The Apple That Eats Itself: Further Notes on Anger
Responding to Objections from Cassian on Anger
Welcome to all the new readers! We’ve been slowly going through John Cassian’s Institutes, taking today to revisit two of the objections that his treatment raised. You can read the original post here, and read Cassian’s chapter on anger here.
Revisiting Anger
In looking at the “eight principal faults”, Cassian’s treatment of vice has primarily to do with how natural things become twisted and tortured. Consider his account of gluttony and fornication: both of these vices emerge from good things—desire and the senses. Without desire and the senses, we cannot come to a knowledge of God, connect with other people, or engage God’s world, and so an answer cannot be swearing off the root of the issue.
But anger is a different case here: Cassian sees almost no role for anger. It emerges as a reaction to wrongness—rightly or wrongly perceived—but anger itself becomes a distorting feature all the time if nurtured. As Cassian puts it,
From almost every cause the emotion of wrath boils over, and blinds the eyes of the soul, and bringing the deadly beam of a worse disease over the keenness of our sight, prevents us from seeing the sun of righteousness. It makes no difference whether gold plates, or lead, or what metal you please, are placed over our eyelids, the value of the metal makes no difference in our blindness.1
Anger serves a negative function, in other words: it can only indicate something might be wrong, but it cannot guide toward a solution. It can dislodge us from being stuck, but it cannot move us well or guide us accurately. The sole positive aspect of it is that it can be directed against our own sin, moving us away from sin, but itself again unable to move us toward holiness.
Is Anger Something That CAN Be Done Away With?
One objection raised is that anger is simply a feature—and a good feature—of human life. As Greg put it,
It seems to me that anger is an emotion which exists in the human soul as an antibody designed to manifest symptoms. Just as physical symptoms warn us about an illness or injury, anger warns us of a problem. This problem can be spiritual pain caused by sin, such as lust, greed or idolatry. Or anger can form in us or others due to our failure to practice kindness, self-discipline, humility or patience (Proverbs 14:29, Proverbs 15:1).
This is where Cassian is in partial agreement. The problem with anger is that because it is a passion, it is intrinsic to what a human is2. Orthodox spirituality emphasizes the role of struggle, of the spiritual and moral life as a visceral one—even after the Holy Spirit indwells us. Insofar as we are “working out our salvation with fear and trembling, for it is the Spirit of God who works within you”, this is a lifelong work. It’s akin, then, to the lingering wound of Paul, a feature of human life that will mark us until the end, however softened but present.
I describe it as a “wound” and not a gift3 because anger is a kind of attested knowledge, but a distorted knowledge. Our reactions are not just spontaneous volcanic eruptions, but our body’s way of describing what a thing is4. If we can mentally describe an opponent as a person who is blocking my pursuit of a goal, our emotional responses also describe that same person in different language. To describe a spider as a necessary feature of an ecological system intellectually, and to recoil in fear at the same spider are two of the ways our bodies describe the same thing. This “speaking in two languages” is just part of how our bodies work, and the two languages often speak as one: the emotions color our intellectual judgments, and our intellect can temper our emotional judgments. But we always “speak” in two tones, and though we might aim that they speak as one, we are divided people engaging a complicated world.
Where Cassian disagrees is that there is definitely a higher and lower “language”: one which is more articulate and clear than the other. I take it to be true that “the body keeps score”, that our bodies hold on to events from the past. But it’s also worth saying that what score the body keeps is not self-evident. If I flinch or recoil at something, it doesn’t automatically mean that it’s worth recoiling at. Prejudices, disgusts, and automatic responses are to be taken seriously, but not ultimately.
Can Anger Be Used for Justice?
The slipperiest of temptations! If what I’ve put above is right, then it seems to follow that, even if anger tips us off that something is wrong, and dislodges us from apathy, it’s work is done at that point. One could argue that the world is agonism all the way down, a world of force needing to be met with counter-force, chastened and righteous. And indeed, Scripture describes the world as one in which darkness tries to overtake light, in which powers and principalities rule and dominate truthfulness. The question, though, is whether anger can fund the opposition to this darkness.
I’m skeptical of a Christian mode of engagement with justice as buying into either the notion of “politics as agonism5” or the notion that a kind of “cold anger6” is either useful or intrinsic to the work of justice. With Cassian, the difference between the intent toward which anger is put matters little, insofar as anger distorts and keeps the opponent as the perpetual opponent. In this way, cold anger is almost worse, in that it is nurtured, sustained and coaxed along like embers kept alive overnight, because I will need them for the work of justice to continue.
The trick of the passions for Cassian is that they actually are successful. Lust and gluttony do in fact make you feel better. They provide pleasure, relief from boredom, and a sense of well-being, but they do it short supply, and require us to keep coming back to them. They do not deliver on their promise long-term. Anger is no different here: anger will do work in short bursts, producing great effort in short spaces, and to treat it as a long-term sustaining motivational source is to try to make anger do something it is not meant to do.
