When Scripture proclaims "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God"[1], it does not first promise the reward of bodily continence: it announces a vision. The saints understood it so. For them, purity of heart is not a mere chapter of sexual morality, but the very name of holiness on the march: a heart grown so limpid, so wholly turned toward God, that it becomes transparent to His light. This article gathers their voices — Desert Fathers, doctors, mystics — on what it means to have a pure heart, why this purity opens onto the vision of God, and by what paths they themselves sought it.
The scope must be set out from the start. Purity of heart includes chastity, but is not reduced to it. On the virtue of chastity of the body properly speaking, see What the Saints Say About Chastity and, for the practical path, How to Grow in Chastity; on the combat against the opposite vice, see What the Saints Say About the Fight Against Lust. The present article takes purity of heart in the broad sense of the Fathers and the sixth beatitude: the limpidity of the undivided heart. For the concrete ways to grow in this limpidity, see How to Grow in Purity of Heart.
What is purity of heart? Beyond chastity alone
The heart, seat of the whole person
In biblical language, the heart is not the seat of feeling, but the centre of the person: where man decides, judges, loves, believes. The Catechism recalls it in a word: "The heart is the seat of moral personality"[2]. That is why Christ traces back to the heart the origin of good as well as evil: "Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication" (Mt 15:19)[3]. To purify one's heart, then, is not to correct outward behaviour, but to restore order at the source: in thoughts, desires, intentions, the inward gaze.
Hence the breadth of the notion. The Catechism lists three areas in which this purity is at stake:
"The 'pure in heart' are those who have attuned their intellects and wills to the demands of God's holiness, chiefly in three areas: charity; chastity or sexual rectitude; love of truth and orthodoxy of faith." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2518[4]
Chastity is therefore only one of the three faces of purity of heart, alongside charity and right faith. A man may be chaste in body and keep a heart impure with pride, duplicity, twisted intentions, or disordered attachments. Conversely, the whole tradition calls pure in heart the one whose will seeks but one thing. It is this full sense that the saints develop.
"Purify my heart": the prayer of Scripture
Before being a doctrine, purity of heart is a prayer. The great cry of the Miserere, taken up each week by the Church in her liturgy, asks not for outward repair but for inward re-creation:
"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me." — Psalm 51:10[5]
The verb used — create (in Hebrew bara, the very verb of the world's creation in Gen 1:1) — says that purity of heart is not first a conquest of man but a work of God: no one makes himself pure by his own strength; he asks for it. Likewise, Psalm 24 makes purity of heart the condition of access to God's presence:
"Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false." — Psalm 24:3-4[6]
The mountain of the Lord, the sanctuary, the vision of God: already the Old Testament binds purity of heart to entry into divine intimacy. The sixth beatitude will only bring this promise to fulfilment.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God"
Why purity opens onto vision
The link between purity and vision is not arbitrary. Saint Augustine fixed it in a formula become classic, which the Catechism still quotes today. Believing, obeying, living well, purifying one's heart, understanding: these five verbs follow one another like an ascent:
"The faithful […] must believe the articles of the Creed so that by believing they may obey God, by obeying may live well, by living well may purify their hearts, and with pure hearts may understand what they believe." — Saint Augustine, quoted in the Catechism § 2518[7]
The vision of God is therefore not a favour added to a pure life: it is its organic fruit. Sin blinds; purity restores sight. As stirred water ceases to reflect the sky and reflects it again once it grows calm, so the heart troubled by disorder no longer perceives God, and the clarified heart begins to see Him again. Purity is, in the Catechism's words, what "enables us even now to see according to God"[8].
The soul-mirror: Saint Gregory of Nyssa
No Father plumbed this theme as deeply as Saint Gregory of Nyssa (†395), in his sixth homily On the Beatitudes. His thesis is bold: to see God is not to look outward at a distant object, but to recover within oneself the divine image that sin has covered over. God engraved His imprint on the soul as a seal in wax; evil has soiled it, but not erased it:
"There is in you, to a certain extent, a capacity for seeing God. […] Evil has spread itself over the divine imprint. It has made this good useless to you by hiding it under defiled veils." — Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, VI[9]
Purification then consists in scraping off the rust so that the gold reappears:
"If by a careful life you wipe off anew the filth that has settled on your heart, the divine beauty will shine forth in you again. […] Having a pure heart, he becomes blessed, because, looking upon his own purity, he beholds the Archetype in the image." — Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, VI[10]
The purified soul is a mirror: limpid, it reflects God; and looking at itself grown limpid, it discovers there the features of Him whose image it is. Purity of heart thus adds nothing to the soul — it restores its native transparency, that of the divine likeness.
