Catholic theologians generally distinguish between hoping and believing. The 12th-century Cistercian spiritual author William of St.-Thierry nonetheless confesses in his Meditations: “I am bold to say that I do not truly know whether I hope for something other than that which I believe. You, Lord are my belief, you are my hope.”William of St.-Thierry, Meditations, no. 10, trans. Sr Penelope (Spencer, MA, 1971), p. 147. The Christian believer holds fast to the divine truths that are necessary for salvation. As a specific virtue of the Christian life, theological faith perfects human intelligence; to adapt the words of the Fourth Gospel, faith consecrates the human mind in Truth (Jn 17: 17). Still, even though properly speaking faith remains a virtue of the intellect, the act of faith requires more than the exercise of human intelligence. Christian belief relies on the energies of human appetite. Because the mysteries of faith surpass the inbred capacities of human intelligence, the human will must supply the required momentum for making the act of fiduciary assent. And because belief demands that we rely on the word of another, the virtue of faith necessarily involves commitment to a person, to the loving God who reveals his truth in the world. Faith commitment of this kind occurs only under the influence of divine grace, as each person is drawn to embrace the ultimate goodness that the Church announces through the preaching of the Gospel.

Whereas the intellect finds its perfection in knowing the truth, the human will because of its particular psychological structure reaches its own perfection through embracing the good. For the Christian theologian, “good” always denotes a real, predicamental quality of being that exists as a result of the divine causality. This means that the resemblance to divine goodness that leads us to call something good is inherent in the thing itself, belonging to it as a form and therefore giving identity to it. Because his love is the cause of their goodness, God is said to love created things. “God’s love,” Aquinas reminds us, “pours out and creates the goodness in things.”Summa theologiae Ia q. 20, a. 2. For the Christian moral theologian, this notion implies that extramental good shapes the development of human freedom and choice. In this sense, real moral good is to be distinguished from what some British moral philosophers consider moral realism, namely, a form of moral argument which supposes that the grounds for moral truth lie only in some part outside of the moral agent. The British philosopher Roger Scuton, for instance, distinguishes between a strong and a weak naturalism on the basis of how strongly one makes the logical inference between the ‘good’ and whatever is judged to be good. See his “Attitudes, Beliefs and Reasons” in Morality and Moral Reasoning, ed, John Casey (London, 1971), p. 57. And so all true goodness in the world variously and verily participates in the very goodness which belongs identically to the persons of the blessed Trinity. Moreover, Christ instructs us that even the created goodness of his humanity points to God alone: For when a certain ruler asked Jesus, “‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone’ “ (Lk 18: 18,19). For the Christian believer, theological hope represents a reaching out for the ultimate goodness that is God himself and so initially perfects the passive capacity in the human being to find complete fulfillment only in God, a capacity that God himself has made part of being human.See Servais Pinckaers, O.P., “Le desir naturel de voir Dieu,” Nova et Vetera 51 (1976), pp. 255-273.

Before we can examine the virtuousness of theological hope, it is useful to recall some of the anthropological presuppositions that undergird the classical treatment of the theological virtue of hope. Using the language of personal fulfillment, the German philosopher Josef Pieper provides a general description of hoping:

Hope, like love, is one of the very simple, primordial dispositions of the living person. In hope, man reaches “with restless heart,” with confidence and patient expectation toward… the arduous “not yet” of fulfillment, whether natural or supernatural.Josef Pieper, Hope, trans. Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco, 1986), p. 27.

As a characteristically human endeavor, then, hoping incarnates a reaching out for anything that is perceived as good, and for the anticipated fulfillment that the possession of something good brings.

Four features of hoping in general merit special attention. First, hope concerns only the movement toward what perfects the human person, toward good objects or ends that enhance the personal dignity of one endowed with spiritual powers. But if a person were to encounter something destructive, the reaction would take on a different shape, for when something evil faces us we experience repugnance or fear. Second, hope looks toward the future, for a person never hopes for what he or she already possesses. Hope seeks a good object that still lies in the future; the person who presently and actually realizes the attainment of something desired reacts with joy. Third, we speak about hoping only when the attainment of the good, future object involves some difficulty or an element of arduousness. Otherwise, when it is a case of someone seeking a good that is easily achieved, the person experiences the simple emotion of desire, which belongs properly in the concupiscible appetite. In fact, the precise note of being difficult to attain establishes the formal object of hope and explains why we find hope among the irascible or contending emotions, instead of the concupiscible or impulse emotions. For if there were nothing difficult to surmount in achieving a particular good, the concupiscible or impulse emotions themselves would suffice to ensure that the human person aspired to such goods. Finally, only something that is attainable elicits hope; a person must judge that the hoped-for reality lies within the realm of possible options. When this is not the case, the individual who is definitively impeded from obtaining any good required for human perfection experiences despair.

The emotion of hope shares in the general dynamics of human longing. As part of the psychological makeup of the human person, hope expresses itself in two ways. First of all, hope exists at the level of the basic sense appetites, viz, as one of the five irascible or contending emotions that serve to strengthen the human person against the difficult situations that life presents. As a human emotion, sense hope arises spontaneously whenever a person encounters a good which, though its achievement may entail sizable difficulties, still emerges as a realizable good. This expectation comprises the simple, primordial movement of the human person toward an expected good. St Augustine writes: “You have only to show a leafy branch to a sheep, and it is drawn to it. If you show nuts to a boy, he is drawn to them. He runs to them because he is drawn, drawn by love, drawn without any physical compulsion, drawn by a chain attached to his heart.”St Augustine, Treatise on John, 26, 4-6 (CCL 36, 261 -263). However, the natural emotion of hope, like the simple disposition of love, lacks the distinctive quality of virtue. For by definition, virtue establishes a person in the stable pursuit of the good, whereas the spontaneity associated with any sheerly emotional response excludes the sort of stability that the definition of virtuousness requires.

On another level, hope designates a moral or human virtue. As is true of all human virtue, the moral virtues that resemble hope, such as magnanimity and munificence, involve a reasoned choice toward the achievement of a good course of action. But in the form of a moral virtue, hope specifically affects human appetite; it even strengthens the irascible or contending appetites. In other words, moral hope begets courage. Since natural hope involves excelling in formidable activities or undertaking lavish projects, these virtues, as I have said, include qualities of soul such as magnanimity and munificence. “Magnanimity,” says Aquinas, “coincides with courage in as much as it strengthens the mind for a strenuous task.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 129, a. 5. And from this connection, the moral theologian recognizes the excellence that hoping achieves in other virtues related to cardinal fortitude, such as long-suffering and constancy.

The Christian tradition treats hope as an analogical concept. As an identifiable human trait, hoping signifies both a simple emotion that arises in response to perceiving sense objects, as well as specific actions associated with certain moral virtues. These latter enjoy the common purpose of ensuring that a person remains fixed in the pursuit of a difficult good according to the order of right reason. “Confidence,” says Aquinas, “implies some form of hope: for confidence is hope strengthened by a firm supposition.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 129, a. 6, ad 3. Within this range of analogical understanding, the exact nature of theological hope emerges. For the theological virtue of hope takes up these common themes and incorporates them into a life of specifically Christian dimensions.

The theological virtues relate the believer directly to God; these endowments of grace establish the human person in an active and full relationship with the Persons of the blessed Trinity, a relationship made possible for us by the saving work of Jesus. As a theological virtue, hope’s special function is to unite the believer with God as his or her supreme and ultimate Good. Theological hope fixes our attention and our emotional energies onto the “dawn from on high” (Lk 1: 78). And for this reason, St Paul encourages us to “be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation” (1 Thes 5: 8).

