THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Faust, let alone to the chrysalis condition; not even the eternity of happiness is here one of repose. Even arrival still remains process here, with rising fall gain, even
salvation does not cease here to contain a Tantalus sui generis, a kind of Tantalus of happiness. Even heaven yields no ready goal­content, there remains instead an
infinitely striving distance from it, and there also remains of course that not scrupulous but rich premonition which passes over again and again to untested horizons. The
scrupulous distance is Protestant, as noted above, as resolutely as the faith in attainability and contemplatable goal­form has remained arch­Catholic. The Protestant
Faustian heaven corresponds, despite its Catholic clothing, to Lessing's proposition that truth is only for God alone, the striving for truth is for man; and related to this is
Kant's doctrine of the eternally only approximative movement towards the ideal. Whereas Dante's heaven, this total exposition of arrival, corresponds with equally great
fidelity to the ultimate faith in Sabbath and rest of classic medieval philosophy, represented above all by Dante's master Thomas Aquinas. In Thomas there is no endless
approach to the ideal at all, but human creatures are thoroughly capable of attaining by means of grace that divinae bonitatis similitudo for which they are destined. So
whereas in the Protestant Faustian heaven the goal perpetually moves and therefore distances itself so much that it almost ceases to be one, in Dante's Catholic heaven
it stands so firmly and eternally in central repose as if in its own essence it was no goal at all, i.e. in correlation to a path, but an absolute self­composure and perfection
of Being in and for itself. But although in Dante­Thomas repose is thus reified and ontologically hypostasized, as in Faust­Lessing­Kant the infinitely striving distance
from it, a primacy of Dante's Paradiso over the Faustian heaven still emerges on the one hand, where this infinite striving is concerned. It is the utopian primacy of rest,
as the schema of fulfilment, over motion, as the schema of unfulfilled striving for something; whereby Dante's land of legend, like that of Giotto, stands as a corrective to
every intention­perspective which does not destroy itself in bad infinity of approaching any more than in infinite variability. The infinity which appears as scrupulosity if
not as ultimate non­wanting of arrival and successfulness is a caricature of the historical­utopian conscience and by no means this conscience itself. This is precisely why
the rose as Dante's symbol of rest has a utopian primacy over the infinitely ramifying symbols of elevation in the Faustian high mountains; for utopia is accordingly not
one of itself, but one of its no longer utopian content — as one that is attained. On the other hand, of course, the primacy of circular rest over Faustian motion