Seeing God, already here below
The promise of the beatitude will be fulfilled fully in the face-to-face vision[11], but it begins in this life. The Catechism lists the four conditions which, even now, dispose us to this renewed gaze:
"This purification of the heart is brought about by the virtue and gift of chastity […], by purity of intention which consists in seeking the true end of man […], by purity of vision, exterior and interior, by discipline of feelings and imagination […] ; purity of heart requires prayer." — after the Catechism, § 2519 and 2520[12]
Chastity, intention, gaze, prayer: these four means — which the Catechism sums up in § 2532 — structure all the saints' teaching on how to become pure in heart. We shall meet them again below.
"Our goal is purity of heart": Cassian and the Desert Fathers
The goal and the end: puritas cordis
It was in the desert of Egypt, in the 4th century, that purity of heart received its most famous formulation. Saint John Cassian (†435), reporting the teaching of Abba Moses in the first of his Conferences, distinguishes with decisive precision the immediate goal (in Greek scopos) from the ultimate end (telos) of the whole Christian life:
"The end of our profession is indeed the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven; but our immediate goal is purity of heart, without which no one can attain that end." — Saint John Cassian, Conferences, I[13]
The distinction is momentous. The end — Heaven, eternal life — does not depend directly on us; it is gift. But the goal, what we concretely tend toward each day, what we can work at here and now, is purity of heart. The whole spiritual life thus receives a practical criterion: good is what makes my heart purer, more limpid, more unified toward God; to be fled is what troubles and divides it.
"Let us then embrace with all our strength what can lead us to the goal of purity of heart; let us flee, on the contrary, as baneful and harmful, what would turn us away from it. […] If we set this goal before us, our acts and our thoughts will always go straight to obtaining it." — Saint John Cassian, Conferences, I[14]
The undivided heart: clinging to God alone
For Cassian, purity of heart is practically one with charity: a heart undivided, with but one object. Everything else — fasts, vigils, reading, renunciations — is but an instrument serving this single goal, never an end in itself. The pure heart is the one attached to nothing apart from God:
"This must be the first aim of our efforts, the unchangeable resolve and constant passion of our heart: to cling always to God and to divine things. Whatever departs from this, however great it may be, must hold only the second or even the last rank in our esteem." — Saint John Cassian, Conferences, I[15]
Here we touch the heart of the whole tradition: purity of heart is willing one thing. The impure heart is a divided heart, scattered between God and a thousand attachments; the pure heart is gathered, simple, unified. Cassian even gives this purity a already mystical scope: it is in it that God's reign is established in the soul.
"Everything lies in the deep sanctuary of the soul. When the devil has been driven out of it and vices no longer reign there, the reign of God is consequently established in us." — Saint John Cassian, Conferences, I[16]
Keeping custody of the heart in the Fathers
This doctrine is not Cassian's own: it is the common good of the Desert Fathers. Saint Pachomius (†348), father of cenobitic life, sums up in a few words a whole programme of inward unification:
"Be perfectly pure, master of your thoughts, master of your body, master of your heart. Let your mind obey! Remain small in your heart." — Saint Pachomius[17]
Purity of heart presupposes custody of thoughts (in Greek nepsis, watchful sobriety), that attentive surveillance of the inward flow which repels the first suggestions before they take root. On this vigilance which is its nerve, see What the Saints Say About Spiritual Vigilance and What the Saints Say About Interior Silence.
Purity of heart is willing one thing
A heart too great for the world
If purity of heart consists in willing but one thing, it is because the human heart was made for God alone, and no creature can fill it. Léonie Martin, sister of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, expressed it with luminous simplicity:
"Our heart is made for God alone; He alone can fill it fully; it is too great for the world." — Léonie Martin, letter to her sister Thérèse, 15 October 1887[18]
Hence the constant teaching of the spiritual masters: impurity of heart, in the broadest sense, is division, the disordered attachment that turns part of the heart toward creatures. The Imitation of Christ voices the bitter experience of whoever seeks elsewhere than in God:
"He who seeks anything but God alone and the salvation of his soul will find nothing but tribulation and sorrow." — Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, I, XVII[19]
Purity of intention: the soul of all purity
Among the faces of purity of heart, the saints insist especially on purity of intention: no longer acting out of habit, vanity, or self-interest, but solely to please God. It is this that transfigures the most ordinary actions. Saint Faustina Kowalska sings it as a treasure:
"O inexhaustible treasure of purity of intention, which renders all our actions perfect and so pleasing to God!" — Saint Faustina, Diary, § 66[20]
Conversely, impure intention taints even good works. The theme returns forcefully in the writings of the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, where Christ warns that it is not the greatness of deeds that counts, but the intention animating them:
"What will become of souls who have done so many actions, even good ones, without purity of intention, out of habit or selfishness? […] It is not the greatness of actions that matters to me, but the intention with which they are done." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, 7 May 1899[21]
Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus says the same thing in her own language: "Jesus looks not so much at the greatness of actions, nor even at their difficulty, as at the love that makes one do these acts"[22]. Purity of intention is thus purity of heart applied to action: one same act, according as it springs from love of God or self-love, will be pure gold or tarnished metal.
