Meek

Meek (pronounced meek)

(1) Humbly patient or docile, as under provocation from others.

(2) Overly submissive or compliant; spiritless; tame.

(3) Gentle; kind (obsolete).

(4) As meeked, to take a stallion from a state of wild rebellion and make it completely loyal to, and dependent upon, his master (obsolete).

1150-1200: From the Middle English meek, meke & meoc, a borrowing from the Old Norse mjūkr (soft; mild; meek; amenable), from the Proto-Germanic meukaz & mūkaz (soft; supple), from the primitive Indo-European mewg- & mewk- (slick; slippery; to slip).  It was cognate with the Swedish and Norwegian Nynorsk mjuk (soft), the Norwegian Bokmål (myk) (soft), the Danish myg (supple), the Dutch muik (soft, overripe) and the dialectal German mauch (dry and decayed; rotten).  It can be compared with the Old English smūgan (to slide, slip), the Welsh mwyth (soft, weak), the Latin ēmungō (to blow one's nose), the Tocharian A muk- (to let go, give up), the Lithuanian mùkti (to slip away from), the Old Church Slavonic мъчати (mŭčati) (to chase), the Ancient Greek μύσσομαι (mússomai) (to blow the nose) and the Sanskrit मुञ्चति (muñcati) (to release, let loose).  Meek is a verb & adjective, meeker, meeking, meeked & meeken are verbs, meekish & meekest are adjectives, meekly is an adverb and meekness is a noun; the noun plural is meeknesses.  Despite the occasional appearance, meaknessness remains a non-standard noun.  

Blessed are the meek

The positive sense of meek implies someone is able to remain calm and subdued even when being provoked. Its negative use is more common and describes someone too passive; the sense of “gentle and kind” is long obsolete.  The word meek is often associated with Christian virtue because it became famous due to its use (Matthew 5:5) in the Biblical Beatitudes (the construct being the Latin beatus (very simple, happy) + the Latin abstract noun suffix to produce beatitudo; the beatitudes thus literally “the happiness”), a collection of practical ethical statements to help one live a happy life.  Matthew 5:5 is the third verse of the Sermon on the Mount (and the third of the Beatitudes).  In the King James Version (KJV, 1611) of the Bible, the text reads “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth” whereas newer translations tend to prefer “Blessed are the gentle for they shall inherit the earth”, an example of the way translators need to update texts to ensure meaning is maintained, their techniques cognizant of sense-shifts in words. 

The translator’s choice of “meek” in the KJV has been the cause of angst for centuries, especially among those who favour a more muscular Christianity.  Swiss Biblical scholar Eduard Schweizer (1913–2006) held that rather than meaning ”humble or modest”, "meek" should be understood to mean “powerless” and there were antecedents to that view. Theologian James Strong (1822–1894) argued the Greek word praus (πραεῖς) means "mild or gentle" but this does not imply weakness, instead referencing the way in which power is handled; it is "strength under control", the demonstration of power without undue harshness.  The English language has no one word or even convenient phrase conveying both gentleness and power together, a point noted by many scholars to explain the frequency with which "mercy" and "merciful" appear in scripture.

Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430).

In the Greek literature of the period, “meek” most often meant gentle or soft but historians and etymologists of the age tend to agree the most accurate interpretation for this verse is “powerless”.  The modern debate long ago assumed a political flavour; Gandhi liked it, seemingly unconcerned whether translated as “meek” or “powerless” but Friedrich Nietzsche was sternly critical, both words to him encapsulating what he damned as the "slave morality" of Christ.  The angst seems however to be a modern thing.  The great theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo thought the beatitudes a self-portrait of Christ, the Gospels from beginning to end a demonstration of the meekness of Christ in its dual aspect of humility and patience, Jesus himself the model of meekness.  As in life so it had to be in death.  On the cross, St Augustine noted, the true victory does not consist in making victims of others but in making oneself a victim: Victor quia victim (victor becomes victim).  In the modern era, victimhood can for many reasons be a thing though the sense Augustine meant now has little appeal.  

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).

