Thank you Pax and FC for your replies. I’m curious how the three categories of virtues are alike and how they are different. I think i have a good idea of what love is, for there is much written about it in the New Testament. There is some helpful information about faith, as well. However, there does not appear to be much written about hope.
Does anyone have an idea of how faith and hope are different from one another?
Socrates, the Virtue of Faith gives us the capacity to have a supernatural knowledge of God. Faith is the beginning of eternal life; it is the first personal encounter of man with the life of God. The mystery of the intimate life of God becomes, through faith, the possession of the soul. Faith is an insertion into the life of the Most Blessed Trinity. Faith is a beginning of eternal life. An act of faith is the adherence of the mind to God: believing what God has taught, accepting what God has revealed, without requiring that we understand it, and living, then, according to our adherence to God and His revelation. And this act is itself an impulse of grace. We are radically incapable of believing and acting according to our belief unless God Himself bestows the power of adhering to revealed truth. No one can say “I believe” unless the Lord first pierces the soul with a ray of light which is at one and the same time the splendor of wisdom and the warmth of mercy. The Light of Glory by which we will have the Beatific Vision of the Most Holy Trinity is here and now received, but as through a veil – as St. Paul writes, we “see through a glass, darkly”.
In theological terms, Faith is an infused habit. The habit of faith, through the divine mercy, is first infused at Baptism and awaits the opportune moment to be ratified by the will and the intelligence. Thus we were educated, and educate our children, in the faith so that we and they have knowledge of the substance of Faith and of the lives we are called to live according to this habit. Faith widens the horizon of the intelligence, makes it capable of functioning in a world which is beyond its natural boundaries, the world of the mystery of God. The intelligence becomes capable of knowing and savoring what it could never have known either in its existence or in its reality, without the gift of faith.
The Virtue of Hope is the flowering of Faith; it makes us tend to our proper end: Life eternal with God Who alone is the object of our Hope. The exercise of Hope brings with it detachment from the world, freedom from passing things, superiority over everything created. It is also the beginning of an inner facility for progressive joy because slowly and gently fidelity to Hope brings about an interior attitude of receptivity to what the Lord has guaranteed to His Faithful. The soul that hopes is always ruled by a holy fear of God, not a fear that paralyzes or begets sadness and disquiet, but one which produces in the soul a sense of the seriousness of life, an interior alacrity and a need for and a stimulus to generosity.
The Virtue of Charity infuses into the Christian a true love of friendship for God; and this is, as we know, the only Theological Virtue that will be ours eternally, because once we have reached our goal – life eternal with God – we will no longer have Faith for we will have full knowledge of the One we love; we will no longer have Hope for we will possess the One Whose presence we hoped for. Charity is God Himself enveloping us and transforming us to love with His Love here and now, this Love to reach its eternal climax in the Beatific Vision. (cf. The Theological Virtues and the Spiritual Life, Fr. Anastasius of the Most Holy Rosary, O.C.D.).
It is difficult to put things in words sometimes. Also, I am always learning, so this is the best way right now that I know how to communicate my perspective.