The Eight Evils: Wrath Chris Selmys Originally published in Issue XVI of Vulgata, May, 2007.

What is wrath? Aristotle tells us, and St. Thomas confirms it, that the motive of anger is always something that is done against oneself. We become angry either because we have been slighted, or because we believe that we have been slighted: because we perceive an injustice commited against ourselves. St. Thomas points to two different factors that effect the degree to which we will perceive an injustice: the first is excellence, the second weakness. Excellence, he says, inclines us towards anger because the motive of anger is always an injustice, and the more excellent something is, the more unjust it is to slight it. Weakness, on the other hand, increases the degree to which we are grieved by such slights, so that men who suffer from some sort of defect will be more grieved by a smaller injustice.

There are essentially three types of wrathful characters, which Damascene calls ill-will, wrath, and rancour, and Aristotle designates as, bitter choleric, and ill-tempered. For the sake of literary elegance, we'll examine them as: bitterness, choler, and rancour. It would seem that these three types of character correspond to the three degrees of anger identified by Gregory of Nyssa: anger without utterance, anger with utterance, and anger with “perfection of speech” -- on other words, anger that is completely and perfectly expressed, in its fullness, by whatever is said. He draws a connection between these three degrees of anger and the saying of Christ that “anyone who is angry with his brother will answer for it before the court; if a man call his brother “Fool” he will answer for it before the Sanhedrin; and if a man calls him “Renegade” he will answer for it in hell fire.” (Matt. 5, 22)

What this suggests is that there is an escalation here: that these different types of anger don't differ merely in kind, but also in severity. So we will begin with the least severe, and go from there.

Bitterness

Why does Christ say, of the man who is merely angry, that he will answer before the courts, whereas if he speaks up, he starts heading towards the fires of hell? It seems to me, that it is a matter of justice: a court is essentially a place in which simple matters are decided. One is either guilty, or one is innocent. A man's anger will be judged in the court, because if the anger is just, then the man will be able to answer for it without imperiling himself. None the less, we are told that if we have something against our brother, we are to go and resolve it before we come before God.

Bitterness is anger unresolved. It often begins with a very benign smile on its face, and a tip of the hat the holiness. We are slighted. We feel that we have been dealt with unjustly. We hold our tongues. Later, we congratulate ourselves on having shown self-restraint – but we do not, therefore, hold the slight forgiven. The mistake is in thinking that because we ought not to cry out “Fool” in the grip of anger, we ought, therefore, not go and resolve the issue after we have ceased being angry.

There are two reasons why a man might fail in this respect: cowardice, and pride. He may fear that if he goes and tries to work out the problem, then it will simply be made worse: that the offending party will not only refuse reconciliation, but will offer a further slight – and since there is moral excellence in trying to reconcile with those who have injured us, this further slight will almost invariably have all the more sting. Needless to say, this sort of cowardice offends against charity, both because it assumes the obstinate unrepentance of the other party, and because it retreats before the obligation to correct another in their sin.

The second reason, pride, arises from the subconscious fear that we may actually have been wrong. We might discover that the other person didn't actually intend us any ill-will, or that the thing which we imagined to be an injustice was in fact a just rebuke, or that it was a trifling matter and we were over-grieved by it. Fearing, therefore, that the court will not rule in our favour, we fail to go and work the matter out, prefering to live in the silent, bitter, belief that we were in the right.

As the unforgiven injuries sit and fester, it becomes a greater and greater struggle to keep silent. The man who is given to bitterness ultimately begins to do injury to himself by his refusal to let go of injustices done in the past. The mere sight of someone with whom he is unreconciled can rouse in his mind a demonic choir of accusations; it can cause his legs to shake, his heart-beat to quicken, his lips to quiver in rage. Within is all the turmoil of all the injustices he has perceived in the past, frothing like steam that has not been allowed to escape from the pot.

This being intolerable, there is only one means by which the bitter man may gain pleasure from his affliction – and therefore only one means by which he may support it. Though his lips are silent, in his heart he harangues against his foes, torments them in his dreams, and takes pleasure, from afar, in all their sufferings.

In time, his ill-will spreads from those who have injured him to the rest of the human race, to the inanimate world, and to God – for in the cauldon of the bitter soul, small injuries are stewed with great, until it seems that life has been but one great sleight against him. Thus an ice-cream truck will disturb him with its singing, and he will grumble in his inmost self, “You too are in on this. You sing only to spite me.”

Choler

The choleric man does not, like the bitter one, hold his tongue. He is the man who cries out “Fool,” and who, in Christ's words, will face the judgement of the Sandhedrin. His case is more complicated: he has returned injury for injury, and so the judgement may fall that not only is he owed nothing, and was wrong in bringing up his case, but also that he now owes in return for the injury he has done. He will, in any case, answer before God, because, having been forgiven everything himself, he has now mistreated the one who owed him but a little.

In choler we do not, however, give full expression to our anger. We are like a pot that lets off a little spurt of steam – the temperature does not continue to rise, but the water does not cease to boil. Like the bitter man, the choleric man carries a hidden trove of unresolved difficulties within him. The choleric man will often think, however, that he has learned a better way of dealing with them than the bitter man. He sees the need for resolution, and begins by mistaking outbursts for just rebukes, feeling that he has done well to be so restrained in his rightful indignignation. An outburst, however, even if it is restrained, is not answerable except in anger. Its true purpose is not to bring about repentance, but to wound.

