Early Christian Thinkers On Anger

Presentation at 2025 Philosophy & Psychology of Anger Conference

In Spring of 2025, I was invited to provide one of the talks in the Philosophy and Psychology Of Anger online conference, hosted by the Plato’s Academy Center. If you’d like to watch or listen to my presentation, here’s the videorecording of it. The transcript of my talk is below.

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I think that given the thematics of this conference, it might be a little bit of a harder sell to say we should check out these early Christian thinkers for understanding and managing anger. I think it's a completely legitimate question for people to say: “Well why should we engage with them?

There's a lot of different possible responses, but in interest of time I've got just one picked out, and this is kind of an appeal to authority. There's a lot of people who like Pierre Hadot and his book Philosophy as a Way of Life. You notice in chapter 4, which is about what he calls “Christian philosophy”, he notes that Christianity in ancient culture is understood as a philosophy that engaged with other non-Christian philosophical schools and traditions. So here's a little quote from him:

Christians believed that they recognized spiritual exercises which they had learned through philosophy in specific scriptural passages, and the reason why Christian authors paid attention to these particular passages was that they were already familiar from other sources with the spiritual exercises of premeditation on death and examination of the conscience.

And I will I'll say a lot of other ones as well. Now there's a very complex story that could be told about, this but in interest of time I'm just going to point out three things very quickly.

The first is that what Hadot is calling “spiritual exercises” we typically call “philosophical practices”. And it gets called by other things. Foucault has “technologies of the self”. Nussbaum has “therapeutic arguments”. But the idea is you're doing something with philosophy.

The second is that the interplay between scriptural passages and philosophical practices is far more rich and dynamic than this passage would suggest.

The third is that early Christian thinkers who were engaging with predecessor and contemporary non-Christian philosophers viewed anger as deeply problematic as needing to be understood and managed, but maybe potentially useful. And so they developed a whole variety of insights and practices to address it.

I think one of the legitimate questions we can ask is: Okay, so what can we actually get out of engaging with these. And maybe the presentation will plant that seed in in some people's heads.

So first off who are these early Christian thinkers? For convenience sake, let's say thinkers who are living and practicing and writing roughly from the second to the fifth century Common Era, so leading up to the breakdown of the Western Roman Empire.

Some of these were converts to Christianity. Some of them were actually philosophers before they were thinking in terms of Christianity. Others were raised as Christians. Many of them had a philosophical education, or an education in law, rhetoric, medicine, all these other things.

And they were very, very interested in issues about anger that were already raised and debated in ancient Philosophy, for example:

• Is anger always bad?

• Can it be useful or not?

• The dangers of indulging in or excusing anger.

• The connections between anger, courage, and justice

• Whether there's different kinds of anger

• Whether the gods or God get angry

These are all things that ancient philosophers, and as Hadot has pointed out, not just philosophers but the culture in general, were concerned with. And we can say in general that most of these thinkers are drawing on a broadly Platonic psychology and ethical conceptions that are drawn from Platonist, Stoic, and Aristotelian schools but within a framework that Christianity is providing to them.

So which thinkers are we talking about? Well, in the second to fourth century, we have:

• Clement of Alexandria

• Tertullian

• Origen

• Lactantius (who actually has a great treatise On The Anger of God)

And then in the fourth and fifth century, it really takes off. We have:

• Basil of Caesaria

• Gregory of Nyssa

• Evagrius Ponticus

• John Chrysostom

• Ambrose of Milan

• Jerome

• Prudentius (who writes a poem, the Psychomachia)

• John Cassian

• Augustine of Hippo

Every single one of these thinkers, some of whom are reading and responding to each other’s view anger as something that's problematic, that needs to be understood and managed and lessened. But they they belong to kind of a spectrum.

We mentioned scriptural passages. So there's a vast variety of these that they are engaging with, many of which are coming from pre-christian Jewish scriptures, for example what we call the Wisdom literature. There's a number of Psalms that talk about or reference anger, for example Psalm 4: “be angry and do not sin”. So they're trying to figure out: Well, what does that actually mean? Psalm 37: “refrain from anger and turn from wrath”.

And then if you look at Proverbs and the book of Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), you're going to find a lot of discussions of anger. but these are all sort of like one-liners. They're not vast arguments. There's nobody writing a Seneca’s On Anger back in that time.

Then when we look at the newer texts, for example The Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew (which is a very important text for them), we have this very important discussion that they all engage with, where Jesus says: “The law says you shall not kill (or murder) but I say to you,” and then he gives these three injunctions

• “anybody who's angry with their brother” (and then we find in parenthesis “without cause”, and I'll tell you why we're bringing that up in a bit) “shall be in danger of the judgment” (so that's bad at one level)

• then “whoever says to his brother ‘raca’ will be in danger of the council (we're getting a bit more serious)

and then “whoever says ‘you fool’ to their their brother” out of anger is being threatened with hellfire

So that's one important text. Another is Paul's Letter to the Ephesians, where we read: “Be angry and sin not. Let not the sun go down on your wrath.” And a little bit later, he says: Let all anger and indignance and clamor be put away from you along with malice.”

James in his Letter says: “Let every person be slow to anger.” Why? “Because the anger of a human being doesn't produce the righteousness of God.”

Now we have to be careful when we're looking at these passages and these thinkers, not to import very modern ways of approaching this. These people are not fundamentalists. They are not bringing up passages to say: “See it's in the Bible! That solves everything.” Instead, these are opportunities for reflection, for conversation, for thinking through matters, for trying to figure things out. And they see a consonance between this teaching and these philosophical practices, metaphors, and insights, and they're trying to integrate these together.

