Beatitude (Part 2)

Suffering is the crucial test separating happiness from blessedness. Suffering can be part of blessedness, but not part of happiness. Job is not happy there on his dung heap scratching his boils with a potsherd, deprived of family and fortune, blamed by wife and friends, seemingly forsaken by God. What arrogant nonsense to tell Job he is happy! But he is blessed, though he does not know it, because he is learning wisdom and coming closer to God, his true good, his true blessedness. It is startling to tell mourners they are blessed, but it is simply silly to tell them they are happy.

The typically modern mind is much more subjectivistic than the premodern mind. It seeks happiness rather than blessedness, feeling rather than fact. Thus its relativistic slogan is: ‘Happiness is…different things to different people.’ The response of the modern mind to the Beatitudes is: ‘Well, that may be O.K. for you, but not for me. For me, happiness is a warm puppy.’ Within horizons bounded by subjective feeling, no one is ever wrong because no one is ever right. It is indeed a warm, puppyish world. By contrast, Jesus is like a glacier, or an explosion, or the blast of a trumpet from heaven. As Matthew notes at the end of his sermon, ‘When Jesus had ended these sayings, …the people were astonished at His teaching, for He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes’ (7:28-29). Happy feelings do not astonish, but objective reality often does. Jesus offers us a plunge into the breathtakingly steep mountains and gorges of reality.”
~Peter Kreeft

Comments

Popular Posts