation asks too much of science; this kind of hope is deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it. On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with the success of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of it hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task...." -- Benedict XVI, Spes Salvi, #25.

I.

Modern philosophy, particularly political philosophy, has been characterized by mislocating the supernatural virtue of hope. Philosophy endeavored to incorporate the transcendent order within the world. It gave man, so it surmised, a practical "hope" of a fully happy life as a result of his own efforts through the sciences of man and nature. Thus the virtue of faith became "belief" in progress. The virtue of charity became the effort to rearrange man, family, and polity so that all that separates man from man would be eliminated through no personal effort of the human subjects.

As a result of this tremendous effort of modernity to make philosophy "practical," the classical notions of the last things—death, purgatory, heaven, and hell—were likewise relocated within this world. The result has been, at every level, a distortion of man and a failure to understand his real dignity and destiny. The greatest aberrations of human history have resulted from this effort to reject the Christian understanding of the proper worldly and transcendent purpose of man. Heaven, hell, purgatory, and death appear in new forms.

In Spe Salvi, the present encyclical on hope, Benedict XVI, with his usual insightful brilliance, reestablishes the proper understanding of the eschaton, the last things.

Read the entire essay...

Comments

[Brian Schuettler]

Romans 8:24 "For in hope we were saved. Now hope that sees for itself is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees?"
Most of the website translations from the latin have been Saved BY Hope, ignoring the reference to 8:24.

[Brian Schuettler]

The above comment was the result of going to the Vatican Radio site and seeing Saved By Hope...I guess they didn't look at the text. :-)

[CarmanK]

From the summaries I have read, the Encyclical seems to reinforce what I believe. An afterlife has to be. There is no justice here on earth. Sometime, God (the creator)has to hold the Hiltlers and other extraordinary evildoes accountable for their actions. That is my hope!