It might seem that any as yet future good, even so great a one as the divine Goodness itself, could not serve as a suitable object for virtue, given that virtue, by definition, makes its possessor good here and now. In fact, some theologians have argued that hope should not be numbered among the theological virtues, for by hoping we do not attain God, rather we establish a certain state of affairs that remains within the human condition, viz, the self’s movement toward the possession of God. Aquinas, however, sets forth a unique and important way to justify the virtuous character of hope. He explains that “in all things subject to regulation and measure, their being good is reckoned on the basis of their reaching the rule (or measure) proper to them.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 17, a. 1. Virtue puts right reason into emotion, and like all virtue, hope looks to establish the proper measure for a specific human activity. More specifically, the virtues of hope shape the proper emotional response that a person should demonstrate when faced with some future, difficult, but attainable good. Thus, while hope by definition remains unfulfilled with respect to reaching its object, the very act of hoping possesses a suitable perfection in itself and therefore qualifies as a truly virtuous activity. By its very nature, then, hoping is tendential.

Aristotle distinguishes magnanimity from hope precisely on the basis of whether persons are able to attain a difficult good by their own efforts, as happens in the case of magnanimous men and women, or whether they are able to reach a goal only with help from others. It is this distinction which opens up for Aquinas a way to clarify the distinctively virtuous quality of theological hope. He says:

When it is a case, then, of hoping for something as possible to us precisely through God’s help, such hope, by reason of its very reliance upon God, reaches God himself. Evidently, then, it is a virtue, since it makes one sphere of human activity to be good and to reach one of the rules it is supposed to reach.Ibid.

The perfection involved in hoping lies, in other words, in the confident way that the believer turns toward God. This reliance, moreover, constitutes the basis for establishing that proper measure or rule that the definition of virtue requires in order that both doer and action manifest a certain perfection.

In this reliance on the divine help, we can again distinguish theological hope from the simple emotion of desire. While desire implies a certain movement toward a future good, it does not form the basis for a theological virtue. Why not? Aquinas replies: “No virtue is called desire, because desire does not imply any present clinging or spiritual contact with God himself.”Quaestio disputata de spe, a. 1, ad 6. In another text, Aquinas enlarges on this topic:

To be sure one who hopes is imperfect with respect to what he or she hopes to obtain and does not yet possess. But such a one is perfected as to this, that he or she already reaches the rule proper to his actions, namely God on whose help he relies.Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 17, a. 1, ad 3.

Hoping belongs to the wayfarer, but it also perfects the Christian on life’s journey, for by assuring one’s reliance on God, it braces the believer to confront the difficulties and spiritual trials that remain part of Christian living.

In order to understand clearly the formal object of theological hope, we must consider the important truth that God alone constitutes the supreme Good for the human person. When Aquinas asks whether human happiness ultimately consists in the vision of God’s very essence, he concludes that the personal relationship with God which we call beatitude is indeed the supreme happiness for each member of the human species.See Summa theologiae Ia-IIae q. 3, a. 8. Aquinas also considers whether a creature can find fulfillment in “seeing” the divine essence in Ia q. 12, aa. 1-11. He further contrasts this kind of vision-knowledge of the divine essence with both the knowledge of God which the human person has in this life through natural reason and through the gift of divine grace. In his commentary on Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 4, a. 8, Cajetan observes that in this life the knowledge of God through grace is not necessarily a higher mode of knowledge than that through reason, which provides its own sort of evidence. Rather faith’s excellence derives from its formal object, namely, First Truth-Speaking. For a discussion of God’s own knowledge which he shares with the blessed in heaven as source of faith and the sacra doctrina, see Summa theologiae Ia q. 1, a. 2 and IIa-IIae q. 2, a. 3. To speak about humankind’s ultimate beatitude as consisting in a “direct vision of the divine essence” implies that the rational soul is capable of an immediate intuition of God’s very being, upon which follows a spontaneously elicited joy, the thorough beatification of the whole person.Thomists traditionally distinguish the mind’s grasp of the divine essence from the will’s joyful elation which results from beholding it. Moreover, they insist that this beatific joy relates to the vision of God in the same way that a specific property belongs to an essence. On this question, Scotus held the view that joy itself is the formal constitutive of beatitude. In general, we can assume that such speculations reflect different anthropological positions. For Aquinas, “the ultimate happiness of humankind consists in its highest activity, which is the exercise of one’s mind” (Summa theologiae Ia q. 12, a. 1). The scholastics traditionally designate the human creature’s share in God’s blessedness as “formal beatitude,” which they distinguish from the supremely blessed life of God in himself or “objective beatitude.”

The theological virtue of hope relates the believer to objective beatitude, that is, the very blessedness of God, but with special reference to formal beatitude. In other words, hope draws the Christian toward the blessed vision of God which the company of the saints on high actually enjoys and which fulfills all their desires. The Christian who hopes seeks God for himself or herself. In technical language, the formal object of theological hope is God-as-possessed.

In the excesses of 17th-century French spiritual idealism, some actually spoke about Vamour pur, a love so disengaged from the self that it could conceivably continue even in the damned.For further information, see Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm (New York, 1950). This account obviously has nothing in common with Christian hope. At the same time, when we say in theology that hope seeks God for the hoper, that is, the loving embrace of God’s goodness for me, we do not thereby subordinate God to either the human creature or to the whole of creation. The believer does not hope for God as one might instrumentally use something created in order to achieve some personal perfection. Rather the Christian desires God for himself or herself because God alone stands as the true ultimate end or goal of each human being’s personal existence. As is clear from the general norms of Christian loving, we can never subordinate another person as a means of self-fulfillment. Since this is true of our love for human persons, it is all the more true of our love for God. As Cardinal Cajetan aptly remarks, in theological hope, “we hope for God for ourselves, but certainly not on account of ourselves - Speramus Deum nobis, non vero propter nos”In Secundam secundae q. 17, a. 5, no. 8.

St Jerome warns against the Pelagians, “Rely not on your wisdom, virtue, or talent, but on God alone; for he it is who directs your footsteps in your pilgrimage to the heavenly home.”St Jerome, Adversus Pelagianos, Bk 3; see St Jerome, “The Dialogue Against the Pelagians,” in Dogmatic and Polemical Works, trans. John N. Hritzu (The Fathers of the Church, vol. 53; Washington, DC, 1965), pp. 230-378. This fundamental Christian belief points to another aspect specific to theological hope. What motivates a Christian to hope that he or she will eternally possess God? What grounds our expectation that we will receive such great benefits from him? How can one maintain this hope throughout a lifetime of falling many times and in the face of many other signs of our unworthiness? In a short essay on hope, Aquinas provides a direct answer to these questions.

First, Aquinas recapitulates the basic teaching that hope’s virtuousness lies precisely in its proper reliance on the divine help.

Faith is not considered a virtue except in so far as it assents to the testimony of the First Truth… likewise hope obtains the status of virtue from the fact that one clings to the help of the divine power while moving towards eternal life. However, were one to seek out human assistance, either one’s own or from another, in order to look for this perfect good without the divine help, this would be a serious sin.Quaestio disputata de spe, art. 1.

Theological usage distinguishes a virtue’s formal terminative object from the formal mediating object. The scholastic theologians describe the formal mediating object as the medium whereby the virtuous person reaches the formal object of the virtue. This amounts to explaining what exactly motivates a person to cling to God in theological hope.

