Blessed Are the Pure in Heart

Adam Clarke, in his Commentary on the Bible (1832), read the words "In opposition to the Pharisees, who affected outward purity". He wrote that "a purification of the heart, from all vile affections and desires, is essentially requisite in order to enter into the kingdom of God."

Albert Barnes, in his Notes, called the pure in heart those "whose minds, motives, and principles are pure", who "desire to be holy in heart".

The objection: Matthew 5:8 names no Pharisee, so the contrast with outward washing is drawn by the commentators.

John Chrysostom, in his fifteenth homily on Matthew, named two kinds of the pure, those "not conscious to themselves of any evil" and "those who live in temperance". In his words, "there is nothing which we need so much in order to see God, as this last virtue".

The objection: katharos is the word Paul joins to love and a sincere faith in 1 Timothy 1:5, so its reach is wider than chastity.

Augustine, as the Catena Aurea gives him, wrote that "They are foolish who seek to see God with the bodily eye, seeing He is seen only by the heart". He joined the verse to a line of the Book of Wisdom and concluded that "the single heart is the same as is here called the pure heart."

Søren Kierkegaard published a book of discourses in Danish in 1847, and Douglas V. Steere gave its first part the English title Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing in 1938.

The objection: the STEP Bible lexicon glosses katharos as clean, used literally or figuratively, and the sense of single comes from the line of Wisdom that Augustine set beside the verse.

John Gill, in his Exposition of the New Testament (1746 to 1748), wrote that "The heart of man is naturally unclean; nor is it in the power of man to make it clean". He held that no one in this life is "so pure in heart, as to be entirely free from sin."

The objection: Paul tells Timothy to flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness (2 Timothy 2:22), which treats purity as a pursuit of this life.

Clarke wrote, "He whose soul is not delivered from all sin, through the blood of the covenant, can have no Scriptural hope of ever being with God."

The objection: the next verse warns, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" (1 John 1:8).

Augustine, in Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount, wrote, "To the pure in heart is given the power of seeing God, as to those bearing about with them a pure eye for discerning eternal things". Chrysostom said of the verse, "He is here speaking of such sight as it is possible for man to have."

The objection: the other promises of the beatitudes, of comfort and of filling, also look to the future (Matthew 5:4 and Matthew 5:6).

In the City of God, book 22, chapter 29, Augustine quotes the verse and asks "whether in the future life God shall also be seen with the bodily eye". Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (part 1, question 12, article 1), reasons from 1 John 3:2 that "it must be absolutely granted that the blessed see the essence of God".

John Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), wrote on 1 John 3:2 that believers will see Christ "without a veil".

The objection: the verse promises that the pure will see God and says nothing of His essence, so that word is the reasoning of Aquinas.

A writer the Catena Aurea gives as Chrysostom, and now called Pseudo-Chrysostom, says that the righteous man "sees God in his heart". He adds, "But in that world to come the pure in heart shall see God face to face, not in a glass, and in enigma as here."

Barnes read the sight as favour with God, since all will see Him as Judge: "to see God, means to be his friends and favorites, and to dwell with him in his kingdom."

The objection: Aquinas holds that "it is impossible for the soul of man in this life to see the essence of God" (article 11), so a seeing now is of another kind.