To sustain anger for the sake of long-term work, then, is not to move toward justice, but to develop a grudge, to turn the biases of anger into permanent structures capable of helping anger carry on long after the flame has gone out. It is to institutionalize a divided world as the norm in which the Christian moral life takes place, as opposed to exercising hope in Christ’s transformation of the soul or treating the enemy as a person to be loved. It is to desire that which is temporary—the flames of anger—to be permanent, rather than letting anger be a transitional signal which (in many ways) is designed to give way.
In The End, God
The bigger stakes for Cassian are simply this: God is not angry. That we feel divine displeasure is experienced as anger, but it is only as a contrast: God’s love, in the presence of injustice, can only be sensed, Cassian thinks, as a kind of judgment upon the state of things. But that God is not pleased with injustice is born not out of a desire to destroy the world, but to see it renewed and holy.
That we see Jesus angry is not a point against this: Jesus, as fully human and fully God, was one—and Christian theology has been fairly uniform on this point—who was bringing atonement not just to the soul, but to the human being as such. And if anger is part of how humans know something has gone wrong, why would expect Jesus to be otherwise? The difference is that when Jesus is angry, he does not allow that anger to lead the charge, but sits down first to make a whip—allowing that anger to dissipate—before going in to drive out the doves and moneychangers. His work here is specific and targeted, not raging out of control, not even drive by anger, but zeal for the Lord’s house.
Anger’s temptations are ten thousand, and all the more reason that Cassian wants us to look at it in the eye and refuse it in all cases but one: against that which cannot be brought to health—the corruptions of our bodies and souls.
Cassian, Institutes, ch. 6.
The distinction here between “passions” and “emotions” is important, but not one we can get into today. See here Thomas Dixon’s excellent work From Passions to Emotions for a genealogy of how the older language was displaced, and the effects this has on understanding moral psychology.
There are innumerable works now by this title. That anger is a gift should be taken in a very modified sense: it dislodges us from apathy, it tells us quickly that we perceive something as out of joint, but it’s hard to see how anger is akin to other gifts, like love, which can be sustained, shared, and returned to others.
There has been a lot of interesting work to revive emotions as a kind of knowledge, and not just reactions or confirmations of intellectual conclusions. The verdict is still out here for me, but I’m persuaded at least to say that our reactions tell us things about what we think that provoke us to ask what it is that we might be thinking unbeknownst to ourselves.
Thank you for this extended explanation. Such excellent discourse enlightens the soul. I covet the opportunity to learn from those who I admire. You make many good points about the Cassian view. The few points where my reformed theological background tugs me back from understanding boil down to fundamental concepts about the degree to which humans have control over their sinful nature. That is the foundation beneath my views on dealing with passions like anger.
My difference with Cassian on some points is likely due to my years as a student of R.C. Sproul. In the debate between Augustine and Pelagius, Cassian’s teaching was presented as a “less flawed” middle ground position in Sproul’s teaching. That Cassian felt the church had gone too far in accepting Augustinian teaching as doctrine and needed to be pulled back. I understand and agree with Cassian’s position on some things, such as his refined view of predestination. I was never able to fully come to terms with his teaching about the interaction of human free will and grace. But I was a student of Sproul, not a follower. I was never able to fully come to terms with all of Calvin’s TULIP either. When it comes to the finer understanding of fallen human passions, I know I have room to grow.
This is my current understanding: Augustine posited that innate human passions like anger only became a dispositive aspect of human free will after the fall when sin became inherent in the nature of humankind. As a result, controlling or eradicating those passions can only happen via an act of grace by God. We can pray for grace, but whether or not we receive it is solely at the will of God. Pelagius believed that the original sin was Adam’s alone, and not passed along to humanity in in subsequent generations. Because he believed that people were basically born good (without sinful nature), he believed that negative human passions were a moral defect which could be fully remedied by enlightenment and acts of human will. Cassian believed that grace was required, but that whether and when grace could act was controlled by human will. Both grace and human will are required. So, the difference in beliefs is one of monergism vs synergism in the utility of grace. As it relates to dealing with passions like anger, so far, I have come to believe the more monergistic view.
While the manifestations of and freedom from original sin may be my core issue regarding what we can actually do about anger, it doesn’t address the stickier issue (stickier for me at least) of whether or not anger fulfills any useful purpose. I can see both sides of this question. I’m not sure I can clearly articulate my gut feelings about it. We might also ask what purpose is served by Christ leaving us to struggle with the sin within us instead or eradicating it after saving our souls from its eternal condemnation. The answer to that broader question on original sin is more clearly defined by widely accepted doctrine regarding sanctification. Perhaps it is the same answer for anger, but persuasive arguments can obviously be made for other perspectives.
As someone who has struggled with anger on a personal level, I have been drawn to the perspectives that align with the spiritual disciplines that have proven helpful to me in that regard. Your thoughtful writing has reminded me that every time I am led to dig deeper into the teachings of the early church fathers, it is a blessing. I’m looking forward now to studying Cassian further.
Your brother Coram Deo,
Greg Williams
www.christiansoldier21.org
Hmmm... What do you think of the verses that describe God's anger?