SILVIU-MIHAI CHIRILĂ, The Tenth Beatitude
Starting from the importance of the Resurrection of Christ to the Church and for the believers, this
essay is also conceived as a reaction to skepticism and materialism, as the dominant trends of our
times. In the eight day after His Glorifi ed Resurrection, Christ comes back among his disciples,
knowing Thomas is present; in fact, he comes especially for Thomas and for us, who are hesitant
in our faith, and invites him to touch his wounds and His side. The end of the gospel in Thomas
Sunday offers clarifi cation with regard to knowledge and its relation to faith. First, Jesus tells Thomas
he believed because he saw, that is he confi ded in his own eyes, by experience, of the fact that
what he was told was the truth. Then, he tells him that there are people who need not experience
in order to believe and that they are the happy ones. In other words, knowing by experience may
bring confi dence, while knowing by faith bestows happiness; it thus results that the knowledge
acquired by putting trust into reason and senses has a strictly gnoseological dimension, whereas
the one resulted from believing in the source of the revelation, that is God, has a strong ontological
component. Bearing in mind the beatitudes Christ announces in His sermon, we may say that the
tenth beatitude, the one used to reprove Thomas, is basis for the nine beatitudes from the Sermon
on the Mountain.
KEYWORDS: beatitude, Thomas, faith, skepticism, experience, revelation

MIHAI-SILVIU CHIRILĂ