Aquinas and Zealous Anger

[vames]

Again you confuse righteous anger with disordered anger
and infer I am promoting disordered anger.

I am discussing righteous anger only. If you could
do me the favor of not making inferences about me,
my understanding of Pope Francis, my motives- that
would go a long way toward a fruitful conversation.
Just as with Clem his assumption I was not Catholic
overstepped the bounds of decency your inserting ideas
into the conversation that are not a part of it is not helpful.

I didn’t make inferences about you or your understanding of Pope Francis, since you didn’t say anything about him. After reading his words, I just wondered: if promoting righteous anger, the distinction between righteous and unrighteous anger and the distinction between anger directed to a sinner and anger directed to a sin were such crucial concepts, how come we never hear about them? Neither the biblical texts (posts #19 and #33), nor the Pope care to praise the righteous anger or to specify which kind of anger they address when they talk about it.

Clem never said that you are not Catholic. I don’t see why you keep on putting words in his mouth. You said the Church teaches that righteous anger is an actual virtue given through the Holy Spirit. He said the Church doesn’t teach that and cited 3 theologians. When 2 or more theologians have different opinions, the solution is to consider again the Scripture and the Magisterium - which, well, don’t affirm that righteous anger is an actual virtue given through the Holy Spirit.

To which you replied “the rest of us hold Aquinas was Catholic in his views as were Augustine and Chrystostom” and posted a certain quote, suggesting that it should be taken as authoritative because it is “directly and literally from St. John [Chrysostom] - a canonized Catholic saint”. The exact quote is: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.”

But the quote, as the very notes from the Summa show, is from the anonymous Opus Imperfectum, falsely attributed to Chrysostom. Never mind, though, because even if Clem didn’t utter a single word about the quote, you felt the need to accuse thim in advance: “Are you Clem trying to harrass people into believing a. St. John Chrystotom was not a Catholic, had not read the Catechism and b. Was encouraging people in vice?”

Do you truly want to quote the real St John Chrysostom, a Catholic ECF? Let’s open again the Summa where it quotes him: “Nothing is more repulsive than the look of an angry man, and nothing uglier than a ruthless face, and most of all than a cruel soul”; “Anger differs in no way from madness; it is a demon while it lasts, indeed more troublesome than one harassed by a demon”. Did Chrysostom have a bad temper, too, like Jerome?

 

[vames]

Anger is a natural passion given by God- like love, or
sorrow, etc. To say something given by God to
every man on the planet is to be rejected, avoided,
etc. especially in view of the fact that Jesus Himself
grew angry as did the prophets and St. Paul would
indicate God gave us something useless, without merit.
Don’t you agree? Do you believe God makes gifts of
useless attributes frequently?

Yes, I agree. That’s why I never understood “Every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment” or other condemnations of anger as advocating impassibility. Trying to suppress anger whenever it appears can only lead us to denial and other problems. But when anger appears, I can recognize its cause (am I threatened? wronged? it’s my bad disposition because of a toothache? etc) and then mind my own business of dealing rationally with the cause: the Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go, because from now on it can’t help me anymore.

My guess is that Augustine or Aquinas needed to come up with their distinctions righteous/unrighteous and sinner/sin because they took the texts literally and then most likely noticed that 1) no human can extirpate anger from his or her nature; 2) anger is an “adaptive” emotion, linked to our capacity to defend ourselves. So what to do with such an impossible teaching? Their solution was to introduce these distinctions, although in reality they can be easily used by people to justify harboring as much anger as they want, just by treating every biblical condemnation of anger as it were about “other” types of anger.

Jerome had a correct intuition (if we love the others like Jesus taught us and pray for them, anger disappears pretty quickly) and an incorrect one (if anger can disappear, it shouldn’t exist at all anymore). Pope Francis’ approach is more gradual and realistic: praying for those with whom we are “a little angry” is a step towards the law of love, by decreasing general aggressivity and generating peace. So he doesn’t need to introduce distinctions between types of anger, to praise a certain type of anger or to command “extirpate your anger right now”.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I didn’t make inferences about you or your understanding of Pope Francis, since you didn’t say anything about him. After reading his words, I just wondered: if promoting righteous anger, the distinction between righteous and unrighteous anger and the distinction between anger directed to a sinner and anger directed to a sin were such crucial concepts, how come we never hear about them? Neither the biblical texts (posts #19 and #33), nor the Pope care to praise the righteous anger or to specify which kind of anger they address when they talk about it.

