Meekness: What it is, and what it isn't
A lot of conflict and unhappiness could be avoided by the virtue of Christian meekness.
A lot of conflict and unhappiness could be avoided by the virtue of Christian meekness.
Editor’s Notes
We begin a new mini-series on the beatitude of meekness.
Our Lord said, in the Sermon on the Mount:
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the land.”
The virtue of meekness – which St Thomas Aquinas treats as a part of the cardinal virtue of temperance – is commonly misunderstood in our day.
As Fr Coleridge explains, it is treated as softness or even insensibility in the face of evil suffered. But there is so much more to meekness than this. Much unnecessary conflict and unhappiness could be avoided by widespread meekness – and necessary conflict would be conducted in a more fruitful way.
In particular, online interactions are apt to inflame passions of anger in a way that is not virtuous – and perhaps we can begin to avoid this by understanding and cultivating this virtue within us.
The Beatitude of Meekness
The Preaching of the Beatitudes
Chapter XII
St. Matt. v. 4; Story of the Gospels, § 31
Burns and Oates, London, 1876.
(Read on All Saints)
Meekness healing another concupiscence
In the first Beatitude our Lord may be said to have laid down a principle, which may rectify all false judgments and inordinate desires with regard to what men commonly consider the good things of this life.
The blessing which He has there pronounced falls upon the mortification and extinction of the great concupiscence which reaches forth to external goods, of which riches are the chief, because they are the means by which all others may be obtained. Our Lord does not simply bless the extinction of the concupiscence and nothing more, but the virtue which is founded upon faith and fostered by grace, which begins in the acknowledgment of the supreme dominion of God over all the things which can be the objects of desire, which makes them, as it were, all over to Him in affection and spirit, and so, emptying itself of all ownership in these fleeting goods, is fit to receive in abundance from His bountiful hands the true treasures of His kingdom.
There is another concupiscence or principle of selfishness in us, which is seated even nearer to the centre of our hearts than the love of riches, and that is the love of ourselves, our own honour, our rights, reputation, consideration, independence, self-will, and liberty. A man may be utterly poor as to the good things of the world, and yet full of pride, impatience, anger, ready to resent any slight as an injury, to assume an arrogant position in relation to others, and incapable of obedience either of mind or action.
Though poverty of spirit, as being so nearly akin to humility, is allied in consequence to that other offspring of humility which we call meekness, still it is not uncommon to find the concupiscence which is opposed to meekness raging furiously in those who have laid what might be the foundation of the Beatitudes in the practice of actual poverty.
As poverty of spirit is humility and truth, in reference to external goods, so meekness is humility and truth in reference to our own independence, honour, and all that touches them to wound them, or that can be sought for as a means of pampering them. Thus it is natural that the great Healer of our concupiscences should proceed from the remedy of avarice to the remedy of pride and anger, and that meekness should follow poverty of spirit in the chain of His Beatitudes.
Here again we shall find that He builds on faith and truth, that the virtue which He crowns consists in a due appreciation of the rights of God that it is in itself most blessed as purifying and perfecting the soul, making it capable of great gifts and favours from God, that it has a blessing for society and the Church as well as for the particular soul in which it dwells, and that it has a claim which may be called natural, according to the nature of the spiritual kingdom, to the special reward which is assigned to it by our Lord.
Conquest of pride and independence
Meekness, as has already been said, is the virtue which keeps down all the inordinate impulses of self-love in the direction of pride, liberty, ambition, anger, impatience, resentment, envy, revenge, and the like.
In our present condition, in consequence of the miseries of life and the presence of selfish passions all around us, meekness has more frequently to manifest itself on what we may call its passive side, in patience, resignation, obedience, and gentleness under injury. But the sphere of the virtue of meekness is not confined to its influence in making the soul bear peaceably and religiously the many evils and burthens to which our condition is liable.
It also tames the desire and ambition of honour and consideration of every kind, being founded on the truth, which faith enforces upon the mind, of the utter absence of any claim or right on the part of any creature to esteem or deference of any sort as due to itself, and of the unapproachable and incommunicable right of God to all honour and rule of every kind and degree.
Thus meekness, like poverty of spirit, is a virtue not of earth only and of this mortal life, but of heaven and of eternity, though in the next world there will be no trials to patience, nothing that can provoke to anger, or arouse envy or resentment.
Yet, as there is poverty of spirit, utter detachment from all ownership, and as there is humility, in heaven, so also is there meekness; and the virtue as it is practised here, and as it is pronounced by our Lord to be blessed, regulates and keeps in place all the movements of the irascible part of the soul, whether they are excited by the desire of honour and esteem or ruffled by the denial of these when they seem to our self-love to be due.
Natural meekness
It appears from this that the virtue of meekness, of which our Lord speaks, is no mere softness, or gentleness, or want of spirit, or insensibility.
It is ordinary with the Christian virtues that there should be certain natural qualities, which exist in a greater or less degree in men of various characters, and which resemble the respective virtues and may be made their foundation, but which are very far from being identical with them.
Thus, in the present case, there is in some men a sort of sluggishness and apathy of constitution which nothing can rouse, or there is a natural gentleness and mildness which seems to take nothing amiss, or, again, there is a timidity of character which shrinks from conflict and resistance, and so yields everything to an aggressor.
But these only resemble Christian meekness, and are not the same as that virtue. They are not founded upon faith and grace, nor do they recognize in the dignity of God the adequate motive for their acts.
They are often, indeed, partial and inconsistent. They fail when there is a severe trial of patience, they give way to certain persons and not to others, and under certain circumstances, and not under others. They have not been gained or matured by self-discipline, they are not rooted in self-conquest.
The Beatitude of Meekness
From:
The Preaching of the Beatitudes
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Bp Sanborn, in a nutshell, defined meekness as 'being slow to anger'.
Thanks for this series and the constant reminder of why supernatural virtue is always grounded in the love of God and that mere natural virtue cannot compete.