St. Augustine’s commentary can turn our gaze to a proper understanding of the Beatitudes as pronouncements of the perfect moral law that were hidden in the Old Testament and unveiled by Christ in the New Testament.

St. Augustine’s Commentary 

on the Sermon on the Mount

by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg

Saint Augustine once observed that the “New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.” In his early years as a Manichean, St. Augustine had trouble interpreting the Bible. Subsequently, he would acknowledge the role of his intellectual pride complicit in his prior difficulty with Scripture. After his conversion, he learned from St. Ambrose to interpret the Scriptures symbolically. As a guiding principle for the revelation of the Scriptures’ inner spirituality, he took the Ambrosian hermeneutic: “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.”

In time, St. Augustine came to possess a consummate spiritual acumen showing remarkable originality in biblical exegesis. By the time he wrote his Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount in 393, he was adept at searching out the will of God revealed through the scriptures. He approached his work with the temperament of a child, rather than that of a scholar. Indeed, as a God fearing man, St. Augustine’s commentary possesses a clarity and depth that recommends it across the ages.

St. Augustine begins with the profound assertion that “anyone who piously and earnestly ponders the Sermon on the Mount—as we read in the Gospel according to Mathew—I believe he will find therein … the perfect standard of the Christian Life.” Imparted by the One True Teacher, the Sermon on the Mount elucidates the divine principles of justice guiding us to the narrow path that leads to communion with the Saints.

Appropriately, St. Augustine spends the greater part of this work devoted to a thorough treatment of the centerpiece of the Sermon: the Beatitudes. In this darkening age, the centrality of the Beatitudes in Catholic moral theology has faded from memory. The Beatitudes have come to be misunderstood moral platitudes. There is a modern tendency to project the Beatitudes as a type of social reform, lifting the poor and persecuted and accentuating a worldly peace, but St. Augustine turns our attention to the fact that they are intended to be directed inward. As Msgr. Ronald Knox said, “we are here to colonize heaven, not make things better on earth.”

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