Therefore, as the formal (mediating) object of faith is First Truth (Speaking), whereby as through a certain medium the believer assents to those things which he or she believes the material object of faith so also the formal (mediating) object of hope is the help of the divine power and mercy (auxilium divinae potestatis et pietatis), on account of which the movement of hope reaches out for the goods hoped for, viz, the material object of hope.Ibid.

The Christian gospel places the experience of God’s mercy at the very heart of the theological life. “Christ is not separated from sinners,” says St Augustine, “rather he is judged with them. The thief escapes, and Christ is sentenced. The criminal receives forgiveness; the one who forgives the sins of all believers stands condemned.”St Augustine, Tractatus super Joannem 31, chap. 7 (PL 35: 1642). The saints underscore the experience of the divine mercy and compassion as an indispensable part of the Christian life. Aquinas’s distinctions give theological expression to this authoritative teaching on Christian salvation.

Within the larger perspectives of theological discussion, the commentatorial tradition that followed after Aquinas questioned why a Christian would expect to attain the full possession of God. While some commentators agreed that God’s merciful omnipotence indeed accounts for the efficient cause of our actually attaining the vision of God, they rejected the view that the divine power can serve as a formal cause of our hoping for it. In other words, there is nothing in the divine omnipotence that gives a specific reason for theological hope as such, and so God’s omnipotence does not serve as hope’s formal mediating object. Rather, as the 17th-century Jesuit commentator Francisco Suarez argued, the very goodness of God himself suffices to explain why someone would be motivated to hope in God.

But there is something of the incomplete in this explanation. For Suarez’s position fails to take account of the fact that the divine power must not only account for the actual achievement of eternal happiness, but also for our intending toward it, for our very spiritual clinging to God in hope amidst the difficulties and obstacles of the present life. And only God’s all-powerful mercy adequately expresses the reason that a Christian believer in the present sin-marked economy of salvation can hope to attain beatitude. Hope shapes the Christian believer to seek the vision of God not simply as a good but as it is a possible good. This happens only in virtue of God’s merciful aid, the effective expression of his disposition to save us. Thus, divine omnipotence and mercy specify hoping in a motivational way.I am indebted to William J. Hill, O.P., Hope (2a2ae. 17-22), vol. 33 of the Blackfriars translation of the Summa (New York 1966), p. 148, note 11 for this summary of the position which John of St Thomas defends in his Cursus Theologicus XVII, Disp. IV, art. 1, no. 17. Aquinas’s position supports the view that the pilgrim Church constantly requires succor in its journey to the heavenly homeland or patria. Alone, the human creature remains impotent to reach the goal of beatific fellowship with the saints and, moreover, experiences frustration in the effort by the experience of personal and communal sin. The formal mediating object of theological hope reminds us that God’s omnipotent mercy, his fatherly care, both can and will overcome these obstacles to our well-being.

Ultimately, since it is through the sacrifice of Christ that God communicates his redeeming mercy, the mystery of the Incarnation forms the foundation for Christian hope. St Paul explicitly points to Christ as the one who guarantees the validity of Christian hope: “But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Tim 1: 12). Christian hoping, then, is unique to the actual order of salvation history. Nevertheless through the virtue of hope, each believer already participates in the promised eschatological salvation. Aquinas takes full account of St Paul’s words to the Romans: “and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom 5: 5). In this context it is important to recall that the Jesuit commentator Suarez failed to signal trust in God’s mercy as a constitutive part of hope’s formal motivating object. But Aquinas’s insistence on God’s merciful omnipotence reminds us that, because of personal sin, the believer never outgrows the need for a loving confidence in God’s mercy. “And because ‘we all make many mistakes’ (Jas 3: 2),” the Council of Trent warns, “each of us ought to keep before his eyes the severity of judgment as much as the mercy and goodness… for our whole life must be examined and judged not by our judgment but by that of God.”Council of Trent, “Decree on Justification ,” chap. 16 (DS 1545 -1550).

Theological hope relates the Christian directly to God, so it includes among its material objects all of the good things that the Christian believer lovingly looks forward to receiving: the vision of God, the accompanying bliss, the resurrection of the body and its glorification, and fellowship with the blessed.Christian hoping ceases at death, when the believer hears Christ say, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Mt 25: 34). The Church, moreover, has officially taught that the beatific vision does not await the general resurrection of the dead (DS 1304-1306). Accordingly, we believe that the separated souls of the just do experience the beatitude of heaven. Furthermore, we recognize in faith that these blessed ones together comprise the company of the saints with which the Church on earth enjoys a special form of communion. At the same time, the resurrection of the body also belongs to the body of Christian truths to which we give our profession of faith in the Creed. Although theological reflection on matters which pertain to eschatology necessarily involves a certain degree of speculation, the common teaching of the Church maintains that the resurrected body also participates in the effects of beatitude. Aquinas expresses this belief beautifully when he says that “participation in the glory of Christ’s body renders our bodies glorious” (Summa theologiae IIIa q. 56, a. 2). Theological hope also entitles the Christian to expect the secondary material objects, that is, created instruments of hope that form part of the Christian dispensation for salvation. This means above all the instrumental causality of Christ’s humanity, but it also includes spiritual goods such as grace, the infused virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the maternal mediation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the intercession of the saints, and the forgiveness of sins, especially mediated through the sacraments of reconciliation and holy anointing. But one can also legitimately hope for temporal goods in so far as these conduce toward beatitude, such as holy friends, good health, psychological equilibrium, and so forth. Again, Aquinas compares these material objects of hope with the material objects of theological faith, namely, the articles of the Creed:

Just as those things that are believed as faith’s material object are all referred to God even though some of them are created, e.g., the dogma that God created all creatures and that the person of the Word takes up the body of Christ in a hypostatic unity, so also all those things which are hoped for as material objects of hope are ordained to the one hoped-for end which remains the enjoyment of God. Towards this kind of formal beatitude we hope to be helped by God not only spiritually, but also with physical benefits.Quaestio disputata de spe, art. 1. See also, Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 17, a. 2, ad 2.

This treatment gives us an insight into how Aquinas overcomes the apparent tensions between future and realized eschatology, between the modern dichotomy of material and spiritual. St Augustine expresses the same matter succinctly: “Those blessings alone are the object of the theological virtue of hope that are contained in the Lord’s Prayer.”Enchiridion de fide, spe et caritate, chap. 114; see St Augustine, “Faith, Hope and Charity,” trans. Bernard M. Peebles, in Writings of St. Augustine (The Fathers of the Church, vol. 2; New York, 1947), pp. 369-472.

In its root meaning, to love means to will a good to someone.See Summa theologiae Ia q. 20, a. 2: “God therefore wills some good to each existing thing, and since loving is no other than willing good to someone, it is clear that God loves everything.” On this basis, the Christian tradition distinguishes between two kinds of love, namely, the love of benevolence (amor benevolentiae) and the love of desire or concupiscence (amor concupiscentiae). Benevolence signifies the willing well to another, or disinterested affection, that properly characterizes the love of friendship (amor amicitiae). And since the one to whom we benevolently will a good thereby becomes united with us in a true bond of friendship, only other persons ought to comprise the authentic recipients of true benevolence. According to the gracious design of God’s mercy, the Christian believer embraces not only the self and other persons such as neighbors and the angels in this kind of loving, but even God himself.

