ANGER: Presented on 11/12/01 at The Newman Center by Rev. Bruce Williams, O.P. as part of the series on the Seven Deadly Sins.

We end this series now with a bang, so to speak, in two respects. First, the attendance level here has exploded with a bang. I’d thought that last week’s topic, lust, would have the highest attendance; but, this time, lust has been far outdrawn by anger. That may have a lot to do with the fact that anger-provoking events have been more on everyone’s mind since our country was attacked two months ago. Second, even aside from the record attendance, we’re ending with a bang because of the nature of our topic; it’s when we’re caught up in anger that things are apt to go "bang."

Certainly we have every reason to be preoccupied with the subject of anger in these awful times. The attacks of 9/11 were ordered and perpetrated by people whose anger at the US had reached the level of raging hatred. Now that we have been so monstrously attacked, we ourselves are angry; and all sorts of issues arise as to how to appropriately deal with that anger, and what ways of dealing with it are not appropriate or questionably appropriate. It has already become evident that there are disagreements among Americans about all this, and sometimes, as a result, Americans are becoming angry at one another.

The fact is that even since long before 9/11, anger has been a growing problem in our community. Just consider the growing phenomena of aggressive driving and road rage; the increasingly widespread recourse people are having to litigation; the way our politics is so often fueled by anger that groups of our citizens have against other groups of citizens. And while we’re at it, still remembering last week’s discussion of lust and controversies over sexuality, let’s also notice that anger is a more evident phenomenon in these past several years within the church, largely over issues pertaining to sexuality and gender. Some Catholics are angry at those they perceive as undermining the authentic tradition of the church. Other church members feel truly injured by that tradition and by the church’s insistence on it, and, in their efforts to vindicate what they take to be their rightful dignity and their rightful status in the church, they are angry.

But even aside from all these public dimensions of anger in church and society, anger is certainly a very significant and widespread problem for many of us individually – in our homes, within our marriages, in our families, in the workplace. The psychotherapist Solomon Schimmel, whom I’ve cited so frequently throughout this series, says without hesitation that the issue he most frequently has to help his patients deal with is anger; it’s the source of more "presenting problems" than any of the other topics we’ve seen so far.

In therapeutic strategy regarding anger, there has been a notable shift within recent memory. In the late 1960s and extending at least into the mid 70s, probably as an overreaction to the tendency of many people to repress anger, the advice commonly heard was that we should just "let it all out." We were urged to give free rein to our anger – to punch pillows, throw things, scream our heads off, and avoid any disciplined effort to curb our feelings of anger and our expression of those feelings. That fashion did not last very long in the therapeutic profession. Why? Because it was soon discovered that when people get into the habit of giving free rein to their anger and to its expression, their anger is not dissipated (as was hoped) but, rather, it’s reinforced. Those who freely indulge their anger whenever it arises will find that they become progressively more angry more often and over more trivial provocations.

This escalation of anger, and its increasing frequency, is destructive – to other people, certainly, but first of all to the persons themselves who are trapped in this pattern. It is being brought out more and more that unchecked anger can make the angry person seriously ill, or even dead. The book title Anger Kills (by Redford Williams, M.D. and Virginia Williams, Ph.D.; NY Times Books, 1993) refers, first of all, to the fatal effects that this unchecked emotion can have on the person himself or herself, leaving aside the effect it might have on others if the anger is acted out in lethal conduct.

The therapeutic community now seems to be moving into closer harmony with traditional moral perspectives on anger. Thomas Aquinas has an interesting discussion in which he compares unrestrained lust with unrestrained anger. There’s no question that both are morally undesirable; the question he poses is, Which is worse? His answer? It all depends on what you mean by ‘worse.’ Unrestrained lust, since it involves such a fundamental and vehement passion which is central to the survival of the human species, will, if unregulated, be a more profoundly debasing vice than anger; and so, Aquinas sees unrestrained lust as worse in that sense of being more debased and more shameful. But if you look at it from another angle, and consider not the inner disorientation of the person’s psychic makeup but, rather, the behavioral outcomes of the two vices, then, in that respect, Aquinas says unrestrained anger is worse. It’s simple: what unrestrained lust leads to, typically, is adultery; what unrestrained anger is apt to lead to is murder.

Is anger always morally reprehensible? Some noteworthy thinkers have suggested that it is. The Stoics held this, preeminently Seneca who wrote an entire treatise on anger that Schimmel is fond of citing. Seneca’s reflections held some attraction for Christians who focused on Jesus’ warning in the Sermon on the Mount that anger against our brother makes us liable to condemnation (Mt. 5:21). In our own time, the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous seems to reflect this severe Stoic attitude, at least for the members of that fellowship intent on avoiding a likely danger to their sobriety.

