The Burning Bush
The Central Beatitude
The Gospel Beatitudes (Mt. 5:3–12) are not a random list, but a harmonious ladder of spiritual ascent, a path of our gradual and consistent transformation. Each step prepares the soul for the next one.
The first three (poverty of spirit, penitent weeping, and meekness) form the initial stage of the pursuit of virtue, which consists in repentance and humility. A Christian realizes his spiritual poverty, mourns over his sins, and pacifies his rebellious spirit.
The fourth and fifth Beatitudes (hunger for righteousness, mercy) are the stages of active virtue. The pacified soul begins to thirst for holiness and expresses it in active love for its neighbors.
And lastly, the sixth, purity of heart (Mt. 5:8), is the natural result of all the previous steps. After repentance and the exercise of virtue, the final and highest stage of inner purity begins, without which all that was before is meaningless. It is a transition from causes to effect, from external work to the state of the heart itself. The first five Beatitudes together form a single path of purification.
The subsequent stages (peacemaking, persecution for righteousness’ sake) are already the fruits of a pure heart acting in the world, as well as joy of unity with God in His Heavenly Kingdom, which completes everything.
So, the sixth Beatitude contains the purpose and meaning of all the Beatitudes. It is impossible to attain purity of heart without humility and repentance, thirst for righteousness and mercy. Just as it is impossible to see God without purity of heart. Purity of heart is a necessary and crucial prerequisite for contemplation. It conditions the fulfillment of the promise: For they shall see God (Mt. 5:8). Everything that goes before leads to this purity, and everything that follows results from it.
The Heart and Its Purity
In the Biblical and Patristic understanding, the “heart” (Hebrew: leb; Greek: kardia) is the deep center of the human personality, where the spirit, the soul and the body, the mind, the will and the feelings, conscience and duty interact. It is an organ of hearing (conscience), seeing (contemplating) God and of duty (service, love) of Him. It is in the heart that the choice between good and evil is made, our thoughts and desires are formed, and our decisions are made. It is here that God and man meet; it is through the heart that the healing and sanctifying grace of God is given to believers.
Depending on what the heart is filled with, it can be impure or pure, sinful or holy. The Lord gives us the opportunity, through the fulfillment of His commandments and the acquisition of grace, to purify our hearts defiled by evil, to make them pure organs of faith, hope and love.
What Is Purity of Heart? What Is It?
A pure heart is, first of all, one and whole. It overcomes all the contradictions between the soul, the spirit and the body, between the mind, the will and the emotions. Full agreement between the will of God and the will of man reigns in it. All its thoughts, desires and feelings are harmoniously directed towards a single goal—the fulfillment of Christ’s commandments. In such a heart there is no place for hostility, hypocrisy, double-mindedness (cf. Jas. 4:8) and distraction.
A pure heart is characterized by sincerity and simplicity. There is nothing hidden in it: no guile, no ulterior motives, no judging or self-justification. The inner state of a Christian with a pure heart always corresponds to the outer expression. Everything that is inside him is also outside: on his face, in his words and deeds.
A pure heart is passionless1 and entirely focused on God, on serving Him. It is absolutely free from attachments based on passions, worldly addictions, worship of idols, superstitions and misconceptions. Its only aspiration and “treasure” is God (cf. Mt. 6:21).
A pure heart is innocent and chaste. It seeks nothing of its own, nothing for itself, devoting itself entirely to the love of God and its neighbor. Pride and vanity, anger and envy, gluttony, avarice and lust cannot even touch it.
Thus, purity of heart is a state of absolute, inner and outer moral perfection, a state of complete enlightenment and sanctification by the grace of God, a state of maximum likeness to Christ and radical devotion to Him.
The Chief Virtue of Purity of Heart
The pure in heart are saints—that is, those who, with the help of Christ, have banished all sinful passions from their hearts and have fully united with God, have attained deification and become His living abodes. If a man love Me, he will keep My words: and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him (Jn. 14:23). The Apostle Paul testifies: I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me (Gal. 2:19–20).
St. John Chrysostom wrote: “Jesus Christ calls ‘pure’ either those who have attained unto all virtue, and are not conscious to themselves of any evil, or those who live in temperance.”2 St. Simeon the New Theologian added: “But purity of heart cannot be found through one virtue alone, or through two, or ten; it can only be found through all of them together, as if they formed but a single virtue brought to perfection.”3
So, purity of heart is not one in a list of many Christian virtues, but their perfect totality, an integral, harmonious and complete unity without exception of all moral and spiritual perfections. The Apostle Paul calls this absolute perfection “love”, “charity”. And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness (Col. 3:14).
Purity of Heart As a Prerequisite for Seeing God
The Lord promises that we will see God Himself if we have pure hearts: For they shall see God. Obviously, in His understanding, this is the greatest thing that we can achieve on the path of our ascent in virtue.
