Lenten Programme IV: Anger

The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme IV: Anger

Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God”

Anger is the third of the Deadly Three and follows upon envy. The Gospel for Passion Sunday highlights the sin of anger. “And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren.” Indignation here is 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. It is not too much to say that our culture is the culture of anger as much as anything else.

But Scripture advises us differently and quite insightfully. “Let not the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4.26), Don’t always be angry and don’t hold onto your anger. Notwithstanding there is a deadly danger in all our anger. It too is a powerful force. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay” as Hebrews puts it (Hebrews 10.30), recalling a host of Old Testament passages about divine justice and divine wrath.

The paradox is that the vengeance, anger or wrath of God is very different from our anger. To speak of divine wrath is itself a form of human speech applied to God which is really about what in us is opposed to God’s goodness and mercy. It is a kind of antidote to our anger because it leaves judgement with God, first and foremost. But this 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 mean 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 liturgy. But anger is not the justified response to perceived iniquities and inequalities, hurts and injuries. Making things 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 that what I think 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, whether it is passive or active. In either case, it negates the good and our impulse towards the good.

There is a wonderful but instructive paradox here. Nihilism is a feature of atheism. Angry persons, both young and old, are angry at a world that is meaningless and utterly indifferent to human ambition and worth. They are angry because they want the world 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 the sense of emptiness and in acts of terrorism that simply seek to destroy. In a way, anger always involves a flight from what is and often, if not 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 are a host of problems: injustices, follies, and stupidities of one sort or another. There is lots to get hot and bothered about, particularly other people, especially their indifference, their complacency, or their ignorance and stupidity, as we see it. 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 a loss of perspective, a loss of self.

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 Graeco-Roman literary culture, was satire. The two dominant forms from the ancient Romans were Horatian and Juvenalian satire, named after Horace and Juvenal respectively. 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 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.

Jonathan Swift and Voltaire are two outstanding literary figures in the 18th century who provide us with a way to think about satire and about the limits of anger or, we might say, the constructive use of anger. Their works 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 or accentuation, 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. Things are all okay for them regardless of how they may be for others.

Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal calls attention to the pressing and depressing problem of child poverty in late 17th and early 18th century Ireland in ways that do not allow us the luxury of ignoring a problem of which we are a part. It is really a kind of literary ‘shock and awe’. Voltaire’s novel Candide also serves to attack all pretence and folly. Jonathan Swift’s epithet includes a phrase from Juvenal: saeve indignatio, “fierce indignation.” It would seem to endorse the conceit of our age of 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 often have the opposite effect.

To the contrary of anger, what is needed is a calm soul, a clear head. The lesson of both Swift and Voltaire is ‘think clearly so as to act rightly.’ It acts as a check on our anger which is more often than not irrational and destructive. But the greater lesson is found in the Passion of Christ.

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 or gentleness. But the real counter to anger 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 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. That is realized in the peace of Christ, “the peace that passeth understanding”, meaning that it is not of our making. That divine peace is bestowed 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.

The peace of Christ accomplished on the Cross is the counter to all of the disorders of our souls but especially to the three deadly sins of pride, envy, and anger. Christ’s peace reminds us that we find our peace, our good in God’s will through our humble attention to that will as written out for us in the life of Christ. Such is the mercy of Christ towards us who are called by Jesus to be the children of God.

Fr. David Curry
April 10th, 2025

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