We all know the peculiar kind of hardening that takes place whenever we have to cope with an aggression. So long as we are treated with charity, we in our turn display a charitable openness of heart; as soon as we become the victims of an insult, we close ourselves; we stiffen and bristle. All our mellowness has disappeared; we oppose a hard coat-of-mail to the arrows of our adversary. To put it more explicitly, we either withdraw behind the walls of defensive seclusion or else turn upon our enemy in anger, returning blow for blow and meeting him in the destructive fury of enmity.

It might be said that fallen man bears in his soul a number of different fields of sensitivity, which receive and at which are aimed the different attitudes of others directed towards us. Insult, abuse, and mockery, notably, are aimed at a certain field in our soul which is keyed to the theme of honor. If that field of sensitivity is touched by the injurious word or gesture, the offender has realized his specific intention. This region of the soul is the habitat of harsh and irascible reactions par excellence. The sores which come about here give rise not to the straight pain of chagrin but to the venomous, bitter itch of irritation and resentment, which stirs us into a fighting position.

Sensitivity or susceptibility of this kind is founded in a certain deeply rooted attitude of self-assertion. In the saint, who has definitively risen above this attitude, the sensitivity that originates in it has been deprived of its base and meaning, and hence dies away. An insult no longer wounds him according to its specific intention but merely as an act of uncharitableness. It irritates him no longer, though it still distresses his heart.

The position of defending one’s honor creates a shuttered attitude against one’s fellow men. Persons strongly centered on that motif—those eminently fanatical about their “honor”—are therefore hard in their general attitude towards others. They are, so to speak, always on the qui vive, always on the lookout for insults to their dignity. In the ordinary sort of person who, though not a saint, is not thus abnormally anxious about his honor, the reaction of becoming hard and sealed up only appears after he has actually been defied or insulted.

The meek man, then, is distinguished by the fact that he does not know this gesture of hardening his soul but remains, even in the face of an enemy, in the position of that soft, unguarded openness which is love’s mode of appearance. In his soul, the sensitive region of honor is blotted out. So also are other sensitive regions that foster some variety of the attitude of fierce resistance to an attacker; the region of specific sensitivity about one’s rights, for instance.

Meekness does not close off the soul, as does sulking

There are also, however, attitudes in which we remain soft and which nevertheless are surpassed by the man endowed with true meekness, Certain people react to offenses or insults, to unjust or contemptuous treatment and so forth, by the attitude of passive ill temper described as sulking. As distinct from the combative rebound of irritation, sulking is not an irascible mood of the soul. The sulker does not stiffen into a fighting position; he lapses into a specific egocentric variety of softness. The overdelicate, squeamish sort of people seize every opportunity to feel hurt and to brood over the offense suffered.