What do you envision when you think of meekness?

You probably see a mousy doormat, someone sheepishly acquiescing to the will of the stronger. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” you might think that those wimps will hand it over without a whimper or word of objection to stronger, more ambitious people. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called meekness “craven baseness.”

Indeed, one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions is “inclined to submit tamely to oppression or injury, easily imposed upon or cowed, timid.” Meekness, then, is a weakness. Why would you ever want to be meek?

The same goes for docility, often characterized as a near neighbor of meekness. We can get a feel for its usage these days from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, where one finds that a docile person is slow, controllable, obedient, submissive, compliant, passive, and under control.

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Or consider condescension. You likely envision someone self-important looking down her nose at a service worker, or some insufferable prig unwilling to come off his high horse to mingle with the peasants. Being condescending, far from being a virtue, is universally acknowledged as a vice.

Meekness, docility, and condescension: three traits with no cultural capital today. And yet, our ancestors typically understood these traits to be virtues. How in the world could that be?

As any philosopher will tell you, in a case of seeming disagreement, you need to settle the definitions of the words in play. How many arguments have been abruptly dissolved by someone saying, “Oh, that’s what you mean”? When we check the meaning of these three terms, I think we come to see that there’s been a switcheroo. As I’ve found in my philosophical research and teaching, some of the virtues that were most celebrated in yesteryear but now go undersung are traits that can help us lead good lives, even now.

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