Concupiscence signifies willing a good to oneself, the desire of what is good for the subject; a wanting that is not necessarily disordered, for it is implanted in us by the author of nature and continues under the reign of grace. By loving this way, we seek for ourselves some authentic good, including those things that are predominately useful or delightful goods. Theological hope remains rooted in this kind of love. Of course, it is possible to affirm that a person hopes for God as his or her formal beatitude without implying that the person thereby subordinates God to the person’s own self-interest. Aquinas provides us with a good philosophical analysis of the interrelationship between the two kinds of love.

Love is twofold: one kind is perfect; the other kind is imperfect. Love of something is imperfect when someone loves a thing not that he might wish the good in itself to the “thing,” but in order that he might wish its good to himself. This is called by some “concupiscence,” as when we love wine, wishing to enjoy its sweetness, or when we love some person for our own purposes or pleasure. The other kind of love is perfect; in this the good of anything is loved in itself, as when loving someone, I wish that he himself have the good, even if out of that fact nothing falls to me. This is said to be the love of friendship, whereby anyone is loved for himself (secundum seipsum). This is perfect friendship, as is said in VIII Ethicorum.Quaestio disputata de spe, art. 3, “Utrum spes sit prior caritate.” The reference to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics runs as follows: “Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.”

In other words, to consider the love of desire (amor concupiscentiae) as an imperfect expression of love does not imply moral wrongdoing. Rather the love of desire is imperfect in the same way that one can consider motion as imperfect, viz, as an act of a being which has not reached its final term.

When the object of the love of desire includes some non-personal thing, the ultimate referent (the end “to which” or finis cui) must always be the one who loves: e.g., I love money because I can put food on the table for my family or sexual pleasure because it involves joyful union with my spouse. Otherwise such love would be disordered, as when a miser loves money only for the sake of money or the profligate sexual gratification only for the sake of sexual gratification. But when God is loved with desire, as happens in theological hope, one can still wish the goodness of God for the self without entailing a disordered subordination of God to one’s own personal purposes. In this regard, God and even created persons differ from such things as wine, money, or sexual gratification. For while within the proper circumstances and given the right conditions, one can seek good things solely on account of the self, the Christian can never consider God in that way. Indeed, to seek to use any person only as a means for one’s own fulfillment forms the heart of selfishness.

Virtuous hoping does not leave the hoper in frozen isolation; there exists a mutual relation between the hope of desire and the love of friendship. Moreover, this inter-connectedness of loves reflects a more basic inter-action that transpires within the human person. Aristotle describes “a sort of circle formed by the acts of the soul: for a thing outside the soul moves the intellect, and the thing known moves the appetite, which tends to reach the things from which the motion originally starts.”See Quaestiones disputatae de veritate q. 1, a. 2 where Aquinas gives this account of Aristotle’s teaching in Bk 3, chap. 9 of the De anima (433al4ff). Insofar as hope looks for and moves toward the hoped-for good, it springs from a love of desire. But insofar as the one hoping looks out for the help which is needed to attain this good, the hoping disposes him or her toward a love of benevolence or friendship. For the hoper comes to love the one who provides the means for attaining the sought-after good.William J. Hill, Hope, p. 137, offers this helpful illustration: “In willing food to the hungry, it is apparent that my love goes out to both bread and man, but hardly in comparable ways. There are actually two goods here, one (loved with an amor concupiscentiae) enriches my hungry fellow man, the other (loved with an amor amicitiae) enriches me. The enriching act is in the former case an ‘appropriation;’ in the latter it is only a ‘communion.’ The good which derives to me is precisely the full realization of my humanity, the most perfect deployment of my liberty under the direction of intelligence, the fulfillment of myself in the construction of the human community. In short, one cannot truly love a friend and in supernatural charity it is God who is now the friend without becoming thereby ennobled. Hope leads to charity, writes Aquinas, “for when a person hopes to receive something good from God, he or she is led to see that God should be loved for his very self.”Quaestio disputata de spe, a. 3. In its most proper and formal sense, hope concerns only the one who makes the act of hope; and so formally speaking, Christian theologians argue that a person can not hope for another person’s eternal beatitude. The tradition, however, does allow that someone can draw other persons into his or her hoping on the condition that there exists a true bond of charity so that such persons are regarded as “other selves.”

Because the theological virtues always point to God as their proper and immediate object, they remain radically different from any ordinary kind of human believing, hoping, or loving. Still, we can discern in the experience of human friendship a model for the way that faith leads to hope and hope to charity. Aquinas offers a good illustration of this in the Summa contra gentiles:

The love that a man has for others arises in man from the love that he has for himself, for a man stands in relation to a friend as he does to himself. But a person loves himself in as much as he wishes the good for himself, just as he loves another person by wishing him good. So, by the fact that one is interested in his own good he is led to develop an interest in another person’s good. Hence, because a person hopes for good from some other person, a way develops for him to love that other person in himself, from whom he hopes to attain the good. Indeed, a person is loved in himself when the lover wishes the good for him, even if the lover may receive nothing from him. Now, since by sanctifying grace there is produced in us an act of loving God for himself, the result was that we obtained hope from God by means of grace. However, though it is not for one’s own benefit, friendship, whereby one loves another for himself, has of course many resulting benefits, in the sense that one friend helps another as he helps himself. Hence, when one person loves another, and knows that he is loved by that other, he must get hope from him. Now by grace one is so established as a lover of God, through the love of charity, that he is also instructed by faith that he is first loved by God: according to the passage found in 1 John 4: 10: “In this is charity: not as though we had loved God, but because he hath first loved us.” It follows, then, from the gift of grace that we get hope from God. It is also clear from this that just as hope is a preparation of man for the true love of God, so also man is conversely strengthened in hope by charity.Summa contra gentiles, Bk 3, c. 153, no. 2, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975).

This text recalls the organic connection that binds together theological faith, hope, and charity; as virtues of the Christian life, each of these infused qualities of soul unites the human person to God in ways that affect the principal human powers.

Hope, nevertheless, forms a distinctive theological virtue. Theologians distinguish hope from charity on the basis of the distinction between the love of desire and the love of friendship. By theological charity, we love God for his own sake, that is, with a love of benevolence or friendship. Both faith and hope share this in common, namely, that by these theological virtues we enjoy a personal, immediate union with God. Faith brings knowledge of the truth; hope brings reliance on God’s help to bring us to blessedness. Hope looks to God as a source from which other good things come to us. From this intrinsic ordering of the theological virtues, it is easy to recognize that there exists a connection between the truth that the believer comes to accept from hearing, ex auditu, and the hope that this message kindles in his or her heart. Jesus begins his ministry “proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news’ “ (Mk 1:14-15).

While every virtue affects the whole person, it is important to know which human capacities a particular virtue shapes. We know that faith constitutes a perfection of the intellect; it makes us knowers of the truth. The virtues of theological love perfect the powers of human appetite, that is, the rational appetite or will of the believer. As the rational appetite forms the subject of theological hope, this virtue deals with the desires of the heart, for, as Aquinas explains, “corresponding to the movement of the inferior appetite where there is emotion, there is a movement of the superior appetite without emotion.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 18, a. 1. It is important to recall that by describing hope as a virtue of the rational appetite, Aquinas departs from the Augustinian tradition that classified hope as a virtue of the memory. While it is true that hope can purify the human memory of the recollection of past sins, it only accomplishes this by helping us confront the future with a renewed confidence in God’s merciful omnipotence. In this way, whatever in our past might inhibit our here and now confidence in God’s mercy no longer intimidates us. “The thief escapes,” St Augustine reminds us, “and Christ is sentenced.”

