Saint Anselm On Anger, The Will, and Virtue

lessons about this difficult emotion from a Benedictine monk and teacher

This article was previously published in Practical Rationality)

As is the case with many other matters, Saint Anselm of Canterbury never provides anything like a systematic discussion of anger, considered as a topic in its own right. Instead, what he left us — this great monastic Doctor, who wrote so eloquently and incisively, but typically only when some need of others or delight of his own compelled him to — are just passages scattered across his works, like stones that call attentive eyes and hands to compose them into a coherent and beautiful mosaic. That is what I intend to do here.

That Anselm the person, in his face to face conversation, in his sermons, in his classes and his discussions (with people from all walks of life but especially with his beloved fellow monks) had much more to say on the topic than his bare writings communicate, is a certitude. What we can correlate and extrapolate from what he did write, or what he said that others wrote down (for instance Eadmer, in his Life of St. Anselm, or Alexander in the Dicti Anselmi) is substantive and coherent, but clearly does not provide an exhaustive summary of Anselm’s thoughts about the emotion of anger.

There are a number of interconnected issues concerning anger that can be unpacked and set out from an Anselmian perspective, producing a composite viewpoint of what his views and teaching on anger were. These include:

• how anger affects the will and reason

• the remedies for anger

• the meaning of divine anger

• the connection between anger and other emotions, desires, virtues, and vices

• anger’s relationship with (right or wrong) punishment

• and, the political or social roles and risks of anger in communities.

We should also note right off that Anselm — so far as I know — never mentions anger as something positively good. Usually, it is something bad — in its very being, or in its cause, or its effects, or in the extent to which it is felt. There are perhaps cases where it might be expediently useful for a person to feel anger, for example in a person who is charged with administering punishment, defending others who need it, maintaining or reimposing (relatively more) right order. But Anselm (as opposed to e.g. Aristotle or Saint Thomas, or even Augustine is some places) does not seem to ascribe any goodness to anger for this reason. It is just not-bad.

Anselm does not define anger anywhere, nor does he seem particularly concerned to do so for this or any other emotion. In fact, definitions play a small role (though admittedly an important one, e.g. when working out a definition of freedom of choice in De Libertate) in Anselm’s thought.

Instead of looking for a definition, we ought to keep in mind that Anselm and at least some of his interlocutors inherited a certain common educational endowment. This included texts of authors, pagans like Cicero, Seneca, Ovid, and Christian thinkers like Augustine, Boethius, and John Cassian (reading the latter’s works was advice within the very Rule of St. Benedict by which Anselm lived). He is presuming in his interlocutors and readers a conversancy with anger not only experiential but also literary, intellectual . . . even philosophical.

Reading these authors, we discover that anger involves pleasure, pain, and desire — a desire to punish, to inflict something on another. It results from being harmed or threatened with harm, injury, injustice, insult, being slighted, looked down upon, or otherwise treated as of less value than one feels oneself to be. These authors also know anger’s propensity to congeal into hatred, to wax out of control into rage, to become a vicious disposition to wrath.

Anger And The Carnal Appetites

As human beings, we possess certain faculties, Anselm thinks — among them reason, the will, the imagination, memory, the external senses, other external capacities like speech or action — and the appetites or desires. Now among these desires are those which Anselm calls “carnal,” or fleshly, “appetites.” These desires are among the lasting effects of original sin, humanity’s fallen state, remaining within the body and the conjoined soul even after a human being has been washed clean of the guilt of original sin.

Anger, or at least anger considered as the feeling, the impulse to desire, seek, and impose retribution, to punish or to hurt another when we feel or imagine ourselves wronged, falls within the range of these carnal appetites. In our fallen condition, we have a natural (i.e. of a damaged human nature) irascibility or irritability. He mentions anger specifically in one passage from the Dicta Anselmi:

[A]lthough my carnal appetite desires the harm of my enemy, still I should not call for this by mouth, but rather to lament this harm and — against my carnal appetite — to speak well of their prosperity, and to say — just by words if I cannot [think this] in my heart at the same time — that their harm displeases me. . . . And so when I by my will [following the dictates] of reason agree consent to God’s precept, though the carnal pleasure or desire feels something different, “Now I do not work that, but sin resides in me.” For it is one thing to feel something, another to consent to it. For when I feel anger, temptation, or some other contrary to the good, if I do not consent to it, it causes no injury.

This issue of the culpability of the person who feels anger is one on which Anselm does stake out an interesting position in general, but one which will be explored in a follow-up post. The reason I bring up this passage here is that we see Anselm using the feeling and desire of anger as a prime and common example of a carnal appetite.

In his De Conceptu, Anselm discusses these more generally. Through the fall of Adam and Eve, human nature — in body and soul — was damaged:

[T]heir whole being became weakened and corrupted. Indeed, the body [became weakened and corrupted] because after their sin it became like the bodies of brute animals, viz., subject to corruption and to carnal appetites. And the soul [became weakened and corrupted] because as a result of the bodily corruption and the carnal appetites, as well as on account of its need for the goods which it had lost, it became infected with carnal desires.

Anselm does not regard animality, or even animal, carnal, fleshly appetites, as per se bad.

