Controlling anger

Waiting in Joyful Hope offers a suggestion on getting rid of anger:

So what must we do to get rid of this anger? We must learn to forgive.

The first process is to make the decision to forgive, remembering that forgiveness is a decision not a feeling.

Once we have made that decision, we must remember all the things that have caused this need for forgiveness.

Then we must list all the other points that have been blessings from this person we need to forgive.

The next point is the most crucial of all, when anger surfaces, we must not bring the list of hurts to mind, but only the list of blessings, and then the anger will subside.

The wonderful prayer (from, I think, Happy Catholic), "God bless them and have mercy on me," also diminishes personal animosity. (As I wrote before, the antidote to hatred is humble prayer; asking for mercy is the gold standard of humility.)

We are, of course, obliged to pray for our enemies, an obligation that would seem to extend to those who aren't our enemies so much as people we flat don't like. It is, I find, a very liberating experience -- animosity and anger being what we're liberated from -- to simply pray that God give them the graces they need to fulfill God's will for them, without reminding God what His will for them is. That is, to pray, "Fill his heart with Your love," without adding, "so that he'll finally stop being such an idjit."

This isn't to say you can't know what another person, even an antagonist, truly needs, nor that you can never pray for a specific intention for them. It is to say, though, that you can be wrong about what another person, especially an antagonist, truly needs -- and so be asking God to give him a scorpion thinking it's a fish -- and that at least occasionally leaving the details to God is a good exercise in humility.

Labels: On Anger

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A responsive chord

Let me answer Jeff's comments on my post below in four notes.

First, of agreement: Yes, absolutely, absence of anger does not guarantee presence of virtue. In my first post on St. Thomas's treatment of anger (both the passion and the vice), I pointed out his teaching about the vice that is the opposite of anger, viz,

Anger may be understood in two ways. On one way, as a simple movement of the will, whereby one inflicts punishment, not through passion, but in virtue of a judgment of the reason: and thus without doubt lack of anger is a sin... On another way anger is taken for a movement of the sensitive appetite, which ... cannot be lacking altogether, unless the movement of the will be altogether lacking or weak. Consequently lack of the passion of anger is also a vice, even as the lack of movement in the will directed to punishment by the judgment of reason.

Second, of qualification: Zealous anger (i.e., the good kind) is not an absolute or virtuous good, something desirable for its own sake. It is rather a useful good, something desired as the means to another good. In itself, anger is a desire to correct injustice and vice under arduous circumstances; what makes it useful is that, as a passion, it keeps us moving toward the correction of injustice and vice in circumstances where we might otherwise give up.

As a means to an end, zealous anger can only be rightly demanded of us -- which is to say, its absence can only be a sin -- when both the end is demanded of us and such anger is a necessary means. I would suggest that, quite often, people demand zealous anger of others (and justify it in themselves) when one or both conditions aren’t met.

The first condition can fail when a person has no particular duty to correct the particular injustice or vice -- as when on-line Catholics get all spun up over poor liturgy in a parish far, far away -- as well as when what provokes anger is not actually injustice or vice -- as when a bishop makes a licit but unpopular decision.

The second condition can fail when the first fails, when a person's duty is not arduous (for example, giving moral support to someone in a diocese far away who is trying to correct his parish's music director), and when a person can meet his duty without growing angry.

The ability to correct injustice and vice without growing angry (in the "movement of the sensitive appetite" sense) has been commended as ideal by spiritual directors throughout the history of the Church.

A third note, of contrariety: I don't find "70% less evil than the other leading brand" type arguments very persuasive, and that's what comments like, "I think they may be doing BETTER than most people who AREN'T getting twisted in a knot," amount to. Sin has enough apologists in the world, and it's no act of charity to excuse sin in another.

Furthermore, the anger I see expressed on the Internet is, I'd say far more often than not, quite simply not anything like what might result directly from "[p]eople who keep abortion in front of their eyes -- what it is in its nature -- and all the disgusting excuses and prevarications engaged in by all sorts of people who ought to know better."

It's a metastasized anger, a reflexive hatred, a habitual posture of derision and spite directed at whatever doesn't meet someone's personal standards.

It's certainly possible that such habits, in any particular person, developed from zealous anger directed against real, radical evil. It's also possible they didn't. In any case, it doesn't much matter.

