Now the phlegmatic temperament differs from the virtue of meekness, first, by being a mere natural disposition, whereas meekness is a virtue born of a free spiritual attitude. Secondly, the phlegmatic behavior has something heavy, listless, lusterless about it, whereas there is proper to meekness a note of soaring and luminous suppleness.

Good-natured joviality is not meekness

However, not only a dull and indifferent temperament but also the good-natured joviality of the typically sociable kind of person, the good mixer, is a thing utterly different from meekness. True, joviality is not only a mere disposition but expresses a personal attitude proper; but its quality is widely different from meekness. It does not convey the sustaining warmth of love; it springs from a need for surface harmony. The good fellow takes everything in a friendly spirit—for the sake of his own comfort rather than out of his consideration for others.

This jolly attitude has something unimportant, superficial about it; you will find it in such persons only as are incapable of a deep fervor and strong self-dedication. It is incompatible with a great and vigorous personality, with the hunger and thirst for justice; generally it is coupled with a certain laziness and shallowness.

It is usually a man of this type whom we are wont to call, with a kind of benign contempt, a mere cipher. Frequently, such people are of an inordinately yielding disposition, with their weakness easily exploited by the unscrupulous. Their freedom from anger and harshness is bought at the cost of grave deficiencies.

Meekness is not the cultivated indifference of the Stoic

Nor, again, should meekness be confused with the aloof composure or ataraxy of the stoic. The cool self-control of the latter, who refuses to be affected by an insult, is colored by indifference and neutrality: a mood far removed from the warm breath of charity exhaled by Christian meekness. What underlies the meekness of the stoic is not loving kindness nor a value-response in reference to a fellow person but a habit of apathy and self-discipline, acquired by sedulous training and cultivated as an end in itself.

Meekness is the manifestation of inward charity

True meekness is not a matter of outward demeanor only; it does not consist in the mere avoidance of angry outbreaks or other manifestations of an unbridled temper. Certainly it implies all that—but implies it as the manifestation of a charitable inward attitude. A man who is inwardly seething with anger and full of enmity towards his fellow but, controlling himself through will power, succeeds in keeping up an appearance of friendliness, is not therefore meek in the sense here reserved for the term. To disavow within ourselves any inchoate impulse of anger, to be intensely aware of its ugly disharmony, to have it shattered by the contact of Christ before the need could even arise to curb it—this is what constitutes true meekness.

Meekness is far more than self-control

Mere outward self-control, when our anger is checked in its manifestation while its venom subsists within us, falls entirely short of that virtue. Nay, even at the stage of formally disavowing our anger but remaining nevertheless inwardly excited, we can only be credited with the pursuit, not with the possession of meekness.