For if in themselves these appetites were unjust, then every instance of consenting to them would be an instance when they caused the consenter to be unjust. But when irrational animals consent to them, they are not called unjust.

In fact, for brute animals not to feel, and have their wills moved by such appetites, would be bad. They have the natures with which they have been endowed, which include those appetites. They also lack the rationality which opens up possibilities for the will, renders it free, sets responsibility upon it, but also — in the human being’s fallen state — subjects it to yet greater temptations and vulnerabilities.

For Anselm, we know human nature through experience of ourselves and others, through theological meditation on scripture correlated to that experience, and through basic metaphysical reflection on human being. As a component of human nature as we know it, we possess, or better yet remain at risk of being possessed by these carnal appetites, basic and persistent drives and desires which we experience in common with other animals.

The easily occasioned feeling of anger is among these. We do not, Anselm thinks, have a great amount of control (though indirectly, we do have some) over whether these appetites, themselves part of our own selves, assail us and attempt to cajole reason and will into service of their satisfaction. But, this is only a part of the story, a portion of the picture of anger in Anselm’s thought.

Anger And The Complex Human Will

In order to more fully understand anger and its place in Anselm’s thought, we have to look at it in relation to the faculty of the soul that figures centrally in his moral theory: the will. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the Anselmian will is complexly structured, and multidimensional. Will, he tells us, means three interconnected things

• the will as instrumentum, the instrument itself of willing, choosing, preferring, prioritizing (the self-determining faculty, or perhaps better put dimension of human existence, which makes us of all of the other instruments — including reason)

• the will as usus, as what one actually chooses in determinate situations, what use one chooses to make of the instrument, multifarious as the instances of willing in a life may be (possibly coexisting with or contradicting each other)

• and the will as affectio, the lasting, directed and structured dispositions, drives, orientations, habitudes.

From the point on when he fully and explicitly articulates this threefold distinction (in De Conceptu, De Concordia, and De Humanibus Moribus), Anselm also stresses that these three aspects of will are equally what the will is. None of them possess what one might call an ontological priority over the others, whereby that one aspect would exist first, and then the others would be mere modifications or particular instantiations of it.

Even in earlier works where he focuses on only two dimensions (will as usus and instrumentum), he adds: “what I am saying about the will can be said about concupiscence or desire, since the will is concupiscence and desire.” In discussions of the will in yet earlier works (e.g. Monologion, or De Veritate), where he does not distinguish different senses of the term, the will nevertheless possesses the same breadth and range as the self- and other-determining faculty, extending not only to actual choices, preferences and priorities, actions, strivings, nor even ending with intentions, but also incorporating desires, loves, hatreds, perhaps even arguably all of the emotions.

How are anger and the will related? Or better put: in what ways is anger a configuration or shape of the human will? Considering this, we ought first to adopt the course Anselm himself did when such seemingly simple questions were put to him: recte distinguamus, let us distinguish these matters rightly. What do we mean by anger?

There is the impulse, the emotion, the feeling as it arises in response, flaring up in a moment’s space. As mentioned earlier, for Anselm, this impulse would be among the carnal appetites, forms manifesting the weakness or corruption of our bodies in our fallen state. And, as also noted, the carnal appetites themselves are not identical with, or even parts of, the will (which is after all, a faculty or instrument of the soul, not of the body — though working through the body). The will can take them up, follow them out, and elaborate the activities they suggest.

But what of the emotion past the first impulse? The continued feeling, dwelling on and within the anger, nursing it, rolling over in our minds its cause, our justifications, the wrongness of the hurt, the rightness of our revenge or even retort — here we are already deeply involving in the will. And, the will is not so detached from the emotion so that we might say: “there’s the emotion which you feel, and then there’s your will deciding whether it allows itself to be moved by the emotion.” No, the emotion of anger becomes a modality of will, the will shapes itself along anger’s contours, fusing with it, taking on the emotion and making that affect its own.

Anger is also the response, bodily in so many different ways: the action seeking to strike, the pallor of blood vessels’ constriction, the shaking of adrenalin infusion, the thickening of the voice, the somatic perception of it in one’s chest, or guts, or limbs, face, even eyes and jaw. Some of these are fairly involuntary reactions. But, so far as it is also an affective response followed out into action, “acted upon,” we say in our contemporary parlance (usually counseling, “it’s okay to feel angry, but not to act upon it”), it is willed. It may be willed and not-willed (or rather willed-not) at the same time , revealing a conflict, a bifurcation within the will — but then it is still willed.

The tendencies towards anger, or towards what we do when angry — are these just the carnal appetites? No, remember what Anselm said earlier in the passage from the De Conceptu: the carnal appetites (which are not willed) give rise to carnal desires in the soul, that is, in the will. And this, even more than will as usus, involves will as affectio, the will as it becomes structured through developed habits, dispositions, fundamental orientations. It is at this point that we can start to talk about anger in terms of virtue and vice.

Anger, Virtues, and Vices

Anger clearly can take lasting root in the will as a vice. What virtues then, would bear on anger? In Anselm’s works, we find virtues that bear upon anger, primarily in negative manners, i.e., by preventing anger entirely, or by lessening its intensity, its ease of provocation, its duration, even by keeping legitimate anger directed properly, preventing it from spilling over to other people, bleeding into other matters or occasions. There does not seem to be anything like a virtue of Aristotelian mildness or good temper (praotēs).

