Rebekah Eklund: Septenaries and Octaves: Patristic Exegesis of the Beatitudes in Medieval Society

Patristic thinkers typically understood the Sermon on the Mount as a précis of the whole of Jesus’ teaching, and the beatitudes as the sum of the Sermon. Patristic interpretation of the beatitudes (Matt 5:3–12) profoundly influenced medieval understandings of how to live a moral or good life, with widespread effects on social norms and practices.Two key patristic figures laid down the trajectories that carried the beatitudes into the medieval era: Augustine of Hippo and Gregory of Nyssa. Their understanding of the beatitudes represent a central component of moral development throughout medieval society. They both understood the beatitudes as virtues that enable the soul to resist vice and draw closer to God. Their numbering of the beatitudes (as seven or eight, respectively) exerted a lasting influence on the proliferation of sets of sevens (the so-called septenaries) and eights (the Great Octaves) in the medieval era. The septenaries and the Octaves permeated medieval liturgy and made their way into everyday life through moral treatises and educational manuals.In cathedral windows and illuminated manuscripts, in sermons and the station churches of Rome, medieval people encountered the beatitudes everywhere, in the form of seven or eight personified virtues. At least by the early twelfth century, in the writing of Rupert von Deutz, the eight Roman station churches for the Easter Octave were linked to the eight beatitudes. The patristic emphasis on the beatitudes was woven deeply into the fabric of medieval life, piety, and social practice.