Fourth, of justification: I've been involved in on-line discussions on Catholicism for nearly fifteen years. In all that time, anger has been a ubiquitous feature. I am not, let me be clear, speaking of anger at abortion or child abuse, or at indifference to these grave evils. I am speaking of anger -- of sullenness and ill-will, and of hatred and derision directed at fellow Catholics -- over things like hymn selection, and whether a priest says "Good morning" at the beginning of Mass.

Faced with this anger, I have at times joined in; at others, reacted with an equal and opposite anger. Often I am still bemused and befuddled by it. Long ago, I learned it was best to ignore it whenever possible.

I stand by what I wrote in that post almost three months ago:

If you don't understand anger, you don't understand a lot of what goes on between people, including between Catholics discussing their Church.

I, of course, am one of those Catholics who discuss their Church, one who finds anger in the words of others and within my own heart.

So no, I don't accept "it's a bit much if we start lecturing them about how terribly they are missing their calling, etc., etc., how dreadful their failings are, and so on," as a relevant criticism of my posts on this subject, nor that they particularly contribute to the tendency of "marginalizing our consciousness of depravity and evil." If anything, I would say they heighten our consciousness of depravity and evil, by pointing out the ubiquitous depravity and evil of hatred and anger in the on-line conversations of Catholics.

Have we not all the one Father?
Has not the one God created us?
Why then do we break faith with one another,
violating the covenant of our fathers?

Answering this last question is one of the things I am trying to do.

Labels: On Anger

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An unquiet evil



Habitual anger is poison to the soul. If not countered by the antidote of humble prayer, it will surely lead to spiritual death.

Some, on hearing this, respond, "But we have good reason to be angry!"

No one would dispute that there is plenty going on today that could enkindle a zealous passion to correct injustice and vice. But where does that leave us? With good reason to do something that, if not countered by humble prayer, will surely lead to spiritual death.

This paradox can be resolved along two lines.

First, the action of another that constitutes our "good reason to be angry" is not really, by itself, a good reason to be angry. Such an action -- the injustice we desire to avenge -- is necessary to be justly angry, but it is not sufficient. Just anger must accord with reason, and the reason involved is not only, "This is a very bad thing!" but, "This is what I can do to correct it!" It is not in accord with reason to get angry at the burning of the Library of Alexandria, because that's an injustice that cannot now be avenged.

Even given an injustice that can still be avenged, the questions remain, "Can I avenge it?" "Can I avenge it in this way?" Only if the answers to these questions are yes is the anger that commits me to act in this way just.

The second line of resolution is the distinction between an act of anger and the habit of anger. I am not too concerned about individual acts of anger (my own aside); some aren't sinful, and those that are ... well, that's what the confessional is for (to say nothing of Matthew 7:3-5).

But the habit of anger is a different matter. The habit of anger is one of the Seven Capital Vices (a vice, remember, is simply an evil habit). Its daughters, per St. Gregory the Great, are quarreling, swelling of the mind, contumely, clamor, indignation and blasphemy. In my judgment, the habit of anger is a loudly sounded note of the Church in the United States at this time, and having its daughters running around freely makes it harder for the faithful to conform ourselves to Christ and to fulfill the Father's will for us in this life.

Moreover, too often this vice is regarded as a virtue. People fail to distinguish between necessary and sufficient causes to be virtuously angry. It's sort of the dual of the "ends justify means" argument, a "cause justifies means" argument that whatever I do must be good because I am responding to something clearly evil.

On top of that, they fail to see what habitual anger -- even and perhaps especially anger at true injustice -- does to a human soul, how it shrivels the heart and blinds the reason.

Many chemical solvents are poisonous, even corrosive. We know that, and we treat them with care. We store them appropriately, take them out only for a particular use, follow the directions on the label, clean up thoroughly, then return the solvents to safe storage when we're done. If we're not completely oblivious, we're well aware of what might happen if we get careless.

Yet there are those who pick up anger, as poisonous and corrosive to the soul as high molar acids are to the body, when they wake and never lay it down throughout the day. They clutch it tight as they fall asleep. What would we say to someone who slept with a bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid, who carried it about with him during the day in search of things to dissolve with it?

Labels: On Anger

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Zeal for the Lord's house

St. Thomas is something of a champion of human reason, which makes his answer to the following objection all the more interesting:

...according to Dionysius, "The soul's evil is to be without reason." Now anger is always without reason: for the Philosopher says that "anger does not listen perfectly to reason"; and Gregory says that "when anger sunders the tranquil surface of the soul, it mangles and rends it by its riot"; and Cassian says: "From whatever cause it arises, the angry passion boils over and blinds the eye of the mind." Therefore it is always evil to be angry.

