Month: April 2025

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.

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

Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”

Envy and anger complete the triad of perverted love, the first of Dante’s threefold classification of the Seven Deadly Sins as forms of disordered love: love perverted, love defective and love excessive. From the standpoint of the theology of amor, everything comes down to what and how we love. That we love belongs fundamentally to our identity as spiritual beings.

As Dante sees it, pride, envy and anger constitute the forms of perverted love, the love that swerves to evil. Sloth is lukewarm love, a defective love, while avarice, gluttony and lust are the forms of excessive love, “love too hot of foot.”

We have already seen how pride is in all of the seven deadly sins. But of all of the seven sins, envy is the most unique and in some ways the most destructive. Why? Because, as one commentator (Graham Tomlin) puts it, there is no joy in it, no fun in envy at all. It is singularly perverse. Its only satisfaction is endless self-torment.

Envy is about hating the happiness of others. Gregory the Great describes the envious person as “so racked by another’s happiness, that he inflicts wounds on his own pining spirit.” John of Damascus defines envy as “discontent over someone else’s blessings.” Likewise, Aquinas describes envy as “sadness at the happiness or glory of another.” Envy is simply endless discontent in constantly comparing ourselves to others.

It is not just discontent at the happiness or blessing that others enjoy, but even at the prospect of their future happiness or blessing. This destructive and hurtful aspect of envy is well described in a Jewish devotional work, The Ways of the Righteous. It relates the parable of a greedy man and an envious man who met a king. “The king says to them, ‘One of you may ask something of me and I will give it to him, provided I give twice as much to the other.’ The envious person did not want to ask first for he was envious of his companion who would receive twice as much, and the greedy man did not want to ask first since he wanted everything that was to be had. Finally the greedy one pressed the envious one to be the first to make the request. So the envious person asked the king to pluck out one of his eyes, knowing that his companion would then have both eyes plucked out.” As Solomon Schimmel points out, “this illustrates the masochistic form that extreme envy can take. The pathologically envious are willing to suffer great injury as long as those they envy suffer even more” (The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology). Quite a remarkable insight into the perversity of our humanity. Such is the hurt or harm of envy.

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