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The Beatitudes
Now Jesus begins his teaching in earnest. The lines that follow are called the "beatitudes," from the Latin word for "blessed." The Greek word being translated here is "makarioi." This word means "happy," but it has a connotation of more-than-worldly happiness. In his recent (and very helpful) translation of the New Testament, David Bentley Hart used the word "blissful," in order to draw out the sense of a kind of divine serenity.
We're going to take the Beatitudes a few at a time. I think that they're critically important and represent the core of Jesus's teaching. Let's start with the first one:
Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens
Here we have the Kingdom of Heaven, again. Jesus and John have already talked about it. But let's take a moment and remind ourselves of what it means, and what it must mean.
First, "Heaven" is the dwelling place of God, and also of his subordinate spirits, whether you call them the Gods or Angels. Therefore, to be in Heaven is to be in the presence of God and of other divine beings.
It is pictured as being located in the physical sky. This could be understood as a metaphor. Alternatively, we can understand that the physical sky is the reflection, in the world of our sensory experience, of the true spiritual reality. This is the view of the Platonists: Everything in the physical world, the world of Becoming, is analogous to things in the spiritual world, the world of Being. Things in the physical world are continually brought into being by the spiritual world. We can contemplate the physical Heaven, then, and understand the nature of things in the true Heaven.
The Kingdom
Second, we're talking about a "Kingdom of Heaven." What is a kingdom? It is, at minimum, a type of society. This means that Heaven isn't empty: We share Heaven with others. A kingdom is a political system, which means that it is governed by a set of laws, which must be obeyed in order to remain a part of that system. And a kingdom is characterized by the rule of a single person, the monarch. In this case that monarch is God.
We have already learned that the Kingdom of Heaven is not a human political system in this world; those have already been shown to be fundamentally Satanic. The kingdom of Heaven is within us, but we also share it with others. The monarch is God, not a human. The laws, then, are God's laws, and these must differ from the laws of human beings-- indeed, they must be "laws" only by analogy. Because God is that power which brings the whole world into being, his laws shouldn't require any extra effort on his part or the part of his subordinate spirits to either enforce them or punish offenders-- God's laws simply work, always. Another way of saying this is that "We are not punished for our sins, but by them." That punishment can only be loss of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the awareness of the presence of God. I say "awareness," because, since He Brings Into Being All That Is, it is impossible for anything to be both deprived of the presence of God and to exist. The Nous is the eye of the soul; transgression of Divine Law clouds the Nous, so that it can no longer see.
Keys to the Kingdom
The Beatitudes are about to teach us how to do that. We begin with the first one.
What does poverty of spirit mean?
Clearly not that one's spirit is out of money. So, what then?
The traditional understanding is that "poverty of spirit" is the recognition that the spirit has nothing on its own-- like a beggar holding out his hat to a passing stranger, the spirit needs God. In our case, let us remember that our goal is the accomplishment of the Great Work, the "Creation of a Man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will." Another way of saying this is that, by the aid of God and the power of God, we complete the work of our own creation, and become the beings that we were meant to be.
Christian tradition gives us two very fine examples of Poverty of Spirit in action. Let's consider them in chronological order.
Quix ut Deus?
Lucifer was created as the highest of all the angels. That idea is well known enough that we don't consider exactly what it means. All of the following comes from within orthodox Christian tradition, with no borrowings from the esoterica, Platonism, or anywhere else, by the way.
Throughout the Middle Ages, it was believed that angels had the job of moving the planets in their courses. When the Church more or less changed its mind and decided to agree with modern astronomers that the planets are billiard balls that move on their own, they didn't downgrade the status of angels-- they remain the sort of beings that could move planets in their courses. And it is a long-established teaching of all the sacramental Christian churches that every natural feature in the world has its own particular angel that watches over it-- so every planet, every star, every galaxy in the remotest corner of space is guarded and governed by an angel.
Moreover, the sorts of angels that have, or might have, the job of moving planets around in space aren't the most powerful sorts of angels either-- nowhere near it. There are nine ranks of angels, as you may know, and guardian angels usually come from one of the lower three grades-- the angels, archangels and principalities. The Virtues are the fifth rank down, and they have sometimes been understood as the angels that watch over natural phenomena. So at the very best, the sort of angels that watch over galaxies might be the fifth from the top.
