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Anger, for Thomas Aquinas, is a natural expression of human passions, one response among many aroused by threats to ourselves and others.
Anger is not simply lashing out at any hurtful thing, but a response that tracks retributive justice.
So Aquinas says that anger is the instrument of justice, so long as (quoting Gregory the Great) we never let it “withdraw from following reason like a handmaid ready to render service.”
True selflessness would eliminate anger. When Cassian comments on Ephesians 4:31—“All anger and indignation and uproar and blasphemy should be removed from you”—he says, “When [the apostle] says, ‘All anger should be removed from you,’ he makes no exception at all for us as to necessity and utility.
This means it’s a complex emotion. It combines open antagonism toward the obstacle (the
cause of injustice) with a passionate devotion to the good (reestablishing justice) that lies behind it.
Or as Aquinas puts it elsewhere, “Anger regards two objects, viz, the retribution that it seeks, and the person on whom it seeks retribution.”8 When things go well, the retribution or redress of a wrong is sought as a good, and the harm of punis...
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The end that moves the rightly angered person is the good of justice,
Aquinas observes that it is true of all sins against temperance—among which anger, lust, and gluttony are all numbered—that, like two-year-olds, the passions get more unruly and hard to control the more we indulge them.
First, good anger fights for a good cause. The vice of wrath turns a passion for justice into a passion for self-aggrandizement.
Wrathful people’s need to have their own way and their overprotectiveness about their own honor and status are clues to wrath’s roots in pride.
We have said that anger can go wrong in its target and in the manner of its expression. When anger has the wrong object, what we are angry about is inappropriate.
and our worthiness compared to that of the offender. If we find ourselves habitually wrathful, the first question to ask is what we are really getting angry about and why. If we are concerned that our anger is missing the right target, sometimes the best thing to do is double-check our perspective and get a second opinion on whether our anger is as justified as it feels, or whether we are rationalizing to cover up something else. We have to broaden our scope of the situation, both to include the rightful claims of others and to put our own claims into perspective.
The second way anger can go wrong is in how we express our anger. Anger can make us feel out of control, enraged, furious.
Aquinas breaks down wrath’s disordered expression into three main categories. We can get angry too easily (for example, when we are quick-tempered); we
can get angrier than we should (for instance, when our anger is disproportionate to the offense); and we can stay angry too long (that is, when anger smolders into resentment and grudge holding).
Anger, when it is a holy emotion, has justice as its object and love as its root. Both love and justice are focused on the good of others. Justice concerns giving to another what that other is due. Good anger is expressed in passionate efforts to make sure others get the respect they deserve, to bring about the end of oppression and tyranny, to give due punishment to those who cause injury and damage, to honor covenants and promises, to give equal treatment to the marginalized, and to uphold the law. Motivated by good anger, we hunger and thirst for righteousness, an appetite that depends on
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Vicious anger, by contrast, is self-regarding and selfish. The wrathful seek revenge, not due punishment; they protect their own honor and cause at all costs, instead of defending what is truly good or deserved.
The virtue opposed to wrath in Aquinas’s Summa theologiae is gentleness, but it is probably better described as “self-possession.”
More importantly, it is simply not our job to secure ultimate justice in the universe as if we were the God in charge.
One suggestion for self-examination is to try keeping a journal for a week. The journal is meant to be a record of the times we were angry and what we were angry about. (If we find that we need to write a paragraph to justify what we were angry about, we might want to take this fact itself as a hint about the excessive nature of our anger and our need to rationalize it!)
Makes you slow down and think.
egos. A sense of humor is the opposite of wrath’s reaction, because the one who can laugh at himself has enough distance from what he wants to be able to deflate his own claims and see them as comically excessive. He is not so intensely concerned with pushing his own way that he cannot step back and see himself as others see him. Wrath narrows our vision of the world, even as it slants our sense of justice toward selfishness. When we can joke about a situation, we have to be comfortable enough with who we are to laugh at our claims on the world, rather than being consumed by them.
Laughing is helpful, but it can make someone not take the situation seriously.
Gentleness, a virtue that imitates Christ’s own character, does not imply that he or we never get angry.
