David Elliot, Hope and Christian Ethics

Abstract

Toward the end of Hope and Christian Ethics, David Elliot bestows upon a fellow scholar (a certain Dominic Doyle) a compliment that, it strikes me, is felicitous if applied reflexively. “[I]n contrast to much Thomist scholarship,” Elliot writes, Doyle demonstrates a knack for translating “Aquinas out of inhouse scholastic language” so as the better “to engage questions of widespread and obvious interest” (p. 189). Elliot’s compliment, however, comes with a proviso. Doyle, it turns out, attempted a somewhat daring development of Aquinas’s account of hope by which Elliot—for good reason, it would seem— is unconvinced. Elliot’s study, on the other hand, takes as architectonic a rigorously faithful rendering of Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of hope as found in the Summa theologiae. For all that, however, Elliot’s Thomism hasn’t a whiff of the parochial or pedantic. On the contrary, in his hands Aquinas feels uncannily contemporary, speaking presciently to the moods and pathologies afflicting our fevered age. For Aquinas, the common thread uniting all forms of hope is that their object is a future good “possible but arduous to attain” (ST II-II 17.1). In the case of theological hope, this possible but arduous object is, quite simply, God. What differentiates hope from charity is that whereas the object of charity is God for God’s own sake, the object of hope is God “qua one’s own good or beatitude” (p. 65). As might be expected, Aquinas posits two opposed vices: despair and presumption. Accordingly, in Elliot’s book we get one chapter on each of these (Chapter 4 on presumption, and 5 on despair). We also receive treatments of the beatitude that Aquinas associates with hope—“Blessed are the poor in spirit”—as well as the associated gift of the Holy Spirit—fear. 908143 PRE0010.1177/1063851220908143Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical TheologyBook Review book-review2020