Editor’s note: Our guest contributor is based in Australia, so some spelling and usage reflect Australian English.
Let’s have lunch. Let’s pack up. And let’s go to bed.
I have twin toddlers, so I say some version of that all day, and a good share of it comes back declined. By about the fourth round I can feel something arriving that I did not choose.
Which is the question I want to ask, and it sounds like it has an obvious answer. When you lost your temper last week, what actually happened? Not what set you off. What happened inside you, in what order, in the half second before you spoke.
Most of us cannot say. We have a rich vocabulary for the trigger and almost none for the mechanism. And a man who cannot describe the mechanism of his own anger will keep aiming his effort at the trigger, which is the one part of the arrangement he does not control.
The Thomistic tradition has a description of that mechanism. It is unnervingly precise, it is about eight centuries old, and it names six specific ways anger gets out of a man and into his house.
The word we have made soft
Ask most people what meekness is and you will get a portrait of a man who does not push back. Mild. Agreeable. Easily walked over. If that is what the word means, no father wants it, and no father should.
That is not what it means.
For St Thomas, meekness is a virtue seated in what he calls the irascible appetite: the part of you that reacts to hard things, the part that fights, flees, hopes, despairs and burns. It is not a mood. It is a trained capacity, and its one job is to moderate anger according to right reason (Summa Theologiae II-II q.157 a.2). Thomas files it under temperance, alongside the virtues that govern appetite (q.157 a.3), and he pairs it with the gift of piety, because a man who cannot govern his anger cannot reliably give anyone, God included, what is owed them (q.121 a.2).
Notice what that makes meekness. Not the absence of force. The government of force.
Even the translation history hides this. When Our Lord says “learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart,” the Douay-Rheims gives us meek, while the RSV-CE renders the same Greek word as gentle. Two very different English words are doing duty for one idea, and neither of them means what the man in the pew hears.
What anger actually is
Here is the definition the whole thing runs on. Anger is the perception of an injury together with a desire for vengeance.
Both halves matter, and the second half is the one we flinch from. The conference I am working from puts it with a bluntness worth keeping: “the vindication is you want to club somebody over the head.” Not merely to be recognised as right. Not merely for the record to be corrected. You want the other person to be hurt, because hurting them is how you make them stop.
Say that out loud about your own last argument and see how it sits.
Thomas describes anger as having a compound structure. There is the pain of the injury received, and there is the desire and hope of getting even (I-II q.46 a.1). The two live in the same passion. And this is the part that explains a great deal of ordinary adult behaviour: the anticipation of getting even is pleasant. The revenge has not happened. The pleasure has. That is why you rebuild the argument in the shower, why you improve your own lines each time, why the whole thing is oddly hard to put down.
The conference goes a step further and calls anger the only composite passion of its kind. Thomas does not put it that strongly, and I am not going to make him say it. The compound structure is his. The exclusivity claim is a gloss.
When anger becomes a moral question
One more correction, because it is load-bearing. The conference paraphrases Our Lord as saying that whoever is angry with his brother is a murderer. The text does not say that. Matthew has the angry man liable to the judgment, the first of three escalating tribunals named in that passage. The point still lands, and it lands harder for being accurate: Christ moves the fifth commandment inward, from the act to the appetite, and puts the angry man inside the same jurisdiction as the killer.
Which does not make anger a sin. Thomas is explicit that anger in accordance with right reason is praiseworthy (II-II q.158 a.1), and the Catechism follows him almost word for word (CCC 2302). The problem was never that you felt it. The problem is who was driving when you did.
The flinch before you have thought
This is the hinge of the whole account, and it is worth slowing down for.
Thomas distinguishes two ways a passion can relate to your judgement. A passion can arrive antecedently, before reason has ruled on anything, in which case it is simply happening to you. Or it can arrive consequently, following from a judgement reason has already made, in which case it is something you are doing (I-II q.24 a.3 ad 1).
Most of us only know the first kind. The flinch. The heat in the chest that is already there by the time the sentence finishes. We experience anger as weather.
The tradition’s claim is that this is not permanent. The irascible appetite can be the subject of virtue (I-II q.56 a.4), which means in plain terms that the reacting part of you is trainable. Not suppressible. Trainable. Reason and will impose a pattern on it, over and over, and the appetite gradually learns to wait.
How reason trains the reaction
How does reason reach it? Not by issuing orders. Passion answers to the imagination, to the picture of the thing rather than the thing itself (I-II q.22 a.3). So reason governs anger the way a man governs a dog he cannot lift: indirectly, by controlling what is put in front of it. Change the image and you change the size of the reaction, because the reaction was always to the image.
That gives you two dials rather than one. Whether there is anger at all, and how much. A man with the virtue fully formed does not merely have smaller reactions. He has the reaction reason authorised, at the size reason authorised, or none.
