Wrath and its daughters

We’ve examined lust and its daughters.  Turning to another of the seven deadly sins, let’s consider wrath.  Like lust, wrath is the distortion of a passion that is in itself good.  Like lust, it can become deeply habituated, and even a source of a kind of perverse pleasure in the one who indulges it.  (Hence the neologism “rageaholic.”)  And like lust, it can as a consequence severely impair reason.  Aquinas treats the subject in Summa Theologiae II-II.158 and Question XII of On Evil.  (Relevant material can also be found in the treatment of the passion of anger in Summa Theologiae I-II.46-48.)

Now, anger per se is not bad; on the contrary, it is natural to us, and good.  It serves the function of moving us to correct injustices, broadly construed.  We are angry with murderers, thieves, and other criminals because we know they have inflicted undeserved harm on others.  Anger moves us to redress this disordered state of affairs by stopping evildoers from committing further crimes, taking from them their ill-gotten gains, inflicting punitive harms that cancel out the psychological and material benefits they have already acquired from their evildoing, and so forth. 

We are also angry at actions that are less grave than such crimes are but that are still in a general sense unjust.  For example, someone cuts you off on the freeway or insults you, and you are naturally angry because the person unjustly endangered you or characterized you in a pejorative way that in your judgment you do not merit.  Your child refuses to eat his vegetables or do his homework, and you are naturally angry because he is not doing what is good for him and not submitting to your legitimate authority over him.  The anger in these cases, no less than in the case of anger at criminal offenses, is directed at injustice in the broad sense of a disorder in things, of things not being the way they ought to be.  Anger is nature’s way of prodding you to do something to set things right.

As Aquinas says in On Evil, quoting St. John Chrysostom, “if there be no anger, teaching is bootless, the judicial process undermined, and crimes unchecked.”  Accordingly, Aquinas concludes, “some anger is good and necessary” (p. 373, Regan translation).  The absence of anger in cases where it is called for is, for that reason, a moral defect, and a habit or tendency to respond to injustices with insufficient anger is a vice.  As Aquinas writes in the Summa:

Anger… [is] a simple movement of the will, whereby one inflicts punishment, not through passion, but in virtue of a judgment of the reason: and thus without doubt lack of anger is a sin…

Hence the movement of anger in the sensitive appetite cannot be lacking altogether, unless the movement of the will be altogether lacking or weak. Consequently lack of the passion of anger is also a vice, even as the lack of movement in the will directed to punishment by the judgment of reason…

The lack of anger is a sign that the judgment of reason is lacking.

End quote.  The sin Aquinas speaks of is manifest today in those who are excessively lenient toward criminals, those who are suspicious of the very idea of punishment, those whose knee-jerk response to even the most horrific crimes is always to talk only of forgiveness and mercy whether or not the evildoer is repentant, and so forth.  Such a reflexive attitude is not the Christian attitude but rather a crude caricature of the Christian attitude.    

What Christianity condemns, and what Aquinas condemns, is not anger per se but rather the opposite vice of excess where anger is concerned.  Anger becomes disordered and sinful when the passion is so strong that it overwhelms reason, when the punishment the angry person seeks to inflict on the evildoer is out of proportion to the offense, when the person at whom one is angry is in fact innocent of injustice, when the angry person acts out of hatred rather than justice, and so forth.  And habituation to disordered anger is a vice. 

If deficiency in anger is common today, excess is of course no less common.  Bizarrely, the defect and the excess sometimes exist in one and the same person.  Consider that curious character familiar from modern political life, the militant pacifist.  For even the worst murderers and dictators, he has nothing but compassion.  Their sins, he assures us, are regrettable but understandable – a result of bad upbringing or weakness of will, an overreaction to social injustice or American imperialism, or what have you.  In sharp contrast, for defenders of capital punishment or just war, the militant pacifist has nothing but venom.  He attributes to them only the basest motives – bloodthirstiness, hatred, political calculation, war profiteering, and so forth. 

It never occurs to him how deeply irrational and incoherent is this combination of attitudes.  For example, if the militant pacifist is going to try his best to show mercy to and understand the motives of murderers and the like, how much more should he show mercy and understanding to defenders of capital punishment?  (“They mean well, they’re just misguided!”)  Or if he is peremptorily going to condemn the latter as hateful and bloodthirsty, how much more peremptorily should he condemn those who kill innocent people? 

(My favorite example of this sort of incoherence is the sentiment sometimes expressed by critics of the doctrine of hell to the effect that the only people who deserve to go to hell are people who think some people deserve to go to hell.  Since critics who say that are thereby acknowledging that they themselves think some people deserve hell – namely those who think some people deserve it – these critics are implicitly including themselves among those worthy of hell!)

Illumination is provided by Aquinas’s account of the daughters of the vice of wrath – the further disorders of the soul which follow upon disordered anger – of which there are six.  The first two have to do with disorders of thought, the next three with disorders of speech, and the last with disorders of action.  (See Summa Theologiae II-II.158.7 and On Evil XII.5.)

