The Beatitudes: Manifesto for All Saints and a new Decalogue
The Sermon of the Mount recalls the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai – with Christ as both God and the New Moses, promulgating the New Law for his saints.
The Sermon of the Mount recalls the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai – with Christ as both God and the New Moses, promulgating the New Law for his saints.
Editor’s Notes
In the Roman Rite, the Gospel for the Mass of All Saints is that of the Beatitudes. This mini-series consists of Fr Coleridge’s introduction to the topic – which precedes over half of a book on each of the beatitudes.
Elsewhere in the work, Coleridge suggests that the Sermon on the Mount was not addressed to all and sundry, but to those who had already started to commit themselves to Christ and his mission.
But while some of the instructions of the Sermon might be intended, in their literal sense, to the “elite” of his followers – for example, the hierarchy, and the religious are intended to rely on divine providence for sustenance in a way that differs to the simple laymen.
However, even such points contain a spirit which is offered to and incumbent on us all. This applies especially to the Beatitudes.
In this part, Fr Coleridge tells us…
How the Beatitudes contain the laws of the new creation in the simplest words.
That they unite the brevity of Sinai with the grace of the Gospel, each blessing unfolding a law of growth in the regenerate soul.
Why every Beatitude is both a virtue and its reward, revealing the harmony between grace and glory.
Coleridge shows us that the Beatitudes describe not favours bestowed at random, but the divine order of blessedness itself.
The Beatitudes
The Preaching of the Beatitudes
Chapter IX
St. Matt. v. 3-10; Story of the Gospels, § 31
Burns and Oates, London, 1876.
(Read on All Saints)
Brevity and pregnancy of the Beatitudes
It has already been remarked that the doctrines set forth with so much solemnity and authority in the Sermon on the Mount, containing as they do the most sublime Christian philosophy, are yet couched by our Lord in the simplest, shortest, and most pregnant language, like so many aphorisms or proverbs, and that, in this brevity and pregnancy, they remind us of the form in which so many great principles of the natural law of morality were summed up and promulgated in the Code which was delivered on Mount Sinai.
This remark applies especially to the Beatitudes, with which the Sermon on the Mount begins. There are other pregnant sayings and precepts in the Sermon on the Mount which are delivered by our Lord in the same royal tone of authority. But in many parts of the discourse before us it does not differ so much as in the opening clauses from other discourses which occur in the Gospels, in regard of the amount of development and expression which is given to the thoughts which are therein contained.
Thus the Beatitudes have a character of their own, as compared with the rest of the Sermon, both as to their substance and as to the form in which they are delivered, and in this respect they may be compared to the Decalogue itself, as contrasted with the many other moral rules and precepts which occur in the Book of Exodus or of Deuteronomy.
We can hardly be wrong in considering them in the light of this resemblance to the Decalogue as to the importance of their teaching, the position which they occupy in the legislation of the New Kingdom, and the particular form in which they are promulgated.
The new Creation
Some of the ancient writers have compared the words in which our Lord has laid down these great laws of His Kingdom, to the blessing spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis, when God saw what He had made, and that it was good, and blessed it, and they have seen in the solemn benedictions here pronounced by the Founder of the New Creation an indication of His identity with the God Who made the world.
Thus, when our Lord blessed the virtues or habits which are crowned in the Beatitudes, He blessed the work of His own hands, a new creation of grace far more beautiful and noble than the natural man, which was to reflect in every line His own image and likeness, and to derive from Him its fruitfulness and power and felicity.
The natural man grows and develops and operates and arrives at maturity by the silent working of the elements and vital principles of which his frame and substance are made up, under the blessing of his Creator: his relations with the universe around him, what he takes from it, what he gives to it, are the results of these conditions of his nature.
The new creature who is formed and fashioned by the Holy Ghost after the image of Christ, has to take his own part, under the guidance of grace, in his own growth to maturity and perfection, and the development of the spiritual powers which are given him in his new birth. And the laws and lines of his advance to the ripe fulness of strength and beauty which God designs for him are traced in the Beatitudes.
They are no chance enumeration of blessed qualities which might be otherwise arranged or to which more might be added, nor are their rewards accidental or distributed at random, or the mere undeserved bounty bestowed by royal munificence on qualities which have no correspondence with the blessings which they receive. The grace which generates them is gratuitous, the glory which crowns them is their own by the laws of the Kingdom of God.
Relation of the virtues and rewards
Thus it has been remarked that our Lord does not say that He will give the kingdom of heaven to the poor in spirit, or that He will make the meek possess the earth, or that He will show mercy unto the merciful, and so with the rest, though such language would certainly have been most true as well as most consoling; but He uses the form, that the kingdom of heaven is of the poor in spirit, and the like, in order that the reward may be understood to grow out of the virtue as the fruit out of the plant.
Thus we may understand the remark of many Christian authors who have written on these Beatitudes, that the blessing which our Lord affirms and decrees is twofold in each case, that is, that the virtue itself is blessed, and it is further blessed in that it has the reward and crown and fruit which He attaches to it. So that if by possibility, or for a time, the meek should not ‘inherit (or possess) the land,’ or the mourners not be comforted, or those who hunger and thirst after justice should not be satisfied, still they would be blessed because they are what they are.
For each Beatitude, as distinct from the reward of which it is the condition and foundation, is an aspect of the perfect soul resting in its own pure tranquillity and peace in the arms of its Father and God, and as a wonderful gem, blazing with inherent brilliancy, may be different in hue or form as its different faces are looked on, and as the gem is what it is even though it have no rich setting, nor be worn in the crown of a king, so the perfect soul has always its own blessedness inherent in itself, or rather it is never shut out from the sight of Him to see Whom is to be blessed.
We find spiritual theologians, in accordance with this doctrine, assigning the highest place of all in the scale of states of the soul to these Beatitudes considered as such.
The Beatitudes
The Preaching of the Beatitudes
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I am always blessed when I visit these Fr Coleridge expositions. Thanks again for doing this great work. As traditional Catholics (and catechumens) we can too often get get caught up in, or even identify with the current controversies; we can forget that the true blessing in being an Apostolic Catholic is in BEING such a Catholic.
An early stage of my conversion was through a contemplation on the Beatitudes. I hope you post more of Fr Coleridge's commentary on these here; they are truly Catholic in soteriological discipline, and he brough this nature out in this brief account so well.
Tough unworthy of your time compared to such an learned and spiritual man, I post my introductory account of the "Discipline of the Beatitudes'; Through the process of writing the first version of this contemplation, I came to realize, "Oh, you are Catholic now". A Protestant can only see these sublime couplets of our Lord as platitudes. A Catholic can see in them the mystery of discipleship,, the root of all proceeding manuals of spiritual discipline in cooperation with divine grace. Thanks again.
https://williamthesamaritan.substack.com/p/discipline-of-the-beatitudes