John Cassian’s Teachings on Anger
lessons about a difficult emotion drawn from monastic life
(this article was previously published in Practical Rationality)
One of the thinkers whose insights about anger I have personally found particularly worth rereading and reflecting upon is John Cassian. In recent years, I’ve started teaching selections from his works in my academic classes dealing with the emotion of anger and related matters, and I have also produced some video and podcast lectures on his work (I plan to produce more of them in the coming year)
He is a not-particularly well-known, but historically influential, 4th-5th Century monastic Father who traveled from his home in the Latin-speaking West to take vows in a monastery at Bethlehem. With permission (and accompanied by his fellow monk and childhood friend Germanus), he traveled to monasteries in Egypt to study their ways of life through observation of the monks, and conferences with their abbots. As it turns out, anger was a significant problem that they had to grapple with. Over generations, these monastic communities had accumulated much wisdom to pass on.
Back in the West, settling at Marseilles, he set down the fruits of this experience and his reflections in two works
The systematic Institutes, which sets out the practices, insights, rules of the eastern monks, adapting them to a new European milieu and climate.
And the more topically organized (but still fairly systematic) Conferences, reconstructions and recollections of his discussions with the abbots of the East.
These writings of Cassian played a centrally important role in the ongoing development of Western monasticism. Since monasteries, institutions oriented by a common and deliberate way of life, were spiritual, cultural, intellectual, and often political centers, the influence of what we might call “Cassian’s doctrine” could be more widely extended than just to monks who read him or who heard his books read, e.g. during their common meals (The Rule of Saint Benedict explicitly recommends Cassian by name for this).
The centrality of monastic practice and community in his works and thought raises an important issue for us readers in the present-day . Should we assume that the ethical standpoint Cassian reports on and elaborates is one solely relevant to or practicable for monks? Are his insights only for those on the path of perfection, retired from the world and its cares, closer to God than us laypeople living — and getting angry — in the midst of secular society?
As it turns out, he does have several things quite relevant to say bearing on such worries, revealing to us that the human heart, beset by the temptation to and habits of anger remains just as much of a battleground for monks and hermits as it is for clergy, laity, and even arguably people with no religious commitments at all.
Assuming Responsibility For Our Anger
Cassian cautions against attributing our anger to the presence and failings of others, telling us that “we complain that we need solitude, as if we should find the virtue of patience there where nobody provokes us.” But, so long as we continue to “lay the blame of our fault on others, we shall never be able to reach the goal of patience and perfection.”
In the Institutes, the desert, the hermetic life, are not refuges to run off to in order to escape oneself:
For whatever faults we bring with us uncured into the desert, we shall find to remain concealed in us and not to be got rid of. . . . it generally not only preserves but intensifies the faults of those who have undergone no correction. for a man appears to himself to be patient and humble, just so long as he come across nobody in intercourse; but he will presently revert to his former nature, whenever the chance of any sort of passion occurs.
He uses his own case as an example, a common enough state (certainly one I can relate to myself), and draws a key lesson:
we recollect that when we were living in solitude, a feeling of irritation would creep over us against our pen because it was too large or too small; against our penknife when it cut badly. . . . we could not remove and get rid of our perturbation of mind except by cursing the senseless matter, or at least the devil. . . . it will not be any good for there to be a dearth of men against whom our anger might be roused; since, if patience has not already been acquired, the feelings of passion which still dwell in our hearts can equally well spend themselves on dumb things and paltry objects, and not allow us to gain a continual state of peacefulness.
He does point out one advantage, however, of getting angry with inanimate things. They don’t respond in turn to our anger as other people do:
inanimate and speechless things cannot possibly respond to our curses and rage, nor provoke our ungovernable temper to break out into a worse madness of passion.
We All Struggle With Anger
Remaining in community with fellow monks, Cassian notes with example after example, confronts one with the same challenges of anger faced by people living in the wider world outside the cloister. Where the monk differs is in having committed to a way of life in which (ideally) excuses are seen through, discarded, replaced by efforts on the path to perfection — a term, one ought to note, that remains quite relative and qualified for human beings within monastic literature.
Monks lose their tempers, take offense and give it in return. They lapse into outbursts. They also at times — angry in their hearts, but unwilling, afraid, perhaps even ashamed to allow it a direct expression — engage in passive-aggressiveness, which Cassian and the abbots whose words he reported knew well, and saw right through. He writes of those who:
say in words that they are not angry, but in fact and deed they show that they are extremely disturbed. they do not speak to them pleasantly, nor address them with ordinary civility, and they think that they are doing nothing wrong in this because they do not seek to avenge themselves for their upset.
Their anger seduces them, subverts their rationality, conceals from them its harmfulness and the wrongness of its disguised expression. In the Conferences, the Abbot Joseph speaks to Cassian about monks who fast out of rage, living off the nourishment of their wrath, and he discusses examples of feigned patience, monks who:
incite [quarrels] with irritating words so as to get themselves smitten, and when they have been touched by the slightest blow, at once they offer another part of their body to be smitten . . . they fancy that they are practicing evangelical patience through the sin of anger.
