Hope in Historical Theology

In 420 A.D., Augustine wrote a manual for the Christian faith. He grounded his guide in the triad of faith, hope and love.[1] The entire work describes how “God should be worshipped in faith, hope, love” as it answers the question: “What should be believed, what should be hoped for, and what should be loved?”[2]

The Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed were central to Augustine’s pedagogy. He argued, “in these two we have the three theological virtues working together: faith believes; hope and love pray.”[3] Augustine’s conception of hope leans toward the future, “hope deals only with good things, and only with those which lie in the future, and which pertain to the man who cherishes the hope.”[4] This distinguishes hope from faith, since faith looks back as well as forward. He suggests that the commonality of faith and hope lie in “what is not seen, whether this unseen is believed in or hoped for.”[5]

The early church father argues that the triad is interdependent. You won’t find one without the other: “love is not without hope, hope is not without love, and neither hope nor love are without faith.”[6] Following the Pauline hierarchy, love stands at the top of the triad. When one loves rightly, he believes and hopes rightly. The contrary is also true, “he who does not love believes in vain, even if what he believes is true; he hopes in vain.”[7]

In the early Christian age, a number of other theologians framed the discussion of hope within the realm of virtue.[8] Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth century desert monk, contributed to the cardinal sin tradition by identifying eight deadly sins. His list included the “noonday demon,” which was characterized by “spiritual dryness, psychic exhaustion, impatience, alternating restlessness and listlessness, reluctance or outright resentment in service of one’s fellows and of God.”[9] Hope was Ponticus’ weapon for fighting the demon of despair.

John Cassian, another fourth century monk, popularized the “seven deadly sins” tradition. His work carried forward the “systematic analysis of the vices.”[10]  Despair was explored further as a vice and hope as a virtue. Cassian counseled manual labor as a remedy for despair. Gregory the Great, the last of the “Latin Fathers” of the church was also pivotal in the “seven deadly sins” framework. He argued that solitude is the great enemy of hope and stronghold for despair.[11] Gregory prescribed spiritual joy and the possibilities of grace as despair’s remedy.

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the fourth century Cappadocian Fathers, tackles the question of hope in the face of death.[12] Grief without hope leads to despair. For Gregory, the resurrection is hope’s invasion of grief. Pastorally, Gregory modeled passionate grief and lament to move his congregation to a place where their rational faculties could engage the objective hope of the resurrection.[13] In Gregory’s perspective, the empty tomb invites hard, yet hope-filled grieving.

In the Scholastic Era, Thomas Aquinas was the champion of hope theology. He offers important distinctions in the hope-as-virtue tradition; his separation of sinful and amoral despairing, his grasp of hopelessness leading to the abandonment of good, the impact of denying the hope of forgiveness.[14] Aquinas, is credited with the distinction that Moltmann resurrected: hopelessness as presumption and despair.[15] Aquinas also taught a two-step view of hope after death, focusing on a disembodied beatific vision upon death and an embodied new earth experience in God’s presence at the resurrection.[16]

[1]Albert C. Outler, ed., Augustine’s Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love (1955), 2.

[2]Ibid. See Brunner, Eternal Hope, 137. “In this unity of faith, hope, and love consists the excellence of the church, of the Body of Christ. To remove one of these dimensions means to destroy the whole. Faith is nothing when it is not active in love. Faith and love are nothing, when they cannot be fulfilled in that for which man hopes. In fact, one can simply describe the new condition of life thus: ‘Born again to a new and living hope.’”

[3]Outler, Augustine’s Enchiridion, 3.

[4]Ibid, 4.

[5]Ibid.

[6]Ibid.

[7]Outler, Augustine’s Enchiridion, 48.

[8]Mary Louise Bringle, Despair: Sickness or Sin? Hopelessness and Healing in the Christian Life (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 52. According to Bringle, extolling hope as a virtue and condemning despair as a sin “sounded a genuinely new note in the history of ideas.” Early Greek literature did not place hope in the realm of virtue. The corollary to hope was not despair, it was folly.

[9]Ibid.

[10]Ibid, 55.

[11]Ibid, 59. Gregory said, “sadness assaults the solitary person everywhere…it is lack of interest in things spiritual, slackness of the mind, neglect of religious exercises, hatred of confession, preference for worldly matters.”

[12]Hans Boersma, “Numbed with grief: Gregory of Nyssa on bereavement and hope,” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 7:1 (2014): 46-59. 

[13]Ibid, 57. Gregory understood that the “the passion of grief can easily “overshadow the hope of eternal life.” He believed it was his “fundamental duty to comfort his congregation with the rational hope of the resurrection—a hope that is temporarily clouded as a result of grief.”

[14] Bringle, Despair, 61, 64-65. Aquinas describes despair as an “essential dynamic of human emotional life…as neither vice nor virtue.” On the other hand, he argues that despair is sin when it is a rejection of the “divine good.” This leads to a nuanced understanding of a “deliberate and positive sin of despair” versus “indeliberate acts of despair.” Despair is sin when it turns away from God, “the divine good” rather than toward him when one is downcast. “The proper object of the virtue of hope is God and ultimate reunion with the divine. Despair as a vice spurns this particular object, rejecting the possibility of living in hopeful affirmation of God’s promises of future blessedness.” Despair in this framework is a “refusal of joy.”

[15]Ibid, 66. For Aquinas, both presumption and despair are an “assault upon and destruction of hope. Both the despairing and the presumptuous individual (often one and the same) conclude distrustfully that they know more about what will or will not happen in the future than does God Godself.”

[16]Jason Hentschel, “Thomas Aquinas, 2 Corinthians 5, and the Christian hope for life after death,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 8:1 (2014): 80. “Aquinas presents…a two-stage hope. It is a hope that provides Christians with a certainty that upon death they and their loved ones enter immediately into the presence and love of God… this dual hope is also the anticipation of something much more. When Christ returns, Christians will rise with immortal and incorruptible bodies.”