Tetralogue IV: Meekness

To those who wander, lost and aimless; for the sleepless and the restless.

The conclusion of the Tetralogue. Other parts are found here: Part I; Part II; Part III.

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You have seen the house built, you have seen it adorned
By one who came in the night, it is now dedicated to GOD.
It is now a visible church, one more light set on a hill
In a world confused and dark and disturbed by portents of fear.
And what shall we say of the future? Is one church all we can build?
Or shall the Visible Church go on to conquer the World?
- T.S. Eliot, The Rock

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No son of mine, I hope,
Is frightened by the sight of fresh-drawn blood.
It’ll soon be time to break him in and train him
In the hard school where his father learnt. My son,
May you be everything your father was,
But less unfortunate. Then you will do well.
I would give much to be in your place now,
Seeing this trouble and not understanding
All that it means. There is no time of life
So happy as the days of innocence
Before you know what joy or sorrow are.
But when you come to know it, then, my son,
See that your enemies know whose son you are.
- Sophocles, Ajax

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Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Break him in and train him, Ajax says. To our postmodern ears and manifold sensitivities (nearly all of which are far too sensitive for our own good), break him in has something of a brutal tinge to it. “What are you getting at, Ajax? That your son is some wild horse to be broken, some wild mustang whose pride has to be flattened?”

Yes, that is exactly it. And we need it at least as much as Ajax’s precious son did. Permit me a quick jaunt into yet another territory in which I am woefully undereducated: that of Greek. The word that unifies everything which has come thus far: πραεῖς, or praus. Our beloved academics very tepidly, weakly translate it: “mild, gentle, meek.” And, of course, technically, they’re not wrong. But what did the Greeks mean—what reality were they seeking to describe, precisely?—by “meek”? Gentle Jesus, meek and mild? No. Oh, no, not at all.

Years before they were ever exposed to combat, horses selected for military service would be taken up and away by the Greeks. Taken up into the mountains, or otherwise sequestered. Then, they were trained. Their pride, and tendencies towards furor, were broken down; they were conditioned to ignore the deafening clatter and shrieks of hand-to-hand combat; they were bathed, as it were, in a crucible of trial and tumult. Of course, not all of the stallions made it. Some, too skittish; some, injured; some, too belligerent, too stubborn.

But what about those that made it through all of the training?

They would come back to the camp, and later on, they would be sent off to war: dressed in shining, sun-splashed armor, their sleek, muscular bodies surging with unrealized kinesis: ready at a moment’s notice for the glories of combat. And in battle, O, in battle—they were terrors to behold. Thundering hooves, pure, single-minded focus on whatever telos their rider had in mind. Nothing could frighten or discomfit them. They were extensions of their masters: unstoppable amplifications of their riders’ intents.

And the Greeks called such horses πραεῖς: meek.

Strength under control. At the beginning, you see the horse play about, basking in his own powers and strength. But then: he begins to run. See how all the geometries of his body shimmer with unity, rhythm, and belonging. He is doing that for which he was Created. There is a term which I created for such visions: existential unity. It is when a creature’s motions and thoughts are in perfect alignment, perfect symmetry, perfect continuity, with what its existence was Created, Authored, to be.

And the music, “girlboss anthem” though it may be, is not beyond my interest either: ... Put my armor on, I’ll show you that I’m unstoppable... I’m invincible...

You realize, of course, that that is what meekness is! Meekness, rightly realized; meekness, to be a channel of God’s Power and Love unto the dim and despairing world! Our armor is the very Care and Providence of God: our invincibility, our security within His Will. Remember my words, that very late night with the melting ice cream—you laughed and laughed, it was such a warm laugh, flooding your face with life and delight—when I insisted that I simply shall not meet my end in a car, on some highway somewhere? That that is not the way I shall die? This is what I mean: to be unstoppable and invincible, forever and forevermore, until we have done every last good work which is set aside for us.

Remember the warhorse, friend. Remember that the gates of hell shall not stand against the Church, which is to say, that the gates shall crumble before the offensive maneuvers of the Church. There is a great war all around us; if only we could see. And you, even you, are fighting a great battle in that war; if only you could see. Remember the warhorse. Remember that you are not your own: that Christ is your Captain. He has Authored you, Created you, into a splendorous work; and He shall not then leave unfinished the work which He began. Meekness: the Expectation that, contra Suicide, there is yet the splendor of the fight which merits the Rage to refuse to give up. I will close with five last words on these four words. Remember the warhorse, friend. Remember who you are. And remember Whose you are. All shall be well; all manner of things shall be made well. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. Amen.

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Rage

I don’t quite know what we’re doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Suicide

                                              Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty draft at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Expectation

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future. I tried to tell her that. Then, after a long silence, she said, “I believe that, for if I had not come to believe it I could not have lived.”
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Meekness

“When,” he asked, “did I ever win a fight in all my life?”...
“It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,” said the Voice....
You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he had delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom....
“But this is very foolish,” said the Un-man. “Do you not know who I am?”
“I know what you are,” said Ransom. “Which of them doesn’t matter.”...
Then an experience which perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him—a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred.... The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.... “Get out of my brain! It isn’t yours, I tell you! Get out of it.... In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost...”
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

Finis

It may be that hell is other people, but so is Heaven. Heaven shall be Three People, and we can meet Him now in other people. But here, betwixt Heaven and hell, there is ample space for injury and pain. And as we run this race, we can falter, and fall, and tear tendons, and break bones; and we can get up, but we shall always fall down again.

But it will get better.