The choleric man tastes the pleasure of vengeance, but having not exhausted it, still retains his sense of injury. This partially released anger is like a half-treated disease – the symptoms no longer plague, but may flare up again at any moment. Thus he comes to be “prone to anger,” and we say of him that his “fuse” is “short.” Benath any new injury is the burden of the old, and any straw becomes sufficient to break the camel's back. By cursing, shouting and punching of walls, he releases enough of his anger that it ceases to be unbearable. He takes, moreover, a kind of pleasure in these outbursts, feeling that by them he is avenged for the load that he is accustomed to bear.

In time he comes to be angry out of habit. Like a pot always boiling, its lid always rattling, he pours out abuse in every direction and on everything. He feels that his complaints are just: that the world owes him shoes that find there way to the door when you leave them in the kitchen, that baby's ought not to be allowed to cry in the streets, and that traffic lights commit a moral offense in turning red. Rebuked for his cursing he replies, “Do you realize what I have to deal with day to day? Sometimes a man just has to let off steam.”

Rancour

The rancourous man, according to Christ, is the one who will have to answer with Hell fire. He offends against the injunction that we shall forgive as we are forgiven, and he demands, in this world, full recompense for every debt that's owed him.

In its most innocent form, rancour poses as justice. It is the insistence that an eye be given for an eye, a life taken in payment for a life. In our lives, it often appears as the insistence that if we are going to sit and be slandered by our brother, then he had better sit silent in return while we slander him. A husband uncharitably unveils his wife's fault, and she says, “If you are allowed to complain about my temper, then I'm allowed to complain about your laziness.”

As St. Thomas points out, vengeance is a pleasure, and complete vengeance a greater pleasure than vengeance partly sated. But like any pleasure, the rate of return always diminishes. Thus the wife ceases to be content returning injury for injury, and rewards a softly spoken criticism with a harangue of faults and vices. As justice, more and more, pleads against us, we feel more and more that justice is unsatisfied – but instead of turning away from our own wrongs, we seek to avenge ourselves on those around us.

Thus the rancourous man, for the sake of a cut finger, breaks every plate and dish in his house. Seeing the destruction he has wrought, he is brought again to anger – but against whom is vengeance to be taken? Surely not against himself. Like all vices of wrath, he begins with some particular ill-treatment, and comes to think himself ill-treated by the world.

In the end, he imagines himself an avatar of justice: whatsoever he destroys, that deserved the fires of Hell. And so from taking a tooth for a tooth, he goes on to destroy an entire people because some Jewish professors didn't accept him at their school.

Hatred

This leads us the final form of all wrathful vices: when anger ceases to flare outwards, and the fires of hatred burn within. “Anger,” says Aristotle, “arises from offenses against oneself, enmity may arise even without that; we may hate people merely because of what we take to be their character...anger is accompanied by pain, hatred is not...Much may happen to make the angry man pity those who offend him, but the hated under no circumstances wishes to pity a man whom he has once hated: for the one would have the offenders suffer for what they have done; the other would have them cease to exist.”

The man who hates ceases to suffer from his wrath. It is complete. It seems, to him, justice. Wherever he sees the spectre of things that once raised him to anger, he knows them immediately for what they are, and hates. Those whom he hates he need not punish: for in punishment there is still a hint of that desire for reformation. The hated object may not be reformed. It must be destroyed. If he stubs his toe on his bed, he does not kick it, but calmly drags it out into the street and makes a conflagration of the offending object.

He may not receive pity, for pity is repugnant to him. Like Javert faced with Jean Valjean's forgiveness, his only option is repudiation and despair. Thus he casts himself headlong into Hell, and sinks beneath the fiery waves with all the weight of unforgiveness tied around his collar like a stone.

Compassion and Forgiveness

How, then, are we to wrestle with these demons? The only way is through the imitation of Christ. An injury may be caused inadvertantly, because of passion, or on purpose: Aquinas' distinction which survives in law-courts to this day. Wrath clouds the understanding, so that we become poor judges of the intent of those who wrong us. We should always attempt, in charity, to assume ignorance, and say with Christ, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” When we can see that we are injured out of passion, we should search our own hearts, find the passions burning there, and look with compassion on the one who wrongs us. When a wrong is done deliberately, it is hardest to forgive – but here we must draw nearest to the Cross, on which Christ, with His sufferings, forgave all the wrongs done throughout time.

We are called to rebuke wrongs in charity: to correct ignorance with understanding, to counsel the passions with mildness, and to turn the other cheek when deliberately struck. This should be done not when the fires of fury burn bright inside us, and when we feel like an avenging angel on the wing, but when the passion has cooled and it may be done in a spirit of humility.

If your wrath makes you feel you have been too much wronged to abide it, you might do well to read Solzhenytsin's Gulag Archipelago. Having spent ten years in one of Stalin's labour camps, he looks on those who tortured him, and what does he say? This is incomprehensible? This is evil beyond forgiveness? No. He searches his own heart, finds the image of the NKVD within, and explains how it is that men become ensnared in systemic evil. He rebukes the Soviet government honestly and soberly, and describes objectively the injustices suffered by himself and others. If this is possible of a man who suffers for ten years, surely it is possible for us in our marriages and our school-yards.