Aquinas defines hope as a confident movement toward the future, and therefore catalogs it as a virtue that belongs to the provisional status viatoris, to the state of the wayfarer. We know that neither the blessed nor the damned can possess hope. For the blessed already possess the beatitude that hope longs after; in them, hope gives way to the joy that accompanies the beatific vision. But for those in hell, no hope of reform remains. In fact, the very realization that they can never reach beatitude characterizes the anguish that the damned suffer. And so Aquinas argues that “it is no more possible for the damned to consider blessedness as still open to them than for the blessed to conceive of it as not already possessed.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 18, a. 3. But wayfarers find themselves in neither condition, and so theological hope urges them on.

Indeed, a proper understanding of theological hope requires an adequate estimation of the wayfaring condition a proper conception of temporality. Since time marks the movement of change, philosophical forms of idealism, which develop out of the assumption of a split between mind and body, deal with temporality only in oblique ways. And so thinkers influenced by idealistic systems of thought find it easy to close the person off in an abstract world of human conceptions, and to constrain the human person within the tyranny of rationalism. On the other hand, existentialist philosophies, which refuse to place limits on human temporality, deny the provisional status of the wayfarer by imagining a kind of ultimate significance to this passing world. Because the heavenly city is sought on earth, humanists turn hope into a form of expectation for a better life. As much as these trends still affect theological investigation today, the theologian must protect the virtuousness of hope from those ideologies that threaten to detranscendentalize it.

The status viatoris implies human creatureliness. In Christian theology, hope aims at overcoming everything that keeps the human spirit from reaching perfection.See Aquinas’s Quaestio disputata de spe, aa. 1 -4. Indeed the various replacements for Christian hope proposed by different ideologies (and sometimes uncritically adopted by theologians) inevitably presuppose that sin and its effects are permanent features of the human situation. One either refuses to accept that the sinful status of the creature can be overcome or argues that the penalties of sin form part of authentic human existence. Neither option is theologically satisfying. Indeed, moral theologies that compromise moral truth usually fail to appreciate the full scope of the merciful omnipotence of God made available to us in Christ. Rather than “easing the burden” of the moral life, these theologies in effect urge people to live without the comfort in God’s love that theological hope both promises and provides. Since theological hope serves the state of the wayfarer, this virtue provides everything that the pilgrim Church requires in order to reach its goal, and with a unique certitude that verifies the very transitoriness of earthly life.

The Catholic Reform of the 16th century steadfastly refused to accept the argument advanced by Protestant theologians that knowledge of one’s own salvation ought to be included among the material objects of faith, that is, as something positively revealed by God. Here Luther’s attempt to discover fiduciary faith led to a confusion between what the mind can know in faith and what the will can achieve through hoping. We must respect the limitations that belong to both kinds of human activity. Qui stat, caveat ne cadat! “Let the one who stands,” St Paul exhorts us, “take care not to fall” (1 Cor 10: 12). Moreover, the Council of Trent affirms that every believer should maintain an unshaken hope that God will provide what is required for salvation: “Even though all should place a most firm hope [firmissimam spem] in God’s help and rest in it, let no one promise himself with absolute certainty any definite outcome.”Council of Trent, “Decree on justification,” chap. 13 (DS 1540 and 1541): “nemo sibi certi aliquid absoluta certitudine polliceatur, tametsi in Dei auxilio firmissimam spem collocare et reponere omnes debet” (emphasis added).

In order to grasp accurately the full significance of this discussion, the theologian distinguishes certitude into its cognitive form, when the intellect is fixed on a truth, and noncognitive or affective certitude. Affective certitude is a form of practical knowledge that directs any operation to its proper end, viz, either as realized or as tending toward an end. According to Aquinas’s explanation, this special kind of certitude compares with the sureness that moral virtues exhibit with respect to their objects, a tendency that can be described as connative. “The tendency of hope toward its end is marked by such certitude as this,” says Aquinas, “in actual fact a derivation from faith’s certitude found in the cognitive power.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 18, a. 4. But since hope’s certitude resides in the will, the character of the rational appetite predominates in its operations; and in this sense it differs both in kind and degree from the certitude that only the intellect can achieve.

As a virtue of the wayfarer, hope develops in us a connatural clinging to God, a sure expectation that God will provide whatever we need to reach happiness, even though the thought of our own resources and the feebleness of our own efforts might otherwise incline us to think otherwise. The practical reliability of the moral virtues serves as model for hope’s certitude. The moral virtues supply the human person with “second natures” which serve as real principles for human action, so that our appetites infallibly will follow the order of right reason. In a similar way, theological hope gives us a “new nature,” one that places our desire for God firmly within the ambience of his merciful omnipotence. In summary, the graced Christian believer possesses the cognitive certitude of faith that a mercifully omnipotent God offers the gift of salvation to all men and women and, as long as the person personally appropriates this truth held by faith, the affective certitude of hope enables him or her to live a life of mature confidence in God’s power. Among the blessed, the certitude of hope gives way to joyful realization of the divine Goodness, whereas in the wayfarers, the members of the pilgrim Church, this certitude still exists in a tendential state.

As a true theological virtue, hope shapes the Christian to trust in God’s merciful omnipotence as the formal means whereby he or she anticipates a full share in the divine goodness. But within the economy of Christian salvation, Christians must appeal as well to the personal agents that the divine goodness has established in the world. So the Christian hoper confidently relies on the merits of Christ, on the maternal mediation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, on the intercessory prayer and help of the communion of saints, and on any other means that aid Christian hoping.The capital grace of Christ forms the foundation for this theological doctrine about created instruments; within the Church their exists a hierarchy of holy helpers among whom our blessed Lady holds the primary place. Thus, the Church suitably invokes her as “spes nostra’’ i.e., our hope. St Bernard was especially fond of invoking the Blessed Virgin Mary as a source of hope: “You will not lose hope when you call on her; you will not err when you think about her.”St Bernard, Homilia 2, super “Missus est,” (PL 183: 71). This praiseworthy practice does not mean that we place our hope in any creature for that which God alone can provide. It does mean, however, that God really uses secondary, instrumental causes in the working out of our salvation. The belief in the communion of saints represents the awareness that each person works out his or her salvation only within the social reality of the Church. As Mother of the Church, the Blessed Virgin Mary forms the center of this reality. Mary is the mother of fair hope: “Ipsam rogans non desperas, ipsam cogitans non erras.”

Because it rests principally on an error in faith-judgment, the roots of despair lie not in sentiment or mood, but in an act of the intellect. For the person tempted to despair supposes that God will not provide what is required to reach salvation; and because such a supposition contradicts Christ’s explicit promise, this disposition toward God constitutes a sinful posture. The theological tradition describes despair as an example of an offensive turning toward God - a conversio offensiva, i.e. an anti-theological vice. In the case of moral vice, the human person turns toward another creature in a disordered way, and thereby turns away from God. The wrongful conversio ad creaturam always entails aversio a Deo. But by engaging in the anti-theological vices, the Christian actually “turns” toward God in a disordered way, that is, the believer takes up a wrong attitude with respect to God’s goodness. Despair especially exemplifies this sort of anti-theological vice. From a theological point of view, despair arises as a result of an error in judgment about the existence and/or nature of God’s saving action. But the vice of despair denotes the felt conviction that God will not provide what my salvation requires or that he will not forgive my sins. While a variety of cultural and psychological factors create an atmosphere conducive to despairing, despair itself is the false notion that results from these factors. And so, despair constitutes an “offensive turning” toward God, viz, not as toward a merciful and omnipotent Father, but rather as to a god who is either incapable or unwilling to save me.

