by CCW | 3 April 2009 21:01
Lenten Meditation on The Seven Deadly Sins
Anger
“And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren.” The Passion Sunday Gospel[1] names our topic: indignation or anger.
Pride is certainly the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and is what is deadly in them. Envy is certainly the ugliest of the seven deadly sins and is ugly and unattractive to all. But anger?
Well, anger is certainly the most common of all the seven deadly sins.
Like all the seven deadly sins, anger, too, has its complement of related terms: wrath, ire, rage, resentment, vengeance and indignation. The Latin term is ira, the shortest and smallest of all the terms used to capture this commonplace sin, the deadly sin of anger.
So common is anger that in the culture of the self-obsessed, the neurotic culture, as it were, anger is the most frequent problem that psycho-therapists deal with in their counseling practices. We live in an angry world full of angry people; we are the angry people. “I am as mad as Hell and I won’t take it any longer” is a slogan for our age. And perhaps, more than any other sin, we try to justify it, to redeem it, as it were, under the rubric of righteous anger.
“Let not the sun go down on your anger,”(Ephesians 4.26) Scripture advises us and rightly so but even as such there is deadly danger in all our anger, sunset notwithstanding. After all, “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay” (Hebrews 10.30), recalling a host of Old Testament passages about divine justice and divine wrath.
But it is something which we often forget and in so doing fall prey to the very thing that lurks in all our anger. Ultimately, all our anger at the world, at one another, even perhaps at ourselves is really our anger at God. We are angry because things are not the way we think they should be. We lash out against God in all our anger, essentially blaming him for the way things are. Damn you God! This is what we think and say in our anger.
Are things the way they should be? Of course not. Are we the people that we should be? Of course not. That is why the confession of sin and the constant reminder about ourselves as sinners is so powerful and so necessary. It is a regular feature of our classical Anglican liturgy. But anger is not the justified response to perceived iniquities and inequalities, hurts and injuries. Making thing better is rarely the work of anger. In fact, anger is more frequently what destroys.
Whatever creative force for the good that might be in anger is not ours. It is important to remember this.
The culture of the neurotic – ours – is, of course, equally the culture of narcissism. A kind of anger is actually encouraged in our narcissism. It is all about me – and when I don’t get my way then I am angry. My anger becomes a way of signaling what I think I should be the way things should be!
But narcissism goes hand in hand with its twin, nihilism. And nihilism, the rage for nothingness, is the destructive force that has anger at its heart. There is a wonderful but instructive paradox here. Nihilism is a feature of hard-core atheism. The angry young persons are angry at a world that is meaningless and utterly indifferent to human ambition and worth; they are angry because they want it to give their lives meaning and purpose. They are angry at what is not! Anger is a feature of nihilism and of its destructive appearance in acts of terrorism.
In a way, anger always involves a flight from what is and almost always involves destruction. The rage to destroy is the polar opposite of the desire to create.
But is there not plenty to be angry about? Yes, to be sure. We live in a world where there is a host of problems: injustices, follies and stupidities of one sort or another. There is lots to get hot and bothered about. Get hot and bothered about people, especially their indifference, their complacency!
And yet, this cannot hide the hideous reality. Whether anger is of the moment, hot and quick, or long and drawn out like a simmering pot, it is blind. It is almost literally enveloped in the fog or smoke of oneself. It means the loss of perspective.
Is there, then, no positive in anger? Nothing to be said about our righteous anger? In the 18th century one of the preferred forms of discourse, drawing upon Roman literary culture, is satire. The two dominant forms from the ancient Romans was Horatian and Juvenalian satire, named after Horace and Juvenal. As Horace points out, “anger is a short madness,” to which we might add, not always short! But anger is a kind of madness, a kind of madness of reason. Nowhere does our unreason come out more clearly than in anger, whether it is the heat of the moment, a quick fuse or a long slow burning rage.
Two outstanding literary figures in the 18th century provide us with a way to think about satire and about the limits of anger. They are Jonathan Swift and Voltaire. Their works are great works of satire and have in them this important and defining feature. They are driven by a strong moral agenda. Eighteenth century satire seeks amendment, the desire to make things better in the realm of morals and manners, in the social and political realm explicitly. Satire works by deliberately exaggerating a particular problem in the social and political realm which exhibits a moral question. The purpose of the exaggeration, often hilariously so, is that we might see the problem more clearly. Satire necessarily challenges the status quo, the authorities of the day in their complacency that because things are fine for them, then they must be for everyone else. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal calls attention to the problem of child poverty in Ireland in ways that do not allow us the luxury of ignoring a problem of which we are a part. Voltaire’s novel Candide, a romp “around the world in eighty pages” (Italo Calvino), also serves to attack all pretence and folly.
Jonathan Swift actually has as part of his epithet, a phrase from Juvenal: saeve indignatio, “fierce indignation.” It would seem to endorse the conceit of our anger.
But Swift and Voltaire knew, as we so often don’t, the limitations of our thoughts and actions. Our thoughts and actions, our schemes and plans to make things better so often have the exact opposite result.
To the contrary of anger, what is needed is a calm soul, a clear head. The lesson of Candide, in some sense, is “think clearly so as to act rightly.”
You can’t be angry. It is too destructive.
Even God’s wrath is really something other than our anger. What is his wrath? It is his love of his own righteousness which seeks our good in his justice. Let that be our guide. Let that remove us from our narcissistic selves and the nihilism that it breeds.
Dante, in his Divine Comedy, has the souls of anger contemplate meekness. But the real counter to anger in his view is the beatitude, beati pacifici. “Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of God.” It is a wonderful beatitude and it is actually the perfect counter to anger. Anger attempts to destroy who we are. Anger blinds us like smoke to the true reality of our humanity. We find our truth and our being as the children of God. It is something that is realized in the peace of Christ. His peace is “the peace that passeth understanding” and it is bestowed most powerfully upon our fearful and angry humanity by the risen Christ. His peace is always more than what the world can give.
Its creative power far outweighs the destructiveness of our anger and indignation. Ultimately, it is achieved through service and sacrifice, the very things which Christ points to in the face of the indignation of the ten against the two brethren.
Fr. David Curry
March 31st, 2009
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