Accordingly, meekness is distinguishable from self-control even as regards its outward appearance. A somewhat discerning observer will easily distinguish one from the other. An act of iron self-discipline always impresses us with a sense of hardness, whereas an act of meekness irradiates the mellow brightness, the supple harmony of loving kindness. The former, besides its value in preventing a threatening clash, may force our respect; but it invariably lacks the irresistible disarming effect of true meekness.

Meekness bears mainly on our behavior towards our fellow men. It is specifically opposed to two sets of qualities: first, to everything brutal, uncouth, coarse-grained, and violent; secondly, to all modes of hostility, to the subtly or pointedly venomous as well as to the massive or rabid form of hostility. Let us next turn our attention to the first-named aspect.

Meekness rejects every brutal, forcible relation to others

He who possesses the virtue of meekness has grasped the essential evil that lies in all brutal force. He is aware of the sublime structure of the spiritual person; of the depth and the delicacy that characterize all valid acts in the realm of that spirituality; of the gulf that divides the laws of physical reality from those in the realm of personal life. He knows the difference between things made and things created: a difference whose archetype we find in that formula of the Creed, genitum, non factum, and whose many analogies pervade the created universe.

Hence, he would never attempt to enforce by mechanical and extrinsic means what is capable of realization only by way of an organic unfolding. He loathes treating personal realities after the pattern of techniques dealing with the world of mechanism. Utterly averse to the very idea of attaining an end by violence, he will also be disinclined to combat the evil in the world by mere mechanical methods.

He experiences intensely the incompatibility between everything brutal or forcible and the spirituality of the personal mode of existence. The preciousness and nobility inherent in the highest sphere of created being, that of the spiritual person, are always present to his eyes.

Meekness is a tender, explicitly spiritual attitude

Not only does meekness imply a specific awareness of this particular status of personal being; it is, itself, something definitely spiritual—the expression of a predominance of spirituality in man. The type of person in whom true meekness prevails must be distinguished, not merely from the obviously contrasting type—the material type, stamped as it were with the unlit dullness and mechanical clumsiness of matter; he must also be clearly distinguished from another type of character with whom he is more easily confused, namely the man endowed with a certain soft and tender kind of vitality, not conditioned by any vigorous instincts, and displaying the flow of life in the form of a soft, flexible, eminently organic rhythm rather than of explosive urges and robust pulsations.

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.