of how a worldview can shape one’s actions, often in
profound and life-affirming ways.
In Greek mythology, “Hope” is part of the story
of Pandora’s box. After Prometheus stole fire from
the gods and gave it to humans, Zeus gave Pandora
as a “gift” to Prometheus’s brother, but she was
actually a punishment for Prometheus’s crime. Out
of curiosity, Pandora opens a box (or jar) contain-
ing all the world’s evils—diseases, envy, vengeance,
and more—and thereby lets them loose upon the
human race. The evils spread throughout the world,
but Pandora manages to close the lid before the last
one—Hope—escapes. The myth provides an expla-
nation of why hope remains even when all other
ills seem to be insurmountable. Some versions also
suggest that Hope was by far the most important to
keep in the box; if Hope escaped from human pos-
session, human beings would have no way to cope
with all the other ills, because without hope human
existence would be unbearable.
Hope is also a central theme in the Judeo-
Christian tradition, and it is especially notable in
the Bible in Exodus, Psalms, and the Gospels. Other
hope-centered works include stories of the lives of
saints as well as the larger body of religious-themed
works in Western and related literatures. Often the
emphasis is on the hope for salvation or deliverance;
this may be the hope for eternal life, for the com-
ing of the Messiah, for deliverance from sin, or for
other forms of spiritual or religious salvation; these
narratives are often connected to hope for earthly
deliverance from persecution, one’s enemies, great
hardships, or even the material world and the limita-
tions and desires of the human body.
Narratives of the miraculous often emphasize
that hoping for the impossible, or for what merely
seems impossible according to earthly knowledge,
is a sign of one’s moral rectitude and spiritual faith.
This emphasis can also be seen in genres that lean
a little more toward the secular, such as medieval
romances about the quests of Arthurian knights.
In these stories, hope is an important part of moral
character because it stands fast in times of great
adversity, and because it allows courage to triumph
over fear.
Hope in the Western Christian tradition is also
one of the three Christian virtues (or the three
theological virtues), which are faith, hope, and char-
ity. These virtues are sometimes personified as three
sisters whose mother is Wisdom. The personifica-
tion of the virtues (of varying number) is also found
in many medieval works of literature. For example,
Hope is a character in Hildegard von Bingen’s Order
of the Virtues (ca. 1151), which is sometimes called
the first morality play as well as the first European
opera. In it, a human woman must choose between
the virtuous way of life and the temptations of the
devil; Hope therefore is part of the victory of good
over evil. St. Thomas Aquinas, who founded the
discourse on the three theological virtues, similarly
argues that hope is a virtue that keeps one tending
toward the divine and spiritual rather than focusing
on fear and despair. It is notable in these religious
traditions that despite the importance of hope to
individual believers, the fundamental or underlying
hope is for the ultimate deliverance to or reconcilia-
tion with God of all of Creation.
The use of light or fire as a symbol for hope is
seen in both Judeo-Christian and other traditions.
Light is used as a symbol not only for life but also
for the hope of renewal or restoration of what has
been lost or separated; it may be for this reason that
winter celebrations often use light or fire to symbol-
ize hope that the spring (and new life) is on its way.
This imagery of light as a symbol for both hope and
life may also be seen in the metaphorical use of the
phrase “the light at the end of the tunnel,” as well
as literary works such as Dylan Thomas’s villanelle
“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (1951).
Many authors and scholars have considered the
nature of hope. In his 1732 Essay on Man, Alexander
Pope writes: “Hope springs eternal in the human
breast.” (1.95) Emily Dickinson writes of the beauty,
comfort, and constancy of hope in a poem usu-
ally identified by its first line, “ ‘Hope’ is the thing
with feathers.” More recently, the author Barbara
Ehrenreich has argued that the constant pressure to
demonstrate a hopeful attitude is part of the “cult of
positivity” that places an undue psychological bur-
den on those who must suffer silently and absolves
those with the power to lessen suffering; she uses
her experiences as a cancer patient to argue that “[t]
o be hope-free is to acknowledge the lion in the tall50 hope