Hope & fantasy:
Jr, E J Dionne
HOPE & FANTASY
THE'MISSING VIRTUE E. J. DIONNE, JR.
YOUR TOWN may not be like New York City, but it's undoubtedly influenced by what goes on here. Of late, I've taken to noticing how much everyone...
...Of late, I've taken to noticing how much everyone in New York-including me-is given to using the word "fantasy...
...Reigns of terror are built on fantasies...
...one no longer has hope...
...My Merriam-Webster dictionary tells me that fantasy is " imagination...
...So you might say that the victory of fantasy over hope is the sign of the cnasicned age we live in...
...And hope has an additional importance for the Christian confronting both secularized Utopian visions and the cheap grace proffered by religious charlatans: It requires, in fact demands, that the Christian remain critical...
...Fantasy is merely a notion that something might be nice or fun or beautiful...
...But if the Christian hope destroys the presumption in futuristic movements, then it does so not for its own sake, but in order to destroy in these hopes the seeds of resignation, which emerge at the latest with the ideological reign of terror in the Utopias in which the hoped-for reconciliation with existence becomes an enforced reconciliation...
...Jiirgen Moltmann, in some ways the father of the theology of hope, captured this well: "Hope's statements of promise . . . must stand in contradiction to the reality which can at present be experienced...
...The inhabitants of Dante's hell can fantasize all they wantExtra copies are available of the January 30 "Contemporary Theology Issue" of Commonweal (10-25 copies, 60@ each...
...Maybe it's a sign of the "malaise" President Carter talked about last year...
...Hope, it seemed to me, always got shortchanged in the great trinity of Christian virtues, even though it is central to the orientation a Christian brings to every action in his or her life...
...Hope, it says, is "trust, reliance";it is a "desire accompanied by expectation of fulfillment'' or ' 'one that gives promise for the future...
...Having a lively "fantasy life" is supposed to be a good thing...
...Belief, of course, implies commitment...
...of course, about sex...
...Once we had Humphrey Bogart...
...over 25 copies, 50@ each).copies, 50@ each...
...Christian hope, in short, both permits action and tests it...
...I bring all this up because I've thought for a while that one of the most hopeful theological movements around is (appropriately enough) the theology of hope...
...HOPE & FANTASY THE'MISSING VIRTUE E. J. DIONNE, JR...
...But there's nothing very concrete there...
...One has a fantasy...
...What's the difference...
...And sometimes, you even act on your beliefs...
...All those who have it are subject to its disciplines...
...Where once we expected our desires to be fulfilled, we're now left with passing thoughts that are merely "illusions...
...Merely to ' 'feel" something is to free oneself of any obligation to act...
...fancy " or" a product of the imagination: illusion...
...feelings come and go...
...Beliefs, however, become embedded in your life, so that even when you don't act upon them, your beliefs at least force you to face a contradiction...
...The flight from hope to fantasy is one of the things involved in what Philip Rieff described as The Triumph of the Therapeutic...
...What's interesting about the triumph of the word fantasy is the word that fantasy has defeated...
...They do not seek to illuminate the reality which exists, but the reality which is coming...
...Now we have Woody Allen...
...There's another special quality about hope, which is that it carries with it the possibility, at least, of transcendence...
...They do not result from experiences, but are the condition for the possibility of new experiences...
...But fantasy is no substitute for hope, either linguistically or philosophically...
...Religious man was born to be saved," he wrote, "psychological man was born to be pleased...
...Fantasy, of course, has a rich tradition and many uses- not the least of which being that fantasies sometimes turn into hopes...
...The difference was established long ago when 'I believe,' the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to 'one feels,' the caveat of the therapeutic...
...We "fantasize" about new jobs and promotions and vacations and books we will write and...
...Neither are "feelings" substitutes for belief...
...It allows neither quiescence nor triumphalist violence...
...Hope stems from a promise or a resolve...
...Later in his Theology of Hope, Moltmann remarks: "Realism, still less cynicism, was never a good airy of Christian faith...
...At the entrance to Dante's hell are the words, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here...
...To have hope is to have something to rely on...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 3
