Aquinas on Hope
In this Jubilee Year of Hope for the Catholic Church, let us reflect on Aquinas' writings on hope.
Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the Thomistic Tuesday series!
As many of you are aware, the Catholic Church is celebrating a Jubilee this year, with the theme being Pilgrims of Hope.
So, what did Saint Thomas Aquinas say about hope, one of the three theological virtues?
Aquinas refers to hope in two ways: as a passion and as a virtue. In his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a 12th-century theologian and bishop, he writes that hope is a passion that makes creatures move towards what is desirable. This, according to him, is how we humans are similar to animals. A predator animal will not attack its prey unless it has a reasonable hope of winning. In the same way, humans wouldn’t typically persevere in difficult tasks, e.g., studying for an exam or working out, unless we had some hope of gaining a benefit.
For those who are fans of Greek mythology, the concept of hope may recall the legend of Pandora’s box. Zeus, the King of the Greek Pantheon of Gods, wanted to punish humanity for stealing his sacred fire. For this, he directed Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, to create the first human woman, named Pandora. Zeus then endowed her with insatiable curiosity and gave her a jar, instructing her to never open it. Unable to quell her curiosity after many years, she finally opened the jar, unknowingly releasing all the evils of the world to mankind. Only one thing remained in the jar, intended by Zeus to be his greatest punishment: hope. By hope, human beings would have to suffer for all time and somehow still bear it.
There is a saying, sometimes attributed to Aquinas, that one can only hope for difficult things. This leads to his reference to hope as a virtue, which makes humans different from animals.
In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas writes that hope is a theological virtue because, by it, we humans can anticipate the highest good of eternal happiness, i.e., God himself. He references the Letter to the Hebrews, which says, “We have this hope as an anchor for our lives. It is safe and sure, and goes through the curtain of the heavenly temple into the inner sanctuary” (Heb 6:19). The use of the word anchor, a symbol of stability, refers to an immovable object that the hope is placed in. This, for the Christian, is none other than final union with God in heaven, a union difficult to obtain.
For Aquinas, hope does not precede faith because eternal life, as well as all of divine revelation, is proposed to us by faith. To hope, we first must believe.
As he wrote,
"...as much as a man through hoping to be rewarded by God, [he] is encouraged to love God and obey commandments."
He also references Saint Paul in his first letter to Timothy, saying,
"The end of the commandments is charity from a pure heart, and a good conscience (i.e., hope)" (1 Tim 1:5).