Jean Khoury

Summary: The act of hope is constituted by three interlocking elements: the presence of Jesus in our life, the object towards which hope is directed, and the means by which that object is pursued. This article focuses on the second of these elements — the object — and argues that the properly Christian act of hope undergoes a series of decisive transformations across the spiritual journey. Prior to second conversion, hope rests upon the Beatific Vision and eternal life as its terminus. After second conversion, through the discovery of Christ’s specific desire to unite Himself to the soul in this life, the object becomes union with Christ in via. After union, the object deepens further still: since Christ is not only Head but Head-and-Body, the soul united to Him finds its desire expanding, by the very logic of that union, towards the completion of His Mystical Body. The article traces this threefold movement through the paradigmatic witness of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus — from her early dreams of heaven, through her prayer before the book of Saint John of the Cross, to the fiery desires of Manuscript B in September 1896, where she expresses her longing for martyrdom, apostolate, and the entry of every elect soul into heaven. Drawing on Augustine’s identification of desire and love as one act of charity, and on his theology of the Whole Christ (totus Christus), the article argues that hope at its fullness is not a desire for Jesus alone but for Jesus in His totality: Head and Body, until the last of the elect has entered into His glory. Information about the object precedes and generates the act at each stage; the means of hope are transformed through purification from human to divine modality, as illustrated in the figure of Peter before and after the Passion; and the small hopes of the early journey serve a preparatory but ultimately subordinate function that must yield, at each stage, to the one Hope that encompasses all.

I. Introduction: The Neglected Precision

The theological virtue of hope has suffered a peculiar fate in the life of the Church. It has not been denied — no council or catechism has dismissed it — but it has been left imprecise at precisely the point where precision most matters: its object. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in faithful continuity with the Scholastic tradition, defines hope as the theological virtue by which we desire the Kingdom of Heaven and eternal life as our happiness.¹ This definition is sound. But it is incomplete. It identifies the remote object of hope — the eschatological possession of God in glory — while leaving largely unaddressed the near object: the union with Christ that God is already offering the soul in this life, as the condition and foretaste of that final possession.

The consequences of this imprecision are pastoral and spiritual, not merely theoretical. An act of hope that points only towards a distant heaven may function, with effort, as a motive for perseverance; but it cannot generate the daily energy, the vital drive, the concrete directedness that characterises the spiritual life at full force. For hope to become — in the words of the Letter to the Hebrews — an anchor of the soul (Heb 6:19), it must be anchored to something near enough to grip, and specific enough to orient. It must know what it is waiting for.

The present article argues that this precision is available within the Catholic tradition — specifically within the teaching of the Carmelite Doctors and Augustine — and that it has decisive structural consequences at every stage of the journey. The act of hope does not simply deepen in intensity as the soul advances; its very object develops. There is a hope proper to the beginning, a hope proper to the period after second conversion, a hope proper to the soul in purification, and a hope proper to the soul already united with Christ. At each stage, the object is the same Person — Jesus — but the soul’s grasp of who Jesus is, and therefore of what it hopes for, grows progressively more adequate to the mystery.

II. The Three Constitutive Elements of the Act of Hope

Before addressing the object of hope, it is necessary to identify the three elements that together constitute the act. These are: first, the personal presence of Jesus in the soul’s life — the encounter with a living Person who makes promises; second, the object — what is being promised, and what the soul is accordingly directed towards desiring; and third, the means — the path by which that object is to be attained, and the dispositions the soul must cultivate to walk it.

The present article is concerned principally with the second element. This focus is not arbitrary. The act of hope is, in the most fundamental sense, a response to a promise. A promise has content — it promises something specific. The act of hope is therefore only as precise, only as alive, only as motivating as its understanding of what is being promised. An act of hope whose object is vaguely identified as ‘heaven’ or ‘eternal life’ — without any articulation of what that life consists in, or how it has already begun — is structurally fragile. It is like extending one’s hands to receive a gift without knowing what the gift is.

The image of extended hands is itself instructive. Hope is like empty hands — hands relentlessly emptied of lesser hopes — extended to receive the Promise. If faith is eyes opened to see the presence of Jesus in daily life, and ears made capable of hearing His word, then hope is the posture of receptivity, of directed desire. But this posture presupposes that the hands know what they are reaching for. Without knowledge of the object, the hands reach into the air.²

III. Before Second Conversion: Hope as Beatific Vision

Prior to what spiritual theology names the second conversion — that decisive moment of personal encounter with Christ that marks the transition from a practised but largely external Christian life to an interior, personally engaged one — hope operates within a specific horizon. Its object is eternal life, the Beatific Vision, the eschatological possession of God in glory.

