Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [185]
In the meek person, there shines the tenderness which is specifically proper to the spiritual. His being breathes the victory of the spiritual sphere over the material and vital. In the meek man a spiritual principle has stamped the whole man with its imprint and conferred its radiant bloom upon him.
Meekness does not try to dominate as do the spiritually “hard”
At this stage, however, one more distinction becomes necessary. There exists, too, a spiritual type of man who also lacks meekness. Persons of this type are not brutal nor mechanical in attitude—which would contradict their being spiritual—yet they reveal what might be called a cramped character. In such persons, everything is controlled by the mind. They are in no way swayed by unconscious vitality. Their conduct is governed entirely by the free center of their conscious personality. In them, the attitude of intentional meaningful response to being has attained to full maturity, but nevertheless, there is something highly strung, something hard and cramped about them.
In their stern idealism, they are set on enforcing, in their own lives at least, what they know to be right and desirable. They overestimate man’s range of power and place a one-sided trust in the efficacy of his will. They are deficient in inward suppleness; they know no melting or serenity.
On the contrary, he who is graced with meekness is eminently supple and serene—tender, relenting, in a sense relaxed, as though soaring in a luminous medium of freedom and peace. He would enforce nothing; he accords everything the time required by its inward law of unfolding. Despite all its fervor and intensity, his effort retains a quality of gracious, unhardened mellowness.
For all its supra-vital rationality and morality, the cramped character we have described above still implies an infringement, however subtle and hidden, of the inward law of spiritual and personal reality. A person of this type transfers, in some way, methods of the infra-spiritual world to the sphere of the spiritual person. He applies purely spiritual forces—his conscious will, in particular—according to the pattern in which our spirit can operate upon material things. Thus, in a sense, his aggressive spirituality, genuine though it is, means a treatment of things spiritual as though they were material.
Meekness respects the spiritual sphere and its laws
But meekness, as we have seen, implies not only the supremacy in man of the spiritual element, but also his respect of the spiritual sphere and its particular laws. He who has true meekness treats spiritual reality according to its proper nature. In dealing with what is spiritual and personal, he adapts his methods to the fact of its fundamental difference from all other realms of being. This is precisely the virtue in which the cramped and violent man is found wanting, be he ever so much actuated by spiritual motives and ever so rational in the choice of his attitudes.
Meekness acknowledges the impotence of force in the spiritual realm
Moreover, true meekness implies the knowledge that in relation to the spiritual sphere—that is, the plane of reality for which meaning is constitutive—violence is not merely inadequate but also inefficacious. The truly meek man is aware that on this plane, forcefulness is far from being the really victorious force; that real spiritual power is of an entirely different and more sublime nature—a power which essentially operates through the medium of the intelligible.
Above all, the fact of Christ is sealed upon his soul, the redeeming merciful love of God, of which Paul the Apostle says: “The goodness and kindness of God our Savior appeared” (Titus 3:4). Brutal or mechanical force is still incomparably more inadequate to and incompatible with the supernatural than it is with the natural sphere. The hidden operation of grace is incomparably more organic than even the most sublime spirituality within the confines of natural being. Every attempt