Clem never said that you are not Catholic. I don’t see why you keep on putting words in his mouth. You said the Church teaches that righteous anger is an actual virtue given through the Holy Spirit. He said the Church doesn’t teach that and cited 3 theologians. When 2 or more theologians have different opinions, the solution is to consider again the Scripture and the Magisterium - which, well, don’t affirm that righteous anger is an actual virtue given through the Holy Spirit.

To which you replied “the rest of us hold Aquinas was Catholic in his views as were Augustine and Chrystostom” and posted a certain quote, suggesting that it should be taken as authoritative because it is “directly and literally from St. John [Chrysostom] - a canonized Catholic saint”. The exact quote is: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.”

But the quote, as the very notes from the Summa show, is from the anonymous Opus Imperfectum, falsely attributed to Chrysostom. Never mind, though, because even if Clem didn’t utter a single word about the quote, you felt the need to accuse thim in advance: “Are you Clem trying to harrass people into believing a. St. John Chrystotom was not a Catholic, had not read the Catechism and b. Was encouraging people in vice?”

Do you truly want to quote the real St John Chrysostom, a Catholic ECF? Let’s open again the Summa where it quotes him: “Nothing is more repulsive than the look of an angry man, and nothing uglier than a ruthless face, and most of all than a cruel soul”; “Anger differs in no way from madness; it is a demon while it lasts, indeed more troublesome than one harassed by a demon”. Did Chrysostom have a bad temper, too, like Jerome?

Clearly, your assessment is one sided. You make it sound as if the question of anger is never broached or is always treated in the negative because, you imply, the consensus among Catholic theologians and Catholic teaching is that anger is wrong. The truth is that for both, anger is a passion that needs to be tempered and controlled by reason. That is Catholic teaching and is essentially summed up by Aquinas in this way.

I answer that, Anger, as stated above (Article 1), is properly the name of a passion. A passion of the sensitive appetite is good in so far as it is regulated by reason, whereas it is evil if it set the order of reason aside. Now the order of reason, in regard to anger, may be considered in relation to two things. First, in relation to the appetible object to which anger tends, and that is revenge. Wherefore if one desire revenge to be taken in accordance with the order of reason, the desire of anger is praiseworthy, and is called "zealous anger" [Cf. Gregory, Moral. v, 45. On the other hand, if one desire the taking of vengeance in any way whatever contrary to the order of reason, for instance if he desire the punishment of one who has not deserved it, or beyond his deserts, or again contrary to the order prescribed by law, or not for the due end, namely the maintaining of justice and the correction of defaults, then the desire of anger will be sinful, and this is called sinful anger.

newadvent.org/summa/3158.htm

If you have actually read the Summa and the Church Fathers in this regard you know what the actual teaching has been. Aquinas calls “zealous” anger a rightly directed anger that is targeted against injustice. Yet, you seem to persist in only giving a one-sided view of the issue as if it has ONLY been viewed your way traditionally. You know that is not the truth, yet you persist in promoting that false notion. The question is, “Why?”
[/quote]

 

[Peter_Plato]

“Let us pass to the despotic part of the soul, spirit. We must not eliminate it utterly from the youth nor yet allow him to use it all the time. Let us train boys from earliest childhood to be patient when they suffer wrongs themselves, but, if they see another being wronged, to sally forth courageously and aid the sufferer in fitting measure.”

– St. John Chrysostom, An Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children, 66.

“Do you see that our practice has more power to do good? By practice I mean, not your fasting, nor yet your strewing sackcloth and ashes under you, but if you despise wealth, as it ought to be despised; if you be kindly affectioned, if you give your bread to the hungry, if you control anger, if you cast out vainglory, if you put away envy.