What are these virtues then?

• Patience, including a disposition towards forgiveness.

• Meekness (mansuetudo, also translated as “mildness” or as “gentleness”)

• Love or Christian charity

• Humility

• and Justice

Those last two exercise absolutely architectonic roles in Anselm’s moral theory — indeed all of the virtues are connected in fundamental ways with both of them — but the first two more specifically bear on anger. Now, we unfortunately don’t possess all that much of the great monastic teacher’s thought on these. We do know from Anselm’s biographer, Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury, that he both taught and counseled on these subjects. He tells us that during the common meals, Anselm discussed these at length and in depth:

For if I were to describe him as he discoursed about humility, patience, gentleness . . . or about any of the innumerable and profound subjects on which we heard him talk almost every day, I should have to compose another work and put aside the one which I have undertaken.

In fact, at the risk of digression, I should point out that Anselm so embodied these virtues, even in his role as Archbishop of Canterbury, that he drew criticism on their account (even from his biographer). The very next chapter of the Vita Anselmi relates:

It is certain that from the moment he assumed a religious habit to the time of his elevation to the episcopacy, he devoted himself to the cultivation of every virtue, and by word and example sowed these virtues in the minds of others whenever possible. . . .He was often even blamed and suffered in his reputation on account of his undiscerning [indiscreta]. . . . cultivation of the virtues which were more fitting for a monk of his cloister than for the primate of so great a nation. His high humility, his boundless patience. . . .were all in this respect noted censured and condemned. And above all he was blamed for his lack of judgment in the mildness of his proceedings, for — as most people saw it — there were many on whom he ought to have inflicted ecclesiastical discipline, who took advantage of his mildness to remain in their wickedness as if by his consent.

Still, Anselm appeared to have a particular gift for a different type of discernment, “adapt[ing] his words to every class of men, so that his hearers declared that nothing could have been spoken more appropriate to their station.”

Interestingly, among the advice given to the laity, specifically to married people, we find the wife charged to:

diligently encourage [her husband] in well-doing, and calm his spirit with her mildness in he were perchance unjustly stirred up against anyone.

Anselm praises Queen Matilda precisely for this in more than one of his Letters — in fact, I suspect that the very word “anger” is used most often in Anselm’s Letters and in Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi of her husband, King Henry, who imposed numerous demands Anselm could not rightly grant (one reason why Anselm is a pivotal figure in the history of Church-State relations), and was angered with Anselm (and really, anyone connected with him!) on many occasions.

Eadmer also tells us of fruits of Anselm’s commitment to spiritual disciplines and to unfolding the rationality implicit in the faith:

Being thus inwardly more clearly illuminated with the light of wisdom and guided by his powers of discrimination, he so understood the characters of people of whatever sex or age that you might have seen him opening to each one the secrets of his heart and bringing them to the light of day. Besides this he uncovered the origins and, so to speak, the very seeds and roots and process of growth of virtues and vices, and made it clearer than light how the former could be attained and the latter avoided or subdued.

This was oral teaching and interaction, and we unfortunately lack any Anselmian work of ethics reflective of this embodied achievement. Nevertheless, in Anselm’s treatises, in his Letters, in the Vita Anselmi, in the Dicta Anselmi, even in his prayers, a number of illuminating references to virtues and vices, their interconnections, their natures, structures, and objects, have come down to us, some of them helpful in understanding anger, for instance when he remarks in Letter 37 that “meekness is the inseparable companion of patience.”

Anselm inherits — and does not question — a classic view that virtues and vices are habitually developed, structured, and expressed dispositions of the soul, tying in not only with our outward actions, but also with our desires, emotions, orderings and understandings of goods and evils. Because Anselm distinguishes different dimensions of the will, it is of very wide scope, encompassing much of the human being in one way or another. The upshot of this is that virtues and vices, including those which bear upon anger, will in fact be ways in which the will (specifically the dimension of will Anselm termed affectio) is disposed, structured, turned and grown rightly or deformedly twisted.

Virtues and vices are, as I have discussed elsewhere, best understood in an Anselmian matrix as specific affectiones of the will, as determinate modes of freedom or of unfreedom of the will, and as particular forms of justice or of injustice in the will (justice in its overarching sense — in this respect, Anselm is like Aristotle, seeing all of the virtues as being in some sense components of “complete justice”)

So, in order to understand virtues and vices, including those bearing on anger, more fully — before we get to the destination we are seeking, concrete, determinate structures of our character, good or bad — we need to clarify a bt more a few key Anselmian points about the will.

Anger and Rectitude Of The Will

I see five main subjects bearing on anger and its connection to the will in Anselm’s works

• what justice in the will is fundamentally

• self-will (or pride) and its opposition to justice

• the two basic affectiones of the will

• weakness of will and temptation

• the order of possible relationships between the carnal appetites and the will.

One of the most original features of Anselm’s moral theory is the definition of justice he (and his student, for it is a dialogue) works out in his De Veritate.

justice is rectitude of will kept for its own sake.

