Gentleness is a personal quality which can be part of one's
character
Character or Characters may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk
* ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
. It consists in kindness, consideration and amiability.
Aristotle used it in a technical sense as the
virtue that strikes the
mean with regard to anger: being too quick to anger is a
vice, but so is being detached in a situation where anger is appropriate; justified and properly focused anger is named mildness or gentleness.
Gentleness is not passive; it requires a resistance to brutality. Gentleness does not submit to tyranny, but it responds with a tender awareness of others’ experiences and pain.
Bryant McGil suggested we act with gentleness when we release ourselves from our wants and want from others, such as wanting others to mind read us, have their attention, expecting continued agreement and always pleasing us; “When you focus on want, you become an endless cycle of wants. To get, simply release, and then gently invite.”. We feel we know more about what we like about our partner, and make effort to know more about it.
A second important usage was common in medieval times, associated with higher social classes: hence the derivation of the terms
gentleman
A gentleman (Old French: ''gentilz hom'', gentle + man) is any man of good and courteous conduct. Originally, ''gentleman'' was the lowest rank of the landed gentry of England, ranking below an esquire and above a yeoman; by definition, the ra ...
,
gentlewoman and
gentry. The broadening of gentle behavior from a literal sense of the gentry to the metaphorical "like a gentleman" applicable to any person was a later development.
Most recently, the late philosopher and psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle wrote in her book, "Power of Gentleness", that Gentleness was, above all other things, a force of ''potentiality''. Gentleness, she argued: "Is an enigma. It is taken up in the double movement of welcoming and giving, it appears on the threshold of passages signed off by birth and death. Because it has its degrees of intensity, because it is a symbolic force, and because it has a transformative ability over things and beings, it is a power."
See also
*
Agreeableness
External links
{{Reflist
Personality traits
Moral psychology
Fruit of the Holy Spirit
Virtue