– St. John Chrysostom, Homily 46 on Matthew

Do you think that John Chrysostom essentially disagrees with Aquinas that anger can be righteous? Doesn’t he mean by “if you control anger” exactly what Aquinas was saying in my previous post? He is not meaning get rid of anger because it has no place, he does mean “control anger” by directing it properly at injustice, not at others (see first quote - “sally forth courageously”)

 

[marywarfield]

I didn’t make inferences about you or your understanding of Pope Francis, since you didn’t say anything about him. After reading his words, I just wondered: if promoting righteous anger, the distinction between righteous and unrighteous anger and the distinction between anger directed to a sinner and anger directed to a sin were such crucial concepts, how come we never hear about them? Neither the biblical texts (posts #19 and #33), nor the Pope care to praise the righteous anger or to specify which kind of anger they address when they talk about it.

Clem never said that you are not Catholic. I don’t see why you keep on putting words in his mouth. You said the Church teaches that righteous anger is an actual virtue given through the Holy Spirit. He said the Church doesn’t teach that and cited 3 theologians. When 2 or more theologians have different opinions, the solution is to consider again the Scripture and the Magisterium - which, well, don’t affirm that righteous anger is an actual virtue given through the Holy Spirit.

To which you replied “the rest of us hold Aquinas was Catholic in his views as were Augustine and Chrystostom” and posted a certain quote, suggesting that it should be taken as authoritative because it is “directly and literally from St. John [Chrysostom] - a canonized Catholic saint”. The exact quote is: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.”

But the quote, as the very notes from the Summa show, is from the anonymous Opus Imperfectum, falsely attributed to Chrysostom. Never mind, though, because even if Clem didn’t utter a single word about the quote, you felt the need to accuse thim in advance: “Are you Clem trying to harrass people into believing a. St. John Chrystotom was not a Catholic, had not read the Catechism and b. Was encouraging people in vice?”

Do you truly want to quote the real St John Chrysostom, a Catholic ECF? Let’s open again the Summa where it quotes him: “Nothing is more repulsive than the look of an angry man, and nothing uglier than a ruthless face, and most of all than a cruel soul”; “Anger differs in no way from madness; it is a demon while it lasts, indeed more troublesome than one harassed by a demon”. Did Chrysostom have a bad temper, too, like Jerome?

Did Chrystostom get falsely quoted? Lol. Ok I will
give you that one and research it further.

But if, as you did earlier, accuse me of taking the
Catechism out of context, why then did you not
address my post on the CCC where it explicitly
states anger is a natural passion and
then several paragraphs later states any passion
directed toward a moral good us taken up into the
virtues and any passion directed to evil becomes
a vice. Now that IS the Catechism talking and no
where does it say we can direct passions toward
a good for just a short time or a little bit.

Therefore it would seem to me that the catechism is clearly NOT
rejecting the possibility of righteous anger.

You ask why the Pope did not address it? How would I know? He didn’t
fax me his speech plans. My guess is he didn’t address it because he was
interested in discussing a different kind of anger, the kind that dive bombs
into injury which is usually the result of “self righteous anger” and not righteous
anger.

 

[marywarfield]

Yes, I agree. That’s why I never understood “Every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment” or other condemnations of anger as advocating impassibility. Trying to suppress anger whenever it appears can only lead us to denial and other problems. But when anger appears, I can recognize its cause (am I threatened? wronged? it’s my bad disposition because of a toothache? etc) and then mind my own business of dealing rationally with the cause: the Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go, because from now on it can’t help me anymore.

My guess is that Augustine or Aquinas needed to come up with their distinctions righteous/unrighteous and sinner/sin because they took the texts literally and then most likely noticed that 1) no human can extirpate anger from his or her nature; 2) anger is an “adaptive” emotion, linked to our capacity to defend ourselves. So what to do with such an impossible teaching? Their solution was to introduce these distinctions, although in reality they can be easily used by people to justify harboring as much anger as they want, just by treating every biblical condemnation of anger as it were about “other” types of anger.

Jerome had a correct intuition (if we love the others like Jesus taught us and pray for them, anger disappears pretty quickly) and an incorrect one (if anger can disappear, it shouldn’t exist at all anymore). Pope Francis’ approach is more gradual and realistic: praying for those with whom we are “a little angry” is a step towards the law of love, by decreasing general aggressivity and generating peace. So he doesn’t need to introduce distinctions between types of anger, to praise a certain type of anger or to command “extirpate your anger right now”.

Because we are dealing with consciously directed will. Forgiveness is not
a passion. Forgiveness is a conscious act of the will and directed controlled
by reason. Anger that is righteous is also directed by reason and controlled
by an act if will.

