Hope: A Virtue for Our Time
Faith, hope, and charity are the three theological virtues — the three virtues that direct us immediately and rightly to God Himself. We all know these three greatest virtues by heart, but it is likely that few of us have spent as much time focusing on hope as we have on the other two. There has always and rightly been a great focus on the virtues of faith and charity — the precious beginning and great culmination of the Christian spiritual life. Like the proverbial middle child, hope is sometimes a bit overlooked. But what if God were to offer us an unshakeable certainty of His love for us — a supernatural confidence in His action for our good, unaffected by the changing circumstances of each passing day? What peace of soul might we enjoy if we embraced such a gift? This is what the virtue of hope, given to each of us in our Baptism, offers us. Here we will take a closer look at the theological virtue of hope and see just how pivotal a virtue it is — especially for our time.
Pope Benedict XVI and the Crisis of Hope
Pope Benedict XVI observed with a particular clarity of vision that we are living in an age that is plagued by a profound crisis in hope. It was in order to combat this crisis that he wrote the encyclical Spe Salvi (“Saved in Hope”). The Pope Emeritus points out that modern man, expelled from Paradise and falling deeper and deeper into sin, no longer hopes to be saved from this woeful condition by redemption in Christ. Rather, modern man places his hope in human ingenuity and advances in technology. Through these, he hopes to regain the dominion over creation that he once enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. This, in turn, will lead us to an earthly paradise and happiness. Therefore, Pope Benedict concludes, modern man hopes for the wrong thing through the wrong means: he hopes for an earthly happiness rather than an eternal one, and he hopes to achieve this by human ingenuity, rather than by the grace of Christ.
Hoping for the wrong thing through the wrong means, society at large seems to oscillate between the false hope that science, technology, or some new political system will finally bring lasting happiness to man, and the emptiness and despair that inevitably follow in the wake of abandoning the God of all hope and consolation. Without the one great hope of eternal salvation which anchors the soul, we find ourselves in an age characterized by fleeting pleasures, anxiety, and despair. Our society is in need of the one great hope that orients our whole lives. For modern man to find his way, he must find the Way, the Truth, and the Life — Jesus Christ.
