Steven C. van den Heuvel Editor Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope Steven C. van den Heuvel Editor Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope Editor Steven C. van den Heuvel Department of Systematic Theology Evangelische Theologische Faculteit Leuven, Belgium ISBN 978-3-030-46488-2 ISBN 978-3-030-46489-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46489-9 This book is an open access publication. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface Recent decades have seen an upsurge in the interest in “hope,” among scholars of various disciplines. Hope is an ambiguous phenomenon—the word has many associations. Yet its core is simple: hope denotes a desire (we hope for something) and it involves a probability (the chances of the attainment of the desire have to be somewhere between zero and one). While most scholars agree with these two basic facts about the phenomenon of hope, there is a lot of diversity concerning the precise structure of hope; there is also debate about the value of hope. Regarding the structure of hope: it is often consid- ered to be a virtue, leading to rich debate on how exactly this virtue is constructed and at what it is (or should be) aimed. Yet there are also those who do not consider hope to be connected with the passions, but primarily with rational expectations concerning the future—Immanuel Kant offers an influential example of such a view. There is also extended debate over the value of hope, going back all the way to ancient Greek philosophy where Western reflection on hope began. The Greek myth of Pandora’s jar is well known; while it has often been interpreted as a condemnation of hope, the myth is enigmatic—it can also be interpreted as a positive endorsement of hope. This ambiguous attitude to hope has persisted, with various nuances, throughout the ages up until the present day. For some, “hope” signals passivity and resignation from the urgent tasks of life, whereas for others it describes the vital strength necessary for progress in human history, as well as for individual flourishing. Research into hope has had its ebbs and flows historically; for several decades, the research had been clearly in flow, and it is particularly noteworthy that this flourishing of research into hope is interdisciplinary. While once it was primarily theologians and philosophers who thought about hope, in recent decades it has emphatically been psychology—in particular the research tradition of positive psy- chology—that has been at the forefront of new thinking on hope. But other disci- plines, too, such as health care, ecology, political science, and economics increasingly recognize the importance of hope as an important motivation for v vi Preface human behavior and are contributing to the theory of hope from their unique vantage points. This volume seeks to contribute to this evolving and multidisciplinary study into the phenomenon of hope in two particular ways. First, recognizing the importance of the centuries-old reflection on the topic, the first part of this book offers historical perspectives on hope. While it looks to the past, this part of the book still offers novel perspectives, as it focuses on often-overlooked theories and developments and challenges established views. Second, this book seeks to document the state of the art of current research into hope, in a number of disciplines, eight in total. Impor- tantly, this volume does not simply present the selected historical and multidisciplinary perspectives as unconnected chapters. Rather, as a result of a productive dialogue among the authors, the volume is a deliberate attempt to overcome inward-looking and reductionist tendencies and to arrive at an integration of the perspectives presented here. Every book, by necessity, has its limitations—and this volume is no exception. This book presents a Western approach to hope—it deals with the history of Western thinking on hope, and when theological views on hope are discussed, these are Christian theological views. Nevertheless, insofar as hope has been described as springing eternal in the human breast, it is anticipated that many of the lessons drawn from this project will find echoes and parallels across a broad range of cultures and religions. Overview of the Volume This volume has two main parts. The first part focuses on hope in historical perspective, while the second part describes the status quaestionis of hope theory in a number of disciplines. The field covered in the first part is vast, reaching back all the way to Pre-Socratic philosophy. It is not the goal of this volume to cover this vast period, or be in any way complete in describing the rich nuances in hope concepts that have been developed. Rather, it is to provide some perspectives on hope that have been developed in different historical eras. This part of the book has five chapters. In the first chapter, philosopher Scott Gravlee writes about “Hope in Ancient Greek Philosophy.” He notes that while hope was acknowledged as important in ancient Greece, current philosophical investigations into the way it was perceived have been few and far between. In his chapter, Gravlee seeks to contribute to this investigation. With the important myth of Pandora’s jar as a backdrop, he begins with some remarks on Pre-Socratic philosophy. He then goes on to extensively examine Plato’s conceptualization of hope. His main claim in this section is that Plato ultimately holds a positive view of hope. Thirdly, he focuses on Aristotle’s rich theory of hope. Taken together, these perspectives show that it would be unjust to overlook the philosophy of hope as developed in ancient Greek philosophy (as is Preface vii often done); rather, this rich thinking on hope can be a valuable resource for contemporary perspectives on hope. The second chapter focuses, as the title indicates, on “Early Christian Thinking on Hope.” The chapter is written by Martin Webber and Kobus Kok, two New Testament scholars; they start out by noting that there is often a division between the research done on the classics and the research on hope in studies of early Christianity. In their chapter, Webber and Kok seek to overcome this division. They do so by developing a “bottom-up” approach; in particular, they focus on the New Testament’s first letter to the Thessalonians (the earliest known New Testament document), in which hope is an important topic. Their investigation of this one particular letter reveals a number of interesting things; what is important in the context of this book is the discovery that the concept of hope found in 1 Thessalo- nians is not unrelated to accounts of hope in the classical world. Webber and Kok show, for example, that both this letter and the Greco-Roman philosophy of that time had a clear eye for the communal implications of hope, rather than just focusing on the effect of hope on the individual. Taking a leap from the classical world, the third chapter focuses on “Hope as a Virtue in the Middle Ages.” Written by Andrew Pinsent, from the University of Oxford, this chapter examines the integration of hope into virtue ethics during a period in which human aspirations were radically transformed following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Pinsent focuses especially on Thomas Aquinas’ theo- logical account of the virtue of hope, and he seeks to illuminate this account by drawing on novel, contemporary insights from experimental psychology, notably the metaphor of joint attention or second-person relatedness. On this account, God is not just the distant and ultimate object of the virtue of hope, but also what Pinsent calls “one’s present co-attending subject.” On this interpretation, there can at least be a tacit awareness of God’s presence in this life, strengthening and encouraging the believer with a foretaste of the promised object of hope. Although God is no longer so widely recognized as fulfilling these roles in modern Western secular societies, Pinsent concludes by pointing out that some of the structural patterns of this medieval account of the virtue of hope and its associated passion continue to be highly significant.