This is not a diminished or deficient hope. The Beatific Vision is the supreme good of the human person, the end for which the soul was made, and the object of the theological virtue as classically defined. Saint Thomas Aquinas is exact on this point: ‘the proper and principal object of hope is eternal happiness’ (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.17, a.2). The soul that hopes for heaven, and orients its entire life towards that terminus, is already living the theological life.

What is absent at this stage is not hope itself, but the specific precision that second conversion introduces. The soul desires heaven, but does not yet know — or has not yet personally encountered — the specific form in which heaven has already begun to be offered: the desire of Jesus to unite Himself to the soul here below, in via, as the near and experiential foretaste of the eschatological union that heaven will complete.

The example of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus before her decisive encounter with St. John of the Cross is illustrative. The young Thérèse was a soul of genuine fervour, deep prayer, and authentic love of God. She desired heaven; she dreamt of the Beatific Vision. She was very much impressed by the book of Father Arminjon. Her hope was real and active. Here is what she wrote:

“At the age of fourteen, with my desire for knowledge, the good God saw that it was necessary to add “to the pure flour” “honey and oil in abundance”. This honey and this oil He allowed me to find in the conferences of Monsieur l’abbé Arminjon on the end of the present world and the mysteries of the life to come. This book had been lent to Papa by my dear Carmelites; thus, contrary to my usual habit (for I did not read Papa’s books), I asked to read it. This reading was once again one of the greatest graces of my life. I did it by the window of my study room, and the impression it left on me is too intimate and too sweet for me to express…
All the great truths of religion, the mysteries of eternity, plunged my soul into a happiness that was not of this earth… I already had a foretaste of what God reserves for those who love Him (not with the eyes of man, but with those of the heart), and seeing that eternal rewards bore no proportion to the slight sacrifices of this life, I wanted to love, to love Jesus with passion, to give Him a thousand signs of love while I still could… I copied several passages on perfect love and on the welcome that the good God will give to His elect at the moment when He Himself will become their great and eternal reward; I repeated unceasingly the words of love that had set my heart ablaze…” (Story of a Soul, 47 r°-v°)

But at the age of seventeen, something happened that would sharpen and redirect it — without cancelling it — in a way she could not have anticipated.

IV. The Decisive Encounter: Thérèse and Saint John of the Cross

Therese tells us that, at the age of seventeen, she read Saint John of the Cross — specifically the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame where he describes growth in Love, union of love with Christ, etc. The great Doctor of Carmel presents union with Christ not as an eschatological promise alone, but as a real possibility offered to the soul in this life, through the path of purification and self-surrender.

“Ah! how many lights I have drawn from the works of our Father St John of the Cross!… At the age of seventeen and eighteen, I had no other spiritual nourishment,…” (Story of the Soul, Ms A 83r°)

What Thérèse encountered in that reading was not primarily a spiritual exercise, nor a programme of ascetical practice, nor an account of mystical states. She encountered information: the revelation that Jesus desires and offers union with the soul here on earth. She learned the specific object of Christian hope — not merely heaven after death, but union with Christ in via, already in this life.

Her response was immediate and structurally instructive. She asked God to realise in her — during this life — everything she had read. “Ah! it is incredible how all my hopes have been fulfilled. When I was reading St John of the Cross, I was imploring the good God to bring about in me what he speaks of — that is to say, the same as if I were to live to a very old age; in short, to consume me rapidly in love, and I have been heard!” (Yellow Notebook, 31.8.9) This is the act of hope in its properly Christian form: informed by a precise knowledge of the object, the soul turns to God and desires with its whole being the fulfilment of what has been promised. The object of Thérèse’s hope did not change in its ultimate orientation — she still hoped for the final possession of God. But it was made more precise: from the Beatific Vision as remote terminus, to union with Christ as near object, already offered and already beginning.

This precision is not a narrowing of hope. It is its enrichment. The near object and the remote object are not competitors; they are the same reality at different stages of the same journey. Union with Christ in via is the anticipated foretaste, the experiential beginning, the dynamic anticipation of the union that heaven will consummate. To hope for union with Christ now is already to hope for heaven; but it is to hope for it in a way that has traction, that engages the present moment, that gives the act its energy.

