Cultivating “Christian Anger”
A Warning from the Fifth Century
by Theodore Pulcini
Teaching religion at a secular college can be a challenging business. It is bad enough that so many of my students have had no consistent exposure to any religious tradition. What is worse is that many have had just enough to “inoculate” them against the development of a serious spiritual sensibility. Every now and then, however, I am stunned by the insights that one of my students will bring to an examination of religious phenomena.
Recently I taught our basic departmental course, “What is Religion?” As part of the course requirements, students had to attend a religious rite of a tradition different from the one most familiar to them. They were then to write an essay analyzing what they had seen and heard, using the various methodological tools discussed in the lectures.
The remarks at the conclusion of one paper in particular caught my attention. The student had gone to a local revival, a camp-meeting crusade that had been brought to the area by local evangelically-oriented congregations. There was much at the event that the student found intriguing, engaging, confusing, and amusing. But it was the reflection at the end of the paper that included one of those stunning insights. It read something like the following: “These people all seemed angry about something. Under all the talk about truth and love and righteousness and morality and compassion and faith, there was a current of anger that swept the people away. They were most enthusiastic, it seems to me, when they were angriest. The speakers knew that the surest way to get the people whipped up was to play on their anger. That is why I am not a religious person. Whenever I went to church or talked to committed Christians, of whatever stripe, the anger was always there, like endless fuel powering the engine.”
I have to admit, this student’s observations hit a nerve. For some time I had been peculiarly uneasy with much of what I was reading in Christian publications, both popular and scholarly, both “traditionalist” and “modernist.” In many cases, it was not that I took exception to what the author was arguing. It was, rather, that the tone was shrill, high-handed, pedantic, mocking, and caustic. These works caricatured and dismissed the other as villainous, insidious, or just plain stupid. What was ostensibly an informed discussion of a topic sometimes even lapsed into sheer harangue. In short, anger took over.
Righteous Anger?
But, one may argue, can anger not be a force for good? Can it not be a means of challenging evil and encouraging righteousness? Can anger not be godly? Should it not be exercised in the defense of truth? Does not even God get angry? Did not Christ openly display anger (Mt. 21:12–13; cf. Mk. 11:15–17)?
My initial impulse was to answer all of these questions in the affirmative. I had no doubt that anger could be salutary when expressed in the service of an upright cause. Now I am not so sure. In preparing for one of my lectures, I had occasion to reread the Institutes of St. John Cassian (who is commemorated in the Eastern Church on the rather hapless date of February 29). Probably born in the West (some hagiographers claim he was born in Rome), he eventually made his way East, to monasteries in Palestine and Egypt before being ordained a deacon by St. John Chrysostom in Constantinople. Eventually he settled near Marseilles where he founded two monasteries, one for men and the other for women. Before his death in 435, he wrote the Institutes, containing some of his most penetrating insights into the ascetical struggle. In the Institutes, he focuses on the eight major vices vexing the monk, among which is the spiritus irae, the spirit of anger.
How would St. John Cassian answer the foregoing questions? Firmly in the negative. To him, anger is nothing less than a mortiferum virus, a lethal poison, which “blinds with its hurtful darkness the eye of the soul,” precluding the possibility of our attaining “judgment of right discretion” (judicium rectae discretionis) or “maturity of counsel” (maturitatem consilii); it deprives us of righteousness (8.1; cf. 8.6). Anger is, in short, a pernicious influence. It leads astray. It distorts.
Consequently, one dare not attribute “this most pernicious disease of the soul” (8.2) to God:
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