The first daughter is what Aquinas calls “indignation,” which (as Aquinas says in the Summa) is directed at “the person with whom a man is angry, and whom he deems unworthy” (emphasis added).  In On Evil, Aquinas adds that “angry persons contemplating the harm inflicted on them magnify the injustice in their minds” (p. 387).  The idea here seems to be that a person habituated to wrath tends to turn over and over in his mind the notions of how depraved are the people against whom he is angry and how grave are their imagined injustices.  He creates fantasy enemies who are more evil in their character and their actions than any real world opponents are, and directs his rage at the latter while mistaking them for the former.

The second daughter is what Aquinas refers to in the Summa as “swelling of the mind,” and in On Evil he says that this is manifest in angry persons who “mull over different ways and means whereby they can avenge themselves.”  Whereas indignation focuses on the imagined depravity of the objects of one’s anger, swelling of the mind focuses on the harms that might be inflicted on these supposed evildoers. 

The third daughter of wrath is referred to by Aquinas in the Summa as “’clamor,’ which denotes disorderly and confused speech.”  Think of the person who is so filled with rage that he cannot get a coherent thought or line of argument out, but simply rants uncontrollably.

The fourth daughter of wrath is “contumely” or harsh and insulting language.  Think of the person so consumed by anger that he characterizes his enemies in unjust and uncharitable ways.  Contumely is essentially the verbal expression of what Aquinas calls the wrathful person’s “indignation” and “swelling of mind.”  (Note that, just as anger is not per se bad, neither is harsh or insulting speech per se bad.  Christ famously characterized the Pharisees as “a brood of vipers” and “whited sepulchers.”  What is bad is harsh or insulting language that is unmerited and/or flows from excessive passion rather than reason.)

The fifth daughter of wrath is blasphemy.  Like contumely, it involves a kind of injurious speech, but in this case directed toward God rather than other human beings.  (Needless to say, this daughter will follow from disordered anger only if God is the object of the anger.)

The sixth daughter of wrath is “quarreling.”  The wrathful person, naturally, is prone to give expression to his disorders of thought not only in his speech, but also by picking fights with various enemies or imagined enemies. 

Now, as with lust, wrath and its daughters are associated with pleasure, and as with lust, this pleasure has a tendency to “lock” or “glue” the person exhibiting the vice onto his disordered behavior.  This is harder to see in the case of wrath than in the case of lust, because anger is directed toward the rectification of perceived injustice, and the perception of injustice is unpleasant.  However, the hope of rectifying injustice is pleasant.  As Aquinas writes, “anger is always accompanied by hope, wherefore it causes pleasure” and “the movement of anger has a… tendency… to vengeance… which it desires and hopes for as being a good, wherefore it takes pleasure in it.”  What Aquinas calls “indignation,” “swelling of the mind,” contumely and the like can therefore be pleasant, and thus addictive to the one exhibiting them, deeply habituating his tendency toward disordered anger.

Taking account of the daughters of wrath, it is easy to see why the sort of person I have called the “militant pacifist” exhibits such non-pacific behavior.  Anger, if one is not careful, can become disordered whatever its object.  This is as true of people whose anger is directed toward capital punishment, war, or the like as it is of people angry over any other perceived injustice.  With the “militant pacifist,” though, we get the paradoxical result that someone angry over what he regards as disordered anger in others comes himself to exhibit disordered anger precisely toward those others.  He might become so obsessed with his cause that he falls into “indignation” in Aquinas’s sense, constructing in his mind a phantom enemy that is far more sinister than the real world people who disagree with him.  He is led thereby into “clamor” and “contumely,” hurling insults and ranting and raving rather than soberly addressing the arguments of his opponents.  And so forth.

Indeed, the “militant pacifist” may, ironically, be more prone to fall victim to the daughters of wrath than other people are.  The reason is this.  Anger, again, is in itself good and natural to us.  It is nature’s way of getting us to redress injustice by punishing evildoers.  Now, some injustices are so extremely grave that nothing less than death would be a proportionate punishment.  And some evildoers are so dangerous that nothing less than war can effectively counter them.  Unsurprisingly, then, large numbers of people continue to support capital punishment and to believe that war is sometimes necessary to deal with evil regimes.  Even in countries that have long ago abolished capital punishment, opinion polls sometimes show that a majority still support it, despite decades of propaganda directed against it.

In light of these facts, opponents of capital punishment, war, and the like are bound to be tempted to conclude that enormous numbers of their fellow citizens are simply depraved.  (It does not occur to them that what is in fact going on is that widespread continued support for the death penalty and for just war reflects a residual grasp of the demands of the natural law.)  Frustrated by the persistence and popularity of attitudes they regard as immoral, those of what I am calling a “militant pacifist” mindset are bound to become even angrier at these perceived injustices – with a spiral into wrath and its daughters being the sequel.

Moreover, precisely because the militant pacifist’s position is always bound to be a minority view (contrary as it is to human nature), it is tempting for the militant pacifist to think of himself as possessing greater virtue than most people.  In particular, he is bound to think of himself as more merciful, more compassionate, more understanding than the great unwashed.  Such self-righteousness can be intoxicating, and contribute to the sense of being “superior” that Aquinas, in On Evil, says is part of the psychology of “indignation” (p. 387).

Finally, precisely because he is so militantly opposed to the purported disordered anger of others, the militant pacifist is deluded into thinking that he, of all people, cannot be subject to that particular vice.  He is utterly blind to the mercilessness and hatred he directs toward those whom he regards as merciless and hateful.