St. Thomas will often point out how we as
human beings differ from God and angels.
One instance of this appears in his discussion of beatitude.
First, God's beatitude.
God does not long for beatitude or obtain it as the fruit of discovery.
Rather, God just is subsisting beatitude.
Next, angelic beatitude.
"Angels come to their beatitude by one movement," he writes.
"Given their nature, they need make a single choice and they reap forever the harvest,
thereof."
Finally, human beatitude.
Man comes to his end by many movements.
As embodied souls, we live discursively.
We engage with our environment, learn from it and fashion a life accordingly.
We come only in time to discover who we are, who God is and how we are to live.
The good life for man is very much a life
on the way.
The life of a wayfarer.
But without a firm grasp of the end, such a life can prove insupportable and impossible.
In order to attain to our end, we need a virtue that anchors us in the beatitude that God
gives so that we can lift up our eyes to the hills from whence shall come our help.
And so, God in his generosity gives us himself in grace and outfits us with the virtue of
hope to conduct us to our heavenly homeland.
In this video, ponder the virtue of hope and
the grace that it imparts to the believer.
The virtue of hope builds on the passion of hope.
By hope, we are moved to pursue an arduous good, which we apprehend as possible to obtain.
Hope in this basic sense is just a movement of the irascible power; that power which supplies
the appetitive energy for difficult goods.
But beyond a mere bodily response, hope also has spiritual dimensions and so it's appropriate
to locate it in the will.
We speak of hoping for a variety of different things.
For a snow day, for a raise, for a successful sports team.
In these examples, it's a natural hope that we harbor.
The moral virtues are sufficient for training these appetites on their good.
But, hope understood as a theological virtue specifically, this concerns our ultimate end
- eternal life with God.
Here, the moral virtues are insufficient.
We do not, of our own power, have the wherewithal to conceive of this good, much less to pursue
it well.
So, God infuses the theological virtue of hope, raising our minds and hearts to him
so that we can respond generously to his offer of beatitude.
Thus, hope is first the work of God and it principally concerns the end.
The virtue of hope is a graced confidence
that God will give eternal life to me and to those whom I love because he is omnipotent
and merciful.
Hope leans on God's help amidst the experience of human inability and insufficiency.
It is a thoroughly Christian virtue.
Hope looks to Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith who has gone before us into the
sanctuary on high and presents our humanity before God as a pleasing sacrifice on our behalf.
We believe and trust that eternal life is
made available to us because Christ has undone the primordial sin and unbarred the gates
of heaven to us.
We might say that hope is a virtue of the already but not yet.
Already in that hope has a clear orientation to fulfillment, won for us in Christ.
It is rooted in the revelation of God and the promise of salvation.
It imparts a kind of certitude flowing from the certitude of faith.
Not yet in that it is given during a time of non-fulfillment.
Hope steels our nerves to withstand temptations against vigilance and perseverance.
It goads us lest we coast and encourage us lest we give up.
It fortifies the irresolute by giving a foretaste of the permanence and perfection of heaven
to come.
As with faith, there is an inherent imperfection
in hope since it approaches God from a distance and cannot yet lay hold of its object.
This imperfection is not present in charity, which enjoys union with God, who is experienced
both now and in heaven as supreme friend and giver of divine love.
And so, hope will not endure as does charity.
In heaven, there will simply be no need for hope as the souls of the just will possess
God without fear of loss or diminishment.
Now, passing on to sins against hope.
Aristotle will often comment that the virtue is in the mean.
And while this applies more aptly to the moral virtues than to the theological virtues, we
can see this at work in the virtue of hope.
The principle sins against hope are presumption and despair.
Presumption is a kind of cavalier assurance that God will save me regardless of whether
or not I consent and cooperate with his grace.
The presumptuous man refuses to make use of the means that God appoints for salvation,
whether they be persevering prayer or sacramental confession.
It is a denial of our status as pilgrims.
It sets aside the uncertainty of the way in favor of the certainty of the saved.
At the other extreme there is despair.
Despair arises from a sadness with the divine good, which one judges inaccessible or impossible.
Despair is a denial that God's promises apply to me or a fear that he will deny pardon even
to the repentant.
Despair sets aside the uncertainty of the way in favor of the certainty of the damned.
Wending his way between presumption and despair,
each Christian is called to live in the uncertain assurance of God's gift.
He is to always pray and not lose heart.
As Josef Pieper writes, "One must cultivate a hope that is humble enough really to pray
and at the same time, magnanimous enough to wait cooperatively for the fulfillment of
its prayer."
A final word about fear.
St. Thomas associates each of the virtues with a gift of the Holy Spirit.
In the case of hope, the pertinent gift is the fear of the Lord.
Here, he takes pains to distinguish what is meant by fear.
The fear under consideration isn't a worldly fear which dreads the loss of possessions.
Rather, it is a disposition that in its initial stages, fears God's punishments and in its
mature stages, fears to offend God in any way.
The former we call servile fear and the latter we call filial fear or chaste fear.
This fear perfects hope by imparting to the soul a supernatural sensitivity for what aids
us and what hinders us in our pursuit of the vision of God so that we might tend toward
the one and from the other.
For those who are on the way, there is simply
no substitute for hope.
As we ascend by many movements to the vision of God, we must be encouraged less we lose
heart in pursuit of this great and arduous good.
For there is nothing so difficult to attain nor anything so worthy of the effort as the
unfailing vision of God.
For our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
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