Even when expressed in theoretical terms, however, despair does not entail a sin against faith. The person who despairs affectively excludes himself or herself from the universal implications of the faith judgment that God wills all to be saved, though such a one may hold fast to the truth on intellectual grounds. And so despair about one’s personal salvation can actually coexist with the act of belief that God wills the salvation of all humankind.

Since despair results primarily in an internal contradiction within the human person, those who are sensitive to the requirements of good pastoral ministry recognize the need to explain fully the gospel of hope to despairing persons, even before making an effort to correct one or another moral vice. For the repeated commission of serious sin frequently indicates that the sinner has forgotten or never learned the truth about God’s merciful love. “Because the one who forgives the sin of all believers stands condemned,” St Augustine reminds us, “the criminal receives forgiveness.”See note 22. Indeed, the person who does not experience the merciful help of the heavenly Father as a real and practical good, finds it difficult to abide in the truth that God is merciful, that Christ has died for the sins of the world, and that the forgiveness of sins really exists within the Church of faith and sacraments. And the person in such a condition needs the power of the Holy Spirit, for the practical dynamics of despair eventually lead to sins against faith, that is, sins that actually reject or abandon the reality of the Christian mysteries themselves.

The two vices that the classical spiritual heritage assigns as the most frequent causes of despair are spiritual sloth - what Kierkegaard calls the “despair of weakness” - and unchastity. According to the view of Gregory the Great, cynicism about spiritual goods and compromises in living a chaste life frequently mask a life of practical despair. The confessor, spiritual director or Christian counsellor should recognize that a reciprocal relationship exists between these moral vices and the anti-theological vice and constantly remind the person caught in habitual sin of God’s merciful love and forgiveness. In a certain sense, despair amounts to a special sin against the redemption. “If sin could truly not be forgiven,” Aquinas says, “then it would not be a sin to doubt forgiveness of sin.”Quaestiones disputatae de malo q. 3, a. 15. But the truth of the matter is that sin has been forgiven and theological hope brings the sinner into contact with a merciful God. To call people from despair and the blackmail of the devil is one of the chief pastoral responsibilities in the modern Church; all Christians, but especially priests (whose sacramental character points toward penance and the Eucharist), need to see this as a constitutive part of proclaiming the gospel of peace.

The true seriousness of despair lies in its anti-theological character. Once separated from the goodness of God, the one without theological hope is left vulnerable to other sorts of sin and, eventually, prone to spiritual death. The suicide of Judas depicts the biblical model for despair. As I have said, the spiritual tradition of the Church identifies unchastity and spiritual sloth (e.g., neglect of prayer, recollection, the sacrament of penance) as the sins that most easily persuade one to fall into despair. But the remedy for despair outstrips in vigor its causes. St Bernard advises that we call to mind the wounds suffered by Christ as a sure way to bring back hope to the heart that, in the tempest of pusillanimous and diffident feelings, has drifted from its moorings. “I have fallen into a grievous sin,” says the saint, “my conscience is alarmed, yet shall it not be troubled; for I will call to mind the wounds of my Lord, who was bruised for our iniquities. What sin can be so deadly as not to be healed by the death of Christ?”St Bernard, Sermo in Cantica, 61; see Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs III, trans. Kilian Walsh and Irene M. Edwards (Cistercian Fathers Series, 31; Kalamazoo, MI, 1979). pp. 140-148.

“There are two things that kill the soul,” says St Augustine, “despair and false hope.”Sermo 87, chap. 8 (PL 38, 535). Because it acts directly against the formal motivating object of theological hope, despair immediately appears as a sinful disorder. Presumption or false hope, on the other hand, mimics authentic theological hope, even though this anti-theological vice also constitutes an “offensive turning” toward God. St Bernard aptly contrasts this deceptive sin against theological hope with despair, “Fear of God’s judgments, apart from hope, casts us down into the pit of despair; while indiscreet hope, unmixed with a reasonable fear, engenders a hurtful security.”St Bernard, Sermo in Cantica, 6; see Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs /, trans. Kilian Walsh (Cistercian Fathers Series, 4; Spencer, MA, 1971), pp. 32-37. Those who presume on God’s merciful omnipotence want his sovereign goodness and forgiveness outside of the order that is established by the divine wisdom and justice. St Thomas cites the example of a person who “hopes to obtain pardon without repentance or glory without merits.” In short then, presumption establishes an “unwarranted reliance upon God.”Summa theologiae, IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 1, ad 2. Because this vice urges us erroneously to imagine that God gives pardon to those who persist in their sins or leads those to glory who shirk from an upright life (see Jas 1: 22), presumption constitutes a vicious attitude in the Christian soul.

Certain periods in the history of spirituality supply examples of this offensive posture toward God. During the course of the 16th-century Reform, the Protestant divines laid great emphasis on the place that interior experience holds in the Christian life. In an effort to address the Catholic need for “inner spiritual experiences,” the Jesuits and other spiritual directors developed various “methods” for prayer and meditation. These methods, however, provided the unexpected and unwelcome result of centering so much concentration on the self that considerable anxiety arose among those who practiced these methods. The leaders of the Quietist movement, especially the Spanish Miguel de Molinos (1640-1697), sought to address this uneasiness among the faithful by counselling that internal states or dispositions counted little in the spiritual life. Quietism accordingly developed into an aberration unwittingly generated by the Catholic Reform in the 16th and 17th centuries. By effectively urging people to think that God rewards us without reference to merits and virtue, the Quietist guidelines and mentality veered toward institutionalizing presumption. The Quietists, moreover, promoted a sort of acquired contemplation that moved a person away from making imperated acts of the will and therefore inhibited the believer from the effective practice of virtue. Quietism may even have promoted forms of moral turpitude. Molinos, the Spanish spiritual master, was in fact charged with innumerable counts of sexual misconduct, and subsequently his theories lost their popular appeal. If the charges against Molinos are accurate however, we can inquire whether the Quietist principles do not adumbrate the distinction, today widely held among certain moral theologians, between the “transcendental level” of human intention and the “categorical level” of human acts. This deceptive cleavage of human conduct from human meaning has led many moral theologians to argue that all forms of bodily human conduct remain as so many neutral appendages of interior spiritual states, which alone can determine an act’s moral worth.

Presumption denotes an affective movement of the creature that is motivated by a false judgment about how God’s mercy conforms to his justice and wisdom. In the final analysis, the one who presumes does not understand that God’s plan for our salvation includes our complete interior transformation. This entails both the work of image-restoration restoring the full character of the human being as imago Dei through the forgiveness of sins and image-perfection causing spiritual excellence in the Christian believer through the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit. The one who despairs forgets that forgiveness of sins is available in the Church; the one who presumes denies that Christian salvation bestows an entirely new capacity for action. It is not true that Christian belief and hope leave people the way they are; divine grace changes and renews those who welcome it. In the Christian life, a person cannot “travel north and south at the same time,” i.e., one cannot persist in a sinful turning toward a creature and at the same time imagine that God’s mercy ignores the turning away from him implied by the very nature of sin. According to the tradition, presumption springs from vainglory and pride, the most serious of the deadly sins. “This sort of presumption,” Aquinas teaches, “appears to spring directly from pride; implying, in effect, that one thinks so much of himself that he imagines God will not punish him nor exclude him from eternal life in spite of his continuing in sin.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 21, a. 4.

