Matthew 5:8 - Pure in Heart, Part 1
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” - Mt 5:8
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Between 1950 and 1980, Josef Pieper delivered various addresses and essays that eventually became the published composition “Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation”.
One of the shorter essays (from 1952) - “Learning How to See Again - beautifully captures his characteristic, intuitive flow and meticulous thought.
In it, he diagnoses a modern crisis: the decline of our spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.
“To be sure,” Pieper writes, “no human being has ever really seen everything that lies visibly in front of his eyes. The world, including its tangible side, is unfathomable…And yet, there are degrees of perception. Going below a certain bottom line quite obviously will endanger the integrity of man as a spiritual being. It seems that nowadays we have arrived at this bottom line.”
He goes on to describe seeing (in its unitive exterior and interior wholeness) as a spiritual act, the political danger of blindness, and both the negative remedy of visual fasting and the positive remedy of artistic creation.
The ultimate cure, he argues, is active engagement with the arts.
When a person attempts to sculpt or craft, to draw or paint, or to describe something verbally, he is forced to slow down, detach from pre-conceived notions, and intimately observe the hidden, quiet complexities of the subject matter.
This process increases one’s visual capacity and his connection to truth begins to be restored.
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I think this is one of the richest ways to approach this beatitude: to understand purity of heart as the restoration of the human person’s capacity to perceive reality truthfully, and ultimately to perceive God himself.
The promise is that the purified heart restores something fundamental to human nature: our capacity to see, receive, and participate in the reality for which we were created.
Within this context, the heart is the organ of spiritual perception.
In contemporary language, we tend to associate the heart primarily with emotion or sentiment.
But the biblical understanding of the heart (lēb in Hebrew; kardia in Greek) is considerably more comprehensive.
The heart is the interior center of the human person, and so it’s not primarily where we feel; it’s where we see.
This is important because our perception of reality is never detached from our moral and spiritual disposition.
What we attend to (or notice) shapes what we love. What we love reinforces what we notice. Love then informs desire & attachment, and what we desire is what we pursue.
Our attachments thus influence what we are capable of recognizing.
Sin disorders this interior vision.
Consider, for example, how easily resentment distorts our perception of another person, or how envy makes another’s flourishing appear threatening.
As another example, pride makes correction appear like a personal attack.
In each case, the problem is that we have become less capable of seeing reality as it actually is.
This is why Christ speaks of the clean of heart.
Purity is more than the absence of moral contamination.
It’s the integrity of an interior life in which the faculties of the human person are properly ordered toward truth, goodness, beauty, and ultimately God Himself.
Next week, we’ll further explore this idea and what it has to do with the integration of the human person.
Onward and Upward,
Ted
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