1025. Omnipotent divine help as the foundation of hope can be understood in two senses:
(a) It may be taken for some created help, that is, for some gift of God possessed by us (such as habitual or actual grace, merits, virtues, etc). It is not in this sense that divine help is called the motive of hope; for even a sinner can and should hope, and the just man’s merits, while they are dispositions for beatitude, are not a principal cause that will conduct him to it.
(b) This divine help may be taken for uncreated help, that is, for the act by which God confers His gifts upon us. In this sense only is divine aid the basis of hope. For if a person is asked why he is confident of salvation, he will not answer, “Because I am in the state of grace and do good works,” but “Because I know that God will help me.”
1026. The divine perfections included in the title of helper now given to God are:
(a) essentially, the almighty power of God; for this is the immediate and sufficient reason for the confident expectation that one will at last possess the same object of felicity as God Himself. The higher and more difficult the goal one sets before oneself, the greater must be the resources on which one counts for success;
(b) secondarily, these perfections include the infinite kindness of God; for it is the goodness of God that prompts Him to employ His omnipotence in assisting creatures to attain their Last End. Man has hope, therefore, of attaining supreme felicity, because he relies on supreme power to aid him, while this supreme power aids him, because it is directed by infinite goodness and mercy. Thus, the Psalmist says: “I have trusted in Thy mercy” (Ps. xii. 6). Just as faith rests proximately on the reliability of God and remotely on His perfection of being, so hope rests proximately on God’s almighty power and radically on His goodness and perfection.
1027. The Excellence of Hope.—Hope is a theological virtue, and is therefore superior to the moral virtues.
(a) It is a theological virtue, inasmuch as it tends immediately to God Himself. As was said above (see 1019, 1023), we hope for God and we hope in God: “In God is my salvation and my glory. He is the God of my help, and my hope is in God” (Ps. lxi. 8); “What is my hope? Is it not the Lord?” (Ps. xxxviii. 8); “In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped” (Ps. xxx. 1). Hence, the Apostle numbers hope along with the other theological virtues (I Cor., xiii. 13). “By faith the house of God receives its foundations, by hope it is reared, by charity it is completed” (St. Augustine, Serm. xxvii., 1).
(b) The two moral virtues that most resemble hope are longsuffering and magnanimity, for the former is the expectation of good that is distant, while the latter is the readiness to encounter difficulties in the quest of high ideals. But these two virtues belong to courage, rather than to hope; for the goods they seek are finite, and the difficulty they encounter is external struggle, whereas the good which hope seeks is infinite, and the difficulty lies in the very greatness of that good.
1028. There are various points of view from which virtues may be compared one with another.