On the Beatitudes

Contents

Only Homilies 1–4 and part of Homily 5 are on the site: the scan text used stops partway through Homily 5.

Reading pages: 1193–1213 · 1215–1233 · 1235–1253 · 1255–1261

1. 1193Opening the first homily, Gregory quotes the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount and invites his hearers to climb with the Word to the mountain of contemplation, from which the promised goods of the Beatitudes are seen.
2. 1195Gregory urges his hearers to climb the mountain with Christ the healer and to dig together by prayer for the treasure hidden in the first Beatitude, a spiritual wealth that each possesses wholly; he begins by defining blessedness as the sum of all goods.
3. 1197Only God is blessed in the full sense; humanity, made in his image, is blessed by participation, and Christ, who cleanses the image from sin, now paints the features of blessedness, beginning with poverty of spirit.
4. 1199As there are two kinds of wealth, so there are two kinds of poverty: lacking virtue is wretched, but being poor in vices is blessed; poverty of spirit is voluntary humility, the one divine trait humans can imitate, after the example of Christ who became poor for us.
5. 1201Humility is the hardest of virtues, because the devil sowed arrogance, by which he himself fell, in human nature; the remedy is to imitate Christ, who emptied himself.
6. 1203The cure for pride is to see what human nature is: made from clay, born in shame, and ending in a heap of bones; the young man proud of his looks and fine clothes should look at the skulls in the common grave and see himself.
7. 1205Mature men in office grow arrogant, imagining themselves lords of life and death, though they are like actors in a stage procession and are often carried from their thrones to the grave; the ruler who is poor in spirit, seeing the equality of human nature, gains the kingdom of heaven.
8. 1207Homily 1 ends: true poverty of spirit sheds earthly wealth to rise light toward God and shares with the poor, so as to reign with Christ who became poor. Homily 2 begins: the Beatitudes are like the rungs of a ladder, though the earth seems oddly to follow heaven.
9. 1209The earth promised after the kingdom of heaven is not this earth but the land above the heavens; Christ uses familiar words like “kingdom” and “earth” because the goods beyond sense cannot be named in their own terms.
10. 1211David, the meekest of men, spoke of “the land of the living,” the heavenly earth free of death and sin; but since speed and vigour are praised elsewhere, as in Paul’s running and boxing, Gregory asks what kind of meekness is blessed.
11. 1213Paul subdues his body like a boxer, David runs at his enemies, and the bridegroom of the Song leaps like a gazelle: since speed is so often praised, how can gentleness be blessed with the heavenly land of the tree of life and the true vine?
12. 1215Christ does not demand impossible freedom from all passion, but meekness, the restraint of passion by reason; anger shows by contrast how blessed meekness is, for it turns a man into a raging beast.
13. 1217The meek man who calms his anger is blessed, the angry man pitiable; meekness grows from humility, for one who knows the lowliness of human nature cannot be insulted, and honour belongs only to the soul.
14. 1219Homily 3 opens on the third beatitude, which worldly people mock as praising misfortune; Gregory first takes it of godly grief for sin, which, like returning feeling in a paralysed limb, is a sign of healing.
15. 1221The fear of judgment, like a stinging remedy, brings the callous sinner to feel and mourn his sin, as Paul did with the incestuous man; but since Christ blesses those who always mourn, and the sinless too are blessed, the beatitude must mean more than repentance.
16. 1223Since blessed mourning cannot be only repentance, Gregory defines mourning as pain at the loss of something gladdening; to mourn rightly one must first know the true good we have lost, as one who has seen light feels its loss in a dungeon while the man born there does not.
17. 1225Christ blesses not grief but the knowledge of the lost good; that good, God himself, cannot be named or grasped, but our very inability shows its greatness, and we were once made in its likeness, sharing incorruption, blessedness, and freedom.
18. 1227Humanity, made in God’s image in paradise, has fallen into slavery to the passions, death, and disease; whoever sees this cannot but weep, whereas those who know nothing better live content like animals.
19. 1229Mourning is blessed for the comfort that follows it, as the bitter herbs of Passover and David’s longing for God’s house show; the parable of Lazarus teaches that, since the fall, human life must taste both grief and joy.
20. 1231Homily 3 ends: those who accept grief now will have endless joy from the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. Homily 4 opens: as a purged stomach regains its appetite, so the soul must be cleansed of false fullness to hunger and thirst for righteousness.
21. 1233Appetite is the beginning of strength, but appetites differ, for bodily food and for the food of the soul; Christ blesses not hunger as such but hunger for true righteousness, the good desired for its own sake.
22. 1235Justice in the ordinary sense, the virtue of rulers and judges giving each his due, cannot be what is meant, since most people hold no office and Lazarus had nothing; the righteousness Christ blesses must be open to all, and the soul must learn to tell nourishing food from poison.
23. 1237Christ accepted hunger but refused the devil’s suggestion to turn stones into bread, that is, to turn appetite toward what is unnatural; those who load their tables with silver plate and luxury beyond need are “eating stones.”
24. 1239Christ did not condemn hunger but the luxury that the devil adds to it; he himself hungered for the Father’s will, which is our salvation, so we should hunger for our own salvation; and righteousness is desired as both food and drink.
25. 1241Christ blesses both hunger and thirst for righteousness, to express the most intense desire for the good, which becomes food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty.
26. 1243Righteousness here stands for every virtue; pleasures never fill, like a leaking jar, and they fade at once, but virtue gives a lasting joy that can be enjoyed without satiety throughout life.
27. 1245The fullness Christ promises increases the desire for virtue rather than ending it; pleasure is like chasing one’s shadow, but virtue becomes the possession of the one who seeks it, and gladdens past, present, and future.
28. 1247The righteousness desired is God the Word himself; whoever tastes him is filled and yet always hungry, like Paul, and virtue makes the soul ever greater. Homily 5 opens with Jacob’s ladder as an image of the Beatitudes leading up to God.
29. 1249Since blessedness belongs to God and Scripture calls God merciful, Christ’s call to be merciful in a way deifies us; but we must judge rightly what mercy is, as people err about God himself, some worshipping the Trinity and others the creation.
30. 1251Mercy, which corrects the inequalities of life, is defined as voluntary grief at another’s evils, or a loving fellow-feeling with the distressed; it is the intensification of love, the highest virtue, and lies in the will, not in material means.
31. 1253If all were merciful, inequality, envy, hatred, and war would vanish and peace and justice would reign; mercy is the father of goodwill and the bond of friendship; but the promise “they shall obtain mercy” also points to a future reward.
32. 1255Good and evil depend on our own choice, for evil has no existence apart from choice; God’s judgment, like a mirror, returns to each what he has chosen, as the sheep and the goats and the rich man and Lazarus show.
33. 1257Since the beatitude does not say toward whom mercy is to be shown, it includes mercy toward oneself: as we pity friends who have lost home and freedom, we should pity our own soul, fallen from paradise into captivity to death and the passions.
34. 1259Insensibility keeps us from pitying ourselves, enslaved as we are to lust and greed; one who knows himself will pity himself and others, and God will judge each as he judged those beneath him; at Christ’s judgment the merciful will be praised by those they helped.
35. 1261At the last judgment, before the throne and the angels, the merciful man will be praised by those he helped, a reward worth more than all gold; the miser who buried his wealth will be dragged to the dark fire and reproached by those he neglected.