Aquinas’s treatise on the gift of Fear of the Lord illustrates both his comprehension of the Christian spiritual tradition and his insight into the psychological dimensions of the human person. In his treatise on the theological virtues, the Dominican neo-scholastic theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange remarked: “Quidam dicunt quod S. Thomas non est psychologus, sufficit hie articulus [Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 1] ad probandum contrarium, contra deliramenta protestantium, jansenistarum, et Kantii. S. Thomas optime utitur gladio distinctionis.”De virtutibus theologicis (Rome, 1948), p. 359: “Some say that Saint Thomas is not a psychologist, but this article [Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 1] suffices to prove the contrary. Against the nonsense of Reformed theologians, Jansenists, and Kantians, Saint Thomas employs optimally the sword of distinction.” To be sure, Father Garrigou-Lagrange’s exasperated tone seems oddly out of place after the Second Vatican Council’s call for theological renewal and ecumenical sensitivity. Still, the student of theology would do well to heed his suggestion that Aquinas’s discussion of Fear of the Lord warrants a close reading. Here we find an essay, representative of the classical period in moral theology, that furnishes an adequate and lucid account of the spiritual development of a Christian soul.

Like each gift of the Holy Spirit, Fear of the Lord represents the flourishing of a particular feature of the Christian virtuous life. But how can fearing God belong to the perfection and virtue of Christian life? The New Testament makes the point explicitly: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love” (1 Jn 4: 18). Still, Isaiah foretells that “the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord” (Is 11: 2) will rest on the Messiah, and the Church numbers Fear of the Lord among the special endowments that belong to every baptized person in the state of grace.

Considered as a human emotion, fear belongs to the order of the irascible or contending emotions. These emotions take hold of a person who is confronted by a threatening evil that is (at least apparently) difficult to overcome. As fear represents an emotive response to evil, the theologian first of all needs to explain in what sense God, who perfectly possesses the sovereign good, can elicit fear. In order to make the required distinctions, Aquinas suggests that there exists a basic difference between fearing evil and fearing the person who has the power to inflict evil. The gift of Fear of the Lord concerns only the person who has the power to inflict evil. In this sense, Fear of the Lord attunes the believer to God, “who will repay according to each one’s deeds” (Rom 2: 6).

In order to understand properly how this gift helps the Christian accurately contemplate an avenging God and thus aids the virtuous reliance on God’s merciful love which hope provides, we must recognize the destructive power that sin itself holds. In other words, the proper use of the distinction between fearing evil and fearing the One who can inflict the evil of punishment requires an accurate theological analysis of the reality of sin. Otherwise, we run the risk of imagining God simply as an avenging Judge who stands ready to mete out punishment to those who have failed to discharge fully their moral obligations. But the authentic Christian notion of the gift impels us to discover a more penetrating and less anthropomorphic analysis of divine judgment.

According to the classical explanation, personal sin always involves two elements: the malum culpae, the evil of fault, and the malum poenae, the evil of punishment. In his treatise on Fear of the Lord, Aquinas recalls this distinction. First of all, he talks about sin as fault:

Because the meaning of goodness always implies order to some final purpose, evil implies deprivation of this order; the only outright evil is one destructive of order to the ultimate end, and this is the evil of fault (malum culpae).Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 1.

The evil of fault - culpa - represents the actual offense that sin effects against the divine goodness itself, whether the sinful fault strikes directly against God in the form of an offensive turning toward him, as happens with sins against the theological virtues, or against God and neighbor, as happens with the sins against the moral virtues. In the second case, we know that vicious actions are constituted in their sinfulness precisely by a disordered turning towards the creature (conversio ad creaturam) that necessarily implies a simultaneous turning away from God (aversio a Deo). “Moral goodness and evil,” explains Aquinas, “consist chiefly in a turning to or a turning away from God.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 2, ad 1: “Bonum morale praecipue consistit in conversione ad Deum, malum autem morale in aversione a Deo.”

On the other hand, since it supposes a painful separation from certain created goods, punishment -poena - constitutes a different sort of evil. For within the larger picture of the moral life, the only real and outright punishment is hell, or the state of being fixed forever in a state of “turning away from God.” And yet, Aquinas explains how in our state as wayfarers the evil of punishment can contribute to overall well-being.

Punishment is indeed a genuine sort of evil, since it does in fact result in the loss of some particular good; nevertheless in the last analysis it is good, namely, in regard to its bearing upon the ultimate end.Ibid.

As bearing upon the final end, here and now punishments of any kind always stand in a relative relationship to our reaching the goal of eternal beatitude. So St Paul counsels the Galatians: “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6: 2).

According to Christian belief, everything that the human person experiences as burdensome and painful results from punishment for sin. But Christian faith also teaches us that suffering can be redemptive. Recall what Christian theology teaches about the present economy of salvation. Because of the lack of original justice, every human person can experience appetitive movements that incline him or her towards disordered behavior; as we know, these disordered emotions continue even after sacramental incorporation into Christ.If this were not the case, people could find baptism attractive for the wrong reasons, for instance, as a means to escape the debilitating effect of unruly emotions or some other burdensome condition that marks the state of original sin. See Summa theologiae IIIa q. 69, a. 3. In addition, other psychological defects such as liability to anxiety, slowness in learning, and weakness of personal resolve in important matters retain the character of punishment for human nature considered in itself. But for the person who lovingly bears such burdens, these same thorns in the flesh become the occasion for conformity to Christ’s sufferings and the gradual reformation of the godly image in which we are all created.See T. C. O’Brien, Original Sin, vol. 26 of the Blackfriars translation of the Summa theologiae (London, 1965), especially pp. 50-55. There O’Brien offers a profound commentary on Ia-IIae q. 83, a. 2: “Whether original sin is in the substance of the soul rather than in its powers.” Only our blessed Lady receives her salvation in another way, though the grace of the Immaculate Conception does not preserve her from sharing in the redemptive sufferings of her Son. The gift of Fear of the Lord helps believers to recognize that in the present economy of salvation, we must take St Paul’s admonition seriously: “While we live we are constantly being delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our mortal flesh” (Eph 4: 11).

The rich spiritual tradition that developed during the patristic period inspires Aquinas to distinguish four sorts of fear that figure in the Christian life: (1) worldly; (2) servile; (3) initial; (4) filial. Worldly fear obviously represents a spirit entirely opposed to Gospel values, whereas the development of servile, initial, and filial fear charts a course of growth in the spiritual life. We will examine in turn each of these kinds of fear.

1. Worldly Fear. Fear is born of love, says St Augustine, for one fears to lose only what he loves.De diversis Quaestionibus LXXXIII Bk. 1, no. 23 (PL 40: 22). The worldly sinner loves only the things of this world. As a completely sinful disposition, this sort of fear has nothing in common with the gift of the Holy Spirit; rather it marks persons who remain sinfully entangled in the misuse of created goods. Those who never think about God’s justice in the course of pursuing sinful conduct embody worldly fear. So worldly fear belongs to a person who remains hostile to the evangelical life. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” Jesus instructs his disciples, “rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt 10: 28). These words are addressed to the person who shudders at the thought of forfeiting one or another created good, even though he or she remains sinfully attached to it, that is, loves the created good outside of a due ordering to God.

