So, what do the terms “purity of heart” and “kingdom of God” mean? We begin with purity of heart. Abba Moses speaks at quite some length about what it is, as well as what it is not. First, we will look at what Abba Moses says about purity of heart in positive terms-what he says about what it actively is.
Abba Moses connects purity of heart to a variety of other terms and concepts that help give us a picture of what it means to him. At one point, for example, he defines it simply as “holiness,” a term he does not further discuss, but one that is probably quite familiar to most readers. 8 Elsewhere he connects purity of heart to tranquility. 9 By “tranquility,” Abba Moses probably means the ability to rein in the mind, avoiding the problem of having one’s thoughts run off in all directions uncontrolled.10 As an extension of this, tranquility, for him, also appears to involve the ability to direct oneself away from evil and sinful thoughts toward holy and pure ones. 11 Abba Moses finally connects purity of heart explicitly with love, saying that purity of heart is specifically the kind of love that St Paul talks about when he says that “if I gave all my goods to feed the poor … but I did not have love, it would profit me nothing.” 12
Holiness, tranquility, love-these things define purity of heart for Abba Moses, and from these three terms alone, we get a good picture of what it means. Still, this is not all that Abba Moses has to say about purity of heart. Indeed, he is in fact probably most clear about what it really is when talking about what it is not.
And from this it clearly follows that perfection is not arrived at simply by self-denial, and the giving up of all our goods … unless there is that love, the details of which the apostle describes
[I Cor 13.3], which consists in purity of heart alone. For “not to be envious,” “not to be puffed up, not to be angry, not to do any wrong, not to seek one’s own, not to rejoice in iniquity, not to think evil” etc., what is all this except ever to offer to God a perfect and clean heart, and to keep it free from all passions?13
Purity of heart, for Abba Moses, is the state of the soul in absence of the passions. By passions he means, as the passage implies, any of the myriad human temptations and inclinations to evil, along with the active carrying out of such inclinations. He lists some of the worst such passions here directly, saying that in not engaging these passions, the human being offers God a pure heart. Purity of heart, then, is what is left in us when sin has been dismissed, when all the accouterments of vice are set aside, and, in short, when the human being ceases to fall away from holiness, tranquility and love. To reach this state is the goal of all Christians according to Abba Moses. We will return to the question of how Christians ought to work toward this goal, and say a little more about what purity of heart looks like in practice, when we discuss the virtues.
~Daniel G. Opperwall, A Layman in the Desert
8. Conf. I.V.2.
9. Conf. I.VII.4.
10. Conf. I.V.4.
11. Conf. I.XVII.I-2.
12. I Cor 13:3. quoted in Conf. I.VI.3.
13. Conf. I.VI.3. Translation adapted from Gibson.
