In chapter 2 Augustine discusses faith, hope, and love in the light of the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed. “In these two we have the three theological virtues working together: faith believes; hope and love pray. Yet without faith nothing else is possible; thus faith prays too.”

Faith is here defined by Augustine as belief in the truths of the Christian religion. There are certain facts concerning, say, the death of Christ, his resurrection and ascension which faith, or belief has as its objects. And it can pertain with matters of the past, present, or future. It’s proper to say, for instance, that Christians have faith that Christ will return in glory.

Hope, while it regards matters to take place in the future, has an evaluative component that faith (understood as belief) seems to lack. “[H]ope deals only with good things, and only with those which lie in the future, and which pertain to the man who cherishes the hope.” We only hope for that which is desirable.

Faith and hope are united, however, in that their objects are unseen, though Augustine allows that there are cases where one can be said to believe in something that is the object of one’s present experience. Presumably the apostles who witnessed the risen Christ could be said to believe or have faith in what they had seen. However, this seems for Augustine to be the exception, and as a general rule faith is in what is not seen. Hope, meanwhile, is by definition in the unseen because what is future obviously can’t be seen. “When, therefore, our good is believed to be future, this is the same thing as hoping for it.”

And hope can’t exist without love. For to have hope is to believe that the future holds that which we regard as good. The faith commended by Paul (contrary to the faith of “the demons” mentioned by James) can’t exist without hope and love. That which Christians believe in, Christ, is also the object of our love and our hope. “Thus it is that love is not without hope, hope is not without love, and neither hope nor love are without faith.”

There seems, then, to be a certain ambiguity in the notion of faith that Augustine sketches here. There is faith understood simply as belief in certain facts, and there is the faith that is inseparable from love and hope. Is the difference determined by a quality in the believer or a quality in that which is believed in? Is faith the root of love and hope, or is the quality of faith determined by them?