True meekness then cannot flourish in us unless our vital union with Jesus precludes the possibility of any attack from subjecting us to the control of its autonomous logic. It cannot exist in us unless our heart is pierced and conquered by the love of Him who said: “A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved you” (John 13:34). This is the point of vantage from which we may conjure up, in its full and compelling reality, the vision of the sublimity of spiritual personality and of the incompatibility of all brute force with the laws of the spiritual sphere.

It is in the light of Jesus’ face—of His transfigured nature as Man—that we shall catch a bright glimpse of the nobility of man qua spiritual person. It is here that we gain a corresponding insight into the preposterous inadequacy of all mechanical and massive methods in the face of the particular structure of spiritual personality. Only thus shall we fathom to the full the odiousness as well as the futility of all rough and violent modes of behavior. We must come to abhor their very principle in our innermost hearts; we must loathe it still more in its association with an intention of enmity—whether or not expressly manifested in the form of actual anger.

But, as suggested above, our sustained vision of Christ will not merely keep us alive to the value of meekness and aware of the inferiority and ugliness of its opposite. It will also help us to abide in the mild, detached, unshielded inward attitude without which we cannot behave with true meekness towards others, A particle of the mellow splendor of Christ will radiate into our own heart. It will soften and refine our inward life and dissolve all cramped ego-obsessions in us. It will even, at a higher stage of virtue, prevent them from arising at all.

Meekness presupposes the humility inherent in patience

Furthermore, meekness presupposes patience. As has been shown in Chapter 12, an eminently spastic and hardening effect issues from impatience; this cannot but sap the very foundations of meekness. But there is an even more specific consonance between these two virtues. Meekness, just as patience, implies one’s abstinence from assuming a false position of sovereignty above the universe—from feeling as though it were one’s due to be an absolute master. The humility inherent in patience is what underlies the softness—the absence of hardening—that is proper to meekness. In meekness lives the basic gesture of serving set forth in the words of Our Lord: “The Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister” (Matt. 20:28).

The natural illusion of a position of sovereignty is closely linked to the natural tendency to enforce whatever seems desirable. Once we feel it self-evident that we should be master over things we cannot help dealing with everything in a certain mode of hardness. Inversely, the basic gesture of service necessarily implies a tone of softness in our way of approaching the outside world. Thus, we see it confirmed that meekness, even though actualized in our relations with created beings, is in its essence conditioned by our position towards God.