The worked example the conference reaches for is Christ, and it is the right one, because he sits at both ends of the dial. Through the Passion, receiving injury continuously, he is silent: led as a sheep to the slaughter. In the Temple, he overturns tables. Same man, same week, opposite outputs, and neither of them is weather.
A caution I will not skip: the gospels never actually call Jesus angry at the Temple. They report what he did, and John alone supplies a gloss, and the gloss is zeal, not rage. The tradition has long read the scene as righteous anger and that reading is defensible. The word is ours, not the evangelists’.
Six ways anger leaves the house
Thomas calls anger a capital vice, meaning a vice that generates others (II-II q.158 a.6), and he names six of its offspring (a.7). They are usually listed in Latin and left there. They are more useful translated, because each one is a thing you have done.
Indignation is the sense that this should not be happening to you. Thomas describes the angry man deeming the other unworthy of treating him this way. It sounds like fairness. It is the first move of pride, and it is the most dangerous of the six, because it is the one that hardens into a settled position. The conference’s observation here is worth sitting with: the marriages that end rarely end at the shouting stage. They end some time after one party decides, privately, that they are no longer willing to put up with it.
Swelling of the mind, tumor mentis, is Thomas’s name for the mind filling up with ways to get even. We call it rumination now. It is the shower argument, the 2 a.m. draft of the email, the conversation you keep winning against someone who is asleep.
Clamor is disorderly and confused speech. The specific, recognisable phenomenon of a man so angry he cannot construct a sentence. The conference illustrates it with a fishing story: an uncle, needled all week by a nephew catching everything, offers to swap spots, and watches the boy pull a five-pound brown trout out of the swapped spot on the first cast. Not angry at the boy. Just wordless, stammering, unable to get anything out. That is the daughter, and it is funnier from the outside than the inside.
When anger becomes a way of life
Blasphemy is what Thomas calls it when the injurious words go upward. In practice, for most men, this is not theological. It is the profanity that arrives with the temper, which is why it turns up in the same confession.
Contumely is injurious words against your neighbour. The sentence engineered to land. You know which one it was, and you knew while you were saying it.
Rixa, quarrelling, is the last and the widest: injuries inflicted on a neighbour through anger. This is the daughter that changes what you are rather than what you did. A man in whom rixa has settled is simply difficult to live with, and the people who live with him organise themselves around that fact.
Set against each, the tradition names an opposite. Indignation is answered by humility, which does not experience the injury as a demotion because it was never standing on the rank. Rumination is answered by custody of the mind, which is mostly a synonym for actual forgiveness. Clamor is answered by silence, meaning not speaking until the moment is right rather than not speaking at all. Blasphemy and contumely are both answered by moderated speech. And rixa is answered by the strangest effect of the virtue: a meek response tends to soften the other person, including one who did not know he had given offence.
Where this leaves you
If the account is right, then anger is not a character trait you have or lack. It is a mechanism with named parts, and every part is a place where the thing can be interrupted.
That also means the usual advice is aimed at the wrong place. Counting to ten works on the output, in the same way that most advice about attention works on the symptom rather than the condition underneath it. The tradition works on the image, on the appetite’s training, and on the specific desire to see the other person hurt, which is the part almost nobody addresses because almost nobody admits to it.
I should say plainly that I am better at describing this than doing it. I can name all six daughters and I could tell you which two of them were in my kitchen this week. Diagnosis is not the cure, and I am not writing from the far side of the problem.
What the saints reveal about anger
I have been sitting with a version of this question for two years now, for a different project. Twelve Americans currently before Rome, each one weighed for canonization, and the file on every single one includes some form of this same problem. Some had a temper their whole lives and never fully broke it. Some had temperance so deep it looked, from the outside, like nothing was ever at stake.
Rome does not disqualify the first kind, and it does not canonize on the second alone. What the tribunal actually examines, cause after cause, is what a person did with whichever appetite they were given, across an entire life, in public and in the room nobody was recording. That is the real subject of Almost Saints: 12 American Catholics & the Cost of Canonization, which opens, not by accident, with the man whose whole public reputation is gentleness rather than steel: Fulton Sheen, and the one ordinary miracle that got his cause this far.
Part 2 takes up the remedies: why some men flinch harder than others, what mortification actually is and why meekness depends on it, the difference between meekness and going easy on your kids, and the reason the tradition insists that the angry man is the weak one.
Two questions to carry until then.
About Our Guest Blogger
Harvey Fernandes, OP, is a lay Dominican, a professed member of the Order of Preachers’ Lay Fraternities, which is the branch of the Order made up of men and women living ordinary secular lives under a Rule. The Dominican charism is to contemplate and to hand on to others the fruits of contemplation, which is as good a description of this book as any. He wrote it by reading the files: postulators’ briefs, diocesan announcements, Vatican decrees, and the guild correspondence that a cause is actually built from.