It should be noted, moreover, that Thérèse’s subsequent possession of Jesus — which she describes as the fulfilment of everything she had read — does not belong to her years of hoping, but to the term of her journey. Her hope was fulfilled: but it was fulfilled toward the end of her life, and after union, not before. To speak of Thérèse as one who ‘already possesses Him’ in the context of discussing hope is to read the terminus back into the journey. She hoped; she was purified; she possessed. These are not simultaneous states but successive stages, and conflating them distorts the structure of the spiritual life.

V. Information as Precondition: The Logic of the Act

The episode of Thérèse and St. John of the Cross discloses a structural principle of the first importance for spiritual theology and pastoral practice: the act of hope presupposes information about the object of hope. This is not a merely psychological observation; it is a theological one.

An act is specified by its object. This is a foundational principle of Scholastic moral and spiritual theology. The act of hope is the act by which the soul desires and moves towards its proper object. If the object is not known — or is known only vaguely — the act correspondingly lacks determination, energy, and direction. It moves, but without orientation. It desires, but without precision.

The question then becomes urgent: who communicates this information? The answer is: the teaching ministry of the Church, in its broadest sense — Scripture, tradition, the Doctors, the spiritual masters, the preacher, the catechist, the spiritual formator, the spiritual director. It is the proclamation — in whatever form — that Jesus desires union with us, that this is what he accomplished on the Cross. This proclamation is the condition of possibility for the specifically Christian act of hope. Without it, hope remains generic, eschatological in the abstract, oriented towards a good that has not yet been given a face or a name.

The urgency of this observation for the Church today is considerable. If the Church’s proclamation does not explicitly communicate that Jesus desires union with the soul here on earth — if it remains content with an exhortation to ‘go to heaven’ or to ‘love your neighbour’ — then the specifically Christian act of hope will not be generated. The soul will have good dispositions, even genuine virtue; but it will lack the specific orientation, the directed energy, the focused desire that constitutes the act of hope in its full theological force.

This is the sense in which the act of hope remains, in significant measure, the Church’s unfinished business.³ The Catechism establishes the doctrinal horizon; the spiritual masters describe the concrete path. What is needed is the integration of the two — the near object and the remote object held together — so that hope may recover its full power as the driving force of the Christian life.

VI. The Six Stages of Properly Christian Hope

The movement from generic eschatological hope to fully formed theological hope in its Christian specificity follows a discernible pattern. Six stages may be distinguished, each building upon the previous and preparing for the next. The first four concern the soul’s approach to union with Christ; the fifth is the possession itself; the sixth is the further deepening that possession makes possible — and indeed, by the very nature of that union, makes necessary.

Stage 1 — First Meeting with Jesus: Second Conversion

The first stage is not properly an act of hope but its precondition: the personal encounter with Jesus — the second conversion — in which the soul passes from a practised but externally governed Christian life to a personal, interior engagement with a living Person. Without this encounter, the specific object of Christian hope cannot be received. One can hope for heaven in the abstract; one cannot hope for union with Jesus without having met Him.

Stage 2 — Discovering Jesus’ Desire: He Wants to Unite Us

The second stage is precisely the communication of the object: the discovery — through reading, teaching, spiritual direction, or direct interior illumination — that Jesus desires not only to be encountered but to be united to the soul, here and now, in this life. This is the moment of Thérèse closing the book of St. John of the Cross. It is the moment at which properly Christian hope — as distinct from generic religious aspiration — becomes possible.

Stage 3 — A New Hope is Born: The Human Modality and the Question of Small Hopes

With the discovery of the object, hope is born in its properly Christian form. At this stage it operates in what spiritual theology calls the human modality: the soul’s natural faculties — desire, imagination, affective longing, deliberate aspiration — are engaged and oriented towards the object. This hope is genuine, alive, and already transforming. But it remains subject to the fluctuations of feeling, the distractions of lesser desires, the fragility of a heart not yet fully purified.

A question naturally arises here, and it deserves a careful answer: are small hopes — the hopes with a lowercase h — not necessary in order to grow towards the act of Hope? The question has real weight, and the comparison is illuminating: as trust relates to Faith, do small hopes not relate to Hope, serving as preparatory steps, as training for the greater act?