Detachment, condition of limpidity
One cannot will one thing while remaining clinging to a thousand. That is why the mystics bind purity of heart and detachment indissolubly together. The venerable Marthe Robin states the law rigorously:
"Every imperfection, even the slightest, darkens the purity of the soul and delays, if it does not prevent, its perfect union with God." — Venerable Marthe Robin, Journal[23]
This law is not anxious rigorism: it simply describes the condition of a mirror. The least dust on the glass blurs the reflection. On the path of detachment as such, see What the Saints Say About Detachment. Here we retain only that detachment is not the goal: it serves limpidity, which itself serves vision and love.
The voice of the mystics: a heart emptied for God to dwell in
Luisa Piccarreta: natural purity and divine purity
The writings of the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947) offer on purity of heart a distinction of great fineness, between a natural purity — content with avoiding evil — and a divine purity, which is jealous love for God down to the slightest breath:
"Purity is content with performing no act, casting no glance, entertaining no thought and uttering no word that is not chaste. […] Love, for its part, is jealous of everything, even of thought and breath, even if they were chaste. […] It gives the soul not natural purity, but divine purity." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 10, 23 November 1910[24]
The highest purity of heart is therefore not an abstention (not doing evil) but a fullness (willing everything for God). That is why Luisa receives the image of the fountain, which exactly meets Gregory of Nyssa's mirror:
"Virgin souls resemble the purity of the fountain. The crystal-clear waters are their upright acts; the sun casting its rays perpendicularly is myself […]. If I do not find in a soul purity, uprightness and love, it cannot be my mirror." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 10, 3 February 1912[25]
A heart emptied for God to inhabit
The mystics' other great image is that of emptiness: for God to come and dwell in a heart, that heart must first be emptied of all that is not Him. The door of the heart is narrow, and the slightest attachment blocks it:
"My Heart is infinitely great. But the door to enter it is very narrow. No one can come to fill its emptiness, except souls stripped and simple. […] The least little hindrance, the shadow of an attachment, an intention that is not upright […] prevents them from coming to delight in it." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, 7 May 1899[26]
Purity of heart thus appears in its true light: not first an absence (of sin), but an availability — a heart swept clear for its divine guest. It is the same intuition found, in other words, in all the masters: "Forget everything, and yourself — and let there be nothing but Me"[27].
The means of purity of heart according to the saints
The saints do not merely praise purity of heart: they point out its paths. The Catechism gathers them into four, which exactly match the teaching of the spiritual masters[28].
| Means | What it purifies | Voice of the saints |
|---|---|---|
| Prayer | The whole heart, through grace asked for | "Create in me a clean heart" (Ps 51:10); one does not purify oneself, one asks for it |
| Chastity | Body and affectivity | What the Saints Say About Chastity |
| Purity of intention | Action, the motive of deeds | The "inexhaustible treasure" making every action pleasing to God[29]; it is not the greatness of deeds that counts, but the intention[30] |
| Purity of gaze | Senses and imagination | Custody of eyes and thoughts (Pachomius, Job 31:1) |
Prayer: asking for a new heart
The first means is prayer, because purity of heart is first a gift. "Purity of heart requires prayer," says the Catechism[31]. No one purifies himself by willpower alone; one asks for the new heart that God alone can create. Such is the meaning of the Miserere prayer, and of all the saints' avowal: limpidity of heart is a grace to implore each day, not a capital acquired once for all.