The great Christian writers generally did not condemn all anger absolutely, although Francis de Sales seems to verge on this and some occasional remarks of Augustine have been taken in this vein. Thomas Aquinas and other mainstream Christian thinkers, including Augustine in his more extended references to the subject, allowed that anger was sometimes justified and warranted. A few earlier authors defended this view by relying on a spurious alternate reading of Matthew’s text, which qualified Jesus’ dictum as a warning only against anger that is "without cause." More commonly, authors of this persuasion acknowledged the unqualified form of the saying as authentic, but interpreted it in context; Jesus was speaking here of anger in reference to the commandment against murder, and the gospels elsewhere show that he himself was sometimes angry though never murderous or otherwise violent. Aquinas, for his part, was willing to suggest that the conflict between the Stoic position and his own might be more verbal than real, i.e., he could interpret the reflections of Seneca in a way that was compatible with his own thought. Were he living today, maybe he could harmonize AA writings with his own thinking as well.

In any case, Aquinas’ own position on anger is clear. He observes that the very word, "anger," can have different meanings. In its simplest and most basic meaning, it refers to a certain kind of emotion we sometimes feel. The emotion occurs spontaneously when we feel we have been injured in some way, and it consists in an impulse to strike back at the source of the injury. Considered abstractly, this emotion cannot be evaluated as morally good or bad. If we go on to specify that in a given situation the emotion of anger is reasonably felt and reasonably acted upon – i.e., we really have been injured and our response is proportionate – then the anger is not morally reprehensible but, on the contrary, a wholesome passion for justice. Aquinas even remarks that one would sin by not being angry in the face of injustice that s/he could and should confront. Lack of anger in such a case could bespeak complacency or even sympathy with the injustice in question; or, alternatively, it could be a symptom of apathetic indifference.

Anger, however, is itself a vice when it is unreasonably felt (there has been no real or significant injury to provoke it), or when, even granted real provocation, it is unreasonably followed up (the retaliatory response is disproportionate, causing undue harm to the offender and/or other parties). These are issues we deal with in many interpersonal conflicts, and they’re also directly relevant to situations of war such as we’re experiencing now.

When it’s necessary and just for a country to fight a war, as in the case of self-defense, it’s also necessary and just to cultivate the anger that is naturally needed as an incentive to fight. In many of our past wars, our country’s fighting spirit was maintained by slogans such as "Remember Pearl Harbor," "Remember the Maine," "Remember the Alamo"; in all likelihood, as our current struggles drag on and we’re growing tired and discouraged, we’ll be exhorted to "remember 9/11." Such slogans, and also the inflammatory war rhetoric of our leaders (Churchill’s oratory in World War II is an especially memorable example), serve the purpose of stoking the fires of anger in order to sustain a people’s willingness to go on fighting as long as the war objectives remain unachieved.

The danger is that inflammatory rhetoric is apt to incite excessive anger which can propel us to atrocious overkill. Most Catholic moralists judge that this happened in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and also in the carpet bombing of Dresden and other German cities by the allies in World War II.

Whatever justified anger some Middle Eastern people may have against the US, it was clearly overblown (with the help of much "religious" rhetoric) to the point of causing the 9/11 atrocity. At this point, surely most if not all of us can identify with the sentiment expressed in a recent letter to Time, to the effect that we’ve heard more than enough hand-wringing about Middle Easterners’ anger at America and it’s now time for them to be concerned about American anger. Natural as such a sentiment is, God forbid that it be carried out of bounds in a way that would lead us to avenge ourselves by committing yet further atrocities.

Aquinas, drawing once more upon Aristotle, identified three varieties of inordinate anger. First there are the acuti, the sharp-tempered people, who are easily provoked into outward explosions of anger.

Their angry explosions can involve verbal or even physical violence, sometimes causing serious harm, but generally their anger is not significantly destructive and it is the least troublesome instance of the vice. It arises quickly and is also quickly over and done with, or at least, it can be soothed relatively easily. A more challenging type are the amari, the bitter people who nurse prolonged resentments over past injuries. Unlike the first type, their anger often tends to be kept inward and so it’s less accessible to being soothed by others’ persuasion. But inasmuch as it is rooted in the pain of previous injury, it tends to abate as the underlying pain or sadness lessens over time. The third and most difficult category are aptly named the difficiles or graves, the real "hard ones," the real "heavies." These people are single-mindedly intent on revenge. There are at least two reasons for seeing them as the worst instance of the vice. First, they tend to be outwardly calm, so their anger (like that of the amari, only more so) is inaccessible to correction or persuasion; they take to extremes the old Kennedy maxim, "Don’t get mad, get even." Second, they don’t let go of their anger with the passing of time (unlike the amari), but only with the achievement of revenge.