The answer is: yes and no, depending on the stage. In the early phases of the spiritual journey — particularly before and immediately after second conversion — small hopes do serve a genuine preparatory function. When Thérèse prayed for the conversion of Pranzini, when she longed to enter Carmel, when she hoped to see Céline follow her into religious life: these were not shallow desires. They were real, spiritually serious, personally engaged longings — hopes oriented towards genuine goods. Their core resides on the fact that they needed to be purified and made only for Jesus in a detached way. God makes sure this happens using different events and circumstances. In this sense, they were formative, because they had to be purified. They exercised the soul’s capacity for desire, cultivated generosity, and oriented the heart progressively beyond itself, but all had to become led by Jesus only. Small hopes of that type exist, but they are opportunities to purify hope and allow it to be the only and unique one. They are not obstacles but apprenticeships.

But — and this is the crucial qualification — they do not become permanent fixtures. The very episode of Thérèse noticing her attachment to a religious sister, turning away without a word, and shedding silent tears, illustrates with painful precision the moment at which a small hope becomes an impediment. The sister’s attachment to Thérèse is not wrong in itself; human affection is not sinful. What makes it an obstacle is that it has been placed where only God can stand. The small hope for this particular consolation has been allowed to occupy the space that belongs to Hope alone.

The pain of that renunciation is real and must not be minimised. To let go of an earthly joy for the sake of a heavenly one costs something — it costs precisely what made the earthly joy precious. And the temptation to recoup the loss through a ‘hope’ that God will somehow compensate — that the unpetalled rose will one day be re-petalled — is itself a form of resistance to the purification being offered. The small hope must be genuinely surrendered, not exchanged for a more refined version of itself.

The relationship between small hopes and Hope is therefore not sequential (first one, then the other) but dynamic and sometimes conflictual. Small hopes are opportunities of purification. The spiritual life consists, in significant part, in learning to recognise this need of purification and detachment and respond to it — not by eliminating desire, but by refusing to let any created object occupy the place that belongs to the one Object alone.

This is the stage at which the distinction between Hope (singular, theological, vertical) and hopes (plural, created, horizontal) becomes practically urgent. The soul that has discovered the object of Christian hope must learn, through daily exercise, to gather all its energies around that one desire, and to release — quietly but firmly — the lesser hopes that would otherwise dilute it.⁴ This gathering is itself an act, one that must be consciously made and regularly renewed.

Stage 4 — Purification: The Passage to Divine Modality

The fourth stage is the passage from human to divine modality through purification. This is the most decisive and most demanding transition in the spiritual life, and it is here that the question of the means of hope becomes paramount. For the means of hope are not constant across the journey; they undergo, in the dark night of the spirit, a radical transformation.

In the human modality of hope, the soul relies — even if it does not fully realise it — on a range of human supports: the felt desire for union, the consolations of prayer, the encouragement of a spiritual director, the joy of progress sensed and measured, the sustaining warmth of community and friendship, some dreams or successes in evangelisation. None of these supports is illegitimate. They are, at the appropriate stage, genuine gifts of Providence. But they are not the fulcrum of hope that would make it pure, reaching God and possessing Him.

In the purification of the spirit — what St. John of the Cross describes as the dark night of the spirit in its most radical form — God systematically withdraws these supports. He deprives the soul of every human point of leverage, every felt confirmation, every interior consolation that had previously made hope feel reasonable and sustainable. This is not cruelty. It is precision surgery. God is removing the false leaning points for the act of hope because the building must learn to stand on its own foundation: God, and God only. He wants to be Himself the fulcrum and the lever of hope — not one support among others, but the only one. Of course one needs to remember Mary’s pure Hope, and how it needs to be transmitted to the soul.

The best illustration of this transformation is not found in a mystical treatise but in the Gospel itself: in the figure of Saint Peter before and after the Passion.

Before the Passion, Peter’s hope is fully operative in its human modality. He hopes in Jesus — and that is not wrong — but his hope is shaped by a human understanding of what Jesus’s mission is and where it is going. He sees the miracles; he has confessed the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi; he has witnessed the Transfiguration. His hope is large, warm, and entirely sincere. But its means are human, its fulcrum is human: it rests on what he has seen, what he has understood, what he has experienced of Jesus’s power and presence. When Jesus speaks of the Cross, Peter rebukes Him — not from malice but from the logic of his hope: this is not where the Promise leads, or at least not by this path. Its leaver also is human, he leans on his own capacity to go to Jesus.