Whereas their passionate underlayers if you will are natural reactions
Controlled by emotion. Such as compassion and anger that is not
righteous. Therefore we have the saint talking about unreasonable patience.
and again many times people dive bomb on that one as well “how can
patience ever be unreasonable?” and on they go to quote the Bible " love is
patient" and immediately reject the possibility of unreasonable patience.

Yet if I re-word “unreasonable patience” to “enabling” I will get a chorus
of ayes.

 

[marywarfield]

And Vames we still have to address the Summa
158-158.8. In which it appears that lack of appropriate anger
can be a vice.
newadvent.org/summa/3158.htm#article8

 

[vames]

Do you think that John Chrysostom essentially disagrees with Aquinas that anger can be righteous? Doesn’t he mean by “if you control anger” exactly what Aquinas was saying in my previous post? He is not meaning get rid of anger because it has no place, he does mean “control anger” by directing it properly at injustice, not at others (see first quote - “sally forth courageously”)

If you read posts #42 and #36, you realize these quotes are really music to my ears.

You previously asked me: “You do understand the Catholic view of evil as privation or distortion of the good, do you not?” If you aree with this view, I guess you agree that the root of moral thinking is something positive, the whole, the perfection, the affirmation, something linked to recognizing and desiring the good, before recognizing and rejecting the bad, the degrees of privation, the negation, the imperfection. We are primarily “for” something and someone before being “against” something and someone. We define ourselves by what we affirm before we define ourselves by what we deny. Precisely because we aren’t dualistic thinkers who believe that good and evil are equally important forces that divide our world.

I talked about my own feelings that prompt me to jump to help a woman who is endangered by a human aggressor or a falling rock and I said that my immediate reaction is to feel empathy for the woman, instead of anger for the attacker - not because by default I can’t feel anger or because I abhor and repress anger whenever I catch it, but because this it what I feel. I can conceive that others can be prompted first by anger; but when I read “if they see another being wronged, to sally forth courageously and aid the sufferer in fitting measure”, I think first about the empathy for the wronged. In any case, I guess there’s no way someone can feel anger for the attacker without feeling empathy for the wronged. Am I naive? This is not a rhetorical question.

 

[vames]

And Vames we still have to address the Summa
158-158.8. In which it appears that lack of appropriate anger
can be a vice.
newadvent.org/summa/3158.htm#article8

OK. Let’s start with your assumption that righteous anger is an actual virtue given through the Holy Spirit.

As per the Catechism, a virtue is an habitual and firm disposition to do the good; the human virtues are stable dispositions of the intellect and the will. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are permanent dispositions which make man docile in following the promptings of the Holy Spirit; they complete and perfect the virtues of those who receive them.

By contrast, emotions are by nature fleeting and unstable (which is not good or bad: this is how they are). We don’t find Anger or Fear listed as virtues, along with Prudence or Temperance, and for a good reason: they are basic, quick reactions to external stimuli.

So the possibility that emotions can be assumed/taken up in moral virtues doesn’t mean that emotions ARE or BECOME moral virtues, let alone that they ARE or BECOME gifts of the Holy Spirit. This is not a transitive relationship, like in:

1. if A can be used in/by B, then A = B
2. if B can be perfected by C, then A = B = C
   where
   A = emotion
   B = virtue
   C = gift of the Holy Spirit.

Like all emotions, anger has a simple nature; it only can have degrees, not two or more different natures, an “emotional nature” and a “moral nature” and an “intellectual nature”. On a basic level, all anger is “good”, because it serves to protect us from external immediate threats, just like it protects animals. Then, as humans, we can notice that anger can be wrong (someone pokes you in the back - you react: who the ***? - then turn back and notice your smiling friend - your anger is gone: ah, it was you…) or right (someone pokes you in the back - you react: who the ***? - then turn back and notice a thief - you start to think about ways to defend yourself). So you can say that anger was wrong or right when you already have the hindsight provided by your reason. But you don’t think with your anger and your anger doesn’t transform itself into logical thinking. You don’t build your moral code according to your anger and your anger can’t transform itself into a moral code.