You can see the strength this argument might have against someone who believes the image of God is in man only through his reason.

Here is St. Thomas's reply, with my glosses:

Anger may stand in a twofold relation to reason. First, antecedently; in this way it withdraws reason from its rectitude, and has therefore the character of evil.

Here, St. Thomas grants the truth of the objection -- and remember, in his treatment anger is a vice opposed to temperance, so it's not like this article denies anger can be evil, or even that it usually is -- by making a distinction in anger's relation to reason. A person can get angry before reasoning the circs. through, which is wrong ("has the character of evil").

Secondly, consequently, inasmuch as the movement of the sensitive appetite is directed against vice and in accordance with reason, this anger is good, and is called "zealous anger."

A person can also get angry after or as a consequence of thinking things through, and if this anger is directed at correcting vice, and accords with reason, it's good.

In other words, St. Thomas is saying that it is possible to be angry in accord with reason, in which case the argument that "anger is always without reason" loses its strength.

So, is it possible to be angry in accord with reason?

Wherefore Gregory says: "We must beware lest, when we use anger as an instrument of virtue, it overrule the mind, and go before it as its mistress, instead of following in reason's train, ever ready, as its handmaid, to obey." This latter anger, although it hinder somewhat the judgment of reason in the execution of the act, does not destroy the rectitude of reason. Hence Gregory says that "zealous anger troubles the eye of reason, whereas sinful anger blinds it."

First, note that he quotes the same St. Gregory the Great who was quoted in the objection saying that anger rends and mangles the soul. So the distinction between sinful anger and zealous anger goes back well before St. Thomas.

What St. Thomas has in mind is the case where someone observes some injustice or vice, determines that it can be corrected, settles on a means to correct it, then becomes angry -- anger being a "movement of the sensitive appetite" associated with arduous desires. Anger is, so to speak, what fuels the flesh to help the spirit attain its end of avenging vice.

It's true, St. Thomas admits, that even this zealous anger "troubles the eye of reason. What he denies is that it is contrary or opposed to reason. The reasoning is, in a sense, already done; the anger is directed at carrying out reason's plan.

Nor is it incompatible with virtue that the deliberation of reason be interrupted in the execution of what reason has deliberated: since art also would be hindered in its act, if it were to deliberate about what has to be done, while having to act.

I find this a fascinating comparison. For St. Thomas, art is right reasoning about a thing to be made. Art is a type of reason, yet when it acts it doesn't reason. It's the whole process that is governed by reason -- hence human, hence virtuous -- not each individual component of the process. In fact, to insist that each individual component of the process be interrupted by the deliberation of reason is to hinder the overall process, if not to wreck it altogether. There are times when reasoning is unreasonable.

If this is true of art, then it can in principle be true of other things. Of anger, for instance. To determine whether it's true of art, I suspect we're better off asking artists rather than relying purely on philosophy. Similarly, we may be better off asking the virtuous whether they can be angry without sinning than trying to resolve that question with a purely speculative argument.

Labels: On Anger

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Vengeance is mine, too

Although St. Thomas agrees with St. Gregory's identification of anger as a capital vice (a.k.a., one of the Seven Deadly Sins), he also says that it is sometimes lawful to be angry.

The apparent contradiction is easily enough resolved -- anger is a broad term meaning "the desire for revenge," and "revenge may be desired both well and ill." But this, of course, just swaps "anger" for "revenge," and we're left with the question of whether revenge really can be desired both well and ill.

As St. Thomas points out in an objection:

Now it would seem unlawful to desire vengeance, since this should be left to God, according to Dt. 32:35, "Revenge is Mine." Therefore it would seem that to be angry is always an evil.

As often happens, St. Thomas grants much of the objection:

It is unlawful to desire vengeance considered as evil to the man who is to be punished, but it is praiseworthy to desire vengeance as a corrective of vice and for the good of justice... and when revenge is taken in accordance with the order of judgment, it is God's work, since he who has power to punish "is God's minister," as stated in Rm. 13:4.

There's a lot going on in this reply, and it needs to be read in the context of the whole article, so that for example you see in the main body of the article he has already said that all anger is evil when "one is angry, more or less than right reason demands." But here let me point out just a few things.