The Passion dismantles all of this. Peter leaning on his own strength denies; he weeps; the structure of his hope collapses entirely. What he had understood of Jesus’s mission is shattered. The supports on which his hope had rested — visible power, felt confidence, the communal energy of the disciples — are gone. He stands in the courtyard of the high priest’s house with nothing.

What emerges after the Resurrection, and above all after Pentecost, is a different Peter — and a different hope. It is no longer hope sustained by what Peter has seen and felt and understood. It is hope that rests on what God has done and promised, entirely apart from Peter’s comprehension or comfort. This Peter can stand before the Sanhedrin, can write from imprisonment, can walk towards his own crucifixion. His hope has passed through the fire of the Passion and come out on the other side transformed: stripped of human scaffolding, resting on God alone. After having gone astray, he comes back, he comes back to the one who hoped for him: Mary.

This is the passage from human to divine modality — not as a spiritual achievement, but as a gift received through suffering and radical detachment, annihilation. God deprives the soul of every human support precisely so that hope may discover its true foundation. The means of hope change: from the soul’s own felt desire, consolations, and understanding, to pure reliance on the promise of God received in naked faith.

Stage 5 — The Possession of Jesus

The fifth stage — the term of one movement within the journey, though not the journey’s end — is what the Carmelite tradition calls the spiritual marriage, followed by the transforming union: the possession of Jesus, the fulfilment in this life of what hope had desired and purification had prepared. This is what Thérèse received; it is what she describes, in her own characteristic idiom, as the realisation of everything she had read in St. John of the Cross.

At this stage, hope is not so much replaced as fulfilled in one dimension while simultaneously deepened in another. The soul no longer hopes for union with Christ in via in the sense of seeking what it does not yet have; it possesses Him. But precisely in possessing Him, it discovers that the Person it now possesses is larger than it had understood. The Jesus whom the soul has received is not only the Jesus of its own interior life. He is the Head of a Body. And the very nature of union — because it is union with Him as He truly is — begins to draw the soul beyond itself, towards His fullness.

Stage 6 — Hope Deepened by Union: The Whole Christ

This sixth stage is the one most easily overlooked, and yet it is theologically the most significant. It represents not a new beginning but the interior consequence of what union with Christ necessarily entails.

St. Augustine, toward the end of his life, in his great commentary on the Psalms, made an observation of extraordinary depth: desire and love are one. The act of loving and the act of desiring are, at their root, a single movement of the soul towards its object, God. This means that as union deepens — as the soul’s love is increasingly identified with Christ’s own love — so its desire is increasingly identified with Christ’s own desire. And what does Christ desire? He desires the completion of His Mystical Body. He desires that not one of those the Father has given Him be lost (Jn 17:12). He desires to see the full number of the elect enter into the glory for which He died.

Since, moreover, the three theological acts — faith, hope, and charity — are at the deepest level one act of self-offering to God, a single movement of the whole person towards its divine object, it follows that as charity grows towards its fullness, hope grows with it. They cannot be separated. The soul that loves with Christ’s own love will desire what Christ desires; and that desire is itself the act of hope, now expanded beyond any merely personal horizon.

St. John of the Cross expressed a principle that illuminates this dynamic: the more we desire or hope, the more we obtain (Ascent book III). This is not a transactional formula but a theological one. Desire, in the soul that has been united to Christ, is itself a form of participation in His own movement towards the Father and towards the elect. The intensity of hope is not a measure of the soul’s selfishness or impatience but of the depth of its union. The more fully the soul is one with Christ, the more fully it shares in His longing for His own completion.

