Despair

DESPAIR. - Psychologically and morally, despair is a positive and direct opposition to supernatural hope.

Psychologically, despair retains the same presuppositions as hope, namely, in the intellect, the knowledge of man's supernatural destination to the beatitude of the eternal possession of God; and in the will, the desire to attain it; but despair excludes what constitutes the essence of hope, namely trust in the promises made by Jesus Christ, which assure us of God's will to give Himself as reward and the means necessary to merit it. In the conflict between this conscious desire for happiness and the lost confidence of conquering it lies the anguish of the despairing person.

At the basis of this spiritual attitude there ordinarily stands either positive doubt about divine forgiveness with regard to one's past sins, or, for the future, positive doubt about the efficacy of divine Grace in sparing one from temptations beyond one's strength or at least in sustaining the weak will in the face of their allurement, of sinful habits contracted and of the good to be done. A sign and at the same time an effect of this attitude is the abandonment of every religious practice, of every struggle against evil, of every effort toward good, as things judged by now ineffective and useless for realizing the despairing desire for salvation.

Very different from despair is the pusillanimity that is often found in the religious practice of sensitive persons, deriving not from distrust in God's mercy, omnipotence and faithfulness to His promises, but only from distrust in one's own cooperation with Grace; a cooperation that in hope acts as a condition to which God has bound the efficacy of His promised goodness and omnipotence in granting salvation and the means of meriting it. Such distrust in one's own cooperation is born in these souls from erroneous preconceptions about its necessity and efficacy, or more often from disappointments and failures, more or less culpable, in one's own ethico-religious experience, or even from innate timidity and lack of confidence in all of one's aspirations, even natural ones, and not only in these aspirations of supernatural hope.

Very different from theological despair is also that form of despair of a pathological character, which is found in an individual whenever, through the effect of some physical or psychic disturbance, he falls into a deep anguished melancholy, despises himself without foundation and considers himself damned, thinking, without reason, that he is committing or has committed sins so atrocious that they cannot find forgiveness with God. The diagnosis and treatment of such a state of mind belongs to psychiatry, not to religion.

It is self-evident that despair in the sense explained is in direct and positive opposition to hope: in direct opposition, because it strikes at its very essence, opposing to trust in God's promises distrust in those same promises; in positive opposition, because this distrust is not merely a failure of the will to adhere to the divine promises, but is an act of the will that refuses them access.

Morally too, despair is positively opposed to hope: because, just as hope, through trust in God's promises, honors His goodness, omnipotence and faithfulness, so despair, through distrust in His promises, offends Him in those same attributes. Therefore despair is in itself always a most grave sin; and although there are graver sins, this is the most dangerous; but ordinarily, as was said above, one falls into despair through distrust in one's own cooperation, or through weariness in renewing efforts against inveterate bad habits, ever reborn under the blows of a long-continued struggle.

Despair is finally in direct opposition to hope, inasmuch as it excludes, by destroying it, the virtue of hope, infused in the act of Baptism, as a permanent endowment of the soul deified in Christ (v. SPERANZA).

Leonardo Azzolini