Are all obliged to live out the Beatitudes, or are they just for an elite?
Christ’s Beatitudes are the Kingdom’s law of hope—obligatory in measure for all, and urging every state of life beyond bare precept into the counsels of perfection.
Christ’s Beatitudes are the Kingdom’s law of hope—obligatory in measure for all, and urging every state of life beyond bare precept into the counsels of perfection.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr Coleridge tells us…
How the Beatitudes form the binding law of Christ’s Kingdom.
That they differ from the Decalogue by appealing to hope rather than fear, promising reward instead of threatening punishment.
Why these heights of perfection remain open to all, whatever their state or calling.
He shows us that the Beatitudes command not only holiness but happiness, binding every soul to seek both in God.
For more context on this series, see Part I.
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)
How far obligatory—contrast with the Decalogue
When the Beatitudes are considered severally, it will be natural to inquire why these particular habits or virtues or states of the soul have been selected by our Lord rather than any others, why they have been arranged by Him in the order in which we have received them, and why He has connected with each one of them that particular reward or crown which He has assigned.
For the present we consider them in general as the great principles and laws of the new kingdom of which our Lord is King—a kingdom, as He Himself said to Pilate, not of this world, but still in the world, and as truly a kingdom with its laws and character and spirit, its organization and variety of grades and ranks, its authorities and its subjects, as the Empire of Macedon or Rome or Persia or Assyria.
When our Lord speaks of Beatitude in connection with this kingdom and its subjects, He speaks of what sums up in itself the formal end for which that kingdom has been created and exists. For the beatitude of man is the glory of God, and these two ends are substantially the same.
The Kingdom of our Lord has for its end the glory of God by means of the beatitude of man, and the beatitude of man by means of his perfection, of which perfection He Himself is the normal type as well as the instrumental and meritorious cause.
This enables us to see the answer to the question how far the Beatitudes, being the laws of the New Kingdom, are obligatory on all its citizens. They are obligatory in so far as the perfection, which is the intention of God in founding it, is obligatory on its several members and on the whole body.
Here again, we are struck with the contrast between the new and the old Legislation. We naturally speak of the precepts of the Decalogue, forgetting that they are almost exclusively in form only prohibitions. They set forth certain principles of the eternal law of morality by taking them, as it were, at the lowest possible point, at which their violation sinks to the level of direct grievous sin of the most obvious and unquestionable heinousness.
The letter of the law forbids, for instance, murder and adultery; and yet we instinctively feel that the principles of the natural law which are thus defended, as it were, on their remotest frontier, enact the custody of the thoughts and desires of the heart as well as the abstinence from outward sin, and that they are touched by any infringement of purity or charity of the most subtle kind.
Thus the faithful Christian who passes his life in the strength of sacramental grace and of the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, free from any serious deliberate sin whatever, can find in the prohibitions of the Decalogue, as he is taught to understand them, an adequate code for his own continual self-examination. They appeal, in truth, to the motive of fear, and teach perfection by striking peremptorily upon the external acts by which the principles which they embody are violated.
There are no particular punishments threatened for particular crimes, for the violation of the prohibitions involves the anger of God the Lawgiver in the first instance, and thus ensures the most terrible punishment.
Appeal to hope
But the Legislation of the New Kingdom appeals to the motive of hope. The use of this motive, and of numberless particular promises to enforce it, is characteristic of our Blessed Lord. He is all bounty and munificence, His hands full of blessings, which He is yearning to bestow, and His promises, of which He is profuse, are the anticipations of the joy which will be when He actually bestows them, not in the way of mere bounty, but as rewards held out and won and then bestowed.
Such a Legislator naturally puts forward the highest grade of the perfection which He desires and the noblest form of the recompense which He promises. There are certainly degrees in which the virtues of the Beatitudes are necessary to and obligatory upon all Christians. In some measure, poverty of spirit, meekness, mercifulness, purity of heart, are needful for salvation itself. The lofty teaching of the Christian code does not raise these degrees, nor abolish the compassionate mercy of God, according to which nothing but mortal sin can destroy the life of the soul.
But the very form of the new commandments encourages men to press on very far beyond what must be observed under pain of sin, and these commandments enjoin an immense range of acts and habits which are, strictly speaking, and in general, matters of counsel rather than matters of obligation.
Beatitudes open to all
And yet, high as is the sphere of the Beatitudes, they are still within the reach of all, in that they require no particular state of life or external vocation in those who may attain them even in their greatest perfection. The richest prince may be poor in spirit, the ruler of half the world, the most exalted in intellect or rank or influence, may be meek, the poorest labourer or the busiest merchant or lawyer may hunger and thirst after justice, and be clean of heart.
There are in the Kingdom of God, in its present phase, differences of vocations and states, which require, and are supplied with, graces of a lower or a higher order for their due discharge; but these differences have no effect as to the attainment of the Beatitudes. Ecclesiastics and lay people, religious and seculars, spiritual rulers and the lowest of their subjects, are on a level as to the principles which are here embodied, which require perfection of the highest kind for their full possession, from which, nevertheless, no one is debarred.
In the same way, the order of graces which are known by the name of gratiæ gratis data, miracles, prophecy, the power of healing, the discernment of spirits, and the like, are no passports to the Beatitudes, nor does their absence from any soul prevent the presence of the latter in all their fulness.
The Beatitudes
The Preaching of the Beatitudes
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I love how this is framed, the Beatitudes are led by the theological virtue of Hope. These are open to everyone of any strata in personal ways in an interior disposition. Thanks!