You said “Now that IS the Catechism talking and no where does it say we can direct passions toward a good for just a short time or a little bit. Therefore it would seem to me that the catechism is clearly NOT rejecting the possibility of righteous anger”. That it doesn’t reject the possibility doesn’t equal an affirmation. Common sense and knowledge of biology and psychology come to help us. Biologically, anger is a tool for survival, a tool for alerting us about the imminence of a threat. It’s the “rush of blood to the head”. So it is naturally short-lived, because nobody can sustain a powerful emotion for very long, regardless if he/she wants it or not. That’s why the Opus Imperfectum, referenced in the Summa, got it right when it pointed out that “Anger, when it has a cause, is not anger but judgment. For anger, properly speaking, denotes a movement of passion”.

Further, when regulated by reason and subjected to the control of the will, the passions may be considered good and used as means of acquiring and exercising virtue. But they are means, tools, auxiliaries, as Fr Vincent Serpa explains here, not an end in themselves and not a necessary condition for developing a moral conscience and acting on it. A pencil is not a drawing. So whoever claims that lack of anger is a sin or a vice is in fact condemning the obnubilation of moral conscience, i.e. the rational process through which people convince themselves that murder or adultery are morally good or neutral. To infer that lack of anger per se impedes an individual to discern that murder or adultery are bad and makes him or her morally numb is really reaching.

On the contrary, the attempt to maintain anger, out of fear that in its absence our moral conscience will be dulled and people will become indolent, is risky - hence the repeated warnings from the Bible against anger (unqualified: anger, period) and the repeated characterization of God as “slow to anger”, echoed in Paul when he spoke about human love: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs”. Again, this is a matter of practical wisdom, not of intellectual speculation: history and common sense teach us that attempting to prolong anger and to confuse it with a virtue is the shortest way to free the anger (until it clouds our minds and determines our behavior, even when we don’t realize it), not to control it.

So the fact that the Catholic examinations of conscience ask “Have I been angry?” instead of “Have I been unrighteously angry?” or “Have I failed to feel righteous angry?” corresponds to a clearer understanding of emotions as opposed to logical thinking and moral reasoning: we know that a pencil is not a drawing and it’s not the necessary condition for making a drawing. We can be sure that a certain thing is wrong even if we don’t feel any anger anymore (again, judges don’t have to feel righteously angry when they do they job) and even before we get to feel any anger (children are taught that adultery is wrong and they accept it, even if they don’t know by experience what adultery is).

 

[vames]

Therefore we have the saint talking about unreasonable patience.
and again many times people dive bomb on that one as well “how can
patience ever be unreasonable?” and on they go to quote the Bible " love is
patient" and immediately reject the possibility of unreasonable patience.

Yet if I re-word “unreasonable patience” to “enabling” I will get a chorus
of ayes.

Not from me: I can just point out that the quote about “unreasonable patience” doesn’t belong to St John Chrysostom - it’s from the anonymous Opus Imperfectum.

 

[marywarfield]

Not from me: I can just point out that the quote about “unreasonable patience” doesn’t belong to St John Chrysostom - it’s from the anonymous Opus Imperfectum.

But you can’t agree that unreasonable patience
as Aquinas addresses it BOT Chrsostom “enables” wrongdoing?

 

[vames]

But you can’t agree that unreasonable patience
as Aquinas addresses it BOT Chrsostom “enables” wrongdoing?

Of course I can. History shows that there is such thing as unreasonable patience. It’s just that, out of prudence, I prefer to pay attention to the Biblical texts about God being “slow to anger” and about “Love is patient, love is kind /…/ it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs”. Why? Because I have learned, from my experience and from others’ experience, that anger is notoriously hard to control and that it’s plainly prideful to say that we can encourage our righeous anger without any risk of being deceived by it. Anger is always quicker than reason, whether I accept it or not, so I prefer to be calm when I make my decisions and to refrain from any theoretical justification that can “empower” my anger.

 

[marywarfield]

Not from me: I can just point out that the quote about “unreasonable patience” doesn’t belong to St John Chrysostom - it’s from the anonymous Opus Imperfectum.

