Delphic Maxim 91: Live together meekly
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
91. Live together meekly
Every morning after I get home from the gym, I make my breakfast and then sit down and quickly glance at today’s maxim, so that I can chew it over a little bit while I eat. When I read this one — live together meekly — I recoiled.
“MEEK?!” I cried (to myself, obviously, my flair for the dramatic isn’t so pronounced that I shriek out about words at 6:30 in the morning…mostly). What a lame way to live together! Why not be loud and outrageous? Why not go boldly into the world, confident and capable and ready to stand up to challenges?
Obviously I need to give this one some more thought.
So as I do when the key word in the maxim throws me off — this time the adverb, which is unusual — I gave it a cursory google to get a couple of definitions. And I realised after doing this that for a very long time I had made an unconscious association between meekness and weakness. They are not the same thing.
To be meek is to be humble, quiet and gentle — and at its worst (imagining how these things play out on the sort of spectrum Aristotle places all the virtues) it might be submissive. Meekness is a quality with a range of intensities, if we choose to read it this way. Some people might be taciturn, which sits at the less desirable end of the meekness scale, or they might be circumspect, which is more desirable.
Contrast this with weakness, which sits at the negative end of a weak-strong spectrum, in the same way that cowardice sits at the negative end of the cowardice-foolhardiness spectrum (or courage, which was the virtue Aristotle was describing).
I don’t necessarily want to put meekness up in the same category of virtues as the moral virtues Aristotle outlined (and which you can read about in an earlier post). But if we think of it in this way, it does go some way to explaining why we might want to live together meekly: be gentle with one another, be humble. This doesn’t preclude boisterousness and fun (or even roughness), but instead describes a way of living with each other, something that captures the totality of our communal lives, not the specifics of relating to individuals. Once again, society and context are king.
I obviously couldn’t discuss this maxim without reference to that famous beatitude from the Bible: “the meek shall inherit the earth”. Actually, the interesting thing about this phrase is — naturally — what gets lost and gained in translation. The Bible would have been written in Greek long before it was written in English, and I wonder if the same word appears on the temple at Delphi as appeared in early Greek translations of The Book.
The passage itself from the Gospel of Matthew appears in the King James version (the big, old fashioned classic version with the dead serious prose) as: “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”. If you compare this passage with a bunch of other versions (especially more contemporary translations like Good News and New International), they variously replace the word ‘meek’ with ‘gentle’ and ‘humble’. So much for meekness being weakness! Wherever you look, it seems to be a real sense of gentleness and deference to the people around us — a kind of politesse, if you will.
So today’s maxim is less shocking to me upon reflection, and actually a fairly decent way to live in the world. Be gentle, be humble, be kind, as much as you can. It doesn’t make you less brave, or less strong — when we properly understand the meaning of meekness, it’s a quality that can sit side by side confidence and strength. It makes a strong person caring, and a brave person humble.