The testimony of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus in September 1896 — in the extraordinary letter to her sister Marie that constitutes Manuscript B — is the most luminous illustration available to us. Thérèse is by this point already united to Jesus (1894). And it is precisely at this moment that her desires reach a pitch of intensity she herself describes as torture. “Ah! forgive me, Jesus, if I am being unreasonable in wishing to repeat my desires, my hopes that touch the infinite, forgive me and heal my soul by giving it what it hopes for!!!” (Ms B 2v) “Jesus, Jesus, if I wished to write all my desires, I would have to borrow your book of life, there are recorded the actions of all the Saints and those actions, I would wish to have accomplished them for you…” (Ms B 3r) “because of my very weakness, you have been pleased, Lord, to fulfil my little childlike desires, and today you wish to fulfil other desires greater than the universe… In prayer my desires causing me to suffer a true martyrdom…” (Ms B 3r) She describes her early desire (like desiring that her sister Celine enter Carmel) as “childlike desires” but she underlines what her desires (her act of hope) became, now, in 1896, toward the end of her life. She often said that God made her desire what he wanted to give her. She is not saying that her actual wild desires were built upon her initial childish desires.
“Child of light, I understood that my desires to be everything, to embrace all vocations, were riches that could well make me unjust, so I used them to make myself friends…” (Ms B 4r)
“Jesus, I cannot deepen my request, I would fear finding myself crushed under the weight of my bold desires…” (Ms B 4r)
“Are my immense desires not a dream, a madness?… Ah! if it is so, Jesus, enlighten me, you know it, I seek the truth… if my desires are rash, make them disappear for these desires are for me the greatest of martyrdoms… However I feel it, O Jesus, after having aspired towards the highest regions of Love, if I must not reach them one day, I shall have tasted more sweetness in my martyrdom, in my madness, than I shall taste in the bosom of the joys of the homeland, unless by a miracle you take from me the memory of my earthly hopes. Then let me enjoy during my exile the delights of love… Let me savour the sweet bitterness of my martyrdom…” (Ms B 4v) And finally: “I am not an eagle, I only have its eyes and its heart for despite my extreme littleness I dare to fix my gaze on the Divine Sun, the Sun of Love and my heart feels within itself all the aspirations of the Eagle…” (Ms B 4v-5r)

As we see in Ms B, she desires martyrdom — but one form is not enough. She desires to have suffered every form of martyrdom from the beginning of creation to the end. She desires to preach the Gospel to all nations, to carry the name of Jesus to the ends of the earth, to be a missionary, a Doctor, an apostle, a priest. She desires to have exercised every form of apostolate the Church has ever known. These desires, she writes, do not oppress her as one might expect — they do not diminish her peace — but they are real, and they are overwhelming. (see Manuscript B)

What is the object of these desires? At first sight they seem bewildering in their scope — almost extravagant. But their logic is precise. Thérèse is not desiring these things for herself in any self-centred sense. She is united to Christ; she desires what He desires. And what Christ desires is the completion of His Body. She wants every elect soul to enter heaven. She will not rest, she writes, until the last of them is inside. Even in heaven, she says, she will not rest; she will spend her heaven doing good on earth.

The object of her hope here is still Jesus — it has always been Jesus — but it is Jesus in His full mystery. It is the Jesus whom Augustine called the Whole Christ, the totus Christus: Head and Body, united in the one Person of the Lord who is both the Son of God and the Bridegroom of the Church.⁵ Thérèse hopes for Christ in His fullness. She hopes for His Body to reach its completion, for every member to be gathered in, for the Church to arrive at the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Eph 4:13).

This is not a different hope from the hope that preceded it. It is the same hope — hope for union with Jesus — now understood at its ultimate depth. The soul that has been united to the Head cannot but desire the Body, because the Head is unthinkable apart from the Body, and the Body is the object of the Head’s own desire. To hope for Jesus is, at this stage, to hope for all that Jesus loves and all that He wills to possess: the full number of His elect, gathered into the glory for which He died and rose.

This great intuition regarding these last stages of growth and how they relate to the Church, Jesus’ Body was traced with great depth by Blessed Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus in his second volume masterwork “I Am a Daughter of the Church”, where the final section is tellingly entitled ‘The Saint in the Mystical Body of Jesus.’ For him, the whole journey of the interior life culminates not in private possession but in mission — in the saint’s insertion into the redemptive work of Christ for the growth of His Body. The journey inward and the engagement with the world are not, at this stage, two movements but one. To possess Christ is to share His concern for those He has not yet fully gathered.

VII. Conclusion

The act of hope is constituted by three elements: the presence of Jesus, the object, and the means. This article has argued that the object of hope is not static across the journey but undergoes a series of real developments, each made possible by the stage that precedes it and each deepening the soul’s engagement with the mystery of Christ.

