Anger and the Unmaking of Meaning

John Cassian, The Blindness of the Soul and the Destruction of The World

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The (Near) Uselessness of A Common Affection

Anger is, for John Cassian, the vice which threatens the moral life more than any other, not only because it is so common to us, but because—unlike the roots of gluttony or fornication—it doesn’t piggyback on something productive. It is, for Cassian, nearly completely destructive:

In our forth combat, the the deadly poison of anger has to be utterly rooted out from the inmost corners of our soul. For as long as this remains in our hearts and blinds with its hurtful darkness the eye of the soul, we can neither acquire right judgment and discretion, nor gain the insight which springs from an honest gaze, or ripeness of counsel, nor can we be partakers of life, or retentive of righteousness, or even have the capacity for spiritual and true light¹.

Anger prevents us from seeing, which in turns prevents us from having good judgment about what we are seeing. This in turn prevents us from being discerning, for we do not see well, nor can we provide counsel to others, having not seen well ourselves. Not being able to judge well, we remain unable to follow anywhere worth going.

This is not to say, however, that we stay still, being stuck in anger. For as Rowan Williams puts it², the spiritual life described here is not one which has neutrality as a possible: one is either moving upward toward God or descending. As such, anger can have only the effect of moving us away from sight, which in turn means that we are unable to judge how to move forward or guide anyone else forward.

Anger cannot, contrary to many of contemporary proponent, be the source of justice, or be a productive part of politics, simply because it blinds us as makes any rational pursuit of the good impossible. Of ancient interpreters, Dante comes closest to our world, describing anger as a kind of misguided justice, viewing anger in the same way that Cassian views gluttony—as arising as a perversion of some good desire. But he stands mostly alone in this. Aquinas disagrees, following Cassian, who views anger as an uncontrollable fire, not that which can be channeled.

The single case in which anger is productive is “when we are indignant and rage against the lustful emotion of our heart, and are vexed that the things which we are ashamed to do or say before men have risen up in the lurking places of our heart³.” That’s it: the only use is for being angry with vice, and vice in ourselves. There’s no point in raging against it others, he says, for anger doesn’t do anything to a person that their own conscience isn’t doing already:

For human nature is prone to fear those whom it knows to be indignant, and is afraid of offending: as in the case of some most just judges, avenging wrath is usually feared by those who are tormented by some accusation of their conscience…And this, with whatever kindness and gentleness it may be conducted, is deemed by those who are justly to be punished to be the most savage wrath and vehement anger.

There’s no point in exhibiting anger toward another person—even one who has done wrong—because their own conscience is doing work on them already, to the degree that those being just punishment perceive dispassionate exercise of justice to be like wrath.

The same goes for God as well, Cassian argues: our experience of wrath corresponds to not wanting something just to happen when we have done wrong, but God is not in fact angry in this way. Our sense of abjection is not the same as God actively being angry toward us, but our interior judgment—our anger at our vice—is in overdrive, meaning that we perceive God’s just statements toward us as something like wrath instead.

The Indifference of Anger

If anger just is, then there is no way for us to say that we can channel it, for it is not that which we willed to emerge. It just shows up, and for any number of reasons. We could link to specific external conditions, but Cassian cuts us off here, saying that even if you got away from specific triggers, that doesn’t solve anger⁴.

For me, it’s from the frustration of being ignored, or from the frustration of things not fitting together in resolution. But if I’m honest, it’s not one particular kind of being ignored that anger comes in through: it doesn’t matter whether it’s a driver cutting me off, my kids blowing right past instruction to go clean their rooms, or a student playing on their phone after I’ve said to put it away. These are all different kinds of “being ignored”, but anger shows up in each one.

The point here is one that Cassian makes regarding anger: it’s effectively indifferent, and thus, just cannot be corralled into good effect, because any use I would put anger to would just be special pleading. The reasons for anger are multitude, and irrational: no amount of taking myself to the side and talking myself down prevents anger from being a possibility:

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 blindness⁵.

The only solution here is patience, “for the end an aim of patience consists, not in being angry with a good reason, but in not being angry at all⁶.” Rowan Williams links it to practicing being not-in-control, or as I’ve put it here on occasion, getting really comfortable with scarcity. Learning to welcome the heat, name it, and put it away is the only way to deal with an irascible passion like anger, not trying to corral it into some kind of “cold anger”, or some kind of durable force upon which you can build something positive.

Anger and The Unmaking of the World

If anger is ultimately indifferent, evoked by a multitude of occasions, and not channeled toward any one end, anger is ultimately the least political affection there is. Anger is, on this reading, more like a rushing river which you think you can harness, but is really like an indifferent force of nature which cannot be harnessed like you think.

Last night, I watched Alex Garland’s new film Civil War. There is much, much to say about it, but I’ll refrain from spoilers. The film takes place in some undefined future in which Florida, California, and Texas are taking up arms against the federal government. We follow a small band of embedded war journalists as they make their way toward Washington D.C. in order to interview the president in the event that the nation does collapse.

What struck me about the film, more than anything else, was how non-political the film is⁷. Literally no one in the movie, on any side, talks about a political vision, or gives us insight of any kind into what started the war, or what the outcomes might be. Over and over again, the combatants describe the war as a struggle between life and death, with any sense of “sides” as being really beside the point of what’s going on.

That all of this is being told through the eyes of photojournalists documenting the war is a really sharp way of driving home this point, because they are there as documentarians only: they make no judgments about the war; they have no stakes in who wins. All politics, all constructive visions, all sense of judgement or vision of what a good future might look like: these are whimsical fantasies in a world which is only the struggle for life and death, and the dispassionate documenting of the world engaged in that struggle.

The only talk of politics comes from quick snippets echoing out of Washington about surrender, reconciliation, and post-war possibilities. But they ring hollow in view of a world which is consumed by one abiding affection: anger and rage which has no beginning, and no particular end in mind. Anger is the law of the world, and in that world, all talk about what it might be for is the talk of fools.

1. Cassian, Institutes, Book 8, ch. 1.

2. In his wonderful book, Passions of the Soul, ch.3. He names anger as emerging primarily from the experience of being out of control, which I think gets to part of it, except that Cassian says that anger says its that, kind of, but still erupts in the soul even when the conditions of control are right.

3. Ibid., ch. 7.

4. Ibid., ch. 17: “The chief part then of our improvement and peace of mind must not be made to depend on another’s will, which cannot possibly be subject to our authority, but it lies rather in our own control. And so the fact that we are not angry ought not to result from another’s perfection, but from our own virtue, which is acquired, not by somebody else’s patience, but by our own longsuffering.”

5. Ibid., ch. 6

6. Ibid., ch. 21.

7. Weirdly, the director takes this movie to be starting a conversation about civil discourse. I have no idea how he thinks this is the movie he actually made. It’s a great film, but it’s not about civil discourse, insofar as politics—the articulation and deliberation over what goods are right for a population to have and pursue—is completely absent from the movie.