“The first thought to which hope gives rise as soon as it is applied to the field of human existence is, paradoxically, the irrationality of hope itself. For an existential anthropology indeed hope develops what Kierkegaard called an ‘absurd logic.’ Shall we take this path? And if we take it, must we not renounce the project as an intellectus fidei et spei? I do not think so. On the contrary, the authentic rationality of hope can be grasped nowhere else than at the end of this ‘absurd logic.’

The first expression of this ‘absurd logic’ of hope is to be found in the anthropological conception of St. Paul. Paul is the first thinker who tried to elaborate an existential interpretation of the two central christological events: the cross and the resurrection. And this existential interpretation is fundamentally antinomic: death of the old human being, rebirth of the new one. This second birth is the eschatological event in existential terms. Now this eschatological event cannot be expressed by the means of a logic of identity. We must express it as a break, as a leap, as a new creation, as a wholly other.

The most striking expression of this antinomic anthropology may be found in the famous fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: ‘Then as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all’ (5:18-19).

Everyone knows the parallelism between Adam and Jesus Christ. This parallelism provides a rhetorical framework for the new logic of hope that breaks through the logic of sin:

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many…. If because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive abundance of grade and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. (Rom. 5:16-17)

Such is the absurd logic of hope, expressed by this grammatical device: much more, much more.

The logic of crime and punishment was a logic of equivalence (‘the wages of sin is death’); the logic of hope is a logic of increase and of superabundance (‘When sin increased, grace abounded all the more’ ’5:20-21]).

This absurd logic is the logic of hope as opposed to the logic of repetition. Hope means the ‘superabundance’ of meaning as opposed to the abundance of senselessness, of failure, and of destruction.

The existential meaning of this law of superabundance is rich and complex. There are many ways of living according to this eschatological event of the new creation. Many ways: personal and collective, ethical and political. All these ways are irreducible to a mere wisdom of the eternal present: they bear the mark of the future-of the ‘not yet’ and of the ‘much more’; in the terms of Kierkegaard, hope makes of freedom the passion for the possible against the sad mediation on the irrevocable. This passion for the possible is the answer of hope to all Nietzschean love of destiny, to all worship of fate, to all amor fati.

The passion for the possible implies no illusion; it knows that all resurrection is resurrection from among the dead, that all new creation is in spite of death. As the Reformers used to say, the resurrection is hidden under its contrary, the cross. For seen from the standpoint of hope, life is not only the contrary of but the denial of death; this denial relies on signs, not on proofs. It interprets in a creative way the signs of the superabundance of life in spite of the evidence of death” (Ricoeur 1995:205-207).

Ricoeur, Paul
1995 Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. David Pellauer, trans. Mark I Wallace, ed. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

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