If there’s anything simple about gluttony, it is its focus on pleasure. One’s own pleasure. Excessive pleasure. Immediate, tangible pleasure.
Gluttony definition
This vice degrades us into being mere pleasure seekers. This is what gluttony is really all about.
The main question we should be asking is not, “How much is too much?” but rather, “How dominated by the desire for this pleasure am I? How difficult would it be to have to give it up or do without it?”
As Aquinas puts it, “Gluttony primarily and intrinsically signifies the intemperate desire to consume food, not the intemperate consumption of food.” “It is a case of gluttony,” he says, “only when we knowingly exceed the measure in eating from a desire for the pleasures of the palate.”1
A contemporary version of the same five uses the acronym “F.R.E.S.H.”: eating fastidiously, ravenously, excessively, sumptuously, hastily.
“Too daintily” or “fastidiously” is the first form. Along with eating “too sumptuously,” it is a form of gluttony which primarily regards what we eat.
The other three regard how we eat.
The key to understanding fastidious gluttons is that they arrive at the table focused on their expectation of getting a certain pleasure and with an equally focused determination to do whatever it takes to get it.
Eating “too sumptuously” is similar to the picky eater’s problem in its preoccupation with what is eaten. But this glutton excessively seeks the pleasures of satiety and fullness, so she eats foods that promise this feeling.
The excessive overeater is one who will eat past the point of fullness for the sake of indulging her tastes.
Thus, the pleasures that the glutton’s life is focused on are material pleasures, pleasures of the body. The effect of this focus is, inevitably, dissatisfaction. Why?
Second, as human beings, we are more than just material beings. Satisfying our desire for the pleasure of eating doesn’t “fill up” the whole person. Our spiritual desires are left empty.
It sounds pretty perverse when we think about it: we are eating things without calories, chewing things not meant to be swallowed, and consuming foods that cannot be digested, so we can have the unrestricted pleasures of eating while carefully bracketing the real nature and function of food itself.
We are ingesting substances for the sake of personal gratification, pure and simple.
In fact, Aquinas says that the more natural and necessary the activity—and eating, which is necessary for self-preservation, is a case in point—then the more pleasure God designed to accompany the activity.
If we condemn natural feelings as evil, or become unable to enjoy the things God meant us to enjoy, then we have become less than we are meant to be.
Reason does not retrench so much from one’s food as to refuse nature its necessary support: thus Jerome says, “It matters not whether you are a long or a short time in destroying yourself, since to afflict the body immoderately, whether by excessive lack of nourishment, or by eating or sleeping too little, is to offer a sacrifice of stolen goods.”9
Gregory says in his work Moralia: “The flesh when restrained more than right is often weakened even for the performance of good deeds, so that while hastening to stifle the forces of sin within, it does not have enough strength to pray or preach. And so while pursing the enemy, we slay the citizen we love.”
Augustine offers some practical advice on avoiding gluttony. He says that what or how much food we eat makes no difference whatsoever when it comes to virtue, as long as we are eating in a way that is appropriate to our health, the people we live with, and our vocation.
The first of Augustine’s general guidelines to measure our judgments about eating and drinking is this: are we eating in a way that contributes to or at least maintains our overall health and well-being?
The second guideline tells us that physical health isn’t the only good at stake in eating: so is regard for those with whom we live.
If we are willing to deprive others to gratify our own desire for pleasure, this may be a symptom of gluttony.
Is our own pleasure-seeking getting in the way of enjoying being together with others at the table?
The last guideline tells us that we were made for a spiritual purpose.
The point is that who we are meant to be and what we are called to do is a consideration that affects what and why and how we eat.
The glutton eats for himself, and his mission is to gratify his own appetites. His mission is “pleasure first,” and he orders the rest of his life around that goal. His god is his belly, and he serves it faithfully.
When we think about developing spiritual discipline about the physical pleasures of eating, we might turn back to Augustine’s advice again: Are we ready and willing to do without pleasure, if this is asked of us? Are we overattached to our own comforts? What would it take to get ourselves to that point of readiness?