We know that in the physical, material sense, No man hath seen God at any time (Jn. 1:18) and cannot see Him, because by nature He is an absolutely immaterial and bodiless Spirit.
God the Spirit can only be seen spiritually—by the human spirit (mind), thanks to its partaking of and enlightenment by spiritual grace in the experience of spiritual prayer and sacramental (mystical) sacred acts.4 We can see God when He appears by grace and reveals Himself to the human spirit, prepared for this by ascetic work. God does not appear in the form of any limited images, but is experienced as everlasting Being, Truth, Life, Love, and Light.
The heart is truly able to see God when the Spirit descends into it, which begins to abide in it like in a temple, using it as an organ of faith and hope, conscience and prayer, mercy and love.
Just as dirty or steamed-up glass does not allow light to pass through, so a heart that is not spiritualized but darkened by the sinful passions of this world, cannot perceive God Who is incomparably far from sin. Even those whose hearts are filled with earthly interests and impressions are unable to see Him, because God is incommensurably higher than His good Creation. To see God the Creator, we must free our hearts not only from sinful passions, but also from concentration on created beings. And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (Jn. 8:32), says the Lord.
A heart pure from sin and created images becomes a mirror or an eye capable of reflecting and perceiving the Divine light. According to St. John Climacus, purity of heart gives people a bodiless nature, making them houses of Christ equal to the light-bearing angels.5
Like is known by like. Only the pure can perceive the Pure. For they shall see God means they will become partakers of His light, His glory, and they will not know Him from hearing, from which faith is born (cf. Rom. 10:17), but in the direct experience of grace, from which sight is born. For now, we walk by faith so that we can live by sight (cf. 2 Cor. 5:7).
Contemplation—the Knowledge of God—Deification
To see God means to know Him in the Scriptures, in prayer, in the sacraments, in love for our neighbor, and in the beauty of Creation, through which uncreated grace is given to us. Having experienced God through grace here in time, we will experience the perfect fullness of the graceful knowledge of God in eternal life. The fulfillment of the promise begins in the Church militant on earth and reaches its fullness in the Church triumphant in Heaven—in the Kingdom of God.
Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is (1 Jn. 3:2).
The sight or contemplation of God testifies to the achievement of the purpose of Christian life: deification, when believers are so united with God that by grace they become partakers of the Divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). Theoria (contemplation) and theosis (deification) are inseparably interconnected and inextricably interdependent.
Through full union with God by grace in deification, the saints continue to see Him. This means that a certain “distance”, a certain “personal space” is maintained between those contemplating and the One Who is contemplated; the deified do not merge with the One Who deifies, do not lose their personality, and communicate with Him “face to face”.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known (1 Cor. 13:12), the Apostle Paul testifies.
Hesychasm—the Patristic Practice of Cleansing the Heart
In the Orthodox tradition, the path of fulfilling the Beatitudes or purification of the heart by acquiring virtue has been theoretically developed in detail and fully tested in practice in Orthodox asceticism. One way or another, it is all dedicated to attaining deification through the struggle against sinful passions and ascending the ladder of the Gospel virtues.
In a narrow, methodological sense, the ascetic acquisition of grace for the sake of contemplating God is called “the prayer of the heart”, or hesychasm (from Greek: ἡσυχία—peace, calm, silence).
Through humble obedience, unceasing prayer (mainly the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”), watchfulness (keeping the mind and heart from demonic temptations and worldly impressions), an ascetic strives for inner sacred stillness—a state when the mind, gathered in the heart, is free from distraction and concentrated in contemplation of God.
In sacred stillness, in which there is no place for worldly attachments and thoughts, an ascetic attains purity of heart and becomes capable of contemplating the uncreated Divine light6—the very light that the disciples saw during the Transfiguration of Christ on Mt. Tabor (Mt. 17:1–6; Mk. 9:1–8; Lk. 9: 28–36).
Thus, contemplation of God as light (cf. 1 Jn. 1:5) is attainable already here on earth for those who, guided by the works of Hesychasts,7 perform the feat of the prayer of the heart. Thus, the sixth Beatitude is fulfilled in practice.
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So, the Beatitude, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, is central and the highest in the ladder of the Beatitudes. Central because all the other Beatitudes are either directed towards it or emanate from it; and the highest because it reveals the ultimate goal of Christian life. All the preceding virtues—humility, repentance, meekness, love of righteousness, and mercy—should lead to a fundamental spiritual transformation of the hidden man of the heart (1 Pet. 3:4). Only such a transformed, purified, sanctified, and healed heart is capable of unity with God and contemplation of His light. It is in this unity and contemplation that the goal of blissful communion with God and the knowledge of God is to be found, the essence of eternal bliss in the Heavenly Kingdom. The ancient Hesychast tradition offers us a pattern of life, proven by the experience of the saints—which allows us to purify the heart and see God.