This involves willing the right thing, for the right reason(s), and it does not apply simply to single acts of will, or even a series of volitions, i.e. will as usus. Now, determining precisely what this rather formal definition means requires us to apply ourselves to figuring out what rectitude or rightness means, both in general principles and in their extension to particulars of situations. Fortunately according to Anselm, we are not on our own. We have the faculty of reason and its products, divine precepts and examples, teachings of other people — a number of resources for determining what the right act, willing, speech, state of character, relationship, or even thought is.

What is the upshot of this for anger? Can being angry, so far as it involves the will, ever be right? Can it be right to will one’s angry state, the actions that flow naturally from anger, to remain unreconciled with another?

Or is the right thing always to endure, to forgive or at least strive to, to exhibit or at least try to develop the virtues, the states of will of patience and meekness?

Reading through Anselm’s works, one certainly gets the strong impression that his view is the latter. He tells us, for example, in Cur Deus Homo, that it is not up to anyone to avenge themselves on one who wrongs them. That lies within God’s prerogative, since all are His creatures. Some must punish, threaten, or fight others in order to preserve the good of social order, Anselm grants, but that could certainly be done without those people feeling anger (or feeling it too much).

Of course, one might point out — and I think Anselm would certainly be receptive to this — that one who has a vicious disposition with respect to anger could will rectitude of will for its own sake, and to preserve the modicum of rightness of will which they possess. If they become angry and attempt to counter their anger, even if they do end up ultimately loosing their temper — which to be sure is a matter of will in one way — they still do will rightly in making the attempt, in willing it, in choosing that good, in choosing against the evil of giving way to anger.

If they so will with the laudable motive of moving themselves even just a little (that’s so often all we can do, isn’t it?) away from the vicious disposition and towards a virtuous disposition, if they willingly make use of the little bit of freedom they have in this to make progress, to render themselves one step closer to mastering their anger, they are willing to preserve rightness of will. And if they do so because they recognize that this is the right, the good thing to do, not just because somebody is rewarding them or threatening them, they are willing to maintain rectitude of will for its own sake. They are willing justice, and to that extent their will is just.

It is quite possible — in fact, this is usually the case to some extent, in one way or another — to have a will divided against itself, desiring, even striving for contradictory or at least incompatible objects, one of which ultimately has to be sacrificed or subordinated to the other. In fact, until we are truly virtuous — and I only hope someday to grasp the hem of that garment! — our wills will contain such discordances. Often we don’t want to face up to them, to accept responsibility not only for the good we will but also for the bad.

So, there could be cases where the angry person at least in part wills rightly, wills justly, and thereby is just, but such cases will inevitably and always be those in which a person is choosing to employ their will to modify the very lasting structure of their will, or at least to oppose another anger-directed volition within their will. The person who is habitually angry, who carries within them and colors the world with their rancor, or who is quick to take offense over too many matters, or who flares out into uncontrollable rage over and over again, or who nurses their grudges until the opportunity comes for their wrath to tower and then crash down upon their enemies — such a person who realizes they are such, resolves to change, struggles to carry forth their resolution, falls but gets up again, they can will rectitude of will maintained for its own sake.

The other circumstances where we might imagine Anselm conceding some possible conflux between the affective response of anger and rectitude of will would be where one ought to defend, impose, preserve, certain goods, whether they be social order, the lives of those one is responsible for, perhaps even one’s own body, or a truth worth fighting for — some have duties to do this. Those who redress wrongs and punish criminals — could there be cases in which feeling the emotion of anger, or even nursing a slow-burning flame of it, might carry that person through, steel them to their unpleasant duties? I think a case can be made that Anselm might accept here — though doubtless he would point out that anger is so seductive, it is so easy to cross over the line separating the legitimate amount, duration, tenor of anger from the excessive, aided by the pleasure that just as much as pain and desire is a constituent and component of the emotion and its characteristic actions.

So, for the most part, from Anselm’s perspective, justice in the will is going to be incompatible with anger as emotion, disposition, and actions considered good, endorsed or even enjoyed by the will rather than endured and opposed by at least part of the will.

Anger And Self-Will

As a thoroughly and deliberately Christian thinker, Anselm’s views on the will are shaped by meditation upon the implications of key doctrines, experiences, and concepts. I have explored at length elsewhere the question whether Anselm’s Christian thought deserves to be called Christian philosophy, so I will just say here that Christianity does not simply supply Anselm with dogmas to be assimilated philosophically within a rational system of thought, but also opens horizons without and within the human being, permitting new questions to be coherently asked, new ideas to be explored, new arguments and lines of thought to be worked out. Virtues, vices, and the human take on clearer, sharper, more distinct lines in such light, affording better vantage upon their complex structures.

One of the essential features, a relational one, of the Anselmian will is its being poised between two fundamental alternatives and its necessity of fateful commitment to one or to the other of them: God’s will or self-will.

Put alternately — and I have to caution against any hasty or oversimplistic identifications at this point — the choice is between justice in the will or injustice in the will. Any given human being’s will is either in a basic, over-arching way oriented towards justice (i.e. justly), or it is directed or attracted towards towards something else, some other object, and this involves a lack of justice where it ought to be in the will (Anselm is Augustinian in his view that injustice is actually a lack, a privation, and does not have independent reality or existence).