So it's not a matter of just replacing Pagan philosophy. Rather it's producing a new hairesis, a new philosophy as a way of life. There's no sort of monolithic doctrinal unity between these thinkers. You're going to see them disagreeing on a number of matters. For example, we come back to that “without cause”. The manuscripts of the books that we call now the New Testament, they had variations.

And one of them was in The Sermon on the Mount where it said “he who becomes angry with his brother eikē (without cause)”. So just one word! There were a lot floating around with that, and then some didn't have that in it. And some of the thinkers, for example John Chrysostom or Augustine said: “Okay, what does that mean? What is it to be ‘without cause’ and ‘with cause’? Maybe some anger could be justified.” Others like John Cassian, this monastic author, will say: “It's never good, and as a matter of fact don't even pay attention to those manuscripts.”

So there's a big stress on a few things and I'm just going to talk about three as we move into the final part of it. So one is virtues and vices. Another is insights. And then another is practices.

Anger could be viewed as always vicious, the way the Stoics typically looked at it. Or there could be a proper virtue associated with anger, the way that Aristotle viewed it. In some of these thinkers, John Cassian for example, anger becomes one of the eight capital vices which will later be the seven deadly sins. Most of these thinkers are focusing on other virtues that are very important, and are often shared by the non-Christian philosophers.

• So patience — they write entire treatises on patience — but you'll also see that discussed in Seneca's On Anger with that word patientia.

• Gentleness or mildness, that's already there in Aristotle, but they're rethinking what is being praos, being calm, being gentle mean.

• Humility is something that they stress, but not in the sense of just “Oh I'm so terrible! I'm so bad!” But rather a proper understanding of yourself, something again we see Plutarch talking about, not so much in on his work on anger, but in How to Tell a Friend from a Flatterer he says we really need to know ourselves.

• Mercy and compassion, which in other translations could be translated as pity. Epictetus will tell us: You probably don't want to feel pity, but it's sure better than feeling anger. We see a huge stress on showing this attitude towards others.

• And then, something that I think is really key, but not unique to Christian thinkers, forgiveness or pardoning. But if you look at Aristotle and his discussion of what it means to be gentle or even-tempered, he actually says that person is forgiving (sungnōmikos).

So they're incorporating a lot of things, and they're redeveloping them some of the insights that they have to offer. I'll just give you a few from some of their texts, because there's many that could be shared.

Tertullian in his book On Patience tells us that revenge in paying wickedness doubles that which has once been done. It seems a solace of pain. It seems like it's going to make us feel better. But it really just adds more evil to the situation.

Basil, who has an entire sermon “Against Those Who Are Prone To Anger, tells us that we should not use our enemy as a teacher. Don't become a mirror of the one who's prone to anger. So you know, as Donald was just talking about, we can think about our own situation in relation to others and whether we're becoming like them in this case

John Chrysostom talking about that work, Letter To The Ephesians, what does it mean to say “let not the sun go down on your anger”? He gets actually very prescriptive, and he says three hours — that's enough for you to be angry. If you can, go shorter than that. That's great. And if night comes and you're still angry, you won't be able to distract yourself in the solitude of the night, and you're going to wake up in the morning even more ticked off than you were already.

Augustine has a really interesting Insight that many of these share, and he talks about this in various places including Letter 38 and several of his sermons. He talks about the danger of anger congealing into a different emotion, hatred. Now this is again something that Aristotle talked about in the Rhetoric, but he says there's a really important distinction here. Hatred will make anger even more unmanageable. You can get angry at people that you love and you can come back from it. but when you start to hate them then you're going to have some real problems. He says: Anger is a “mote” a little tiny bit. Hatred is the “beam in the eye” So he's using another scriptural passage there.

John Cassian, who takes a zero tolerance approach to anger, says that patience includes not only not responding angrily, or being patient in the sense of suffering, or getting rid of your anger. It has to extend to forgiving other people as well

So what kind of practices does this lead to? Again much more than we can discuss here. So I'm just going to give you some examples

One that's talked about a lot is redirecting our emotion of anger that we are going to feel towards parts of our self that generate anger and other vices. John Cassian who thinks that anger is almost always bad says: Well, if you direct anger against itself or the part of you that's getting angry ,that that could actually be helpful.

Another key thing is recalling what's been shown to us. Now that presumes that others have been good to us. But forgiveness, or mercy, or patience in place of anger. Have others given that to us? Well then we should be returning that to them, instead of trying to take revenge or retaliate.

Another is to remind people of injunctions that evil shouldn't be repaid for evil, or that retribution should be left to the Divine rather than being placed in uncertain human hands. We've already talked a little bit about this, realizing that anger has a tendency to develop into vice, or something more, that can be very helpful.

I'll just bring up one other one. So people have mentioned in the comments “angry God.” Lactantius will say: Yeah God gets angry, and God should get angry. In that very treatise he says: don't use that as an excuse for your own anger, because you're not God. If anybody had a reason for it (and divine anger looks very different than human anger), it would be that thing. But you're not like that, so you're not going to be able to effectively manage it.

So I know I'm already a little bit over time. I'm going to wrap it up right here. Thanks everybody for following along! And maybe you'll find some of these thinkers to be a useful resource as well .You don't have to buy into any sort of religious commitments in order to sort of plumb texts and find useful insights and practices.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.