A similar pretense of patience employs what we nowadays call the “silent treatment,” intended to provoke another person to anger, to wound, to goad, to inflict pain on them. Very effective, Abbot Daniel points out: “often a feigned patience excites to anger more keenly than words, and, a spiteful silence exceeds the most awful insults in words.”
These considerations introduce a very interesting point. It is true that Cassian unequivocally condemns anger, saying, “we ought to banish it not only from our actions, but also entirely to root it from our inmost soul.” Among the means for rooting anger out, he sets down a sort of zero-tolerance policy:
we make up our mind that we ought never to be angry at all, whether for good or bad reasons; as we know that we shall at once lose the light of discernment, and the security of good counsel, and our very uprightness, and the temperate character of uprightness if the main light of our heart has been darkened by its shadows.
Complicating the picture, it is not only one’s own anger that one bears and must learn to take responsibility for, but also the anger provoked within one’s neighbor. This makes good sense if you think about it. If anger is such a bad thing, it is not only bad for the person who is affected by its effects and expression in the angry person, that is, the person who gets hurt, deprived, or attacked by the one enraged. It is also a bad thing to the one who suffers it in their soul, the person who feels the anger, who is gripped and driven by it. Given that, to provoke one’s neighbor to anger is to do them harm. To give offense is to offer a noxious gift of anger to the one offended.
A Paradox and Objection
One might bring up an objection here, one which Cassian does not address, but which he would certainly have the intellectual resources to answer. If a person is entirely responsible for their own anger. . . if seeing things rightly and making progress depends on grasping this very truth that one cannot displace the blame for one’s anger onto another, onto the towards whom one feels angry — then doesn’t that go for me too?
Why isn’t my neighbor also entirely responsible for his own anger? Does not his or her responsibility absolve me then of mine? Going further, if there is some responsibility still on my side, well then, what about God, if He made me angry — or certainly made people angry with Him as recorded in Scripture? Would not that line of reasoning make God also responsible?
As typically the case with paradoxes, more resides beneath the surface than appears at first glance. One can twist this plaint in two different directions:
A horizontal one, remaining on the same, human level
and, a vertical one, looking upwards, bringing God in for argument
This vertical one, we should point out, can go two ways as well:
One might point to Scripture’s instances and examples of divine anger, and ask: “look, if it’s all right for God to be angry — and He’s God after all — why isn’t it all right for me?”
Alternately, one might also find fault with the way God has managed matters, the providential ordering by which He arranges the world, one so complex, flexible, and yet inescapable that even human free will is able to be incorporated within it.
One can scour John Cassian’s works and not find passages precisely addressing all of these possible objections a person struggling with anger — their own against others or that of others against them — might articulate. One of the objections is, however, very specifically addressed: What does it mean when Scripture says God is angry, speaks of God’s wrath?
We have heard some people trying to excuse this most pernicious disease of the soul, in such a way as to endeavor to extenuate it by a rather shocking way of interpreting Scripture: as they say it is not injurious if we are angry with the brethren who do wrong since, say they, God himself is said to rage and be angry . .
Cassian’s response in the The Institutes is immediate, assured, and not particularly original (not that the latter is any fault). Whether Christian (Lactantius has an entire work on divine anger), Jewish (Philo of Alexandria provides an excellent example), or pagan (it was commonplace to make sense of anthropomorphism about the gods through allegorical interpretation), this was already a longstanding, even traditional topic addressed by theology or philosophy of religion in the ancient world
Those proffering such justifications “are ascribing to the Divine Infinity and Fountain of All Purity a taint of human passion.” Put in another way, they are attributing to God something that, when one first imagines it, could seem to make sense, but when thought through really couldn’t fit. Cassian notes that if one chooses to understand anger to be attributed to God “literally in a material and gross signification,” then all of the other metaphorical language — God sits, sleeps, stands, has hands, forgets — all of that has equal cause to be granted.
Instead, we ought to rightly understand these sorts of expressions as allegorical (side note: those who appreciate Saint Thomas’ fourfold senses of scripture: literal, analogical, moral, and anagogical, will find that distinction made earlier in Cassian’s Conferences). God does not suffer the passion of anger (nor for that matter, could He be subject to the vice). Rather:
When we read of the anger or the fury of the Lord, we should take it not anthropopathos, i.e. according to an unworthy meaning of human passion, but in a sense worthy of God, who is free from all passion; so that by this we should understand that He is the judge and avenger of all the unjust things which are done in the world; and by reason of these terms and their meaning, we should dread him as the terrible rewarder of our deeds and fear to do anything which is against his will.
What is perhaps somewhat original (not being an expert in patristics, I cannot say for certain) is Cassian’s further explanation. Those who have done wrong, or who worry whether they might do wrong (John Cassian is a proponent of free will, so he knows that it is quite reasonable for an imperfect creature, endowed with free will, to worry about their future uses of it in the face of temptations) — those people fear the anger of the judge, the “avenging wrath.”
