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.