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Of late, I have come to realize that I am rapidly becoming for all intents and purposes a spiritual couch potato, a consumer, not a participant in my life. For instance, thanks to a handy WordPress widget called “Press This” I an collecting a large cache of articles to comment on for this blog that I instead sit upon like a dragon on its golden hoard. finding many ways to distract myself from from this form of written meditation on faith. I also have a large pile of books to read and review that ever grows larger, not smaller. However, we are in the Season of Lent, the great “forty days” of preparation for the celebration of Easter, the Feast of Feasts, the Resurrection, and it is high time I begin actively meditating on faith again, so as to not be as the Foolish Virgins in Christ’s parable.
With this mind, I went through my heaps of articles looking for something worth commenting on now. Naturally I found a gem. One of the first articles I used the “Press This” feature on was a piece recommended by the handy Pocket reading app displayed on Firefox’s “new tab” pages: “Anger Is Temporary Madness: The Stoics Knew How to Curb It”. written in early 2020.
I have also been making my third or fourth attempt at reading A Layman in the Desert: Monastic Wisdom for a Life in the World by Daniel G Opperwall, a layman and professor of Orthodox Theology in Toronto. The book is an approach to the proper appropriation of monastic spiritual (and ascetic) literature by the modern layman and laywoman through a study of the 7th century Spiritual Conferences of St. John Cassian. At the heart of the book is the twofold goal of Christian life in society: the pursuit of love and the assuaging of anger. In fact, anger captures the attention of a number of Fathers in this book. That reading, brought “Anger is Temporary Madness” back to mind. So here we are.
This article originally appeared in the journal Aeon by Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at City College New, York City. The point of the article is to show why anger is always a Bad Thing, even when it has a legitimate source. Along the way he namedrops quotes Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and even the example of Nelson Mandela in prison. At the end of the article he offers 10 bullet points of practical advice for removing anger from our life today based on the teachings of Seneca.
My first response to reading it was “Oh, this is an interesting take on Anger, it offers some good pointers”, in fact one of my favorite parts of the article is where he quotes Epictetus: “Stand by a rock and insult it, and what have you accomplished? If someone responds to insult like a rock, what has the abuser gained with his invective?” This quote is almost Zen in its admonition to have the attitude of a rock (but the situation of Zen is its own entire set of meditations). Then I re-read the article, taking note of who was quoted, and who -or what- was not quoted, or offered up as an example. And I saw how the point is to get rid of anger, now how to engage it constructively.
To be honest, the article has more than a tinge of “self-help-itis” about it, even linking to an American Psychological Association website section on anger management. It probably has more appeal to the “post-Christian” crowd who want to better themselves without the “baggage” that religion is perceived to bring with it. At the same time, the practical advice Professor Pigilucci offers is just that, good practical advice. I think it just needs a better grounding.
And then I realized it contradicted what, from my studies of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas I understood anger to be: a virtue and a passion. Anger is a passion/appetite/desire/feeling/emotion that results from the experience of a perceived injustice that calls on the perceiving person to right the injustice. Anger has led to many positive outcomes in our nation’s past and present. Yet, for the Stoics, anger was one among the passions that needed to be utterly removed from our repertoire. True, anger is aroused for mostly trivial reason, but that is more an abuse of the passion -our disordered approach to anger- than a fault of anger itself. This is the Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of anger. Nevertheless, even for these worthies, anger is a difficult passion to master, and is best left alone. Not without reason is anger considered a virtue, but also a vice -in fact anger is one of the Seven Deadly Sins- in moral philosophy and moral theology.
There are two kinds of passions, you see. The concupiscent passions, so-called for being simple goods we are to obtain and simple evils we are to avoid, are six in number: Love and its contrary, Hatred; Desire and its contrary, Aversion; Joy and its contrary, Sadness. The irascible passions on the other hand, of which anger is the odd-man out, are more difficult goods to obtain or evils to avoid and are five in number and include in addition: Hope and its contrary, Despair; Courage and its contrary, Fear. No, anger is not the same as hatred. Goods to be sought and evils to be avoided are what make up the contraries. Love, Desire, Joy, Hope, and Courage are goods we want; Hatred, Aversion, Sadness, Despair, and Fear are the evils we do not want. However, anger contains in itself both a good to be sought and an evil to be avoided. As such, it has no contrary. From this you can see why anger is very problematic to handle, which is why it is best left alone.
The Eastern Fathers, on the other hand, joined the Stoics in impressing upon their readers and hearers the necessity of ridding the soul of every last vestige of anger if one is to achieve a state of spiritual perfection. In this vein, it is not without reason that our Eastern Fathers considered anger, more so than pride, the last sin and passion to be overcome in our journey to perfection in Christ.
So what does this have to do with my -and by extension, our- walk with Christ? We are not Stoics who seek to subdue the passions for the sake of subduing the passions, for anger is a passion and an appetite that is part of our makeup as rational animals. It is also a passion that has been severely disordered by the Fall. Now the passions, also called the appetites and, more abstractly, emotions, are powers of the rational soul (i.e. Man) that we share with the sensitive soul (i.e. Animals), that we use to acquire goods and avoid evils. That is to say, it has a place in our life, and simply willing it away, or forcibly suppressing it does not work in the long run. It must be subdued to our Reason, like every other passion; and yet, this is not done by simply attending an Anger Management seminar, class, retreat, or certification program. Like so many other it requires constant vigilance, and does not fare well in isolation, Unless our efforts at controlling anger are conjoined to similar efforts, such as asceticism of the Desert Fathers or the Via Negativa of Ss. Teresa de Avila or Juan de la Cruz, to master all of the passions, anger will instead master us every time.. But we can’t rely solely, or even mostly on our own unaided efforts. Unless we offer up our anger and our vigilance to Jesus, in fact, and receive the Grace that comes by Faith, and wash out anger with love, we will always wonder why we fail to make any headway in the troubled waters of life.
So, calming our anger is good, channeling anger toward good is better, and subsuming anger to our Reason in the context of a life dedicated to the Prince of Peace is best.
In the meantime though, don’t hesitate to use the calming techniques that Professor Pigliucci recommends, just don’t stop there..
via Anger Is Temporary Madness: The Stoics Knew How to Curb It