The offspring of anger, like the three varieties of the vice just described, are understood according to what goes on in the person’s mind and heart as well as how s/he expresses this inner attitude. There are two offspring referring directly to the inner dynamic. First there is the "indignation" (indignatio) arising from offended pride, whereby we negate the humanity we have in common with the offender by either despising him ("that animal") or demonizing him ("the Great Satan," "the Evil One"). Next, we have a certain "swelling of the mind" (tumor mentis) as we get carried away thinking about ways to get revenge. This violence at the level of fantasy may or may not eventually be acted out externally, but it’s disorienting even when it remains just in our imagination. Then there are several other offspring denoting the various ways that anger is externally acted out. Three of them might be grouped together as "verbal violence." First we have what Aquinas and Gregory labeled as clamor, the explosive sputtering of incoherent expletives by enraged people. Certain contemporary rap lyrics, as well as some people’s inability to utter a single sentence without inserting obscene four-letter words, seem symptomatic of much unacknowledged rage in our culture. Next, going beyond this clamor we have contumelia or insult directed against those we feel have offended us. These insults are not mere incoherent expletives; on the contrary, they are often quite coherent and pointed. Finally, under verbal abuse, we list blasphemy; at the height of rage, violent and insulting language is directed not only against human offenders but against God. And the very last offspring in the traditional list, rixa, designates violent strife that can become physical, sometimes even homicidal. Right now there seems no handier illustration of this homicidal expression of rage, and of the blasphemous invocation of God to justify it, than the attacks of 9/11.

We conclude by exploring various remedies for inordinate anger. I remarked earlier that an overly indulgent approach to anger was briefly popular a few decades ago, as an overreaction against the false remedy of repression that too many people have tried. We engage in repression when we attempt to deny and disown our anger, pushing it out of our consciousness and, so to speak, burying it alive. We’ve learned that repression is not an effective way to deal with unruly emotions, and it leads to greater problems down the road. What’s buried alive stays alive and keeps on doing its mischief out of sight.

We need to distinguish between repression and "suppression." In the latter case we don’t deny our anger or push it out of consciousness, indeed we own up to it; but we refuse to embrace and nurture the angry feeling, and we squelch the impulse to act it out. Sometimes as an emergency measure this may be appropriate and even necessary, to avoid getting carried away into behavior that can be unduly harmful to others and even to ourselves. But it’s not recommended as a long-term strategy. For the longer haul, we need better remedies.

Instead of merely squelching our anger, it’s preferable to find ways of dissipating it. The old trick of slowing down and counting to 10 often works quite well here; it affords the opportunity to step back a bit from the intense provocation we may be feeling, and consider our situation more rationally. As we pursue this consideration, we need to address the deeper emotions that underlie and motivate our anger. We may discover that behind our anger there is too much wounded pride or, perhaps, too much unprocessed grief over past offenses we’ve suffered; either way, we now have an exaggerated sense of injury that makes us vulnerable to inordinate anger. In other cases, anger results from the frustration of one’s pursuits in the area of greed or gluttony or lust; these frustrations can be felt as injuries to one’s imagined "rights." (But the reverse also occurs in other cases; some people’s overindulgence in food, intoxicants, or sex is really a way of acting out deep unacknowledged rage against themselves or others.)

Additionally, we need to mention one more source of anger that’s often overlooked, namely, fear. The book titled Alcoholics Anonymous (the so-called "Big Book" of the AA fellowship) is emphatic on this; while it says that resentments are the number one offender, it adds that resentments are typically driven by fear. It makes perfect sense; anger arises from our sense of having been injured, and we can only be injured to the extent that we’re vulnerable. We Americans would do well to acknowledge that much of our own present (and justified) anger is driven by the (very natural) fear inherent in our new-found sense of vulnerability after the successful attacks on our homeland. – Incidentally, advocates of the Enneagram tradition have suggested that the omission of inordinate fear from all our traditional listings of the capital vices bespeaks the unacknowledged deleterious influence of that very fear in Western Christian spirituality.

At a more profound level still, the most needed remedy against the vice of anger is the cultivation of the virtues which forestall it or at least moderate it. Patience, whereby we serenely put up with unavoidable annoyances and frustrations, will fortify us against the easy onset of anger in such situations. Gentleness is the virtue that directly moderates anger, disposing us to resolve conflicts peaceably as far as possible. This virtue has traditionally been called "meekness," and that term is still appropriate provided it’s not mistaken as designating a wimp or "doormat." Clemency is closely related to gentleness, and also to mercy; it’s the disposition to soften or mitigate, as far as reasonably possible, the harshness of retaliation against an offender. It’s not the weakness of sentimentality, but rather, an exercise of that spirit of forgiveness which the teaching and example of Christ proposes to us as the indispensable, sure-fire remedy for anger.

All these virtues I’ve mentioned are, of course, outgrowths of the love/charity/agape which conforms us to God, whose mercy is above all his works. Our faith professes a God whose all-surpassing power is shown most forcefully in mercifully pardoning and forgiving. When we are cruel instead of merciful, wrathful instead of gentle, impatient instead of patient, we’re typically trying to reassert our power; but these reactions really attest to our lack of power, our insecurity, and – again – our fear. Biblical revelation, and preeminently the saving work of Christ, challenges us to be powerful in a godly way by being merciful.

Even though Aquinas and our tradition generally allow room for a just and wholesome exercise of anger, this allowance is based on the realization that we are not God and our vulnerability does not permit us to emulate the power of divine mercy completely. Sometimes we do have to fight back in anger at those who threaten or inflict harm. Here we must trust in the same God whose grace tempers our anger with a spirit of gentleness and clemency, to enable us where necessary to channel our wholesome anger into zealous and effective action in the service of justice – and, ultimately, true peace – for all people along with ourselves.

God Bless America. God bless us all!

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