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By Root 2117 0

of His pursuers; His attitude of sorrowful mildness and forgiveness, remaining fully open even in the face of His betrayer and of His slayers: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34); that glance of a wounded yet generous and serene love, which lighted on Peter the Apostle after his denial of the Lord, kindling in him a fire of charity never to be extinguished again: here is holy meekness, a force issuing from inalterable and triumphant Love, a force infinitely more irresistible than any natural power on earth.

Here, indeed, is the new accent, the new idiom of the Gospel: the new gesture—minored in a thousand forms of expression– of redeeming Love, which the world does not understand but by which it is bound to be overcome. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.”

Holy meekness embodies transcendent power

It constitutes a specific test of our possession of a supernatural spirit if we comprehend the sublime beauty of holy meekness and recognize the transcendent power it embodies. Whoever still seeks for strength in some kind of natural heroism proves that, though he may have grasped certain truths of the Faith, he is as yet enslaved to a pagan idol of virility. The weaponless candor of holy meekness impresses him as something feminine; he deems it inconsistent with the spirit of virility.

Many a Christian is inclined to this error. In reaction against a well-known sickly, sweetish disfigurement of Our Lord’s person in a certain insipid brand of devotional images, songs, and pious books, such Christians would read into the person of the God-Man a natural ethos of virile heroism. Combatting one mistake, they thus fall into the opposite one. Every attempt at thus dwarfing the stature of Him from whose “brightness a new light hath risen to shine on the eyes of our souls” (Preface of the Nativity) to the measure of purely natural categories—be it that of a placid kindliness or warlike courage—is in itself preposterous.

Holy mildness and meekness are as far remote from feminine fragility, let alone weak sentimentalism, as are the conquering solemnity and supernatural force of the Kyrios and Victor Rex from natural heroism, let alone a crabbed emphasis on virility. Nor do these two supernatural aspects merely stand side by side; they are indissolubly linked together. The holiness and supernatural sweetness of him “who is meek and humble of heart”; the heart that, unshielded, lies open to any attack: fons totius consolationis (“fount of all consolation”: Litany of the Sacred Heart); the suffering, holy, redeeming Love—this is what brings us to our knees and reveals to us the divine power of Him of whom St. Paul says, “All things were created by Him and in Him; and He is before all: and by Him all things consist” (Col. 1:16-17).

The primal truth of Revelation—that “God is Love”—flashes up in the all-redeeming love of the Lamb “who taketh away the sins of the world.” Of the Son of Man (whom the Church thus glorifies in the Sequence for Easter: “To a Father kind, rebellious men / sinless Son hath led again”), St. John says: “And we saw his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Consider the image which the holy Liturgy presents to us of the Lord. According to the mystery proper to each feast, Christ appears to our eyes now in His infinite mildness and meekness (as in the Vesper of the Most Holy Name of Jesus), now in His victorious Divine power (as in the Sequence for Easter); now again, in both attitudes immediately united one to the other, as in the commemoration of the Passion on Good Friday: Popule mens, quid feci obi?. . . Agios o Theos; Agios ischyros; Agios athanatos. (“O my people, what have I done unto thee?. . .O holy God; O holy, O mighty One; O holy, immortal One.”)

For these attitudes are, in truth, not two opposites but two sides of one and the same Being, Divine and Human; their union denotes that specific mark of God, an apparent coincidentia oppositorum.

Those, then, who possess a supernatural spirit may be known