Rowan Williams: Faith, hope and charity in the world today

11 Oct 2010

I want to try to gain a different kind of perspective on the three great theological virtues of faith, hope and charity by seeing how they are dealt with by one of the great mystics of Christian history, the sixteenth-century Spanish friar St John of the Cross.

St John - like everybody else in his generation of Catholic theologians - takes for granted a picture of the human mind which sees it as working in three basic ways: the human mind understands, it remembers and it wants. Or, in more abstract terms, the human mind is made up of the interaction of understanding, memory and will.

And the distinctive and fresh insight that St John of the Cross offers, is that if you put together understanding, memory and will with faith, hope and charity you have a perfect picture of where we start and where we finish.

In the Christian life, he says, faith is what happens to our understanding; hope is what happens to our remembering; and love is what happens to our wanting. To grow up as a Christian is to take that journey from understanding, into faith, from memory into hope and from will into love. the rest