Raimond Gaita and Wendell Berry on Hope in Difficult Times

 Can't stop writing today!

    I just read a short piece by Raimond Gaita "Justice and Hope," published in a book of essays of the same title. It connects with my reflection on Jonas as while writing that I realized just how pessimistic I am about the future, which is in tension with the virtue of hope, which for me as a father and as one who loves the world is a duty. This problem has been with me for a long time. How to love the world given a realistic assessment of the state of the world and a rather pessimistic outlook on the future. I wonder just what is it about the world that makes it worthy of unconditional love and makes hope a kind of duty. 

   For Gaita "hope" is not optimism. It is much closer to a fidelity to reality. Hope is the refusal to allow evil, suffering, or injustice to have the last word in our understanding of the world. It is connected to love rather than prediction. One continues to care for justice not because one expects success, but because justice is intrinsically worthy of devotion. The publisher's description captures this well when it says that for Gaita an "unconditional love of the world" is the deepest form of hope and the source of our commitment to justice.

    I immediately thought of (for me) the deepest meditation on hope I know of and saw the connections: I mean a short essay by Wendell Berry “A Poem of Difficult Hope,” which is a reflection on a poem by Hayden Carruth (1921-1908), “On Being Ask to Write a Poem against the War in Vietnam.”

    I want to go into both essays in more detail but what is clear to me is that both men reject a hope based on optimism (or lack of hope based on pessimism). I was always want to wonder what grounds we have for believing things will get better as the basis of hope.  But Berry and Gaita are asking rather what grounds we have for remaining faithful to what is good. That is a deep shift.

    Berry begins with place. He loves a particular hillside, a creek, a field, a farming community, a marriage, a tradition. His hope grows out of fidelity to these concrete realities. He often says, in effect, that one must be faithful to the good one actually knows rather than to abstract predictions about the future. The farmer plants trees whose shade he will never sit under. He cares for the land even when he fears that industrial de-civilization may continue its destructive course. Hope, for Berry, is therefore not confidence that things will turn out well. It is a virtue of stewardship and gratitude. I can connect that to love of my children.

    Gaita begins less with place than with persons. Again and again he returns to moments when another human being is revealed as possessing a dignity beyond all calculation: the nun in the psychiatric hospital treating patients with love, the mother who refuses to abandon a disabled child, the friend who remains faithful to the dying. To his friend and “second father”, Hora, in this essay and the stories he told and the way he was present in these stories. These moments disclose what he calls our common humanity out of responses to particular (authoritative) human beings. Hope arises from faithfulness to that reality. If hope depends on forecasts, then a sufficiently bleak forecast destroys hope. If hope depends on love, then it can survive even in dark times.

    The question is whether reality discloses anything intrinsically worthy of love. For Berry, the answer is yes: the world as creation. A field, a marriage, a child, a community are goods before they are resources. They deserve care whether or not history vindicates them. For Gaita, the answer is also yes: persons reveal a goodness that commands reverence. The love of a parent for their child, his father and Hora’s unconditional commitment to live decently, these not merely useful or adaptive. Such realities reveal something about the meaning of the world, “the redemptive light they cast on the world.” This he connects with “making themselves newly answerable each day to life’s invitation – perhaps better, to its call – to wonder at the marvel of the world.”

     This is where I think both approach a fundamentally religious horizon, even when they are not making a theological argument. If the world is merely a collection of facts, then unconditional love seems irrational. One might enjoy parts of it, but why love it unconditionally? Why not conclude, as many intelligent pessimists do, that the balance sheet is mixed at best? Berry and Gaita seem to be saying that there are experiences in which the world appears not merely as a collection of facts but as a gift. Not a gift in the sense that everything is good. Berry knows ecological devastation. Gaita has written about genocide, cruelty, and moral horror. Rather, the gift lies in the existence of goodness itself: love, friendship, beauty, mercy, truthfulness.

     For me, the deepest question then becomes whether the goodness we encounter is merely a local accident in an otherwise indifferent universe, or is it a clue to the nature of reality itself. I believe the latter. Just as I resist defining a person by their worst actions, I resist letting the horrors of history, including the present, define the final meaning of reality. I see these horrors as horrors because I see them in the light of the Good, or of love. Thus hope becomes a duty. Not because we have a duty to be optimistic – I am not – but because despair can become a refusal to acknowledge the reality of the good that is already present. And what I learn from Gaita and Berry is that the duty is not to feel hopeful. It is to remain faithful to what has shown itself worthy of love, even when hope becomes difficult. That is a much sterner and, perhaps, more believable conception of hope than the modern expectation that tomorrow must be better than today. That is also I think a deep understanding of hope as a theological virtue. 

. . . 

I want to say something about Berry’s essay on Carruth’s poem, and then connect that to the Gaita essay I just read. Here is the poem:

 

"On Being Asked to

Write a Poem Against

the War in Vietnam"

 

Well I have and in fact

more than one and I'll

tell you this too

I wrote one against

Algeria that nightmare

and another against

 

Korea and another

against the one

I was in

 

and I don't remember

how many against

the three

 

when I was a boy

Abyssinia Spain and

Harlan County

 

and not one

breath was restored

to one

 

shattered throat

mans womans or childs

not one not

 

one

but death went on and on

never looking aside

 

except now and then

with a furtive half-smile

to make sure I was noticing. 

