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fac et spera

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A Latin exhortation meaning "do and hope," urging bold action while maintaining faith in the outcome; in poetry, it embodies the ethic of risk, courage, and perseverance against uncertainty.

Detailed Definition
Fac et spera is a motto that balances action and faith, the doing and the hoping. In poetry, it appears in verse of moral encouragement, in poems about perseverance, and in devotional verse where human effort and divine grace are seen as partners. The two imperatives, acting and hoping, are held in creative tension, neither collapsing into passive faith nor into anxious self-reliance. The phrase has an elegant brevity that suits it to inscriptions, epitaphs, and the concentrated form of lyric verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
The Scots motto fac et spera appears in many contexts of colonial settlement and of perseverance under adversity, and it generated a tradition of verse about the faith required to act without certainty of outcome; A student writing a poem about embarking on an uncertain creative project might use fac et spera as a structuring principle — the courage of beginning combined with the faith that something good will emerge; George Herbert's poetry is saturated with fac et spera — the discipline of devotional practice maintained in hope, even when feeling and consolation have withdrawn; A poet writing a poem of encouragement for someone beginning a difficult endeavor might use fac et spera as both structure and message — act fully, hope genuinely, trust the process; The Protestant work ethic as it appears in seventeenth-century devotional poetry is an expression of fac et spera — the conviction that diligent labor combined with active trust in Providence is the right posture before God and the world
Additional Notes
Fac et spera is a compact motto that balances the active and the receptive — the doing (fac) and the hoping (spera) — without collapsing either into the other. Students should note the theological dimension: in Christian thought, fac et spera reflects the cooperation of human effort (the active life, vita activa) and divine grace (the gift of hope). This is different from both Pelagianism (the heresy that humans can earn salvation through their own efforts alone) and from quietism (the position that human effort is irrelevant and one should simply wait on God). The phrase occupies the middle ground of orthodox Christianity: act fully and do your best, but maintain hope as a gift from beyond yourself rather than as a consequence of your own achievement. Related terms include spes (hope), labora (work), and the Benedictine motto ora et labora (pray and work), which shares the same balance.
Also Known As
do and hope act and hope make and hope
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