INSIDE america

A Presence, not Utopia

By Lorenzo Albacete

The Pope, in his second encyclical Spe Salvi,  insists that hope is not based on inner dispositions, but on the surprising discovery and experience of a Presence
At the very beginning of his second encyclical, Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI states clearly what is at stake: “Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live in the present as well.” And he immediately identifies the problem to which the Church offers the solution: the reduction of reason that destroys our capacity to have the certainty we need to live in the present, to grasp reality as it is, and to respond appropriately. So, once again, the Holy Father sets before us the concern that we have sought to understand from the charism of Fr. Giussani: only the encounter with Christ, recognized by faith, grants us access to the real. Without Him, life remains an “indecipherable enigma” (cf. Pope Benedict to the Bishops of Latin America in Aparecida, Brazil).
Since the very beginning of his pontificate, Benedict XVI has bluntly confronted the true nature of the modern challenge to Christianity, namely, to show why it is necessary for the well being of the world to state and demonstrate clearly what it is that Jesus, and only Jesus, can contribute to this world. And his answer has been exactly what we have learned from Fr. Giussani: without Jesus, we cannot know what is real. Without Him, we would live in a world “without hope and without God” (Eph 2.12). The salvation of the world is the revelation of the certainty which makes hope possible and reasonable. It is the presence of God in this world through the Incarnation that makes hope possible and reasonable. Hope is born from the ground of faith in Christ, that is, from the recognition of Christ’s presence.
Recall Fr. Giussani’s insistence to the CLU students that what we base our hope on is a Presence, not one more utopia (cf. “From Utopia to Presence”, in Traces Vol.4-No11, 2002, pp.I-XII). This is precisely Pope Benedict’s point: without Christ, we are sustained by utopia, by a false view of reality, by an illusion. Only Christ makes possible the “hope that does not disappoint.”
Because it is a matter of presence and not another discourse about what life is all about, the encounter with Christ is not  “informative,” but “performative.” It changes our lives. This real change, this new creation, this new heart, this broadening of reason, is exactly how the world is saved by the presence of God in Christ and through Christ. This is why only Christ is the Savior of the world. That is why what Christ brought into the world is “something totally different” from any other view about the origin, meaning, and purpose of human life and history. It is the certainty of this presence in the world that grounds our hope.
The Letter to the Hebrews (11:1) defines faith as the “substance of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen.” In the encyclical, the Pope offers us an exegesis of  this text more similar to an academic lecture than an encyclical, which shows how close this subject has been to Pope Benedict’s heart precisely at its most fundamental level: to decide whether Christianity has anything to offer that really cannot be found elsewhere. The discussion concerns the word “substance.” The question is this: Is what faith makes present entirely a matter of a change in our inner attitude or conviction (so that faith is a kind of “standing firm,” as Luther saw it), or is it indeed a making present of something that was not there before? The Pope insists that faith is not simply a matter of an inner attitude; it is the recognition of a Presence independent of our inner attitude. Hope is not based on inner dispositions, but on the surprising discovery and experience of a Presence. From this discovery of a Presence here now, we find ourselves  “reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a proof of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet.’ The fact that this future exists changes the present, the present is touched by the present reality, and thus the things of the future spill over those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.”