The argument may be summarised in six propositions corresponding to the six stages. First: prior to second conversion, hope rests upon the Beatific Vision as its terminus — a genuine and authentic form of hope, but one awaiting the precision that personal encounter with Christ will introduce. Second: at the moment of second conversion, through the communication of Jesus’ desire to unite Himself to the soul in this life, the object of hope is made more precise without being replaced; the near object (union with Christ in via) specifies and animates the remote one. Third: this precision presupposes information; without a proclamation of the object, the act of hope in its properly Christian form cannot begin. Fourth: small hopes serve a genuine preparatory function in the early stages but must be progressively surrendered — not eliminated but refused the place that belongs to Hope alone; the relationship between small hopes and theological Hope is real but asymmetrical. Fifth: hope deepens through purification, passing from human to divine modality — the means are transformed as God removes all human scaffolding and becomes Himself the sole fulcrum and lever — as illustrated paradigmatically in the transformation of Peter before and after the Passion. Sixth: after union with Christ, ie after possessing him, the object of hope deepens by the very nature of that union; since desire and love are one (Augustine), and since the soul united to Christ shares His desire, hope expands from the personal possession of Jesus to the completion of His Mystical Body — the Whole Christ, Head and Body, until the last of the elect has entered into glory. This sixth movement finds its most luminous expression in Manuscript B of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus.

The act of hope, understood in this way, is not a single act that remains constant throughout the Christian life. It is a living act, one that grows with the soul that makes it — changing its object as the soul’s knowledge of Christ deepens, changing its means as purification strips away every human support, expanding its scope as union draws the soul into Christ’s own desire for His Body. It begins with a dream of heaven; it ends with a desire for the whole Christ.

The Church’s task — unfinished, and now urgent — is to recover and transmit this understanding at every level: so that the act of hope may become what it is meant to be — not a vague aspiration towards a distant consolation, but the primary driving force of the Christian life, gathering the soul at each stage around the one Promise that Jesus Himself has made, and carrying it forward, through every purification, into the fullness of His mystery.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Augustine of Hippo. Enarrationes in Psalmos. In Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 38–40. Turnhout: Brepols, 1956.

Catechism of the Catholic Church. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1992.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.

Teresa of Ávila. The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila. 3 vols. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1976–1985.

Thérèse of Lisieux. Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux [including Manuscript B]. Trans. John Clarke OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1976.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. II–II, q.17. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920.

Secondary Sources

Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus (Henri Grialou OCD). I Want to See God. 2 vols. Trans. Sr. M. Verda Clare CSC. Notre Dame, IN: Fides Publishers, 1953–1957.

Second Vatican Council. Dei Verbum. Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. Vatican City, 1965.

Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Vatican City, 1964.

Author’s Prior Articles

Khoury, Jean. “Jesus’ Embrace on the Cross.” School of Mary.

Khoury, Jean. “The Act of Hope: The Church’s Unfinished Business.” School of Mary.

Khoury, Jean. “The Distinctively Christian Hope.” School of Mary.

Khoury, Jean. “The Forgotten Theological Act: Hope.” School of Mary.

Khoury, Jean. “Introduction: When the Light Grows Dim.” School of Mary.

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Notes

1 CCC 1817. The classical Thomistic formulation is found in Summa Theologiae II–II, q.17, a.2: ‘the proper and principal object of hope is eternal happiness.’

2 The image of extended hands as a figure of hope is developed in the author’s article ‘The Act of Hope: The Church’s Unfinished Business’ (School of Mary), which also identifies the parallel with faith understood as opened eyes and ears.

3 The phrase is borrowed from the author’s article of the same title. The argument there concerns the inadequacy of the Catechism’s definition not in its content but in its incompleteness — specifically its failure to integrate the near object of hope alongside the remote eschatological one.

4 The distinction between Hope and hopes is developed at length in the author’s article ‘The Forgotten Theological Act: Hope’ (School of Mary). The theological act is ‘vertical’ — it connects us directly to Jesus-God — whereas ordinary hopes are horizontal, connecting us to created goods however legitimate.

5 Augustine’s theology of the totus Christus — the whole Christ, Head and Body — pervades his Enarrationes in Psalmos, which he composed across several decades and which represent the most sustained development of this theme in all of patristic theology. The identification of desire and love as one act is consistent with his broader theology of the will as ordered love, developed across the Confessions, De Trinitate, and the Enarrationes.

6 Thérèse of Lisieux, Manuscript B (Letter to Sr. Marie of the Sacred Heart, September 1896), in Story of a Soul, pp. 192–200. The passage describing her desires as ‘torture’ occurs at the opening of the second folio. This letter is widely regarded as the theological heart of her autobiography and contains her celebrated discovery of her vocation to be ‘love in the heart of the Church.’

7 The Petrine example is developed from the author’s teaching in the School of Mary SF400 course, Lesson 12, in the context of explaining the purification of the means of hope in the passage from human to divine modality.

Author’s note: This article was composed with the assistance of an AI writing tool. The theological content, argument, and judgements are those of the author.