In Praise of Anger
A Good Man’s Anger, That Is.
These are dangerous days—and not just for white women minding their own business on trains, or for good-natured conservative pundits debating radicals on college campuses, but for all of us. We live in a failed society, and the increasingly obvious malice of our Ruling Class is provoking levels of anger not seen in my lifetime. It’s like these elites are consciously filling the kegs with powder and attaching fuses.
To make matters trickier, we Westerners have long been plagued with confusion about the place and purpose of anger—meaning we are often clueless about how to respond to outrages committed against us. When people have denied their anger for too long, thinking it wrong or somehow sinful, the explosion when it finally comes is even more explosive.
So the confusion must be cut away. All moments necessitate clarity, but especially the dangerous ones. Toward that aim, this short essay will turn to the surprisingly vigorous and refreshing insights of Thomas Aquinas on the subject of anger. Let us pray that we can learn to be angry in the right way in these dangerous days.
What Anger Is For
Anger is good. Or more specifically: a good man’s anger is good. It is a natural and proper response to injustice. Ask yourself: how is a man supposed to respond when he sees a twenty-three-year-old girl’s throat slashed by some savage monster on a train (and notices the absolute radio silence from the corporate media)? The answer is obvious: he had better be angry!
In Question 158 of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas lays out truths that will surely scandalize modern sissified Christians, if they ever bothered to read the Universal and Angelic Doctor of the Church. Though it is certainly “unlawful to desire vengeance considered as evil to the man who is to be punished,” it is “praiseworthy to desire vengeance as a corrective of vice and for the good of justice.” And “When revenge is taken in accordance with the order of judgment, it is God’s work, since he who has power to punish ‘is God’s minister,’ as stated in Romans 13:4.” In short, anger “in accordance with reason” is “deserving of praise.”
That phrase “anger in accordance with reason” suggests the real problem with the disordered runaway rage that we are rightly warned against: it threatens good judgment. He who is overwhelmed by rage will make errors that jeopardize his cause. Prudence is the first of the cardinal virtues for a good reason, and not due to some feelgood notion of vague moral uprightness. Prudence must rule because only when we make the right decisions do we have a chance of making good things happen, of winning the contests before us.
The need to master one’s anger is achieved through meekness. This virtue, according to Aquinas, “restrains the onslaught of anger” and “properly mitigates the passion of anger.” Again: not because anger is fundamentally wrong, but because it can present a distinct threat to good judgment if not controlled. So not only is meekness very different from the pushover’s virtue; it is practically a martial virtue, a prerequisite for strength and accomplishment, since the man who lacks it will waste his vital energy on pointless squabbles and will make himself weak.
But a man’s meekness is only impressive when he has serious anger to contend with—just as a man’s sexual self-control is only impressive when he experiences actual desire. A man should feel truly human instincts, urges, and responses as he was made to feel them—while also cultivating the control and mastery that frees him from being owned by them.
This meekness is precisely what historian Louis Bertrand describes in Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, also known as El Cid Campeador, in the following passage: “Fundamentally tempestuous and violent by nature, he learned how to hold himself in check. He got the better of his enemies by a perfect mastery over himself, even though he was sometimes subject to terrible gusts of passion. He restrained them almost immediately. This violent man was able to pass himself off as a man temperamentally moderate.” The great hero’s martial excellence cannot be separated from his meekness.
Another implication: if a man does not feel anger when he ought, he deserves blame. Aquinas quotes St John Chrysostom to that effect: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.”1 Hotheadedness is at least understandable; the hothead shows real signs of life, which is why the tendency toward anger is common among great men. But the fellow of “unreasonable patience” is contemptibly lame, dead inside. The rageful man is closer to the mark because it is easier to master excessive liveliness than it is to inject animation into dead spirits.
Anger ultimately serves a very useful purpose. Aquinas: “The power of anger is given to sentient beings so that the hindrances may be removed whereby the force of desire is impeded from striving toward its object, whether because of the difficulty of achieving a good or because of the difficulty of overcoming and evil.” In other words, anger energizes a man to confront the evil that he otherwise might think it better to endure.2 Josef Pieper adds that “Wrath is the strength to attack the repugnant; the power of anger is actually the power of resistance in the soul.” Notice how he puts that: anger is a power, and thus it needs to be used well, not shamed and denied and buried in confusion. The failure of good men to get angry leads to a reign of injustice.
So listen to what anger is telling you. Use anger wisely. Righteous anger can and should energize us, but we need to make ourselves into the kind of men who feel anger at the right things and in the right way. This means being outraged by wickedness and the destruction of beauty and attacks on the innocent, rather than passing trifles and insignificant jabs. It also means mastering your rage so that it never overwhelms good judgment and leads you into the traps your enemy has set for you. The fight for the future will depend upon the anger of good men.