Refleksje o pojmowaniu nadziei historyka zachodniej myśli politycznej
Authors:   Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie, Szlachta Bogdan 
Published: May 2023

The Christian understanding of hope seems to encompass two areas: the first, extracted more often, is associated with a „hope of moral value”, sometimes juxtaposed with happiness, which, in the view of Christ’s followers, is achieved only in the „extra-temporal plan” (although, if we accept some interpretations, it is also fulfilled in the Church, the pilgrim „State of God”, as St. Augustine would say, since in it there is already a union of the human subject with God who brings the kingdom. God); the second area is connected with the first in that it reveals hope in connection with the Incarnation, the appearance of God in the material plane, not as Providence, but as a Person who is really present in the human body, suffering and even dying, especially in particular in connection with the Resurrection, the announcement and resurrection of man, and its duration until the resurrection. In both images, the presence of God seems to be crucial, and thus the importance of the non-political sphere, insofar as this is limited to the efforts to rule as imposing one’s own will on others. The historian of Western political thought finds this presence in connection with several models of the so-called Church-state relations prevailing in different historical periods. However, it no longer finds a similar presence in the most important twentieth-century political projects. In fact, he encounters three other ways of understanding hope, each of purely political value. Of these, the most popular still seems to be the one that is associated with the liberal tradition, but in such a version, which – especially in connection with the „messianic turn” of the late twentieth century – takes the form of emancipation from various „devices”, „dispositives” such as law or language; the transformations postulated in them are to support the work of liberation, emancipation, to bring hope for their fulfillment in a purely temporal plan, not supplemented by any „extramodial plan”. The Christian way of understanding hope, referring to such a „plan”, seems to the supporters of this approach dangerous, captivating, at least hindering the emancipation for which every person should converge for self-fulfillment in mortality, the realization of his desires here and now, without waiting for another plan. The call for the recognition of messianicity by each individual in himself is thus accompanied by opposition to the Christian project as one of the devices not only institutionally supported, but also used for the enslavement or objectification of individuals. However, there are two other projects: one of them announces the need to take into account the belonging of individuals to communities, it brings hope not only for them, but also for the wholes to which they belong; in this case, less reluctant to Christian hope, especially when the culture of the communities is linked to their religious dimension or rootedness, hope concerns the preservation of the cultural identities of the communities, their languages and the meanings expressed in them, their law based on customs or the dominant and long-standing culture. Another project, called multicultural, links hope not so much with maintaining cultural unity as with its breakdown, taking into account in legal formulas the distinctiveness and cultural diversity of citizens of the same country. A hope close to Christians disappears in certain political projects, replaced by hopes that are to be fulfilled only in the „temporal plan”.