CONTRA FATUM

"Apocalypticism preserves the Christian doctrine of hope from facile optimism and from false prophets who say 'peace, peace, when there is no peace' (Jer. 8,11). Eschatology is not a doctrine about history's happy end. In the present situation of our world, facile consolation is as fatal as melancholy hopelessness. No one can assure us that the worst will not happen. According to the laws of experience: it will. We can only trust that even the end of the world hides a new beginning if we trust the God who calls into being the things that are not, and out of death creates new life." (Jürgen Moltmann: The Coming of God, First Fortress Press 1996, p. 234)

“This is true perfection: not to avoid a wicked life because like slaves we servilely fear punishment, nor to do good because we hope for rewards, as if cashing in on the virtuous life by some business-like and contractual arrangement. On the contrary, disregarding all those things for which we hope and which have been reserved by promise, we regard falling from God's friendship as the only thing dreadful and we consider becoming God's friend the only thing worthy of honor and desire.” (Gregory, LOM, p. 137)

"He, therefore, who was lofty in mind standing, as it were, on some prominent look-out point and straining his vision to see those things which were far removed, saw wherein the difference between evil and virtue lies. The means of judging these matters is on the basis of their ends, not on the basis of what is currently at hand. For by that eye of the soul which is capable of contemplation and discernment he has understood what has been stored up for the good through hope as though it were present[...]" (On the Inscriptions, GNO 41, p. 99)

"Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived. Therefore, the ardent lover of beauty, although receiving what is always visible as an image of what he desires, yet longs to be filled with the very stamp of the archetype." (Life of Moses, Ferguson, §231)