Last week we launched the Three Things Beatitudes Course for members. You can listen to the audio from the first session for free. If you want to join us for the rest of the course, just click below.
The Beatitudes are Jesus Christ’s invitation to true human flourishing.
“Beatitudes” is a strange English word. It comes from the Latin beatus. In the Latin version of the Bible used in the Christian church from the fourth-century onward (the Vulgate) the first word out of Jesus’ mouth in the Sermon on the Mount is beati. You can hear it sung in this beautiful Taizé chant of the Beatitudes:
Beati is the plural of beatus—and it simply means “happy”. The Beatitudes are the happy statements. They were translated this way into Latin because of the original Greek. In the Greek New Testament, the first word of Jesus’ public teaching is makarios. It also means “happy”—but this isn’t just any happiness.
In Classical Greek, makar was a common word referring the happiness of the gods. When used of humans, it described a person whose life was approaching this kind of divine happiness. When a philosopher, sage, religious teacher desired to lay before you their vision of what true happiness looked like, makarios is the word they would use.
When Jesus stands on the mountain and begins his public ministry with seven statements that all start with makarios, he is not doing something original.
He is doing what philosophers and wisdom teachers of his day would do — and he does it as God incarnate.
In our first session, we looked at the meaning of makarios. We saw that “flourishing” gets at the meaning of makarios more clearly than the common translation of “blessed”. This took us to Psalm 1 where we saw that the Beatitudes are Jesus’ expansion of the image of the flourishing tree. This provided the backcloth for a look at the first Beatitude: “Flourishing are the poor in spirit because the kingdom of heaven is theirs” (Matthew 5:3).
Below you will find two resources for deeper understanding of the meaning of makarios and poverty of spirit.
The Meaning of Blessed
The following is an excerpt from The Beatitudes: Some Thoughts for All Saints Day, a beautiful book by Elizabeth Rundle Charles. Mrs. Charles was a devout nineteenth-century Anglican who wrote many books, most of them lost to time (but available online!). She apprehended the deep meaning of makarios and wrote about it with great elegance.
Let us be still, and drink into the full meaning of this word, which begins the recorded public teaching of our Lord.
He is setting the music of the future,—of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the Catholic Church; and He begins it with the grand full chord of rest and joy, never more to be lost. For this opening is, to Him, also a close, a fulfilling and a restoring. He begins with a resolution of all the discords, as He only can Who knows them all; because all the pathetic minors of our human music as well as all the jarring discords of our earthly noises have vibrated on His heart. He, the Man of Sorrows, strikes the full chord of heavenly joy. From first to last it is the same. Now, in this His first public teaching to the multitudes which we call the Sermon on the Mount, in the free fresh air of the mountains, He begins with this “Blessed.”
Let us try to get a clear, simple, unsophisticated understanding of what this word “Blessed” itself must have meant,—must mean for ever,—from His lips,
Whether He spoke in Greek or in the usual common Syrian speech of His day, may be debated. What is certain is, that He did not speak in any pedantic literary dialect, or any unhuman, sanctimonious, semi-religious or ecclesiastical phraseology, in which “blessed” means some kind of subdued, toned-down, pale, religious substitute for what true, simple, human hearts everywhere, the “common people who heard Him gladly,” mean by gladness and joy.
If it was a word of Hebrew parentage, it was surely such a word as David with his fervent childlike poet’s heart, so keenly alive to every vibration of sadness or delight, would have used in those Psalms of his which shout and sing and dance for joy.
If it was a Greek word, it was surely a word ranging from the festive life of the ‘blessed gods,” radiant on their Olympus, through all the natural joys of love and home, of patriotic victory or national festivals. It was a natural word, common to all, as little needing definition as love itself; however, like love itself, it might need rescuing from stain and degradation.
“Happy” is a poor word, we are told, of low parentage, meaning what comes on us fortuitously from outside, “happens” upon us. Joy, it is said, is a loftier word, springing from a fountain within; in Greek, at all events, having one root with grace and love.
But we may too easily lose the simplest and deepest meanings of words by being too subtle in our interpretations. Of all renderings, mere antiquarian renderings are apt to be the least true, merging the common reality in the exceptional costume, subordinating substance to style, instead of regarding style as the natural outgrowth of substance.
To pour the whole wealth of blessing which this word contains into another language, we need as many vessels as we can find.
For when our Lord means to turn the water of our common speech into His wine, we may be sure He would have us fill the “water-pots up to the brim.”
“Happy” may be a low-born word, but Christianity has lifted many a low-born word from the dust and set it among princes. And there is a shade of meaning in this word which we cannot well spare from our “coat of many colours.”
“Happy” as healthy children are happy, in their father’s house; “happy” as the laughter of a child, or the smile of a sudden surprise of joy in eyes wet with tears; happy with the gaiety of hearts released from self-seeking, of minds relieved from strain; as a mother “remembering no more the anguish for the joy;” as a patriot when some great victory is won, some wrong of ages undone.
“Blessed” with no pale. shadow of joy, with no mere calm of a far-off Olympus looking down serenely on human strife, but with the creative, overflowing bliss of the Heaven which is love. “Blessed’ as the Blessed Mother herself, whom all generations shall call blessed, embracing in her babe the Saviour of the whole world.
“Blessed” with a heart in harmony with itself, at rest, content, satisfied, full of all the music of which human hearts are capable, from the soft murmurs of content to the thunder of the many waters of ecstatic rapture: all that is involved in all the words expressive of human bliss, reaching up to Divine creative joy. “Blessed,” happy, glad, joyful, with the gladness of happy children, the joy of blissful mothers, with the blessedness of Heaven, of God Himself, “Who is over all, blessed for ever.”
This was the royal proclamation of High Festival, the glad tidings, the healing balm which our Lord has sent down through every age into every heart in that first word from the Galilean hill.
What does it look like to be “poor in spirit”?
We closed our time together by asking what postures the first Beatitude might point us to. We spoke about a posture of dependence—recognising our need to depend upon other people and upon God.
For a deeper understanding of what this means, check out The Anthropology of Expressive Individualism by Carter Snead (an excerpt from this book). The title is a mouthful, but for our purposes plug in “wealth of spirit” for “expressive individualism”.
The latter part of the article points to what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has called “the virtues of acknowledged dependence”, which we could perhaps equally call the virtues of poverty of spirit. Here’s a snippet:
Remembering who we are and where we came from in this way should awaken in us a profound sense of gratitude and a sense that a fitting response to such care is to become the kind of person who makes the goods of others her own—to become one who cares for others without condition or calculation. When one remembers how he came to be who he is, through this sustaining network of unconditional care and concern, he becomes alive to the fact that it is not possible to repay those who supported us; the only response is to extend the same care and concern to others in need, not because it satisfies a balanced owed, but because this is what it means to become one who is responsive to others solely because of their needs, without calculation or self-interest. We will be able to offer such care and concern because in having received it, we become people capable of extending it to others.
Within this framework, one’s gaze is not fixed, limited to her inner self and its depths. One’s attention instead turns outward, understanding that flourishing is becoming a participant and steward of the network of giving and receiving that sustains life as humanly lived.
See you on May 29 for our next class on the second and third Beatitudes.
We’ll consider how we commonly seek happiness by distracting ourselves from sadness and by stoking the fire of our anger. The way of Jesus is better.
The Tangle of Blessing — Three Things Beatitudes Course Audio