Blest Are the Pure in Heart

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

The author of our Hymn of the Week, John Keble, was the sort of man it is hard to imagine outside of the nineteenth century, and that is to the credit of his age. His father was an Anglican minister, devout, intelligent, highly cultured, and satisfied with a modest vicarage in Gloucestershire, in the lovely surroundings of the Cotswolds. The elder Keble educated his children at home, sending the boys to Oxford when they were ready, which his son John did at age 14, winning a scholarship to Corpus Christi College.

When you hear the word “college,” you must not think of those credentialing machines that we have among us, where thousands of young people dwell in overwhelming anonymity, thinking mainly of getting out of there to build a career in the world and to make money or to secure some personal ambition. Corpus Christi College, when John Keble was a member, and indeed only a young teenage boy still growing up, was made up of a few dozen youths who lived together, read books together, discussed important questions regarding religion, political life, history, literature, and art, and formed their imaginations at the fireside of friendship. One of those fellows was Tom Arnold, that is, the boy who would become Dr. Thomas Arnold, the wise and saintly headmaster of Rugby (whence we get the name of the sport the boys invented there), and father of the poet and titan of criticism, Matthew Arnold. Keble was a splendid scholar, not only in the classics but in mathematics too, and at the age of 18 he was elected to be a fellow at Oriel College. That would be like being an assistant professor at Harvard. Among his associates at Oriel, and a dear friend and collaborator, was the young John Henry Newman, whose work we have also featured at Word and Song. But that is another story.

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Keble wasn’t just a scholar or a controversialist. He was a poet. He never claimed to be a great poet, nor does it appear that it was in his heart to strive for comparison with such giants of religious poetry as George Herbert or John Milton. But all that he wrote, if I can judge by what I have seen, is strong, direct, unpretentious, and sincere. In the introduction to his collection of poems, The Christian Year, he says that he sought for some strain of music of his own, worthy to express his devotion to God. Of himself there was none. “Prayer is the secret,” he says. “And thus with untuned heart I feebly prayed,” knocking timidly at the door. The Spirit, the “Fountain of harmony,” “by whom the troubled waves of earthly sound / Are gathered into order,” that same Spirit that stirred above the dark waters on the first day of creation, must stir above the soul and quicken it with light. So then, Keble’s poetry is prayer, born of prayer. But that doesn’t mean that he was simply scribbling down his feelings as he pleased. Remember, all his life he was surrounded by the refinements of a classical education; and he also numbered among his closest friends Sir John Coleridge, nephew of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the poet Wordsworth himself, whose nephew Christopher Wordsworth, later an Anglican bishop, wrote our previous Hymn of the Week, “Songs of Thankfulness and Praise.”

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This week’s hymn, “Blest Are the Pure in Heart,” is taken from a much longer poem that Keble published in The Christian Year. It is headed with the verse from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” That is the secret that is in plain sight. Let’s think about this for a moment. It isn’t only true that we love somebody because we’ve gotten to know him. It is also true that we can hardly get to know a human being very deeply unless we love him. “Where there is love, there is an eye,” said the worthy and fascinating monk, Richard of Saint Victor. It’s not just because people hide things. It simply follows from the nature of an intellectual being. There are unfathomed depths. Why, we often float along the surface of our own selves, so that we need someone who loves us to cause us to see more of that world beneath, and with God, we are talking about someone who, to quote Saint Augustine, “is more intimately near to us than we are to ourselves.”
“What do you wish?” asked Jesus to the blind Bartimaeus. “Lord,” he replied, “that I may see.” Hence do we pray for purity of heart: that we may see.

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Blest are the pure in heart, For they shall see our God; The secret of the Lord is theirs, Their soul is Christ's abode. The Lord, who left the heavens Our life and peace to bring, To dwell in lowliness with men, Their pattern and their King, He to the lowly soul Doth still himself impart; And for his dwelling and his throne Chooseth the pure in heart. Lord, we thy presence seek; May ours this blessing be; Give us a pure and lowly heart, A temple meet for thee.

Debra has found for you today a beautiful version of this week’s hymn sung by The Guilford Cathedral Choir.

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