First, St. Thomas says "it is praiseworthy to desire vengeance as a corrective of vice and for the good of justice." It is to each person's conscience that he must look to decide how often his anger is directed toward correction of vice and the good of justice. Even when anger is directed toward these goods, one must determine whether the actions taken under its spur are at all likely to effect correction and justice. The passion of anger is often inflamed for reasons not in accordance with the order of judgment, and often not in circumstances in which the order of judgment can be served by the one who is angry.

Which leads to the second point, that my desire for vengeance is not necessarily a desire that I, personally, do the punishing. I can be justly angered by something I read in a newspaper without entertaining the thought of traveling to wherever the injustice occurred and knocking together the heads of the guilty.

What I don't see that I can do, though, is nurse the desire for vengeance without ever acting on it in some way that might contribute to the restoration of justice.

Finally, I think there's a real risk with humans that what begins as a corrective of vice becomes an unreasoned, habitual response. It is never in accordance with the order of justice to treat another person as an object; with anger, the danger is of treating another person as something that, when it acts in some way, we correct by kicking it, so to speak. Vengeance can never be indiscriminate; if it becomes habitual, it becomes vicious.

Labels: On Anger

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The utmost patience

Unsurprisingly, St. Benedict beat me to the point of my previous post. Here is Chapter 72 of his Rule:

Of the Virtuous Zeal Which the Monks Ought to Have

As there is a harsh and evil zeal which separates from God and leads to hell, so there is a virtuous zeal which separates from vice and leads to God and life everlasting.

Let the monks, therefore, practice this zeal with most ardent love; namely, that in honor they forerun one another (cf Rom 12:10). Let them bear their infirmities, whether of body or mind, with the utmost patience; let them vie with one another in obedience. Let no one follow what he thinks useful to himself, but rather to another. Let them practice fraternal charity with a chaste love.

Let them fear God and love their Abbot with sincere and humble affection; let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may He lead us all together to life everlasting.

The Latin for the word in bold is morum, which of course means "mulberry."

No, actually it means morals or character. St. Benedict tells his monks to bear each others' moral infirmities with the utmost patience, infirmitates suas patientissime tolerent.

I should probably point out that patience with infirmity is not indifference toward iniquity. Patience is essentially an internal matter; strictly speaking, I am not patient with someone else's infirmity directly, but with his infirmity as it exists in my mind and heart. As St. Augustine wrote:

The patience of man, which is right and laudable and worthy of the name of virtue, is understood to be that by which we tolerate evil things with an even mind, that we may not with a mind uneven desert good things, through which we may arrive at better.

To receive the moral infirmity of my Christian brother with an even mind, this is St. Benedict's advice; and St. Augustine's warning is that if I receive it with an uneven mind, I lose not only the good things impatience costs me directly, but the better things they would have brought me later.

Finally, St. Benedict's pairing of the physical and the moral -- "infirmitates suas sive corporum sive morum" -- suggests that impatience with moral infirmities makes no more sense, at least for the monk aspiring to perfection, than impatience with physical infirmities. We are, perhaps, more capable of overcoming moral infirmities than physical ones, but that doesn't make overcoming the moral ones the work of an instant. If someone I know to be habitually sullen acts sullen, is this a reasonable cause of impatience for me? How should I expect him to act?

Labels: On Anger

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Clingy evil people

God and Mammon aren't the only things people can cling to. According to the Grail Psalter's translation of Psalm 36:5, the sinner "clings to what is evil." (Other translations are more passive; e.g., NAB has "they do not reject evil," Douay-Rheims has "evil he hath not hated.") And you might recall Sirach 27:30 from this past Sunday's first reading:

Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.

That's indisputable, isn't it? Wrath and anger are hateful, and the sinner does hug them tight. (And yes, granted, your wrath and anger are perfectly justified, as are mine, but here we're speaking of sinners.)

I think that "hug them tight" gets it exactly right -- psychologically, I mean; I can't speak to the accuracy of a translation. (The Douay Rheims has "the sinful man shall be subject to them," which is also true and important, but makes a somewhat different point.)

This wrath and anger ("ira et furor" in the Vulgate) that sinners hug tight is clearly not rage (or choler), the first of three kinds of anger Aristotle identifies. You don't hug tight quick flashes of anger, unless maybe you're a boxer who can't count on his skill to win. St. Thomas says the sin of this first kind of anger has its origin in persons "who are angry too quickly and for any slight cause."

