In the first article in a lecture series on the Consolations of Theology, Moore College lecturer RICHARD GIBSON illuminates Lactantius on anger.
There are three passions, or, so to speak, three furies, which excite such great perturbations in the souls of men, and sometimes compel them to offend in such a manner, as to permit them to have regard neither for their reputation nor for their personal safety.
- Lactantius
Race riots on a Sydney beach. Senseless road rage. Violent video games. Global terrorism. We might be tempted to think that anger, and the rage it generates, is an acutely modern problem. In his 1996 best-seller, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman noted that “Each day’s news comes to us rife with such reports of the disintegration of civility and safety, an onslaught of mean-spirited impulse running amok” (p. x). Whether anger is the match or the petrol, it inflames forces that seem to threaten civilisation as we know it.
In their urgency to find effective ways to manage anger, some have turned away from civilisation as we know it, the ‘Western’ variety, to the East, and the resources of Buddhism. For Buddhism, anger is a mental affliction that must be eliminated. One of Goleman’s follow-up volumes, Destructive Emotions (2003), reported a scientific consultation between psychologists, neuroscientists, and the Dalai Lama. Strikingly absent from the 404-page book’s index is any mention of God, Jesus, Bible, or Christianity. Does Christian theology have nothing to offer a serious discussion of anger?
What are we to make of anger, especially our own? Many of us know all too well the shame felt after using words like whips, lashing out and lacerating loved ones. We can still taste our horror at outbursts that could only be classed as abusive; their sole intent to maximise the hurt. (Let’s not mention the e-mails!) Some of us would still give all our worldly possessions to be able to take back the slap, the punch, the blow; still astonished at ‘what came over us,’ at ‘what possessed us.’ Who would not want to “get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger” (Eph 4:31).
And yet there are times when anger seems to come from the better part of us. That anger that rises up when a young mother dies, leaving behind children yet to attend a day of school. Anger at the duplicity of politicians. Anger at the indifference of powerful men to the human rights of the weak, especially when they escape justice. Anger at the exploitation of young girls and boys by paedophiles. Anger at the hypocrisy of church leaders who fleece their sheep. Anger like Jesus’ at the stony hearts of the Pharisees (Mark 3:5); indignation like his towards the disciples when they acted like the Pharisees (Mark 10:14).
What am I to do with my anger? Get in touch with it? Ventilate? Meditate? Assassinate pillows? No-one ever taught me how to be angry. No-one ever taught me when to be angry. Of course I’ve been surrounded by various examples of expression, repression, denial, Vesuvius-like convulsions, self-control, and the six-week simmer. But what is anger for?
Ours is not the first generation to struggle with the problem of anger. It is as old as ‘civilisation.’ The first word of the first epic poem written by the Greek poet Homer (eighth century BC) was a word for ‘anger.’ For the next ten centuries Greek and Roman philosophers devoted lots of attention to the problem of anger-management. By the time the New Testament was written the most frequently advocated approach was to do away with anger altogether. Anger was regarded as unworthy of the wise person. And understandably, by extension, it was regarded as incompatible with divinity. The gods, it was increasingly assumed, must be immune to it.
As soon as Christian communities began to gather around the apostles’ preaching they too needed to wrestle with the reality of anger; anger directed towards them in persecution, anger between members of their communities, and the anger of God. They drew on the Old Testament Scriptures as they did so and were no doubt aware of popular and philosophical approaches to its management.
As Christian apologists and thinkers tried to provide coherent and comprehensive accounts of the Christian faith they were forced to systematise the Bible’s teaching, often motivated by a desire to commend the faith to the educated and philosophically aware. By the beginning of the fourth century, the majority interpreted the Bible largely in line with the plausibility structures of their culture. Anger is unworthy of the godly. While the Stoics saw it as ‘sickness,’ Christians catalogued it under ‘sin.’ Anger is incompatible with God. When the Bible attributed anger to God, it used language in a special way; accommodating to our human limitations; describing the indescribable in terms we could understand.
Lactantius (250?-325?) is a strange place to go craving the consolations of theology. When encyclopaedias refer to him as ‘rhetorician’ or ‘apologist’ you are meant to understand he is not rated as a theologian. Certainly, he is never mentioned in the same breath as the luminaries: Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine, or Calvin. It doesn’t take much to detect flaws and limitations in his thought. But this is partly what draws me to him. He is of relatively small brain. He got some things wrong. But at crucial points he finds a clarity that comes from reading and believing the Bible in the face of the pressure of the philosophical consensus. I think he got some things right that most of the luminaries got wrong.
In contrast to his hero (Cicero), his mentor (Arnobius), and most Christian thinkers of his time, Lactantius insisted on God’s personality and the emotions that went with that. To be unfeeling is to be corrupted. To be completely at rest is to be dead. God is slow to get angry. But the universe is governed by a God who has access to all the information and who is angry at exactly what he should be angry at, He cares deeply about how the vulnerable are treated. “If God carries on the care of the world, it follows that he cares for the life of men, and takes notice of the acts of individuals, and he earnestly desires that they should be wise and good.” Nobody ‘escapes’ his justice, his intensely personal opposition to all evil.
Against those who urged elimination and even those who urged moderation of anger, Lactantius insisted that anger was a gift from God, implanted in us. Of the ‘three furies,’ anger, love of gain and desire, Lactantius writes: “we say that they ought not to be taken away or lessened. For they are not evil of themselves, since God has reasonably implanted them in us . . . for they are given us for the protection of life"they become evil by their evil use.” Anger cannot, by definition, be evil. It is given by God for the restraining of evil, self-indulgence and arrogance. When it is directed to these purposes and kept within the boundaries God has set anger is a virtue. Lactantius envisages vehement anger being appropriate in some circumstances.
For Lactantius, there is a vital theological perspective on anger. God’s anger is vital to his providential and just rule of the universe, something for us to celebrate. Our anger can be a source of devastation. Unless we understand where our anger comes from, what we are trying to achieve by expressing it, and why God made us with the capacity for it, we will inevitably act viciously, cruelly, and violently. But anger is not necessarily sickness or sin. It is possible, in our anger, not to sin. We do not have to deny or repress it (Eph 4:26). Under the right circumstances it can be a virtuous thing.
