Hope is not optimism. Optimism predicts; hope keeps walking without a forecast.
Where It Belongs
Hope is the second of the three theological virtues, between Faith and Charity in Paul's triad from 1 Corinthians 13. Like its two companions it is, in Aquinas's scheme, infused rather than acquired, a gift aimed at an end beyond human reach, and like faith it is provisional: hope's business is the not-yet, and possession will one day retire it. In the meantime it does the load-bearing work of the three, because it is the virtue of the interval, everything between promise and arrival is hope's territory.
What It Is
The scholastics were precise: hope is the confident movement of the will toward a future good that is difficult but possible to attain. Every word filters something out. A good already possessed needs no hope; an easy good needs none either; an impossible good permits only fantasy. Hope lives exactly on the ridge between presumption, which treats the difficult as already guaranteed, and despair, which quietly reclassifies the possible as impossible. Despair was the failure the tradition feared most, not because it is dramatic but because it is efficient: the person who stops expecting stops walking, and every other virtue loses its reason to operate.
Its Opposing Sin
Hope's shadow among the seven is Sloth: acedia, the sorrow in the face of the good. Despair is acedia's final form: the noonday demon's whisper that nothing matters, matured into a settled verdict. This is why Dante's slothful run shouting exempla of zeal, motion is hope re-enacted by the body until the soul remembers how. The remedial pair of Diligence and hope work one muscle: diligence takes the next step, hope believes there is somewhere the steps are going.
Related
- Faith and Charity, the other theological virtues
- Sloth, the sin whose ripened form, despair, hope answers
- Diligence: hope's working partner
- Virtues, the three lists
- Christianity, the carrying tradition
Difficult, but possible. Hope is the discipline of keeping both words true.