“Abandon every hope, all you who enter!
— The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, Canto III, Line 9 (Mark Musa translation)
Even people who have never cracked the spine of The Divine Comedy know this quote. It is one of those common bits of lore that form the foundation of Western Culture.
It does, however, take some time and maturity to really understand the hell of hopelessness. I say this because I did not understand the reality of hopelessness until later in my life. This is when I first encountered severe clinical depression.
Now, at age 70, I have experienced it and encountered it in myself and others all too often. One of the most debilitating symptoms of clinical depression is just that: hopelessness.
It is important to realize that “Abandon every hope, all you who enter” is not advice or a warning. It is a curse. Hope is stripped from those entering hell as the first punishment.
The Malebolge
The episode in which this broke through to me was in Dante’s description of the Malebolge. The Malebolge are ten evil ditches in the eighth circle of hell.
The fifth ditch in the Malebolge is guarded by the Malebranche, demons who torment corrupt politicians submerged in a river of boiling pitch. Two of these demons collide over the pitch and become bogged down and ensnared themselves. This led me to wonder why the sinners didn’t arise and pull down their tormentors and inhabit the banks of the ditch themselves.
The short answer is that while these sinners were more than vicious, corrupt, and scheming enough to imagine such a feat while alive, they cannot now do so. This is because the inhabitants of the hell have no hope. Hope is the element that brings efforts from concept to attempt to execution. While they can still lie and attempt petty schemes, actually bettering their condition in any way is beyond their power even to imagine.
Hopelessness in the Here and Now
The twentieth century featured more than a few events that looked calculated to extinguish hope. There was, for instance, trench warfare, concentration camps for mass extermination, and the Gulag Archipelago. Any number of institutions were also seemingly constructed to snuff out hope and creativity in those subject to their authority. Some of these horrors still persist today – the Laogai, the prisons of Iran and Venezuela, and the entire nation of North Korea.
Even with all the force and concentrated effort of modern technology, psychological insight, and the power of the State, such efforts have failed to kill off all hope. Some survives in samizdat communications, in escape plans and attempts, or in the sheer determination to survive and bear witness to what was done.
Hope does, apparently, spring eternal in the human breast, even under the most unlikely circumstances.
People appear to be built to resist external influences. This is a propensity that may appear to peak in adolescence but which crops up in people at any time of their lives. Put people in an environment designed to create hopelessness and some percentage of the people will resist it to their fullest, sometimes succeeding.
Hopelessness from the Inside
But the greatest scourge of hope in our modern nation is probably from the inside. Depression is epidemic among Americans. It hits as many as 10 to 18 percent of people in any given 2-week period (reporting seems to be inconsistent between different health organizations and news agencies).
Fortunately the studies reporting the highest rates of depression also report the shortest average duration of the episodes. Less than three percent of people reporting symptoms of depression characterize it as severe. Most people characterize their experience as mild to moderate.
Severe, lasting depression from a person’s internal makeup (composed of biological or environmental factors, or a combination of both) may be the biggest opponent of hope in our country today. Americans have been seen as the most optimistic people in the world since the time of Alexis de Tocqueville. This is because Americans generally expect good outcomes over time no matter what their current situation.
Optimism and hope also go hand in hand. Pessimism (the opposite of hope) is founded on the sense that things will go wrong. While measures of American optimism have slipped in recent years, our optimism is still high.
In recent years, measurements of our national hopefulness have fallen in concert with measurements of our religious devotion. This does not seem to me to be coincidental. The hope of heaven is the mother of all hopes, just as the source of all goodness is God. If we abandon these anchors, we abandon what they hold . . . hence the curse at the gates of Dante’s hell.
Hope in the Outside
Our neglect of goodness leads us to hell. Upon our arrival the last of our true hope is drained away as well, revealing the falsity of what some treated as hope in their mortal lives.
In the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” (CCC 1817) “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.”
Ecclesiastes warns us from the very first verse and throughout the text against substitutes for our true hope: “Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).
“Everything in this life passes away – only God remains…” wrote Fr. Seraphim Rose, the Russian Orthodox monk and mystic.
And over and over Psalms advises us to put our hope in the Lord alone, and that Jesus Himself is our Hope of Salvation. No wonder Hope is put aside at the gates of hell.
If we are to have hope in the outside world, it must be based on a foundation of hope in Heaven. Nothing else can withstand the storms of life and the human fondness for strife. We must remember that Jesus is the Light of the world. It is his guiding Light that leads to all things in which we can anchor a firm and solid hope.
The Anchor of Hope
St. John writes, “My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one” (1 John 2:1).
Jesus Christ is our anchor, our hope, and the rock of our salvation. Against Him, the gates of hell truly cannot prevail.
A Prayer for Hope (Against Depression)
Oh Resurrected Lord
Shining with the Glory of the Father
And seated at the Right Hand of God
Please hear me as I call to you from the depths of my sorrow.
You who bore all the pain and shame of the world in death
Hear me as I call to you from own pain and shame
I have lost sight of Your light
My eyes are overwhelmed by darkness
And my heart is heavy with dread
The taste of life is ashes in my mouth
And death opens its arms in greeting
Deliver me from my extremity, Oh Lord
And restore to me Hope
Open my eyes to see again your light
Fill my heart with gratitude for your blessings
And my soul with the sweetness of Grace
Remind me of your Love
and give me the strength to return to the world you have made
Rejoicing in your mercy
Fill my mouth with praises to Your name
And my days with works of Your will
So raised with You, I may never return
To the emptiness and despair of self alone.
Amen
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