For some reason, the word meanness has lodged in my mind and hovered before my eyes lately, and since I am a word guy from way back, I decided to explore the meaning of this word (meaning has a completely different sense of “mean”).
First of all, possibly because I am so close to the school, meanness comes to mind as characterizing what kids (and adults, unfortunately) do to one another out of cruelty, spite, or aggression. For example, We discourage mean actions among the students, and punish them. Maybe nowadays we are more likely to call that kind of meanness bullying; but interestingly enough that notion of meanness is particularly modern and American. Around here, when you say, Don’t be mean, this is the sense of the word you most likely have.
There is another sense entirely that is older and more widely used throughout the English-speaking world, in which meanness has a distinct sense of poverty or lack. Now, that brings to mind circumstances, often beyond anybody’s control: The farmers’ lives on that rocky, hostile ground was marked by meanness. There may be enough to survive, but there is not much more: that’s meanness.
But beyond that, there is a sense to the word that might fit somewhere between the second and first senses here mentioned, because that meanness can be not only circumstantial, but also include an aspect of personal choice and activity in it: bad behavior that is chosen and willed by a person. Worse than simple frugality, it is similar to but stronger than stinginess. That’s harsh!
Aristotle characterized meanness in this sense as a vice, opposed to the virtue of generosity. Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica (IIaIIae, Q. 135) as usual builds on Aristotle, explaining that meanness, which in Latin he rendered parvificentia, is the opposite of magnificencia, which is the willingness and ability to do great things. So not only does the vice of meanness pinch pennies, but also it refrains from big projects in favor of minimal goals; it refuses even to attempt great things.
Subsequent philosophers have pointed out that meanness need not be restricted to financial matters (pecuniary meanness) but asserted that there is also meanness of behavior, in interpersonal matters that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
With this understanding, we can see how it can happen that people who were depending on a person for magnificence, that is, for great things to be done, but instead find only meanness of behavior (parvificentia), that results in meanness of circumstance (poverty) for them. Meanness, the stingy vice, is often paired with or indistinguishable from the sort of meanness we associate with classroom bullies, cruelty or spite, and the result is the same: vice leads to privation, privation to grief. How then, for the ones so deprived, not to permit the meanness of circumstance inflicted on them, to lead them to fall into meanness of behavior themselves, or even cruel meanness?
The virtue opposite the vice of meanness is magnificence, and one’s hopes for magnificence would be best answered by the greatest doer of great things, God, the Holy Spirit. Let me propose the ancient Veni, Sancte Spiritus as the prayer against meanness:
Come, Thou holy Paraclete,
And from Thy celestial seat
Send Thy light and brilliancy:
Father of the poor, draw near;
Giver of all gifts, be here;
Come, the soul’s true radiancy.
Come, of comforters the best,
Of the soul the sweetest guest,
Come in toil refreshingly:
Thou in labour rest most sweet,
Thou art shadow from the heat,
Comfort in adversity.
O Thou Light, most pure and blest,
Shine within the inmost breast
Of Thy faithful company.
Where Thou art not, man hath nought;
Every holy deed and thought
Comes from Thy divinity.
What is soilèd, make Thou pure;
What is wounded, work its cure;
What is parchèd, fructify;
What is rigid, gently bend;
What is frozen, warmly tend;
Strengthen what goes erringly.
Fill Thy faithful, who confide
In Thy power to guard and guide,
With Thy sevenfold mystery.
Here Thy grace and virtue send:
Grant salvation to the end,
And in Heav’n felicity.