What is the ultimate criterion and origin of justice in the human will? It is in fact the divine will, Anselm maintains, and the will is just when it accords with God’s will. But, we must be careful not to assume that he holds or puts forth any simplistic conception of God and the human being which would identify the divine will with dictates simply imposed from on high on a passively obediental subject whose only appropriate response is to blindly and unthinkingly obey. Reason, and the rationality permeating the human will, are among the greatest gifts, the most deeply rooted and characteristic of our nature, with which the Creator endowed human beings, and the desire of, the striving for, the will to justice takes its full shape, in Anselm’s view, through employing our capacities to better and better grasp what God does in fact will of us.

In De Concordia (and several other works) Anselm tells us:

rectitude of will is present in someone when that person wills what God wills them to will.

This is quite determinate and specific , as another formulation in an earlier work, De Libertate, indicates:

keeping rectitude of will for the sake of that very rectitude is, for each person, to will what God wills that person to will.

Notice that the scenario he sketches is not simply that God wills something, commands it, and then we either will that or will something else (or perhaps deliberately will-against what God commands). God’s will bears upon the very framework and fabrics of our wills, the interior of our beings. He wills that our wills be (self-)directed towards certain objects, actions, commitments, that our wills conceived on a larger, less momentary scale be fundamentally oriented in certain ways and not in others. If we keep this in mind, then we better understand Anselm when in Cur Deus Homo he says:

Every rational will of the creature should be subject to the will of God. . . . This is justice or rectitude of will, which makes people just or upright [rectos] of heart, i.e. of will.” Later in the same work he stresses: “Every rational creature owes [debet] that obedience to God.

Humans possess a number of complementary means for more or less successfully grasping what God’s will in fact is, both generally and as applied to the specific situations, actions, thoughts, emotional responses, and volitions that are the building blocks of actual human lives. Among those Anselm mentions in his works are:

• right application and development of reason

• Scripture and the norms of Christian doctrine and practice

• proper education

• proper attention to cues and insights provided by one’s moral environment

• purification and full development of the will and reason

• acceptance of and collaboration with divine grace.

Anselm also regards aligning one’s will with God’s will as progressively recovering and realizing the full potentialities of created human nature, obscured and damaged through original sin as well as through effects of our own personal sins, our own acts of injustice contravening the divine will in favor of self-will. There is what we can call a teleological structure built into will and reason, an “ought” (debere), or put in Anselm’s own terms a “what they were made for,” which we realize only through the right uses of those very faculties of will and reason.

The alternative to aligning one’s will with God’s will is to choose what Anselm calls by the difficult to translate term propria voluntas, “self-will” (also rightly rendered by Hopkins and Richardson as “autonomous willing,” if a particularly modern sense of “autonomous” is kept in mind). Self-will is an end of the will, choosing itself, and also to (attempt unsuccessfully to) be like God.

It is also a disordered condition of the will itself, since to will itself as opposed to willing what God wills inevitably involves willing other objects than solely one’s own autonomy (really, on a basic motivational level, one wills that for the sake of other objects, contra Kant) — any of the other goods of the created or even uncreated order, whether real or just imaginary.

The self-willing will becomes further disordered, bifurcated, divided against itself because unfortunately, when the human subject resists ordering its will more or less along the lines the divine will suggests, prioritizing itself over the divine will, inevitably it succumbs to and becomes subordinated to some other power, attractive, exploitative, even addictive to it.

The most paradigmatic (and in a metaphysical sense, original) case of self-will is the devil’s, who “willed something (by) an autonomous will, which was set under none other” and even “not only willed to be equal to God because he presumed to have autonomous will, but even willed to be greater [than God] but willing what God did not will him to will, so much he set his own will above God’s will.”

In the De Similitudinibus, Anselm describes the situation of the human will as being set not only between ranges of various objects possible for it to choose, but as having to decide itself more fundamentally between the alternatives of choosing for itself God’s will or choosing itself, self-will, and thereby choosing an alignment with God’s (and humanity’s) enemy, the devil. He frames this in a matrimonial metaphor.

The human will “is between God and the Devil, like a wife between her legitimate husband and some seducer. Her husband commands her to conjoin only with him, but the seducer tries to persuade her to copulate with him.” If the will opts for God, i.e. keeps justice (or if it has lost it, seeks and accepts it when it is offered again by grace), joining itself to the divine will, to “God’s rulership” (imperium eius) in obedience, like a “legitimate spouse, it brings to birth legitimate children, i.e. virtues and good works.” The soul and its powers then become, as he says, “opened to doing what God commands.”

For the soul is opened to the inclination of the virtues and to willing what should be preferred, memory to the remembering what ought to be remembered, thought to thinking what ought to be thought upon, understanding to distinguishing what should be willed or remembered or thought. And, the mind is raised up to charity, is disposed to humility, is strengthened towards patience, and is opened to the other virtues that should be generated.

Choosing self-will (which Anselm identifies as pride) also brings along in its train effects upon the will exceeding the immediate situation of choice. Anselm articulates these through several well-chosen similitudes:

For [self-will] is like a stream, which divides into three main parts, from which derive different and innumerable tributaries, which in certain places are separated from each other, and in other places two or more of them are joined back together. For in such a way self-will is divided into three main kinds, from which arise different and numberless vices; and these are sometimes disjoined from each other in a human being, and sometimes two or more are conjoined

Indeed, self-will is like some adulterous queen, who conjoins herself with that adulterous king from whom she has three children. For, from these three, all the other children and grandchildren are generated and likewise multiplied, so that they cannot be numbered. All of these remain in this king and queen’s family, and each one of them performs their bidding in its own way. And, when the king, with the queen and the assembled army of sons and grandsons, opposes some other king, he makes war upon and then plunders the other king’s kingdom.