It is almost an anti-poem, a rejection of the belief that poetry – which can be a source of the love of the world, as it is for some, including me – can stop war or makes any difference whatsoever. What Carruth says is brutally simple: I have written poems against war all my life. None of them restored a single breath to a single victim. Pointless. The repeated "not one, not one" is literally painful for me to read. It strips away every romantic illusion about the political efficacy of literature. The ending is especially forceful. Death is personified mockingly. It is as though death is amused by the poet's protests. The poem contains no optimism whatsoever. It refuses consolation.  Indeed, the poem leaves us with almost nothing. The war continues, death continues, evil continues. What survives? Only fidelity. And perhaps Berry's claim is that fidelity itself is already a form of hope. Not hope that we will win or that history bends toward justice. But hope in the sense of refusing to become what the darkness would have us become.

    I think what fascinated Berry about this poem is that he did not read it as a counsel of despair. Berry's argument, I think, is that Carruth has stripped away a false hope. The poet cannot save the world by writing poems. The intellectual cannot save the world merely by writing essays even as great as Berry's. Protest itself does not restore what has been lost. Berry thought that acknowledging these realities was the beginning of moral seriousness rather than the end of it, especially as he is a poet himself (one of my most needed). For Berry, hope cannot be grounded in fantasies of effectiveness. Carruth's poem asks whether poetry can stop death and the answer is no. Berry's point is that does not relieve us of the obligation to write truthfully, care faithfully, and love what is good. The answer is no. And I think this is where his agrarian life philosophy enters. If poetry does not stop wars, then what remains? Well, faithfulness, good work, marriage, friendship, neighborliness, care for a place, telling the truth. Which is to say, the ordinary practices by which human goods are preserved.

       Can one continue to love what is good when one no longer believes that goodness guarantees success? Yes. The more I think about it, the closer both come to a fundamentally religious virtue. Not optimism, but faithfulness to goodness in the absence of guarantees. That may be the deepest meaning of "difficult hope." Hope as a theological virtue. 

. . . 

Gaita ends with a theme brought up earlier in the essay. Plato’s thought that one becomes what one loves. What does that have to do with hope and justice?

    Go back to Carruth's poem for a minute. The temptation is to conclude that the poems changed nothing. That conclusion assumes that the value of poetry lies primarily in its ability to change external events. Now bring in Plato’s thought – we become what we love. Now a different question emerges. The question is no longer whether a poem makes a difference but rather what kind of a soul does the writing and reading of such a poem help us become. Death, cruelty, and injustice do not merely destroy bodies. They also tempt us spiritually. They tempt us toward cynicism, indifference, hatred, despair, or a fixation on power. They tempt us to become their likeness.

    Thus Plato’s belief that we become what we love. If one loves wealth, one becomes acquisitive. If one loves power, one becomes tyrannical. If one loves what is noble and beautiful, one's soul is gradually ordered by those realities. Gaita takes this deeply seriously. Justice matters not only because victims deserve justice but because our response to injustice shapes our souls. If I become indifferent to suffering, or if I allow evil to determine the horizon of my vision, then something in me is diminished. Gaita asks why we should remain faithful when success is uncertain. The answer, I think he might give, is that fidelity itself is constitutive of our humanity. It is part of what it means to be a just person. And Plato explains why: because every act of love shapes the lover. 

. . . 

   Now apply this to Carruth’s poem and Berry’s reading of it. The poem did not restore a single breath but neither did it capitulate to death. It bore witness and it refused to lie. It refused to sentimentalize. It refused to look away. And in doing so it preserved something in the poet's own humanity and potentially in the humanity of its readers. It revealed our common humanity. I think this is very close to Gaita's understanding of hope. Hope is a way of refusing to allow evil to become the object of ultimate devotion. We must continue to love justice, mercy, beauty, truth, and souls because these things are worthy of love. If one ceases to love them because they seem hopeless, then we have already begun to worship power instead.

      And thus Gaita's unconditional love of the world. It means refusing to let cruelty define what the world fundamentally is. And Berry's difficult hope can be read similarly. The farmer who plants trees may know perfectly well that the larger culture is moving in the opposite direction. Yet if he ceases planting because success is uncertain, then his soul begins to form an attitude grounded in destruction rather than from the good he loves. If we become like what we love, the most important question is whether goodness remains the object of our love even when victory is uncertain. That, it seems to me, is the heart of both Berry's difficult hope and Gaita's hope grounded in justice. They are both trying to prevent the soul from being conquered by the very evil it opposes. Again, I think they are reflecting on the theological virtue of hope. 

. . . 

   What I find moving in both Berry and Gaita is that they hope without denying evil or tragedy. Neither offers the comfort that everything will work out. Yet neither allows suffering to become metaphysically ultimate. Perhaps I am so moved by their work because they are trying to show how one might remain faithful to goodness after innocence has been lost, goodness east of Eden, so to speak. They understand that hope is needed when the societies fail that the human beings with the power construct and we must decide what remains worthy of love. That is a harder hope, but also a deeper one. And it is close to the concerns that have occupied me for years: whether our encounters with beauty, love, friendship, justice, and the dignity of persons disclose something about reality that remains true even in the face of suffering, evil, and death. 

    And the soul formed by justice, hope, (faith for many), and love is itself a product of the world and makes the world worthy of love, one of the things that make it worthy of love anyway.

 

 Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. “A Poem of Difficult Hope.” What Are People For? Essays. North Point Press, 1990, pp. 87–95.

 

Gaita, Raimond. “Justice and Hope.” Justice and Hope: Essays, Lectures and Other Writings. Edited by Scott Stephens, Melbourne University Press, 2023, pp. 13-23.