But in the other two kinds of sinful anger -- sullenness and ill temper -- the origin of the sin is "that anger endures too long," which is where the hugging tight comes in. St. Thomas gives a perceptive description of the differences between these two sins:

Both "sullen" and "ill-tempered" people have a long-lasting anger, but for different reasons. For a "sullen" person has an abiding anger on account of an abiding displeasure, which he holds locked in his breast; and as he does not break forth into the outward signs of anger, others cannot reason him out of it, nor does he of his own accord lay aside his anger, except his displeasure wear away with time and thus his anger cease. On the other hand, the anger of "ill-tempered" persons is long-lasting on account of their intense desire for revenge, so that it does not wear out with time, and can be quelled only by revenge.

From this perspective, the anger I see among Catholics on the Internet is largely a matter of ill temper. And not just because whatever is locked in a person's breast necessarily doesn't wind up in a blog comment. The "intense desire for revenge" among some Catholics is almost palpable.

What to do about this ill temper? From the perspective of the ill-tempered, of course, there is no question of sin, since they aren't holding onto their anger for too long. Fraternal correction, then, requires more than simply pointing out that they are sinning. You have to get them to see that "this long" is too long, and getting ill-tempered people to see something like that isn't easy.

Apart from that, though, I think it's crucial to avoid responding to anger with equal and opposite anger. There are a lot of vices that, when seen in action, tempt you to join in, but anger is one of the vices that tempt you by suggesting indulging in them will virtuously counter another person's sin. (Detraction is another such vice; drunkenness, on the other hand, is a vice whose temptations don't make much of an appeal to virtue.)

At the same time, with virtue lying in the middle, if someone is ill-tempered with respect to something that ought to anger you -- that is, if he was right to get angry in the first place, but wrong to cling to his desire for revenge for so long -- you shouldn't overcompensate by not getting angry, as though his excess and your deficit somehow average into just the proper amount of righteous anger.

All that's obvious enough, I suppose. What I have to remind myself of time and again, since ill temper is one of the vices that triggers a choleric reaction in me, is that it is not the unforgivable sin, nor a mark of utter depravity. Why a person has this vice and not another isn't generally for me to worry about. Everyone is fighting a great battle, as the saying goes, and clucking over how poorly someone else is doing on one front helps no one.

Labels: On Anger

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Dies Irae

Anger is an ever-present factor of human interaction. If you don't understand anger, you don't understand a lot of what goes on between people, including between Catholics discussing their Church.

Since I don't understand anger, I'm looking at what St. Thomas has to say about it, both as an irascible passion (considered in itself, its causes, and its effects) and as a capital vice.

Anger is a peculiar phenomenon. As St. Thomas puts it, "it is a passion somewhat made up of contrary passions;" it's the one passion that has no contrary passion, but as a vice it does have a contrary, which doesn't have a one-word name but amounts to not being angry when you should be angry (that lacking anger is a vice is explained just after anger is shown to be a capital vice).

What may be immediately useful in all this is the distinction between species of anger made by Aristotle, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. John Damascene. The three species are "choleric," "sullen," and "ill-tempered" -- or equivalently, "wrath," "ill-will" and "rancor." In St. John Damascene's words:

When anger arises and begins to be roused, it is called rage [or choler] .... [Ill-will]implies that the bile endures, that is to say, that the memory of the wrong abides.... Rancor, on the other hand, implies watching for a suitable moment for revenge....

St. Thomas corresponds these three kinds of anger to three things that give increase to anger. The choleric man is easily moved to anger; the passion of anger because of an excess of bile (okay, we can tighten up the biology), the vice in response to any slight cause. The sullen or ill-willed man is moved by an inflicted injury that remains in his memory -- for too long, if his anger is sinful. The ill-tempered or rancorous man has a stubborn desire for vengeance that lasts until they have inflicted punishment.

I think these three kinds of anger can all be discerned and distinguished in the heated arguments that characterize so much of on-line Catholic discussion. Some people are easily moved to anger that quickly dissipates; perhaps most everyone is, if they're having a bad day. Others feed their sense of personal injury with angry words, and still others are clearly aiming to inflict injury on their opponents.

The difference between ill-will and rancor, between anger is turned inward and anger turned outward, may not always be easy to detect, but I think I have encountered people who are clearly rancorous, who are habitually angry and habitually trying to bring down their enemies, yet who show no sign of acting out of memory of some grievance against themselves or others.

Labels: On Anger

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