Blessed are you

Eudaimonia is Aristotle’s word for happiness, especially in the Nicomachean Ethics. It means a great deal more than what we might mean by happiness which is usually subjective and personal as well as passive and accidental. For Aristotle it is much more objective and substantial. Simply put, happiness is a life lived in accord with virtue. It consists in the activity of the rational soul acting in accord with virtue or excellence. The highest or primary form of happiness is contemplation, an intellectual good, while politics is about moral actions and is secondary. That highest form of happiness approximates the life of the gods because the highest power in us is the mind. “We ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality, do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest in us”, which is the life of intellect. “The life of the gods is altogether happy”, he says, “and that of man is happy in so far as it contains something that resembles the divine activity”. The idea is that the human good seeks what lasts and is complete rather than what passes away. But the word he uses here is makarios which means blessedness, the idea of a blessed life.

 

We go from the giving of the Law to Moses in the Ten Commandments, the universal moral code for our humanity, to the Beatitudes of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, the Summum Bonum, the highest good for our humanity. They are the blessednesses. The word in Greek is makarios and is used nine times in twelve verses by Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus “opens his mouth” and teaches what belongs to the highest good for our humanity. While Aristotle recognizes pleasure as a feature of happiness, pleasure is indeterminate: it takes many different forms. He does not deny the place of sensual pleasures as contributing to our happiness but he doesn’t make them essential to happiness since they do not last.

 

The Beatitudes extend that thinking to a remarkable degree. They argue for a greater degree of inwardness: a blessedness in spite of and in the face of hardships and suffering. The first and last Beatitude illustrate this and frame the whole set of the Beatitudes. In other words, there is a structure here that revolves around the paradox of difference for most of the Beatitudes except for the paradox of the same in the fifth Beatitude. The first and last have the same ‘reward’: “the kingdom of heaven” is promised to “the poor in spirit” and to those who are “persecuted for righteousness’ sake”. The kingdom of heaven contrasts with both the poor in spirit and those who are persecuted. That promise belongs to the idea of a life of blessedness that transcends the world but without negating it.

 

Who are the poor in spirit? They are precisely those who are not puffed up with a sense of self-importance and self-regard; literally, full of themselves. This is hubris for the ancient Greeks and pride in the Christian sense which close us off from the kingdom of heaven. The idea is that the poor in spirit are open to the truth and beauty and transcendent goodness of the kingdom of heaven. So, too, those who are “persecuted for righteousness’ sake”. They recognise something greater that defines them. As such, neither the poor in spirit nor those who are persecuted are simply victims. Their attitude of soul, the activity that moves them, belongs to their freedom and dignity.

 

The third Beatitude is the blessedness for those who mourn. They shall be comforted. The Scriptures especially abound in stories about God’s encounter with those in grief and loss. “Do not weep”, Jesus tells the widow of Nain who has lost not only her husband but now her only son. What is he saying? Do not weep? Not exactly. What he is saying is “don’t always be weeping”. Don’t be defined by your loss. Why not? Because of the compassion of Christ in whom all things exist and to whom all things are gathered and have their place. There is more to our lives than the experience of loss and sorrow. Such is the comfort of God’s grace. “Blessed”, too, “are the meek for they shall inherit the earth”. Is this a consolation prize? A kind of second-best? No. The meek here are the gentle ones who see God in creation and know the earth as his creation and themselves within it. In knowing God as Creator the whole earth is theirs as that which they honour and love in God.

 

The fourth Beatitude shows us that those who “hunger and thirst after righteousness” shall be filled or satisfied. The quest for justice is a true quest. It, too, has its ultimate meaning and truth in the justitia dei, the justice of God which is the true measure of all justice. To hunger and thirst after righteousness is about seeking what God seeks and which belongs to his being.

 

This is followed by the one Beatitude which illustrates the paradox of the same. Mercy for mercy. “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy”. Does mercy extinguish and negate justice? No. As Portia says in Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’, “mercy seasons justice”, perfects it. Again, it is about a divine quality at work in us. This is followed by the sixth Beatitude of “the pure in heart” who are promised the sight of God. The pure of heart see the transparency of God in his infinite goodness and mercy. Their purity is the condition of the vision of God. They know even as they are known, to put it in Paul’s language. The penultimate blessing is “the peace-makers” who “shall be called the children of God”, the God who is the author of peace and lover of concord. What is in God is in them. This brings us full circle to the eighth Beatitude of those who are “persecuted for righteousness’ sake”. It is an important qualification. They stand and suffer for what is right and true and that is more by definition than what they suffer and endure. Therefore “theirs is the kingdom of heaven”.

 

The Beatitudes end with their application to everyone who is “reviled and persecuted” for Christ’s sake. “Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven”. Why? Because that is the story of the prophets and even more of Christ. “Blessed are they”, as the Psalmist puts it, “who going through the vale of misery use it for a well”, a well of blessings. This is the great insight of the Beatitudes. They have entirely to do with who we are in God’s sight and with what moves in our souls, something which is always more than just what happens to us. We are more though not less than the circumstances of our lives. We journey in this view from misery to felicity. The Beatitudes signal the highest good of our humanity as found in the grace of God, the mercy which cannot be constrained or limited.