Custody of the heart and the senses
The second path is custody of the inward and outward gaze: watching what enters the heart through the eyes, the imagination, memory. Tradition gladly quotes Job's covenant: "I have made a covenant with my eyes"[32]. It is not a matter of despising the visible, but of preventing foreign images and thoughts from troubling the water of the heart. This is the Fathers' nepsis, watchful sobriety, whose natural climate is interior silence: see What the Saints Say About Interior Silence.
The sacraments: the spring that washes and nourishes
The third path is sacramental. The purity of heart received in Baptism[33] is restored in confession, which does not merely erase the fault but gives the heart back its limpidity, and is strengthened in the Eucharist, where Christ — purity itself — comes to dwell in the soul. On these springs, see What the Saints Say About Regular Confession and What the Saints Say About Frequent Communion.
Mary, the All-Pure
Lastly, the saints constantly refer to Mary, the Immaculate, as the model and mediatrix of purity of heart. A Religious of the Sacred Heart sums up this Marian path:
"We must have a pure heart if we wish to answer our Christian vocation. We must bear within ourselves the likeness of Jesus and Mary. Without this purity, there is no happiness on earth. […] Taking Mary as our model, we must tend through daily efforts toward this complete renewal of nature." — Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart Bernaud[34]
The image placed at the head of the Infobox is The Immaculate Conception of the Venerables by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (c. 1678), a work kept in the Prado Museum and reproduced here from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.
The fruits of purity of heart
Seeing God — and happiness even here below
The first fruit is that of the beatitude itself: seeing God. Not only in the vision of Heaven, but even now, through a clearer, more savoury knowledge of divine things. Saint John Cassian said it: purity of heart opens onto "purity of heart and spiritual knowledge"[35], that relished understanding of God's realities which is won not by study alone but by limpidity of soul. It is also a happiness: a heart reconciled with itself, no longer needing to flee its own gaze, tastes a peace unknown to the divided heart.
Loving with an undivided heart
The second fruit is the capacity to love purely. Chastity, says the Catechism, makes it possible "to love with an upright and undivided heart"[36]. The pure heart, freed from covetousness and self-love, becomes capable of total gift — toward God and toward neighbour. Far from hardening, purity makes tender: it does not suppress love, it purifies it of all that falsified it. That is why the virtues are bound together: purity of heart never walks alone; it calls and sustains all the others. The Eternal Father taught Saint Catherine of Siena:
"No virtue can be perfect without having the others to a certain degree; for all the virtues are bound together." — The Eternal Father to Saint Catherine of Siena, Dialogue[37]
Transparency to God
The ultimate fruit rejoins the starting point: purity of heart makes the soul transparent to God, a mirror in which He contemplates Himself and in which, in return, it discovers Him. This is the completion of Gregory of Nyssa's image and of Luisa's fountain: a heart so limpid that God is reflected in it without obstacle. There lies the term of the whole journey — not a moral performance, but a likeness recovered, that of the creature become again the faithful image of its Creator.
In summary: what the saints say about purity of heart
| Voice | Its own contribution on purity of heart |
|---|---|
| Psalms | Purity of heart is asked for ("create in me a clean heart") and gives access to the Lord's mountain |
| Saint Augustine | Believing → living well → purifying the heart → understanding: vision is the fruit of purity |
| Saint Gregory of Nyssa | The soul-mirror: purified, it reflects God and contemplates the Archetype within itself |
| Saint John Cassian | Purity of heart is the goal (scopos) of the whole Christian life; Heaven is its end |
| Saint Pachomius | Mastery of thoughts, body, heart; remaining small |
| Saint Faustina | Purity of intention, the "inexhaustible treasure" making every action pleasing to God |
| Luisa Piccarreta | Natural purity (avoiding evil) / divine purity (everything for God, jealous of the slightest breath) distinction |
| Marthe Robin | The slightest imperfection darkens purity and delays union with God |
| Catechism | Three areas (charity, chastity, faith); four means (prayer, chastity, intention, gaze) |
To go further
- What the Saints Say About Chastity — purity of body and affectivity, one of the three areas of purity of heart.
- What the Saints Say About the Fight Against Lust — the negative path: direct combat against the vice that soils the heart.
- How to Grow in Purity of Heart — the practical path, concrete means for growing this limpidity.
- What the Saints Say About Interior Silence — the climate of custody of the heart and of the Fathers' nepsis.
- What the Saints Say About Detachment — emptying the heart so that it wills but one thing.
- What the Saints Say About Spiritual Vigilance — watching the first movements, the nerve of daily purity.
Notes and References
Gospel according to Saint Matthew 5:8, official liturgical translation: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Sixth of the eight Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:1-12).
1Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2517: "The heart is the seat of moral personality: 'Out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication' (Mt 15:19). The struggle against carnal covetousness entails purifying the heart and practising temperance."
2 3Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2518: "The sixth beatitude proclaims: 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God' (Mt 5:8). The 'pure in heart' are those who have attuned their intellects and wills to the demands of God's holiness, chiefly in three areas: charity; chastity or sexual rectitude; love of truth and orthodoxy of faith."
4Psalm 51:10, official liturgical translation: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me." The Hebrew verb bara ("to create") is that of Gen 1:1: purity of heart is presented as a re-creation worked by God alone. The Miserere psalm, penitential prayer taken up each Friday at Lauds.
5Psalm 24:3-4, official liturgical translation: "Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false." Purity of heart is there the condition of access to the sanctuary and to God's presence.
6Saint Augustine (354-430), De fide et symbolo, 10, 25, quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church § 2518: "so that by believing they may obey God, by obeying may live well, by living well may purify their hearts, and with pure hearts may understand what they believe." The chain believe-obey-live well-purify-understand makes the vision of God the term of a progressive purification of the heart.
7Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2519: "To the 'pure in heart' are promised that they will see God face to face and be like him (cf. 1 Cor 13:12; 1 Jn 3:2). Purity of heart is the precondition of the vision of God. Even now it enables us to see according to God […]."
8Saint Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395), Homilies on the Beatitudes, 6th homily (on Mt 5:8): "There is in you, to a certain extent, a capacity for seeing God. […] Evil has spread itself over the divine imprint. It has made this good useless to you by hiding it under defiled veils." French trans. after patristique.org; critical text in Sources Chrétiennes (Gregory of Nyssa, Les Béatitudes). The image of the divine seal engraved in the soul and covered over by sin structures the whole homily.
9Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes, 6th homily: "If by a careful life you wipe off anew the filth that has settled on your heart, the divine beauty will shine forth in you again. […] Having a pure heart, he becomes blessed, because, looking upon his own purity, he beholds the Archetype in the image." Trans. after patristique.org. The famous theme of the soul-mirror: the purified soul sees God by seeing itself become again a faithful image.
10First Letter to the Corinthians 13:12, liturgical translation: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face." Cf. 1 Jn 3:2: "we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." Scriptural sources of the beatific vision promised to pure hearts.
11Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2520: "Baptism confers on its recipient the grace of purification from all sins. But the baptized must continue to struggle against concupiscence of the flesh and disordered desires. With God's grace he will prevail: by the virtue and gift of chastity, for chastity lets us love with upright and undivided heart; by purity of intention which consists in seeking the true end of man […]; by purity of vision, exterior and interior; by discipline of feelings and imagination […]; by prayer." Canonical list of the means of purity of heart.
12 31 36Saint John Cassian (c. 360-435), Conferences, I (Abba Moses), 4, Sources Chrétiennes 42 bis, Cerf, 2008, p. 95: "The end of our profession is indeed the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven; but our immediate goal is purity of heart, without which no one can attain that end." Classic distinction between the telos (the ultimate end: the Kingdom) and the scopos (the immediate goal: puritas cordis).
13Saint John Cassian, Conferences, I, Sources Chrétiennes 42 bis, Cerf, 2008, p. 97: "Let us then embrace with all our strength what can lead us to the goal of purity of heart; let us flee, on the contrary, as baneful and harmful, what would turn us away from it. […] If we set this goal before us, our acts and our thoughts will always go straight to obtaining it." Purity of heart becomes the practical criterion for discerning every action.
14Saint John Cassian, Conferences, I, Sources Chrétiennes 42 bis, Cerf, 2008, p. 103: "This must be the first aim of our efforts, the unchangeable resolve and constant passion of our heart always to cling to God and to divine things. Whatever departs from this, however great it may be, must hold only the second or even the last rank in our esteem, and even be regarded as a danger."
15Saint John Cassian, Conferences, I, Sources Chrétiennes 42 bis, Cerf, 2008, p. 113: "Everything lies in the deep sanctuary of the soul. When the devil has been driven out of it and vices no longer reign there, the reign of God is consequently established in us."
16Saint Pachomius (c. 292-348), Counsels to a Resentful Monk, Saint-Léger Éditions, 2017, p. 31: "Be perfectly pure, master of your thoughts, master of your body, master of your heart. Let your mind obey! Remain small in your heart." Father of Egyptian cenobitism; purity of heart is there bound to mastery of thoughts (nepsis).
