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Ed Brooks, member of the Pastorate team and Director of the Oxford Character Project, has just finished his DPhil writing on the virtue of hope. Here he offers a brief introduction to the complex and important contemporary debate about the nature and value of hope.

‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers’, wrote Emily Dickinson, ‘That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops at all.’ Like a bird, hope may be small, but it is also hardy. The lightness of its presence belies a strength that keeps it singing through life’s most powerful storms. The challenge, when it comes to growing in hope, is to learn to listen: to tune in—and then to join in—the song.

The art of good hope

Victoria McGeer is one of a number of Anglophone philosophers who have recently engaged in a new wave of inquiry into the nature, and especially the practice of hope. Hope is ubiquitous, she argues, ‘a unifying and grounding force of human agency… a condition for the possibility of leading a human life.’ But it is also enigmatic, puzzling, elusive, opaque. It resists philosophical capture. McGeer is right: good hope is an ‘art’. The bird won’t be caged, but perches ‘in the soul’, a place beyond the bounds of contemporary secular inquiry.

McGeer’s analysis of hope is insightful. She notes the dual dangers of hoping too much (presumption) or too little (despair), but refuses to follow the doctrine of the mean to suggest that what is needed is just the right amount of hope. It is the quality, she says, and not the quantity that is important: ‘Given the nature of hope, given its essential role in supporting our capacities as self-directed agents, our question should be, not how much hope, but what kind of hope serves us best and what can be done to develop our skills for hoping well?’

These are important questions, but they also highlight the difficulty of hope as a modern art: following this line of thinking soon confronts us once again with the opacity of hope and the modern reticence when it comes to matters of the soul. Some will no doubt be reluctant to consider it, but might the renewed interest in hope in late modern philosophy benefit from some theological help at this point? Certainly, the religious traditions are rich sources of reflection when it comes to hope. Prominent among them is the stream of classical theology following St Augustine, who held hope to be a primary disposition of human life. Hope is one of three fundamental virtues, residing in the soul along with faith and love. Of the three, it is love, says Augustine, that is ultimate. Hope is the virtue that directs life, by faith, along the way of love—love for God and for one’s neighbour. Hope, we might say, is the virtue of faithfully awaiting the future of love.

Importantly, in Augustinian perspective, hope isn’t merely a private virtue. Hope is public and its impact is political. Hope structures a form of communal life along a path that is travelled by way of humility and directed towards the progress and ultimate fulfilment of love. Hope stands in solidarity with others, refusing the ultimacy of evil, and so of despair, not by averting its gaze but by its persistent commitment to the good in the midst of suffering and hardship. Hope recognises evil but it sees good in the world, in others, and for them, as well as for oneself. Where it is present as a corporate practice, the strength of the community supports those for whom present darkness obscures any light on the horizon. By faith, hope holds on to a future that is not yet in full view. It bends life—through Christ for Augustine—towards the fulfilment of love that is the ever-present promise of creation’s future.

Hoping well

If a renewal of Augustinian hope holds promise in late modernity, what of McGeer’s second question? ‘What can be done to develop our skills for hoping well?’

The most prominent contemporary answer comes from positive psychology. Here, hope is taken to combine two aspects: a certain strength of human agency and a potential pathway(s) to the future. Hope is an important aspect of personal wellbeing, and it is strengthened as a form of positive self-realization. Numerous personal testimonies and empirical studies attest to its credentials. Perhaps so, but this is quite a different account of hope to the one we have been considering. It might be described as optimism or positive expectation and it functions well as a marketable model, promising a solution to the uncertainties and anxieties of what the future might—or might not—hold. But it also seems to overlook hope’s unsettling depth. As Charles Mathewes puts it, ‘Hope is part of a way of being in the world, a virtue whereby we come to shape ourselves as perpetually unsettled, or of recognizing our unsettledness—a way of enduring our begrudging recognition that the future is going to be genuinely surprising—surprising in a way whose “surprisingness” will never end.’

If we are left dissatisfied by the paperback promise of positive psychology, perhaps we might turn to the time-honoured resources of classical philosophy. Since Augustine (and the Western intellectual tradition after him) understands hope following the classical language of virtue, perhaps an Aristotelian perspective on virtue-formation might help us. According to Aristotle, virtues of character emerge through ‘habit’. An important way of growing in justice, courage, temperance, prudence, and many other virtues, is by doing virtuous actions: ‘We become builders, for instance, by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.’ It is through intentional practice, at least in part, that stable and enduring dispositions of character are formed. If this approach to learning to hope is promising—and it is—turning to Aristotle also presents a problem: hope was not an Aristotelian virtue. In fact, Aristotle was fairly ambivalent about hope, which he recognized as important for human agency but also a danger to it. Epitomized by the enthusiastic youth or disinhibited drunkard, hope could undermine the courage that relied on the strength of one’s own will to face down and overcome difficulty. In the image of Dickinson’s poem, the bird is not owned or possessed but it perches in the soul: its presence can be relied on but it shouldn’t be presumed. It comes from without, as a gift.

Following Aristotle by way of Augustine delivers a more receptive mode of human agency in accord with the fundamental reality that life is a gift of grace. It is to be received with open hands and lived in love with a whole heart. For Augustine, hope is a virtue because there is more to life than we could ever make of it ourselves. There is a future fulfilment beyond our understanding towards which life can—and should—be lived in joyful confidence, even through seasons of suffering and doubt. Augustine modifies Aristotle: human agency is always expressed within and in relation to the ultimacy of love. Human virtues are the character qualities that order life in view of divine love and towards its fulfilment. But if Augustine modifies Aristotle’s conception of virtue, he doesn’t completely overthrow it. Hope is receptive, it involves a certain way of seeing the world, its provisionality, its pain, and its promise. And it is lived in a mode of patient waiting, towards a future that cannot be manufactured. And yet we are not simply to wait around. If virtue is formed in practice, we can learn the ‘art’, or skill, of good hope by practices of receptivity: waiting without immediately seeking diversion; enduring difficulty whilst resisting the resolution offered by presumption or despair; listening without jumping to conclusions; looking with the awareness that there is always more than meets the eye; appreciating others without succumbing to the pressure to compete; being where we are and being thankful for it; committing to live beyond ourselves because love has a future.

The challenge, when it comes to growing in hope, is to learn to listen: to tune in—and then to join in—the song.