80 The Yes oJ [esus Christ

person's conscience and calls into question the self-

justification in which such a person has taken refuge after

the loss oE Eaith. The downtrodden conscience speaks

again from outside, and now everything that gives it voice

must be crushed underEoot along with it. More generally

we can say that the person who refuses his or her meta-

physical greatness is an apostate with regard to the divine

vocation of being human. The monstrous and enormous

hatred that seethes in many terrorist organizations today

cannot indeed be understood at all without this cornpul-

sion to crush ones conscience underfoot arid along with

it everything that recalls its message?

Spitefulness (malitia) in the strict sense consists for

Thomas Aquinas in deliberate rebellion against God, in

hatred of God: a stance that is actually absurd and that

be comes possible only when metaphysical inertia, the

rejection of God's love, has become the core of someone's

existence. Here it becomes clear that slothfulness or

inertia (false humility) and pride of rejection are inter-

locked. Today we are discovering how this kind of out-

come spreads and casts its spell over people who in the

captivity of their rejection are driven to a hatred that can

only be satisfied by the destruction of man. This kind of

despair can also wear the mask of optimism. Indeed, the

ideological optimism we have described earlier is funda-

mentally always a mask hiding despair.

Hope and Love 81

Varieties oj Seif-Satisfaction: Bourgeois Pelagianism

and tbe Pelagianism oj tbe Pious

In order not to draw this meditation out too long I will

skip an analysis of presumption, that twin-sister of

des pair: the common foundation of both attitudes lies in

the error of thinking that one does not need God for the

realization and fulfillment of one's own being. Following

Josef Pieper closely, I would like merely to try to offer a

few comments on two widespread forms in which this

vice finds expression and which from a purely superficial

point of view can appear harrnless."

The first variation of presumption that we need to talk

about is the bourgeois liberal Pelagianism that rests on

considerations such as these: "If God really does exist and

if he does in fact bother about people he cannot be so

fearfully demanding as is described by the faith of the

Church. Moreover I'm no worse than the others: I do my

duty, and the minor human weaknesses cannot really be as

dangerous as all that,' In this widespread attitude to life

we find the human self-belittlement that we have already

described in the case of accidie and the self-sufficiency

with regard to infinite love that people think they do not

need in their bourgeois self-satisfaction. Perhaps in times

of peace one can live for quite a long time in this frame of

82 The Yes 0/ Jesus Christ

mind. But at the moment of crisis people will either be

converted from it or fall victim to despair.The other face of this same vice is the Pelagianism of

the pious. They do not want any forgiveness from God,

nor indeed any gift at all from him, They want to be okay

thernselves, wanting not forgiveness but their just reward.

They want security, not hope. By means of a tough and

rigorous system of religious practices, by means of

prayers and actions, they want to create for themselves a

right to blessedness. What they lack is the humility essen-

tial to any love-the humility to be able to receive wh at

we are given over and above what we have deserved and

achieved. The denial of hope in favor of security that we

are faced with here rests on the inability to bear the ten-

sion of waiting for what is to come and to abandon one-

self to God's goodness. This kind of Pelagianism is thus

an apostasy from love and from hope but also at the pro-

foundest level from faith too. Man hardens his heart

against himself, against others and ultirnately against

God: man needs God's divinity but no longer his love. He

puts himself in the right, and a God that does not co-

operate becomes his enemy. The Pharisees of the New

Testament are an eternally valid representation of this

deformation of religion. The core of this Pelagianism is

a religion withour love that in this way degenerates into a

sad and miserable caricature of religion.

Hope and Love 83

Fear, Hope, Love

If we talk of the connection between hope and love the

subject of fear must finally also be touched on. The Pela-

gianism of the pious is a child of fear, of a damaged hope

that cannot endure the tension of awaiting the uncom-

pellable gift of love. So from hope arises anxiety, and that

in its turn gives birth to the striving for security in which

no uncertainty can remain. Love does not now overcome

fear because the egoistic person does not want to entrust

hirnself or herself to its kind of certainty that can always

only be a certainty of dialogue. From this point of view

fear must be exorcized independently of the others

through what is at my own disposal-through what I domyself, through my own work.

This kind of striving for security rests on the total self-

assertion of the ego, which refuses to take the risk of

emerging from its shell and entrusting itself to the other,

This is in fact the test for the absence of true love. On

the other hand we need to ding firmly to a kind of fear

that is not only compatible with love but necessarily fol-

lows from it: the fear of hurting the beloved, of destroy-

ing the foundations of love by one's own fault. Liberalism

and the Enlightenment want to talk us into accepting a

world without fear: they promise the complete elimina-