Hope’s Hidden Life

In “Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis,” Denise Levertov encounters Christ as he bears “Incarnation’s heaviest weight.” In these fleeting moments, she writes, Christ finds himself “out of his depth,” enduring the “sickened desire . . . to simply cease, to not be.” The poet’s meditation on these moments offers a useful lens for reconsidering Augustinian hope. In view of Christ’s suffering as the incarnated divine promise, how does Augustine interpret the meaning of St. Paul’s “one hope” (Eph. 4:4) and St. Peter’s “living hope” (1 Pet. 1:3)? While other hopes unfold under the shadow of death, the life that is “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3) draws its hope out of the depths to which Christ has descended. This results in a new way of keeping time in God’s promise: a way that for Augustine disrupts and exceeds, without abandoning, life in the saeculum.