readoldthings

The Beatitudes, as detailed in Matthew 5:3-12, read as follows:

3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Initiation

Now, it's my view, as I've stated repeatedly here, that all of these taken together work as a unified program of spiritual development and initiation. Let's remember what came before this. Jesus, following John, tells us: Change your nous, for by doing so you will attain awareness of the spiritual reality which is already within you. ("Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.")

He then teaches the Beatitudes: this is the process through which the Nous is changed.

Three Phases

The Beatitudes can be broken down into 3 groups of 3, which we can call the Three Phases.

The First Phase teaches us to alter the disposition of our souls, in order to open ourselves to the Divine. In the First Beatitude, we learn the disposition of Spiritual Poverty: This is the immediate opening of the Soul to God, including the recognition that the Soul itself has nothing and is nothing without the Eternal One by whose power it is brought into being.

The Second Beatitude is a recognition of the nature of life in the material world. As Plotinus writes:

The divine Plato who uttered many noble sayings about the soul everywhere expresses contempt for all that is of the senses, blames the commerce of soul with body as an enchantment, an entombment, and upholds the saying of the Mysteries that the soul is here as a prisoner.

Finally, the Third Beatitude teaches us the proper ordering of our inner world. Our passions and appetites, the parts of our souls that are bestial and tie us to the earthly world, are to be tamed and brought under the rule of our Nous-- which is possible, now that the Nous, the highest level of the Soul, is opened to God.

The Second Phase teaches general principles of magic and the spiritual life, and of the nature of divinity, by way of specific prescriptions. The Fourth Beatitude shows us that our appetite is not to be amputated but rather turned toward its proper object, the Divine. This, too, can be found in Plato and his successors: For Plato (in the Symposium) and for Plotinus, this is the work of the Divine Eros, which leads the soul upward from the realm of sense toward the Universal Soul, the Intellectual Realm, and the Eternal One. More generally, the principle is that the things of this world are not to be destroyed, but saved and redirected. The Fifth Beatitude teaches us to practice mercy, and in this way receive mercy; in this way it also teaches us the Law of Karma, that what ever we do will return to us. The Sixth Beatitude teaches us to constantly redirect our Inner Vision toward God, so that even as we sojourn in the World of Shadows, we do so with the awareness of our true life in the Eternal Realm of the Gods.

In the Third Phase, the changes in the soul of the Follower of Christ begin to manifest. In the Seventh Beatitude, we find that, having brought forth the work of God and and united our wills to the Will of God, we become divine and bring forth the image of the divine. In the Eighth and Ninth Beatitudes, we learn something extraordinary. The True Initiate, the one who has seen God (Beatitude Six), and through whom, in consequence, God has begun to manifest (Beatitude Seven), will not be accepted by the people of the World of Shadows. They will be rejected, persecuted, reviled. And they are to rejoice, because this itself is an outward sign that they have, indeed, achieved the Beatific Vision.

But it's more than just that. The promises made in the Beatitudes, in my view, are not primarily about future achievements. It isn't "Be a real goody goody now, and you'll be rewarded later." No! That might make for a fine system of social control, but it's beneath the Master Jesus. The last two Beatitudes don't teach us that we can rejoice because we'll be happy later, or that we ought to not mind it so much because there's a big old apple pie waiting up there in the sky. What they teach is much stranger and more interesting.

Some months back, in one of his discussions of Dion Fortune's The Cosmic Doctrine, JMG quoted J.R.R. Tolkien's discussion of the elves and other magical beings in the Lord of the Rings who have lived in the "Blessed Realm," the home of the gods:

those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power.

What Jesus is telling us is not that we oughtn't mind persecution because we'll be happy later. We won't be happy later, but we will be happy now, while we are being persecuted, even though we are being persecuted. By following his initiatic path and beholding the face of God, we will dwell in both worlds at once. As Plato says, we will "keep our eye fixed" on the "universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual."

This more than anything else shows us how so many of the early saints went willingly, even gladly to their deaths. Dwelling in the Heavens even while their bodies moved about the Earth, they had no need to fear torment or pain, and when death came, it was only the severing of the final bonds which tied them to the material reality. And so they did not die, but rose from this tomb of matter to the True Life of the spirit.