Severity As a Personality Quality

Severity as a person's quality is the ability to find an equilibrium between love and loyalty to duty.

Severity is the ability to combine love with the necessity of fulfilling a duty. Stereotyping thinking at the mention of severity draws a Siberian muzhik, cooking steel in a handful or floating in a bath of his friend with a broom with embedded reinforcement. The associative range of severity is impressive, moving from extreme to extreme - rudeness, love, rigidity, tenderness, exactingness and gentleness. People are confused as to why the mind gives such contradictory characteristics to this quality of personality. It turns out some mesalliance - rigidity is crowned with love, roughness dissolves into tenderness, and exactingness tends to softness.

But it's worth looking at the descriptions of great good personalities to make sure that the judgments of rigor given by the mind are correct. The great ascetic of the 16th century, the patroness of Spain of Teresa of Avila, was characterized by the quality of soft harshness. Natalia Roerich speaks of her mentor as a harsh, but unusually kind and sympathetic person. Severe, wise manifestations of the heart are not easy to see. Unlike tearful kindness of sentimentality, severity does not advertise its cordiality.

Severity manifests itself, first of all, with respect to itself by severe austerities, iron self-discipline, abandonment of personal selfish thoughts and desires. Starting with herself, she eradicates self-pity, self-will, pride with her conceit, narcissism and arrogance. Spilling himself, sternness is condescending and friendly to people. For her, condemnation and accusation of others is alien and unacceptable. Condemnation of oneself, that is, self-sufficiency - as many as you like, but other people - a taboo subject. Crystallizing his consciousness, severity goes along the path of spiritual growth. The more developed spirituality, the more severe its verdict regarding yourself. Seraphim of Sarov called himself "a wretched Seraphim."

The severity tears off from the person hypocritical masks of kindness, decency, honesty and truthfulness. And it does this, turning inside the personality, squeezing out of it the evil inclinations. Severity does not seek the enemy in other people, in the difficult circumstances of life, in fate's fate. She firmly believes that the enemy is sitting inside and with him is a hard and brutal battle. The enemy of selfishness rusty anchors clinging to the mind, reason and feelings of personality, but gradually under the pressure of austerity, he gives up his positions. In this battle with the enemy is carried out indirectly. Why direct skirmishes, if vices can be replaced by virtues? Reasonable severity accentuates its self-discipline on the upbringing of virtues. Defects are "written out" themselves from the manifested qualities of the individual.

Severity - there is an unshakable willingness to go to the end. It is far from cruelty and rudeness. If there was no love and cordiality in it, it would quickly degenerate into these vices, but the fact is that rigor is not rude words and cruel acts. Severity, as an attribute of justice, is the search for the golden mean between love and duty. In cruelty there is no love, one misanthropy and meanness. Severity worries for every action, where somehow one of its sides has suffered - love and a sense of duty. Cruelty rejoices at the manifested hatred.

It would seem that the softness and severity are two different poles, the oppositely charged qualities of the personality. The first is unequivocally a dignity, and the second is too incomprehensible and secretive in manifestation. But, abstracting from external tinsel, looking into the spiritual treasure hoarding, you come to the conclusion that there is no contradiction between gentleness and severity. Both qualities are virtuous and are the tops of human spirituality. Severity will always be in demand where there is a stubborn unwillingness to notice its evil tendencies, where self-justification and self-deception prevail.

The leader of the people-IV Stalin is difficult to classify as unconditional bearers of such dignity as rigor. This is a very complex personality in the psychological sense, in which, along with severity, rigidity and cruelty were vividly manifested. And yet the tragedy of his son, Jacob, revealed to the people the severity of his leader, hidden behind the cruelty.

The circumstances of the capture of Jacob are unclear. It is likely that he was not captured in battle, but specially captured by German intelligence officers. After the war, the Australian reporter Case Hooper, who was with him in one concentration camp, reported on Yakov's request to tell his father that he remained faithful to his homeland. Everything that the fascists concocted about him is an insolent lie. Stalin was immediately informed of the capture of his son. After the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin, through the Red Cross, received an offer to exchange his son for Field Marshal Paulus. Stalin made it clear to everyone that the fate of his son is inseparable from the fate of the belligerent people, and that the law is the same for all. His answer flew around the world: "I do not change the soldier to the Field Marshal."