It also seems at some point Vames reasonable
to concern ourselves with our fellow man and not
just our own state of holiness/lack of. For we end
up in our efforts to avoid those things that we worry
ourselves might condemn ourselves leaving the rest
of the world high and dry like a bunch of Buddhists.
For instance a Buddhist gives to charity not so much
cause he is concerned someone else might starve
but because he wants to lessen his own materialism
on the Eight Fold Path to Enlightenment.
And so we are becoming.

If the Catholic governor of New York states pro life
people are no longer welcome in his state, which he did
last week, there is a decided lack of outcry. Why?
Lots of reasons I suppose but all of them poor.
A. Apathy and sloth
B. a compulsive fear of being angry or the cause of
anger because WE might not get to Heaven.
C. Despair
D. Condemnation from those who view all anger
as sin and not useful.
E. those of the I Am crowd who believe we ARE God.

One of the interesting things is no one ever gets
angry in our Church anymore.
Kill somebody? I forgive you.
Genocide? We forgive you and no of course we are
not angry.
Blew the legs off a little kid? Of course we are not angry
because we don’t want to make Jesus…ANGRY. Lol.
Our biggest reason for rejecting anger is fear of
making God angry cause He said no. At the same
time we promote a God who is unconditionally
loving and forgiving. Yet He might get mad.

I remember the totally insipid response in my
former diocese when adter twenty years it was admitted
that it sheltered the most scandalous
child molesting priest in American history. The then
Bishop got to the pulpit in the Cathedral and announced
(to us parents who had rushed to the catholic schoolU
to rescue our children after a victim set it ablaze and
burned it to the ground at the start of the school day)
" We have to remember priests and Bishops are
only human and therefore sin like all people. "

Inadequate much?

 

[vames]

It also seems at some point Vames reasonable
to concern ourselves with our fellow man and not
just our own state of holiness/lack of.

Absolutely, but things are not as separated as they may seem: if I’m prudent about my own anger, it isn’t just because “a compulsive fear of being angry” motivated by my attempt to preserve my holiness, but because I want to avoid doing wrong to others. Because I know from experience that if anger is a desire for vengeance, it’s easy to justify my anger and kill an abortionist or a governor of my state because I am moved by a “righteous” desire of vengeance. This is the thing that Jesus warned us against when He spoke about loving our enemies vs. “an eye for an eye” style of justice. Thankfully, we can do better than that.

I have reflected about your post about the rude guy from the Assembly of God and what your visiting priest and fellow parishioners said. And I felt angry, believe it or not. If the guy insulted you and your family and said you are filthy harlots, this was an obvious reason to “escort him to the door”; to say that you should have hidden the statue or the icon “to avoid offending him” is definitely stupid and can legitimate any stupid rule saying that people are forbidden to expose icons and statues in their own homes, because it can offend any potential guests who have other beliefs. The priest and the parishioners can ask themselves: if a member of this Assembly of God enters a Catholic church as a tourist or if there’s a storm outside and there’s no other shelter, or if he sees a Catholic church from outside, he may be offended by the statues and icons and the cross on the tower, then why do we keep exposing them? It’s absurd. By this logic, we have no rights and the member of the Assembly of God has all the rights. So your husband was right to tell the guy to leave your house; it wasn’t the guy’s house, so he should have known that he can’t make the rules in your house.

But the priest and the parishioners may have a point about “engaging him in debate” - this is what the Pope and the hierarchy do when they engage in a dialogue with non-Catholic people, because they know that responding to insults with insults (I’m not saying you husband did that) and basing their behavior on anger can lead only to more anger, hate and misunderstanding from the part of the “other”. Sometimes this dialogue is possible; sometimes is impossible, because the “others” have more anger (“righteous anger” from their perspective) than we have and are clearly blinded to any rational discussion. I guess the latter was the case with your rude guest. Thankfully, people are different; besides, a person can be overcome by anger at a certain moment and can be calm an open to discussion later. So it’s a matter of discernment - if and how can we talk to people whose minds are clouded by emotion and whose beliefs are founded on anger (like in: Catholics = those despicable idolaters who worship statues; people who demand punishment for sexual abuse by priests = those vengeful hotheads who don’t understand that all people are humans, therefore sinners).

So if we don’t want to be told “your mind is clouded by anger, so you don’t understand X, so you don’t deserve my attention”, we should make other realize that we aren’t motivated by anger. It doesn’t mean that we should suppress or condemn our initial, natural anger: it means that we don’t act out of our own anger anymore, but out of rational considerations, like “your right ends when the right of others begin” or “do to others as you would have them do to you”.

