Definition of "beatitude" [be•at•i•tude]

• Supreme blessedness or happiness. (noun)
• Any of the declarations of blessedness made by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. (noun)
• Used as a title and form of address for a patriarch in the Armenian Church or a metropolitan in the Russian Orthodox Church: Your Beatitude. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Now hope seems to correspond especially to the last beatitude, which is: "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God," since it is said in Rom. 5: 2: "we ... rejoice in hope of the glory of God.""
• "On the first point: a beatitude is the actuality of a perfect virtue."
• "Hence the last beatitude, which is the term of spiritual perfection, fittingly corresponds to hope in point of its ultimate object, while the first beatitude, which involves recoil from worldly things which hinder submission to God, fittingly corresponds to fear."