Ancient cultures, whether Hebraic, Greek or Roman, identified certain emotions or "humours" with certain parts of the body. Thus, the locus of compassion was the bowels or the guts.

St. Mark, for instance, says about Jesus' reaction to the sight of a large crowd, like sheep without a shepherd, that, " he took pity on them " (Mk 6:34 ).

A more accurate translation should be: "He was moved in his guts to see them." The locus of anger, on the other hand, was the nose. Quite appropriately.

The nose is the place from which you snort with rage. But there was no emotion specifically correlated with the heart. The reason is that the heart had a more total symbolisation. It did not symbolise (as it does for us) emotion as opposed to reason. The heart stood for the deepest self, the real self in its fullest interiority.

Thus, " Render your hearts, not your garments " is equivalent to "Render your real, not your external, superficial selves." " Create for me a new heart " is similarly equivalent to "make me over completely, transform me."

The pure in heart of our Beatitude therefore refers to those who possess an uncluttered and undivided interior life. They are the ones who " see " God.

"Seeing" God, however, is not something entirely of their own doing. It is not the case that once a commitment is made to unclutter oneself, or to make one's inner life less muddy, the net result is that one "sees" God.

I have spoken to you " (John 15:3). In other words, a pure heart is fundamentally a gift. At the very roots of our deepest self, it is God dwelling in us who gives us an inner life that is genuinely ours.

This means that our real identity is rooted in a source that forever eludes our grasp. As Aquinas said, we do not (cannot) apprehend the essence of our own souls.

To have a pure heart is to thus have a life which wells up in us from a source too deep for us to plumb. It is to have a heart that is constantly being created and sustained by newness of life from its source in God.

The "work" which is ours is to allow the creation of a pure heart to take place, to remove obstacles, to facilitate the process. It is here that we attend to and monitor our conduct. Jesus said repeatedly that his kind of morality was a morality of the heart.

No matter how externally or ceremonially righteous we are, how much we wash before sacrifice, if our hearts are not clean, our righteousness counts for nothing. When we attend to what's within and purify the source of our actions, a change occurs in how we see.

Seeing God in all of it

Philosophers and spiritual writers have always noted a correlation between being and seeing. As a person is, that is how they see. To the jaundiced eye, Aristotle observed, everything appears yellow. If our lives are rooted in God, so that the wellspring of life in us is God, then what we will see is God.

This means God in everything, in flowers and natural wonders, and also in the bleeding man on the Cross. To have a pure heart is to be capable of seeing God in all of it.

If we unmuddy the springs of life in us, and let the life of God permeate our being, in any situation we find ourselves, we can discover God. We can look at anything in the face, without blinkers, and without sugarcoating, and affirm the presence of God.

Purity of heart clarifies vision. Cynicism pretends to clarity. It looks behind and under everything, including what is beautiful and good to find a worm lurking somewhere. Purity of heart does the opposite, because it knows that God is absent from no part of his creation.

Purity of heart is also the opposite of false innocence. Poets and artists display a special kind of innocence, of looking at things and seeing them, as it were, for the first time. From ancient times this has also been a characteristic of the wise man or woman.

They find it strange and never quite understand, what everyone else around them seems to accept and take for granted. The world is born for them anew every morning.

But there is also a false innocence, which consists not of vision but of blinders. This innocence is a form of childhood which is never outgrown. It shrinks before complexity and evil, and retreats into helplessness, saying to itself: if I close my eyes, this will go away.

This kind of innocence only makes things look easy. It cannot come to terms with evil, either in or outside itself.

The kind of purity the beatitude celebrates, on the other hand, is one that fears nothing, because it has incorporated its fears into itself. It knows that the seeds of evil and violence are also within and not realities completely outside the self.

It knows that goodness is not a matter of trying to be good all the time but of a growing sensitivity to the good and evil in one's own heart, that perfection in this life entails a complete embrace of the willingness to be imperfect.

The beatitude privileges the act of seeing. It does not say that the pure of heart know God (which, of course, they do), but that they see God. They are haunted by a vision they glimpse, which never releases them. The only peace it promises is the peace of pursuit.

Creation means that God sees all that he has made and finds it good. Since God is the wellspring of life for the pure in heart, they enter thereby into the very drama of creation. Like artists, they render value to the world by their seeing.

Just as God's vision is the cause of the world's value, their seeing represents an ongoing acknowledgement of God's valuation and approbation.