Does the world of today sorely need to be taught righteous anger, because people have become too acquiescent in the face of evil? I have asked myself this question when faced to the “just let’s be nice to each other” attitude that leads nowhere (and that in my eyes has more to do with a general lack of empathy than with a lack of righteous anger). But so far there’s nothing on this topic coming from Benedict XVI and Francis. What I see, instead, is a constant chorus of protests from “righteously angry” laypeople who constantly condemn the latest popes for being too lukewarm and “nice” for their own tastes. A thundering pope, a crusading pope, who excommunicates people left and right and rejects all dialogue with “heretics” is what they want. I’ve seen the SSPXers posting a picture of Jesus cleansing the temple when they wanted to justify their shameful behavior at the Kristallnacht memorial. Such “much more Catholic than the pope” attitudes taught me a good lesson about righteous anger assumed as a guiding principle for dealing with “others”.

 

[Peter_Plato]

So if we don’t want to be told “your mind is clouded by anger, so you don’t understand X, so you don’t deserve my attention”, we should make other realize that we aren’t motivated by anger. It doesn’t mean that we should suppress or condemn our initial, natural anger: it means that we don’t act out of our own anger anymore, but out of rational considerations, like “your right ends when the right of others begin” or “do to others as you would have them do to you”.

My suspicion here is that there is a confusion between the emotional or outward manifestations of anger and the internal “motion” or movement to action at injustice that Aquinas likely has in mind. We associate anger with its physical manifestations - red face, erratic gestures, loud vocalization, bulging eyes, forceful or aggressive movements - when I don’t think those are what anger, properly speaking, entails. These are the “accidentals” that might result from anger not properly controlled, but are not essential to it.

 

[vames]

My suspicion here is that there is a confusion between the emotional or outward manifestations of anger and the internal “motion” or movement to action at injustice that Aquinas likely has in mind.

We all know that anger has multiple manifestations. Passive aggresivity is an excellent outlet for an anger that is suppressed or denied.

 

[clem456]

My suspicion here is that there is a confusion between the emotional or outward manifestations of anger and the internal “motion” or movement to action at injustice that Aquinas likely has in mind. We associate anger with its physical manifestations - red face, erratic gestures, loud vocalization, bulging eyes, forceful or aggressive movements - when I don’t think those are what anger, properly speaking, entails. These are the “accidentals” that might result from anger not properly controlled, but are not essential to it.

“Anger, when it has a cause, is not anger but judgment. For anger, properly speaking, denotes a movement of passion”: and when a man is angry with reason, his anger is no longer from passion: wherefore he is said to judge, not to be angry.

 

[Peter_Plato]

“Anger, when it has a cause, is not anger but judgment. For anger, properly speaking, denotes a movement of passion”: and when a man is angry with reason, his anger is no longer from passion: wherefore he is said to judge, not to be angry.

Source?

 

[glendab]

Well, we do know that anger is one of the seven deadly sins and is to be avoided. Yet we see Jesus being angry at the money-changers in the Temple and taking a whip of cords and basically trashing the place! Most definitely an angry, zealous outburst.

Thank you Mary for the document for this discussion. It makes for interesting reading and I will give you a better answer when I’ve completely read it. It is something to think about.

On a personal level, my anger has gotten me into trouble more than once and caused sin in my life, so I know I need to mortify as soon as I recognize I’m angry. It hides though in many forms in my life. So just stiffing it isn’t enough. I need to root it out and eliminate it entirely to be free of it’s corroding influence in my life. Anger is a very negative emotion.

So how do we distinguish between righteous anger over a perceived or real injustice and the actions we need to take? Simple: Do whatever He tells you in the form of doing what the Church tells us. Then I don’t have to worry at all about whether or not my response is correct.

I will probably never take a whip to anyone in a Temple area. I’m not God and He does anger correctly no matter how He does it and how I may perceive His actions. He does get angry doesn’t He? :bigyikes:

Glenda

 

[clem456]

Source?

It’s a source that you have already referenced in this thread, that you claim to be intimate with.

Read. Pray. Absorb. Listen to what the Church says.