Digital Continent Digital Continent Easter 2017 | Page 61

Living a moral life is a life of obedience, it is a life expressed in love as the beloved, “it
is love for God and a drive to act as God wills.” 150 St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the words of
Christ given to God’s people that day on the mountain were counter cultural, certainly counter
cultural to the life of the heretic. St. Thomas grouped the beatitudes in relation to appetites and
“types of life.” 151 The first three beatitudes, being poor in spirit, those who mourn and the meek
are found in the sensible life where “happiness is sought in pleasures and tangible goods.” 152 This
teaching completely counter to the culture being lived in the south of France during the twelfth
century. St. Thomas wrote that created beings are to turn away from “one’s passions whether
irascible or concupiscible,” (Ia IIae q.69 a3) to seek happiness in moderation, living the virtues
of prudence, fortitude, and temperance. 153 Being perfected required an extreme life of asceticism,
denying themselves of the goodness of God’s creation, while believers not yet consoled took part
in all manner of sin and debauchery.
The next two beatitudes, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and those who are
merciful exhibit the virtue of justice in the active life. St. Thomas wrote that “the active life,
consists chiefly in man’s relations with his neighbor, either by way of duty or by way of
spontaneous gratuity” (Ia IIae q.69 a.3). Loving one’s neighbor is a call to action of every
created being who would live a life in beatitude, it is a life lived in charity “and by a gift, so that,
150
Saint Anselm, The Theistic Proofs, “Faith Seeking Understanding”: The character and purpose of Anselm’s
theistic proofs, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anselm/., accessed June 7, 2016.
150
Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Pursuit of Happiness: God’s Way Living the Beatitudes. Trans.
Sr. Mary Thomas Nobel, O.P., (OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998), 196.
151
Ibid., 196.
152
Ibid., 196.
153
Ibid., 197.