“For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”—Matthew 5:20 KJV
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”—e. e. cummings
“On the Road was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.”—Jack Kerouac
“I’m not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.”—Jack Kerouac
The Beatitudes are the first part of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount, delivered early in his public career on a “mount” in Galilee to a good crowd of the curious and heavy-laden. He lays out pretty much the entire Christian ethic in those three chapters in Matthew—with a more condensed rendition in Luke, the Sermon on the Plain. Whether the two passages were only two versions of the same material in the hands of two writers, or two separate reports of the same stump speech, is up for debate.
A Latin form of the word “beatitude” appears in the Vulgate Bible (late 4th century) (Romans 4:6), typically translated “blessedness,” and the English version seems to have been coined in the early 5th century, a derivative of the Latin word via Old French. The plural form “beatitudes” appears in the 1520s, referring to those “Blessed are” pronouncements in Matthew 5: 3-11.
The word is perhaps thinly represented by the generic “blessedness.” More fully, we are dealing with the human attributes particularly favored by God, as evidenced by their direct source in the words of Jesus. It is the state of grace that, crudely considered, gets you into heaven, but more cosmically, represents the ultimate goal of human mentality/behavior, validating the idea that worldly power and prestige are not the correct metric by which to gauge human value.
This is hard to grasp since one struggles to find more than a perversion of that mentality in much of the modern church. Humility to the highest aspirations of human life, and subservience to the extortions of the scribes and Pharisees, are not the same thing.
Jack Kerouac is one of those cultural figures who have been largely reduced to a caricature in the public perception. It might seem surprising to many that the prolific writer, spiritual seeker, and mystic that was Jack Kerouac should have a dog in the fight regarding the word “beatitude.” Kerouac is generally credited with the phrase “Beat generation,” though the use of the word “beat” to describe the world-weary, iconoclastic, post-war movement is attributed to the street poet Herbert Huncke. Of course the word carries connotations of “tired and worn out,” as one would expect from an underground movement of dissidents disillusioned by a horrific war and mainstream conformist culture, but Kerouac added the idea of the “beat” of jazz music, the soundtrack of that era’s cultural dissent, as well as “beatific,” a reflection of the joy of a life lived ardently and sincerely.
In his words:
Beat doesn’t mean tired or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of goals: the vibrations of sincerity.
The essence of the Beatitudes is the declaration that truth lives in the opposite of the expected. A radical rejection of the conventional values of “the world.”
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Kerouac was not above stealing a library book or two, and he read widely in, among everything else, Eastern philosophy. He never really deserted his Catholicism before his death at 47, but saturated it with the rich influences of eastern thought. In thinking of the Beatitudes, and the spirit of Kerouac, I am reminded of one of my favorite sections in the Tao te Ching—number 41(trans. Stephen Mitchell), offered here in part:
The path into the light seems dark,
The path forward seems to go back,
The direct path seems long,
True power seems weak,
True purity seems tarnished,
True steadfastness seems changeable,
True clarity seems obscure,
The greatest art seems unsophisticated,
The greatest love seems indifferent,
The greatest wisdom seems childish.
The Tao is nowhere to be found,
Yet it nourishes and completes all things.
❦
The emphasis on “true” implies the existence of "untrue.” The former is preferred.
The norm ages badly.
Human hope lies in deviation.