And after self-will has joined itself to [the devil], it conceives three principal vices from his seed (i.e. from the perverse suggestion), namely wrongful pleasure, exaltation, and curiosity, and through the five corporeal senses it lets them out, as if giving birth. Truly, from these three so many of the other vices are born and so are multiplied, so that they are without number. And all of these arise from the family of the Devil and self-will and from themselves they produce a quite wondrous multitude. And so the Devil and self-will oppose God the king of kings, and the assembled army of the vices makes war on his kingdom, namely the world, and plunders it. And this army invades the human race in such a way that either many vices seize upon many human beings, or one vice seizes one person, or many one, or one many, in different places. And whoever they are able to master, having bound them by bad habits [consuetudine] they throw them into hell, where each of the vices demands from the person whatever they committed by them [i.e. by the vice]. And since this would never be able to be satisfied, the person will never not be in misery.

These are not all of the illuminating metaphors through which Anselm reveals how self-will structures the soul and the human will for the worse, but we ought here to consider the application of all of this to anger.

Where does anger fit, if we consider it in terms of the Anselmian alternative between aligning one’s will with God’s will or freeing it to pursue its own ends, structure itself, and ultimately lose itself in a servitude to its own desires and those other wills with which it enters into commerce to satisfy or at least slake those desires? Two aspects of anger immediately arise as relevant

• What the conscious Christian knows God’s will to be respecting anger.

• Anger’s arousal, motivation, prolongation or intensification, and habitual structuring in the will.

Saint Anselm, as remarked earlier, does not seem to regard or speak of anger as ever positively good. This positions his views in relation to other Christian thinkers along three lines

• His views contrast those of Aristotle — and with his latter Christian interpreter, Thomas Aquinas), who view some anger as good

• He follows in the steps of John Cassian, who thinks that all anger is bad (with the possible exception at anger at one’s own anger)

• He accords with Augustine, who does acknowledge legitimacy to some anger, but who also counsels heightened caution lest originally right anger be allowed to linger, transforming into the much more problematic and unambiguously bad emotion of hatred.

In Letter 403, just for one characteristic example, writing to a group of nuns, Anselm brings up a passage from the Sermon on the Mount central to Christian reflection on anger:

Do not think that any sin is small, although one may be greater than another. . . . What sin will be small if Truth bears witness that one who is angry with his brother will answer for it before the court of justice; one who says ‘Raca’ must answer for it before the council; and one who says ‘you fool’ must answer for it in hell fire.

In Letter 414, writing to another group of nuns, he mentions anger along with envy and vainglory as examples of “unbecoming emotion[s] of body or soul” likely to arise, suggests remedies for dealing with them, and provides a useful moral maxim for assessing whether one’s will is aligned with God (and thus whether one must reflexively employ one’s will to restructure one’s own will:

If you wish to know whether your intention is right: what is subject to the will of God is certainly right. Whenever you plan or think of doing anything great or small, speak thus in your hearts: ‘ Does God want me to want this or not?’ . . . [If] your conscience tells you that God does not want you to have that intention, then turn your heart away from it with all your might.

This has direct bearing on anger. If one actually stops to consider whether one’s will, one’s emotional response is rightly aligned and directed, when one is angry, even without bringing any divine teaching into the mix — if one is really honest with oneself about one’s anger, and does not allow anger’s propensity to seduce rationality into its service to lead one into thinking one’s angry response perfectly reasonable! — in most cases the conclusion is clear: I shouldn’t be feeling this, or I shouldn’t be so quick to respond in anger, or feel it so intensely, letting it spill over into everything else, against other people . . . . If one brings in Christian teachings about anger, its risks, the picture is even more clear.

The emotional response of anger — or even the situation preceding it liable to produce anger — sets before the affected person the alternative between justice or injustice in the will, preferring to align one’s will with God’s will (even against a portion of one’s will) or to privilege one’s own will in opposition to God’s. This is not to say that simply feeling anger stirring in oneself is immediately and in every case equatable with injustice — as mentioned in the first post, and as will be discussed in later posts, even saints have to contend with the carnal appetites — the question is what one does then.

Of course, to the degree that one’s will contains pockets of self-will, portions compartmentalized apart inconsistently from God’s will, even to the extent that one’s previous election of self-will has affected lasting structures of the will for the worse, so long as it reverberates through one’s soul, one’s desire’s, one’s relationships, one’s thoughts, like unmuted discordances previously struck whose notes have not yet entirely ended, insofar as any of these are our case, we will more liable to anger. For anger arises when one’s will is contravened, and if one is following one’s own waxing, ill-structured will, it is much more likely to be crossed by others’ wills, actions, words, even by their thoughts or emotions expressed.