2. Servile Fear. Fear of punishment remains for many persons the principal motive for maintaining some relationship with God, and so this psychological stance ordinarily plays a role in the development of the theological life. Aquinas distinguishes two modes of servile fear. The first is a mere servility, but the second is a fear of punishment that includes a proper recognition of the evil of sin. In his commentary, the American theologian William Hill summarizes this important distinction: Servility or slavishness, he explains, occurs when the avoidance of punishment is considered as a greater good than conforming to the divine will, in such a way that the proper motivation for the act lies in that very preference. Servility is, in effect, an inversion of the hierarchy of values, a refusal to acknowledge that the divine good is superior to one’s own private good. As such, servility is always contrary to charity.Hill, Hope, p. 56, note b. In servile fear that is free of such servility, or even in initial fear, the avoidance of punishment may predominate psychologically, i.e., here and now more intensely engage the attention, but implicitly it is evaluated as objectively subordinate to the greater evil of sin.

In order to understand correctly this important point, we must recall that punishment for sin lies in the disorder that the sinful action itself causes in a person’s life. By reflection on the meaning of human life and, especially, by the experience of the self-destructive character of sinful behavior, the human person comes to realize that sin inflicts its own punishment. Indeed, every disordered desire, as St Augustine likes to remind us, carries with it its own punishment. Servility distinguishes those disordered persons whose very attachment to some created good, such as sexual gratification, high honors, or personal convenience, prevents them from conversion, from moving towards God. The person possessed of worldly fear simply gives no thought to God, whereas the servile person considers God but remains frozen in sin because he or she refuses to acknowledge that the divine good is superior to his or her own embrace of a created good.

Servile fear without the mark of servility characterizes the person who experiences the sense tugs and pulls towards disordered behavior of one kind or another but honestly acknowledges that to pursue created goods in this way would entail a painful separation from God. Still fear of punishment alone restrains such a one from sinning. As such, this attitude represents the spirit of the Old Law: “You who fear the Lord, wait for his mercy; do not stray or else you may fall” (Sir 2: 6-9). St Augustine even says that servile fear can exist along with willingness to sin.De natura et gratia 57 (PL 44: 280). So servile fear keeps a person from the love that characterizes initial fear; and for this reason, the believer who remains in this rudimentary disposition never becomes like the little child that the Gospels tell us will inherit the kingdom of heaven (see Mk 10: 13-16).

The graced Christian can remain with servile fear over a long period of time. For a person can maintain a self-regarding love by fearing the punishment that sin entails, and at the same time develop the proper kind of self-love that comes to perfection only with theological charity. This happens when, for example, a person painfully recognizes and accepts that the “punishment” of sin is of less moment than sinful separation from God. To put it differently, servile fear is not contrary to charity because through servile fear a sinner comes to appreciate that suffering the purification of disordered attachments no longer constitutes the maximum evil. Of course, this sort of spiritual growth requires that one accept at some point the objective truth about the moral life. “To regulate human life according to divine reasons [rationes] is in fact the work of wisdom,” Aquinas teaches, “and the first indications of this ought to be reverence for God and subjection to him, with the consequence that in all things whatsoever a person will shape his life in reference to God.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 7.

Take the example of the person who indulges in some form of unchaste conduct, whether in thought, words, or actions. To the extent that the fear of forfeiting delight in venereal pleasure restrains a man or woman from accepting divine truth, in this case about chastity, the unchaste person remains fixed in a state of servility. To put it differently, such a one abides outside the order of divine wisdom and love. And this implies that his or her life is not shaped in reference to God. But when a sinner experiences the true emptiness of unchaste activity in any form, and thereby comes to recognize the truth about the virtue of chastity, such a person begins to experience servile fear, i.e., he or she fears returning to the state of enslavement that this particular form of sinful self-gratification generates. “Servile fear is caused by love of self,” says Aquinas, “since it is fear of punishment as detrimental to one’s own well-being.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 6.

In servile fear, the sinner recognizes the self-destructive character of sin, that is, its intrinsic punishment, and starts to look for ways to avoid it. Significantly for Aquinas, this happens only when the believer accepts the “first principles of wisdom,” which Aquinas identifies as the “articles of faith.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 7. The Church’s role as a moral teacher is especially important at this stage of moral development. When this growth takes place however, reverence and submission to the heavenly Father replace a false regard for and slavish attachment to the creature. As the Old Testament wisdom observes, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 1: 7).

1. Initial Fear. Substantially initial fear denotes filial fear, but in a mixed or imperfect way. For the motive that inclines a person to avoid alienation from God still involves fear of punishment, but with the dawning realization that to love God constitutes a good in itself. Aquinas makes the point with great clarity:

Of itself initial fear is not concerned with punishment, as if this were its own proper object, but only to the extent that it has mixed with it the quality of servile fear. In its essentials, servile fear is compatible with charity, once the servility is put aside. Thus, servile fear continues to be operative, along with imperfect charity, in those instances where the motivation is not only love of rectitude but fear of punishment; yet such activity ceases with the coming of perfect charity, which, as 1 John says, “casts out fear which dreads punishment” (4: 18).Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 8, ad 2.

There is a relationship between love and discipline: the weak person refuses discipline in as much as it seems a rejection; only the loved person can accept discipline as a means to grow closer to the source of love. In a certain sense, everyone remains a beginner in the spiritual life. And to that extent initial fear characterizes the lot of most Christian believers, for only the gaze of the saint remains so lovingly fixed on God that he or she possesses both the wisdom to discern properly the moral good and the will immediately to recoil from all evil.

1. Filial Fear. The gift of the Holy Spirit achieves in the believer the ability to reverence God and to avoid any alienation of ourselves from him. For this reason, filial fear grows to the extent that our charity increases. St Augustine writes that “chaste fear really means a will so disinclined to sin that we do not worry about falling from frailty, but rather shun sin in perfect tranquillity.”De civitate Dei Bk 14, chap. 9 (PL 41: 416). Those who reverence God as a true Father fear not the loss of disordered attachments to created goods, but only fear offending the Father whom they love as the source of all goodness. The Christian spiritual tradition repeatedly holds up the filial norm characteristic of a good child as the central feature of a holy life. As a matter of fact, as a way of identifying with Jesus who came among us as a little Child, the saints are known to cultivate devotion to the holy childhood. The 12th-century Cistercian Guerric of Igny throws light on the gift of filial Fear and the mystery of the Incarnation. In one of his Christmas homilies, he says: “When [Christ] manifested himself to mortals he appeared as a Child, a little one more lovable than terrible. Because he came to save and not to judge he preferred ways of inciting love to means of striking terror.”Guerric of Igny, Liturgical sermons, trans, by monks of Mt Saint Bernard Abbey (Spencer, MA, 1970).

Filial fear perdures even among the saints. “Evil for the rational creature lies either in becoming subservient to a lower creature out of disordered love, or in not submitting to God and instead in presumptuously rebelling against him and scorning him.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 11. But even though this is not possible in heaven, the gift of Fear remains in the blessed. Fear of the Lord takes the form of awe, a beholding of the wonderful work of our salvation “his utter transcendence and incomprehensibility.”Ibid. Christians anticipate this state of heavenly awe by living the beatitude of poverty of spirit. “A beatitude,” explains Aquinas, “means an operation of a virtue in a state of complete perfection.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 19, a. 12, ad 1. The one who lives poverty of spirit submits to God and therefore remains disinclined to seek glorification in his or her own person or in any other except God. The true experience of childlike dependency that marks the poor in spirit remains the best disposition for developing a life of Christian love. It should characterize not only the one who is perfect in charity, but also the person who is just coming to learn about moral rectitude and chaste fear.