“The faith I love best is hope”: Perspectives of Hope from Charles Péguy
“The faith I love best is hope”: Perspectives of Hope from Charles Péguy

Summary/Abstract: Following calls from recent popes to a rediscovery of the theological virtue of hope, this paper examines a poem dealing specifically with that subject, by Charles Péguy, a French poet who died in 1914 in the early fighting of the First World War. He is a key fi gure of what has been called the French Catholic revival. His dramatic monologue takes the form of a catechism lesson addressed to the young St. Joan of Arc, in which Hope is portrayed as a little girl. Rooted in a rediscovery of the “real” and under the infl uence of the philosopher Bergson, Péguy’s message seems to be that a childlike Hope could be the key to a renewal of Faith and Love, and perhaps to a re-energizing of the Christian message. Péguy wrote his poem at a time when France was deeply traumatized by the Franco-Prussian war, the Dreyfus scandal and the anti-clerical purge of the early 20th century. It was a society that had lost is bearings. Many themes of his day are strangely current in our own.

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