To one who conceives of religious life as a preserve set aside for the pious and saintly who are not beset by the same trials and temptation as everyone else, the attention Anselm devotes to stressing the requirement for bringing one’s will into harmony with wills of other people — not only for one’s own or the others’ benefit, but so that there can be a livable religious community that does not give scandal within and without in place of fulfilling its function — the number of times Anselm brings this up would be remarkable. He even, on an occasion about which I’ve commented elsewhere, remonstrates with another Benedictine abbot over the deformation his ill-thought-out, in fact sinful, regime of punishment imposes on the wills and characters of young monks.

Anger has a paradoxical tendency to incorporate what is finest in us, our rationality, not just to overwhelm it, but to twist it to its own uses. What might be reasonable in one’s response of anger is all too easily escalated into seemingly rational but on a higher level unreasonable volitions. If one becomes angry through the myriad devices, desires, dodges, defense mechanisms comprised within one’s self-will, the anger in its turns ministers to that self-will, eventually solidifying into a structure of vice, connected with, serving, provoked by other vices, other malformed structures of the will, which in their turn flow back into that current of self-will

Anselm has no illusions about how deep and lasting the damages within the will can go, and he does not think that once the will turns from self-will and back towards the divine will, everything — on indeed anything — is immediately repaired. Anger, once it has set its roots and grooves within the human will and learned its ways into and around inside reason (and this for most of us starts already in childhood) is particularly difficult to tackle, to disentangle, to bit by bit make better. But being able to see a bit more rightly does give some advantage.

So, understanding the vice of anger as one determinate shape of self-will, as a specific configuration of injustice in the will, as willing something else rather than keeping rectitude of will for its own sake — objects of satisfying ones desire to hurt in response, to take offense unduly, to nurse one’s resentment rather than striving to forgive — willing something other than what God wants one to will (and God wills for one what will ultimately be best for one), this does fill in a portion of the picture and lend some perspective to this emotion and its associated vice.

Anger and The Two Wills

As mentioned earlier, the will has a threefold aspect in Anselmian moral anthropology: there is will-as-instrument, will-as-use, and will-as-inclination (or -as-affection, as-disposition, affectio). Anselm also makes an important distinction from De Casu Diaboli onward in his works between two wills: the “will-for-justice” and the “will-for-happiness”.

Both of these are examples of the third aspect of will. They are motivational structures perduring through and expressing the will of the person in multiple determinate situations. There are several features of these affectiones of will which I summarized a number of years back in a paper, which will be helpful to bring up early on here.

Anselm says that “the will-as-instrument is affected [affectum] by its inclinations,” probably the reason he uses the rich term affectio to denote them. To be sure, the will-as-instrument is also affected, in that it takes on determinate form in time in action and intention, by its uses — but will-as-inclination affects the will-as-instrument over time, habitually, motivationally, affectively structuring it and conditioning the wills-as-use, the determinate intentions, choices, preferences, acts that a person has or makes.

An example indicates that will-as-inclination also includes brings the dimension of intensity of willing: “So, when it intensely [vehementer] wills something, a person’s soul is said to be affected to willing it, or to will it affectively [affectuose].” This dimension of intensity in important in another example: “when we assert that one person has more [of the will to live justly] than another, we are not calling will anything other than that inclination of the instrument itself, by which one wills to live justly.” Inclinations can be stronger or weaker, more or less intense, more or less able to maintain themselves in the face of attractions, temptations, even intervening oppositions by the will-as-use (as for instance when we resolve to modify not only our behavior but our thoughts and feelings).

Affecting or inclining of the will-as-instrument is essential to the very working of the will. Without the drive or direction given by will-as-inclination, the will-as-instrument would not move, would not take the form of particular will-as-use. In fact, the will — different in this from all of the other powers, faculties, or instruments of the human soul and body — is self-moving, self-shaping, self-determining. Anselm writes:

[t]he will-as-instrument moves all other instruments which we freely [sponte] use, both those that are in us. . . and those outside us. . . and it causes all voluntary motions. But, the will-as-instrument itself moves itself through its inclinations.

Inclinations of the will possess a degree of constancy and stability. Will-as-inclination is

that by which the instrument itself is determinately affected [sic afficitur] towards willing something even when it does not think about that which it wills — so that, if it is recalled to mind, it either immediately or at a given time wills it.

Some of these long-standing, constant volitions may reside below the level of consciousness unless we decide to focus on them, for example “willing health.” Others may, in one sense seemingly force themselves upon us, like “willing sleep,” while in another sense they constantly remain directed to some instrumental goods — sleeping when we need to replenish and rest our bodies, so that we can realize, pursue, or preserve other goods.

Virtues and vices are affectiones of the will, specific configurations into which the will is inclined, structures of desires, feelings, thoughts, and actions coalescing into determinate volitions in particular situations. Anselm uses the example of a just or holy person, who wills justice not only by determinate wills-as-use, but constantly, as will-as-inclination, even while asleep or not thinking about justice. If they are actually just, they can be relied upon to will justice when placed in a situation calling for it, and so, in this sense, on a deep level of their being, they will justice all of the time. Their being, their character, is structured along those lines.