The object of their trepidation is the typical effects, not the passion of anger, in the person of the judge and against themselves. They attribute the passion, and perhaps even the vice of anger to the judge, but this reflects their own skewed perspective, a phantasmagoric projection of their fear, rather than reality:
[N]ot indeed that this passion exists in the minds of those who are going to judge with perfect equity, but that, while they so fear, the disposition of the judge towards them is that which is the precursor of a just and impartial execution of the law. And this, with whatever kindness and gentleness it may be conducted, is deemed by those who are justly to be punished to be the most savage wrath and vehement anger.
What particularly struck me me when reading this again — one of the areas of my research being debates about the existence and nature of Christian philosophy (a term Cassian uses, at least once) — was that Cassian’s and other patristic authors’ discussions of anger provide excellent examples for how Christian philosophy, as Gilson, Maritain, Blondel, and others conceived of it, actually developed: the necessity of grappling with divine revelation, to explore its intelligibility, to unpack and follow its exigencies, patterned not only new ways off thought, but new ways of life which then told the rationally inquiring human subject not only more about God, but also about their own selves, human nature, the social order, and the richly created world. That is a large subject, however, and I now have to set it aside for the moment, relegating it to a blog post later down the line.
What about the two other points to the paradox? If Cassian genuinely believes in a providential ordering of the universe by God, then how can He (or anyone, for that matter) rightly fault me, hold me fully responsible for offending and enraging my neighbor? There are several viable responses that could be made to this, and most of them would steer us into (at least to me still-) murky and complexly eddied waters of Cassian’s position on the interaction between grace, providence, and human free will. So, I will simply say this: two commonplaces of monastic literature are highly relevant here.
Here is the first of those. What the virtue of humility requires, embodies, and is gradually built up through, is a realization and focus on one’s own condition, one’s own responsibility, one’s own efforts and strivings. It is a matter of attaining perspective, by which the insistence of certain questions will lessen, not because they have been provided a systematic, logically arranged answer, but through a realization that the questions are perhaps badly put, reflecting a mistaken perspective, both practical and theoretical. For instance:
If the words of the Gospel bid us make satisfaction to those who are angry for past and utterly trivial grounds of quarrel, and those which have arisen from the slightest causes, what will become of us wretches who with obstinate hypocrisy disregard more recent grounds of offense, and those of the utmost importance, and due to our own faults; and being puffed up with the devil’s own pride, as we are ashamed to humble ourselves, deny that we are the cause of our brother’s vexation and in a spirit of rebellion disdaining to be subject to the Lord’s commands, contend that they never ought to be observed and never can be fulfilled? And so it comes to pass that as we make up our minds that He has commanded things which are impossible and unsuitable, we become, to use the Apostle’s expression, “not doers but judges of the Law.”
The other thing one ought to keep in mind is the view that God’s providential arrangement of matters, including people getting angry with us, even without good cause, is ordered to provide us occasions for following the Christian way, for doing or enduring those sometimes bitterly painful things that are ultimately for our benefit, for developing closer towards the divine likeness yet marred and distorted but still within our beings. Cassian touches on this while explaining one of Christ’s precepts about anger:
And because we often spurn the brethren who are injured and saddened, and despise them, and say that they were not hurt by any fault off ours, the Healer of souls, who knows all secrets, wishing utterly to eradicate all opportunities of anger from our hearts, not only commands us to forgive if we have been wronged, and to be reconciled with our brothers, and keep no recollection of wrong or injuries against them, but He also gives us a similar charge, that in case we are aware that they have anything against us, whether justly or unjustly, we should. . . . hasten first to offer satisfaction to them. . .
Still, setting aside issues concerning the providential order, just focusing instead upon oneself and one’s neighbor, it remains fair to ask: “I’m wholly responsible for my own anger, right? I’m not supposed to blame it on anyone else. I’m supposed to cultivate the connected virtues of patience and meekness (or mildness, gentleness, what the Greeks termed praotes, and which we translate by all these different terms into English), and if I haven’t got them, it’s somehow my own fault? All right, I’ll grant all this. But then, my neighbor is a person like me, no? Well, why isn’t he or she just as responsible for their own anger, their own irritability, their own lack of virtue? How is it that I somehow share blame in it?”
Cassian’s works address this in several ways. One, which is not particularly well-worked out, involves his teachings about the specific faculties and dynamics of our common fallen and damaged human nature, and this helps us understand the workings of anger in ourselves and in our fellow creatures. Another turns such questions aside, steering consideration to strength and weakness instead. A third, yet more practically oriented, charts out the path to virtuous dispositions respecting anger, which when developed will heal not only our own ire but that of our (perhaps all too easily) offended neighbor.
I’ll end with a passage which does not tie these three themes together in a clean knot, but which at least begins looping them into each other.
But you must certainly know that in general he plays a stronger part who subjects his own will to a brother’s, than he who is found to be the more pertinacious in defending and clinging to his own decisions. For the former by bearing and putting up with his neighbor gains the character of being strong and vigorous . . . . [H]e may be sure that he has gained much more by his virtue of long suffering and patience. . . . For a weak man will never support a weak man nor can one who is suffering in the same way, bear or cure one in feeble health, but one who is himself not subject to infirmity brings remedies to one in weak health