The highest choir of angels are the Seraphim. One among these was called Lucifer-- one of the highest, maybe, or perhaps the very highest; sources differ. Either way, Lucifer had just one problem. Though more powerful by far than the sort of being that can push a galaxy around without any trouble, he wasn't the highest thing in the universe. That role belongs to God, and only to God.
If you want to understand Lucifer's problem, it pays to take a minute to reflect on the numbers 1 and Infinity. 1, as we've discussed repeatedly, is a number, but it is also present to all numbers. For every given number, there is only one of it-- one 2, one 12, one 786,348. This means that every number has the same relationship to 1, and 1 is equally present to all numbers-- no matter how great, no matter how small.
Infinity is similar. No matter how great any given number is, the distance between it and infinity is always the same-- infinity. If you've counted to three, you will have to go on counting forever to reach infinity. The same if you've counted to 100. The same if you've counted to 786,348. This tells us that infinity minus any other number is still infinity. The gap between any number and infinity is infinity. And the gap between any particular being and Infinite Being is the same-- Infinity.
So you can see the problem. Although Lucifer was more powerful than any other created being, his relationship to God, the Infinite, was the same as that of any other being-- a lesser angel, a housecat, a worm-- even a human being, even a woman.
This was an intolerable situation for Lucifer. And so he resolved to overthrow God, and set himself up in God's place. After all, why not? Wasn't he the most powerful of all creations? Wasn't he...
Like God?
This was the question that Lucifer put to the Assembly of the Angels. He was like God, he would be like God, he would be God. Fully 1/3rd of the heavenly host agreed-- they would overthrow God, and set Lucifer in his place.
Some disagreed.
One angel-- what his name was is unknown, but we know that he was not one of the highest; he came from the lower ranks-- dared to question Lucifer. "Who is like God?" he asked. And the answer is: No one, nothing. Not an angel, not a god, not Lucifer. And so the angel left the Assembly and resolved to follow God, no matter the cost.
For that reason he was given command of all the armies of Heaven, exalted above the Cherubim and Seraphim. He put aside his old name-- God is very fond of renaming people, as we shall see as we proceed-- and he was given, as his new name, his question: In Latin, "Quix ut Deus?"; in Hebrew, מיכאל, "Michael."
Raising himself up by Pride, Lucifer found himself cast down to the uttermost depth.
Lowering himself through Humility, Michael found himself exalted to the highest of heights.
The highest available for an angel, that is. The greatest position for any created being was given to another.
Ecce enim ex hoc beatam me, dicent omnes generationes
If the year was 3 B.C. and you were asked to name someone of particularly low social status, "Jewish woman living in a backwater part of the Roman Empire" would be as good a choice as any. And yet it was to just such a person that the archangel Gabriel came, saying "Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call his name Jesus."
She could have refused; she could have made bargained-- "Okay, what do I get in return?"
Instead she said, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to thy word."
Later, visiting her cousin Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, she spoke these words, which might be said more than anything else to embody the concept of Poverty of Spirit:
Magnificat anima mea Dominum;
Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo,
Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae;
Ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior,
For he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid;
Behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
For his Pride, Satan is cast down to the bottom of the universe, the lowest pit of Hell.
For her Humility, Mary is exalted above all other creatures; in Orthodox hymnody she is called "more honorable than the Cherubim, more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim."
St. Louis de Montfort writes:
God chose her to be the treasurer, the administrator and the dispenser of all his graces, so that all his graces and gifts pass through her hands. Such is the power that she has received from him that, according to St Bernardine, she gives the graces of the eternal Father, the virtues of Jesus Christ, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit to whom she wills, as and when she wills, and as much as she wills.
Recall that the word "grace" is a translation of the Greek "energeia," referring to the actions or the power of God. By submitting to the Will of God, Mary becomes the dispenser of the Power of God. That is the model for all magic in the Christian tradition. Mary is the first Christian, and her path, beginning in the Joy of the Annunciation, proceeding through the unimaginable Sorrow of her son's torture and execution, ending in her Glorification as Queen of Heaven and Earth, is the model for the path that all those who would follow in the Initiatic Tradition of the Master Jesus must walk.
