Living the Beatitudes

By Scott Ferrier, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

The Pursuit of Happiness — Living the Beatitudes, by Fr. Servais Pinckaers, OP, opens up the rich treasures of the Beatitudes by introducing many of us to Saint Augustine’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew (Matt 5-7). Augustine applied the teaching of the Sermon to himself and tried to live by it. He would later state in his ‘Confessions’ that the “hunger for happiness that devoured him has been appeased with the Beatitudes.”

According to Pinckaers, Augustine made five significant theological intuitions about the Sermon. First, he believed it was the perfect model of Christian life through the Lord’s teachings on right conduct. It brought together all the precepts we need for our guidance in life. In them we receive Christ’s answer to our deepest questions about happiness, by leading us to God and the Kingdom of heaven.

His second intuition was that the Beatitudes represented seven degrees or stages leading the Christian from humility or poverty of spirit to wisdom and the vision of God. The symbolic use of the number seven for Augustine and the patristics was a way of expressing perfection. The first three beatitudes bring us to conversion, then the search for wisdom, from the fourth to the seventh.

His third intuition was to interpret the entire Sermon in the light of the Beatitudes. For Augustine, they comprise not only an introduction, but a sort of keystone which dominates and divides the Sermon. The Beatitudes became for him the perfect answer to the question of happiness and the framework of his moral teaching.

The fourth intuition was the connection he made between the Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in Isaiah 11. Augustine was the first to link these texts. The Christian cannot follow the way of the Beatitudes without the grace of the Holy Spirit accompanying him on each stage of the journey. 

Finally, St. Augustine then connected the Beatitudes, the gifts, and the seven petitions of the Our Father, by drawing out the profound importance of the need for prayer at each stage of the journey. Thus, for each of the seven paired gifts and beatitudes, there are corresponding petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

The Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s teaching on repentance, conversion, and the Kingdom, reveals to us what the Holy Spirit wants to accomplish in our lives. By going ‘beyond the words to the reality signified’ the teaching contains a secret power which can act upon our bodies as well as hearts, as long as we have the faith and the hope for the cure by our Divine Physician.