Hope

In Christian theology ‘hope’ has a central role as one of the three theological virtues. As theology has gradually become separated from moral theory, the inclusion of ‘hope’ within a theory of ethics has become rare. Hope can be either intentional or dispositional. The former is a specific hope for something, whereas the latter is a state of character. Kant gave a central place to intentional hopes in his moral theory with his doctrine of the postulates. Hope also played an essential role in the moral and political writings of Ernst Bloch and Gabriel Marcel. Bloch regarded hope as concerned with a longing for utopia, whereas Marcel regarded hope as a disposition to rise above situations which tempt one to despair. In each of these writers the Christian connection between hope, on the one hand, and faith and love, on the other, remained, although Kant and Bloch did not oppose these categories to reason, but sought to ‘subsume’ them under it.