Hope, the Little Girl
Dante stands before the gates of Hell and reads the inscription upon the arch, whose last line is one of the profoundest and most terrible written by man: ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. I have explained it to my students thus: The true virtue of faith does not exist in Hell, but a sort of minimal and ineffectual form of it does. “The devils believe, and tremble,” says James (2:19). The true virtue of charity does not exist in Hell, but desires and passions do, however unfulfilling or misery-making they may be. So Milton’s Satan admits, seized with envy for the embraces of Adam and Eve, which he gazes at covertly:
Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two
Emparadised in one another’s arms,
The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss, whilst I to Hell am thrust,
Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least,
Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pines.
But hope? Not a ghost of it, not even in curdled or monstrous form. No hope; that door is shut.
Of the three theological virtues, hope may be the easiest to overlook or to misunderstand. Puddleglum of happy memory, that dour marsh-wiggle in C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, is a pessimist all over, and yet a creature filled with hope; else he had never gone on the journey against all reasonable odds to find and to set free Rilian, prince of Narnia. We are apt to think that hope implies optimism, a trust that from age to age, things get better, thus transposing upon the moral, social, and intellectual state of man his evident progress in scientific discovery and technological invention. It is hard work, as I have often found to my surprise, to persuade otherwise conservative people that their forebears were likely wiser in what they read, more eloquent in what they wrote, more skilled with their hands, filled with more music in their minds and hearts and more prayer in their knees, than we are. One would think that diaries, letters, magazines, newspapers, popular novels, widely beloved poetry, sheet music, churches, and public buildings from the American centennial in 1876 would embarrass us in 2026, we who manage to do so little with all our great wealth.
Hope is the real thing. Optimism is the charlatan with his slick talk and his elixir for all that ails you—catarrh, lumbago, gout, apoplexy, everything. Hope builds up treasure beyond the present world. Optimism picks your pocket with promises of wealth to come. Hope lays a bridge from this world to the next. Optimism sells you one in Brooklyn.
The Virtue That Surprises God
And that brings me to a most unusual poem, Le porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu, The Portal to the Mystery of Hope, by Charles Péguy (1873–1914). The poem is more than two hundred pages long, all in free verse, with a period after every line, full sentence or no. I do not have the space even to begin to address its entirety. As for the author himself, his journey from agnosticism to the Catholic faith and his heroic death at the onset of the Great War are worthy of careful biographical treatment. But I would like to touch on something that Péguy impresses upon us, something that we now most urgently need to hear. Hope is both the most childlike of the three virtues and the one most centered upon the child. If so, then the relative childlessness of the contemporary Western world is a sign of its gray heart, its aged and cringing despair.
The speaker in his poem, the nun Madame Gervais, addressing the girl Jeanne d’Arc, says that God himself is surprised neither by faith nor by charity. You have to shut your eyes and stop up your ears not to believe. You have to harden your heart against all the human suffering about you not to love. But hope?
But hope, says God, that’s what does astonish me.
Even me.
That really is astonishing. (translation mine)
Faith and Charity, in Madame Gervais’s telling, are, with Hope, the daughters of God. We can picture Faith and Charity as full-grown women. But Hope stands out among the three by her smallness:
Faith is a true wife.
Charity is a mother.
An ardent mother, warm-hearted and brave.
Or an older sister who is just like a mother.
But Hope is a little girl, nothing at all.
She was just born last Christmas. She plays with the wooden creche and the snowman. Yet, says Madame Gervais,
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Subscribe (Print + Online) 
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Subscribe (Online Only) 
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on poetry from the online archives
37.5—Sept/Oct 2024
A Battle Plan for Peace While Growing Old by Anthony Esolen
more from the online archives
35.4—Jul/Aug 2022
The Death Rattle of a Tradition
Contemporary Catholic Thinking on the Question of War by Andrew Latham
34.1—January/February 2021
Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher by Hans Boersma
21.1—January/February 2008
John Chrysostom’s Discovery of the Blessings & Mysteries of Marriage by Mike Aquilina
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
Support Touchstone
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
