“Spe salvi” Saved In Hope
Saved In Hope will be coming very shortly, in fact tomorrow, the second encyclical of Benedict XVI’s pontificate. Benedict presented a beautiful reflection on God is Love in his first opus (Deus Caritas Est) and now will presumably continue and synthesize the theme of hope and love, two of the three Theological Virtues. Is Benedict writing in a descending order? Stay tuned.
In the interim, a very good introduction and source of context to the pending encyclical can be found at Catholic Answers entitled “An Apologetics of Hope” written by Carl E. Olson, author and editor of Ignatius Insight. Carl is a very gifted writer and has an engaging style that nudges difficult and complex ideas into an understandable format, thus encouraging the timid and less stouthearted to attempt the audacious.
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http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2006/0610fea2.asp
Love, as St. Paul explained in 1 Corinthians, is the greatest of the three theological virtues. Faith is the theological virtue most commonly debated and pondered by theologians and apologists. Hope, on the other hand, has among many Christians a status similar to the Holy Spirit: vague in character, forgotten in conversation, and an enigma in everyday life.
Human and Theological Virtues
A virtue is a habit, or a consistent and “firm disposition to do the good” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1803). The human virtues are the attitudes that control man’s actions and passions according to reason and faith. They include the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. They prepare man for communion with God, which ultimately comes through the divine gift of the theological virtues, which in turn “dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity” and “adapt man’s faculties for participation in the divine nature” (CCC 1812). The origin and object of the theological virtues are one: the Triune God. They direct man to God, they are infused into man by God alone, and they are made known to man by divine revelation.
The Catechism defines hope as “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1817). The German Thomist Josef Pieper wrote in his classic work On Hope (in the volume Faith Hope Love) that “in the virtue of hope more than any other, man understands and affirms that he is a creature, that he has been created by God.” Philosophers, he went on, would not describe hope as a virtue unless they were also Christian theologians. Pieper means that hope—the desire for fulfillment beyond what is found in time and history as opposed to the hope we have for good health or a long life—makes no sense unless there is a personal and loving God.
St. Thomas Aquinas explains in the Summa Theologiae that “man’s happiness is twofold.” The first happiness belongs to human nature and can be obtained by man’s natural efforts. The other, he writes, “is a happiness surpassing man’s nature and man can obtain by the power of God alone, by a kind of participation of the Godhead, about which it is written that by Christ we are made ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4)” (ST I-II.62.1). Because this supernatural happiness surpasses what man is naturally capable of, he is reliant on God to provide the ability to achieve it.
Continue reading at Catholic Answers >>>>> http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2006/0610fea2.asp