17Léonie Martin (1863-1941), sister of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, letter to her sister Thérèse, 15 October 1887: "Our heart is made for God alone; He alone can fill it fully; it is too great for the world; so what folly to be too attached to creatures." Servant of God (cause for beatification opened in 2015).
18Thomas a Kempis (c. 1380-1471), The Imitation of Christ, book I, ch. XVII, 2: "He who seeks anything but God alone and the salvation of his soul will find nothing but tribulation and sorrow." The divided heart is a tormented heart; purity of heart is unification.
19Saint Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), Diary, § 66: "O inexhaustible treasure of purity of intention, which renders all our actions perfect and so pleasing to God!" Purity of intention is purity of heart applied to the motive of acting.
20 29Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947), The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, 7 May 1899: "My daughter, what will become of souls who have done so many actions, even good ones, without purity of intention, out of habit or selfishness? […] It is not the greatness of actions that matters to me, but the intention with which they are done." Centro Studi Piccarreta editions. Passage verified word for word on the vol. 2 copy (Via Divina library).
21 30Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus (1873-1897), Letter 65 (to Céline, July 1889): "Jesus looks not so much at the greatness of actions, nor even at their difficulty, as at the love that makes one do these acts." Letters edition (Cerf-DDB). Thérèse's echo of purity of intention.
22Venerable Marthe Robin (1902-1981), Journal: December 1929 – November 1932, Éditions Foyer de Charité, 2012, p. 38: "It must be concluded that every imperfection, even the slightest, darkens the purity of the soul and delays, if it does not prevent, its perfect union with God."
23Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 10, 23 November 1910: "Purity is content with performing no act, casting no glance, entertaining no thought and uttering no word that is not chaste. It tolerates the rest. […] Love is jealous of everything, even of thought and breath, even if they were chaste. […] It gives the soul not natural purity, but divine purity." Centro Studi Piccarreta editions. Passage verified word for word on the vol. 10 copy (Via Divina library).
24Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 10, 3 February 1912: "Virgin souls resemble the purity of the fountain. The crystal-clear waters are their upright acts; the sun casting its rays perpendicularly is myself; the variety of colours is love. Now if I do not find in a soul purity, uprightness and love, it cannot be my mirror." Centro Studi Piccarreta editions. Passage verified word for word on the vol. 10 copy (Via Divina library). The fountain-mirror image meets that of Gregory of Nyssa.
25Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, 7 May 1899: "My Heart is infinitely great. But the door to enter it is very narrow. No one can come to fill its emptiness, except souls stripped and simple. […] The least little hindrance, the shadow of an attachment, an intention that is not upright, an action that does not aim at pleasing me, prevents them from coming to delight in it." Centro Studi Piccarreta editions. Passage verified word for word on the vol. 2 copy (Via Divina library).
26Jesus to Sister Mary of the Trinity (1903-1980), Consent to Be Nothing, Éditions Arfuyen, 2004, p. 44: "Forget everything, and yourself — and let there be nothing but Me." Carmelite of Tours; formula of the heart's simplification down to the one thing necessary.
27Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2532: "Purification of the heart demands prayer, the practice of chastity, purity of intention and of vision." Summary of the four means developed in § 2520 and 2519.
28Book of Job 31:1, official liturgical translation: "I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I look upon a virgin?" Classic biblical source of "custody of the eyes" as a means of purity of heart.
32Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2520: "Baptism confers on its recipient the grace of purification from all sins." Purity of heart is first a baptismal gift, to be kept and restored.
33Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart Bernaud, quoted in Geneviève Vignes, Demeurez dans son Amour, Éditions du Sacré-Cœur, 2018, p. 17: "We must have a pure heart if we wish to answer our Christian vocation. We must bear within ourselves the likeness of Jesus and Mary. Without this purity, there is no happiness on earth. […] Taking Mary as our model, we must tend through daily efforts toward this complete renewal of nature."
34Saint John Cassian, Conferences, I, Sources Chrétiennes 42 bis, Cerf, 2008, p. 119: "One possesses [the kingdom] of God by the practice of the virtues, in purity of heart and spiritual knowledge." Spiritual knowledge (the savoured understanding of divine things) is presented as a fruit of purity of heart.
35The Eternal Father to Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), The Book of Dialogues, Treatise on Discretion: "No virtue can be perfect without having the others to a certain degree; for all the virtues are bound together, and each virtue is the beginning and principle of the others." Purity of heart is never isolated: it calls and sustains all the virtues.
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