Hope

Hope, spes, is the second of the theological virtues, and Aquinas defines it as the movement of the will toward a future good that is difficult but possible to obtain, with the divine assistance as its ground. It is bounded by two opposite failures: despair, the judgment that the good is not to be had, and presumption, the expectation of it without the means. The tradition treats despair as the graver, since it cuts off the very movement toward the good; Dante places it at the gate of hell in the line abandoning all hope. Hope is the virtue of the pilgrim rather than of the arrived, and the tradition holds that it does not persist in the blessed, since what is possessed is no longer hoped for, whereas charity does persist; that is the sense of Paul's statement that the greatest of the three is charity.

The twentieth-century philosopher Josef Pieper, in his short study On Hope, argued that the virtue is easily confused with mere optimism or a naturally hopeful temperament, and insisted instead that theological hope has a specific object, one's own final beatitude attained only with God's help, which distinguishes it sharply from ordinary hopefulness about worldly outcomes. Pieper drew as well on Aquinas's own account of hope as a virtue proper to what he calls the status viatoris, the condition of one still on the way rather than arrived, a formulation that gives philosophical precision to the tradition's older image, echoed in Dante, of hope as the particular good of the pilgrim journeying rather than the soul already home.

Hope has the cleanest emblem of the three theological virtues and one of the oldest in Christian use. The anchor comes from Hebrews 6:19, where hope is called an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, and it appears scratched on tomb slabs in the Roman catacombs from the second and third centuries, well before the cross became the ordinary Christian sign. It survived into the later repertoire unchanged, and it is still the one attribute a viewer can read without a handbook.

The image works because it inverts what hope is usually taken to mean. An anchor does not lift; it holds, and it holds by being fixed in something the ship cannot see. That is exactly the definition the tradition gives, and which the atlas records elsewhere: a movement of the will toward a future good that is difficult but possible, resting on an assistance outside itself. Optimism would be drawn as wings. Hope is drawn as ballast.

Painters did also give her wings, and a crown reached for above, and hands raised toward something outside the frame. Giotto's hope at Padua is winged and rising, which is the other reading and the one that stresses the movement rather than the ground of it. Ripa keeps the anchor.

The atlas draws the anchor. It is the older attribute, it belongs to hope alone, and it reads at small size, which the raised hands and the distant crown do not.