Theologically though, St Augustine must be right because, for Christianity to avoid internal contradiction there can be no other view.  That was never likely to appeal to Nietzsche who, even before he went mad (something of a calling among German philosophers), argued that in preaching humility and meekness, turning the other cheek, Christianity introduced a stultifying poison into humanity which destroyed its élan and mortified life.  After Auschwitz, something of an industry has existed to absolve Nietzsche from every accusation, many essentially suggesting he was not against Christ, only against Christians but some remained unconvinced.  French anthropological philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) still thought Nietzsche offered only the two absolute alternatives: paganism or Christianity, the former exalting the sacrifice of the weak for the benefit of the strong and the advancement of life, the latter the sacrifice of the strong for the benefit of the weak.

Augustine and Nietzsche may both have been wrong; it seems it is the geeks who have inherited the Earth: Mark Zuckerberg (b 1984, left), Bill Gates (b 1955, centre) and Elon Musk (b 1971, right).

The line "blessed are the geeks for they shall inherit the earth” is one of many variants of the Biblical phrase.  Appearing in her first collection The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), the last three stanzas of Sylvia Plath’s (1932-1963) poem Mushrooms reads:

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
 
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
 
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

The imagery in the work is of mushrooms silently emerging from the earth, stealthily and inexorably taking over the environment.  As an allegory that could of course have been something political and it certainly wasn’t about mycology, scholars concluding, being Sylvia Plath, it was a comment on the insidious nature of women's oppression, the triumph of the fungi dangling the possibility of resistance and liberation.  So female agency, suppressed by patriarchal hegemony, will be realized as the meek arise and quietly proliferate, the gradualism of the process meaning men won’t realize it’s happening until one day, the demand for equality proves irresistible.  Sylvia Plath had really bad luck in her choice of men.

Technically, Mushrooms was written in syllabic form, the meter determined by the number of syllables per line; in this case five, with two or three stresses and the structure (eleven three-lined stanzas (tercets)) was typical of her approach.  Most eye-catching was her use of enjambment, a technique in which a clause is split at the line or even stanza break to maintain the syllable count.  What enjambment did was continue a sentence from one verse line to the next without a punctuated pause, compelling the reader to scan on uninterrupted if the flow is to be preserved.  That sounds like a dictatorial edict imposed just so the math of the structure can be preserved but, done well, it means the narrative flow is continuous, allowing a leitmotif to be maintained over several lines, something which could be lost were conventional punctuation to be used; even over a few lines with a relative handful of words, a train of thought can be lost.  In Mushrooms, the metronomic effect is one of a quiet but relentless build-up to revolution.

Triple-Face Portrait by Sylvia Plath (circa 1951) tempera on paper, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Although now commonly associated with modern, free-form poetry, enjambment is an old technique, appearing sometimes in the epic poems of Ancient Greece dating from as long ago as the eighth century BC and over the centuries, although the fashion for it came and went, as a deliberate stylistic tool it never vanished, poets seemingly like it as a piece of “light & shade”, contrasting with the more frequent end-stopping of the formal meter.  In the Medieval to Early Modern period, (especially in Latin and early vernaculars), because there was such an emphasis on meter and rhyme, instances of enjambment became less common but it was never wholly absent.  In the Renaissance there was a great revival of interest in the Classical world which led to early Modern English making greater use of enjambment in an attempt to emulate the fluid, expressive verse of the Ancients and this was something continued by the Romantic poets because of their quest for naturalistic rhythms of speech.  In the twentieth century, the modernists took to enjambment to create a long continuous flow which suddenly and jarringly would end, echoing what composers were doing with orchestral and later electronic pieces.

Of the variants, the best known may be: “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights”, attributed to US oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty (1892-1976).  Like a few oft-quoted fragments from many, no primary source (speeches, recordings, documents etc) proving the words came from his pen or lips has ever been identified but the quote often is cited in dictionaries, history texts and biographies and certainly it was a dictum the oilman never disowned, few doubting it reflected his world view.  More troubling was: “Blessed are the meek, for they make easy targets” which appeared in the diary of a protagonist in the videogame Postal (1997) a TDS (top-down shooter, a sub-set of the class “Shoot 'em ups” (known also as STGs or shmups) and a sub-genre of action games) in which the central character commits mass-murder with a variety of weapons of increasingly lethality.  Even in 1997 it was a controversial game but whether a line like: “Blessed are the meek, for they make easy targets” still has the capacity to shock is doubtful because, in the US, mass-shootings of civilians (including young children in their classrooms) have become so frequent news of another has just become part of the orthodoxy of modern life, echoing the idea of comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) who, as the death toll in World War II (1939-1945) rose observed: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”