In his works, Anselm discusses only two main affectiones of the will, the will-for-justice and the will-for-happiness. He does not go into as great detail as we might have liked him to have provided, or follow out his fertile distinctions into all of their implications, but he does offer us enough to be able to think productively about anger in terms of the will. He arrives at this distinction through considering cases where these two wills-as-inclinations contrast and conflict, first introducing it in order to make sense of the plight of the Devil in De Casu Diaboli. The distinction turns on the lasting, basic, objects of the will, those goods or values motivating, attracting, providing incentives for the will to move itself towards them.

Anselm maintains throughout his works that all things, so far as they have being, are good— even of those things that have, result in, do, or even choose evil. But this does not mean that they are goods for us, perceptible as such through our possession and exercise of reason, whose functions include discernment of (and between degrees of) goodness and badness, truth and falsity, justice and injustice, and other such qualities, electable or rejectable by the will. In the Dicta Anselmi, he is recorded as having taught:

To the perceptive judge there are three goodnesses, [namely that of] being [essentia], the beneficial [commoditatem], and justice. Everything that is, so far as it, is good. Now the one that is beneficial is good in twofold way, for it is, and it is beneficial. But some things are beneficial through use, others through their effects, other through both. For food that is sweet but harmful is beneficial by use but not at all by effects. Bitter medicine is unbeneficial [incommoda] by use but by effect beneficial, since it is useful. A meal that is sweet and healthy is beneficial by use and effect. . . . Now, justice, because through the nature of its being [essentialiter] it is good and beneficial and just, appears to surpass in many ways simple being or the beneficial.

This is a very useful passage for interpreting and contextualizing Anselm’s discussions of the two kinds of good, the two wills, and the nature of justice in the will (as the will to justice) progressively developed in his treatises De Casu Diaboli, Cur Deus Homo, De Conceptu Virginali, and De Concordia. One can very easily get the idea that justice as a good is necessarily opposed to the beneficial. Likewise, one can come away with the notion that they are two distinct orders of things.

Rather, justice is something supervening, arranging, further ordering, rightly directing the lower orders, adding something to them. In one of my as yet unpublished writings on Anselm, which explores implications of Anselm’s Christian Platonist metaphysics, I have termed this “ontological dignity”. Justice is not a mere epiphenomenon of the order of things, a quality that our minds or even God’s mind subjectively attribute to them. Rather, it is an enhancement and augmentation, a plenitude and richness of being. Justice involves things being as they-ought-to-be, and thereby them being more fully. And justice itself, whether in the will or derivatively in things also has being.

To return to the order of the beneficial, the will for happiness, as Anselm tells us in De Casu, is a “natural will for avoiding the detrimental and having the beneficial.” In De Concordia, he calls it an “aptitude,” an inclination “towards the benefit that is willed” (ad volentum commoditatem). Anselm holds that the human will always is turned towards, desires or loves, or has an inclination for, willing happiness, and what happiness ultimately does consist in — he is by no means knocking this, since in fact his depiction of blessed eternal life in heaven comprises all such goods — is lasting possession of beneficial goods.

As we see in the passage I cited, it is quite possible to desire, to choose some of these things for different reasons, grasping their “beneficial” goodness in multiple ways, some of which reveal when considered more closely that what appears fully beneficial, commodious to ourselves, intrinsically good for us, may not in reality be so, could for instance be pleasant but harmful.

The will for happiness, ever-present, always actively but only partially determining, moving, shaping the will as a whole, is in its turn determined, sometimes nudged just a little in its overall configuration, sometimes fatefully turned from one direction to another, by will-as-use, particular choices or complexes of interrelated choices made by the person. It thus takes on determinate form for each person in all its specificity through the interplay and combined effects of a history of choices, a narrative of experiences and decisions that while in one sense wholly unique to that person, nevertheless occurs within a larger shared drama of humanity.

Or, better expressed, for Anselm: a larger shared drama of fallen and redeemed humanity, a drama in which every character save two possesses a will weakened, damaged by an original loss of integral justice in the will. Unlike the will-for-happiness, the will-for-justice can be lost and it can be regained. I’m not going to discuss this aspect of Anselm’s moral theory in detail here, since by now some readers are doubtless growing impatient to see all of these discussions and distinctions actually applied to anger. Suffice it to say three things:

First, although a person who lacks the will-for-justice can still will what is just, can still recognize justice and discern justice and injustice apart from each other, can feel desire for and intellectually appreciate the need for justice in the will, the human person cannot on their own, by their own effects, restore the missing justice in the will. Only divine grace can restore it, although once justice is restored it requires human participation for that justice to be retained, increased, effected.

Second, justice in the will, or the will-for-justice is not simply an inclination towards willing what is just. By virtue of Anselm’s very definition of justice as “rectitude of will maintained for its own sake,” it involves willing to keep that justice in the face of temptations, choosing to prioritize justice over what the will-for-happiness already urges one towards — in cases where they conflict — in fact, the more just the person, the less those two affectiones of the will should come into conflict. So, when justice in the will is lost, it is, as Anselm tells us, precisely because the person wills something more strongly than justice, chooses that over maintaining justice in their will. It might be comfort or safety. It might be pleasure. It might be just the (limited) good of willing through the “self-will” discussed above. But what loses the will-for-justice for a person, what nullifies it within their will, is choosing some other good in its place.

Third, either justice is in the will, or injustice is left in the place — or places — where justice is lacking. As any good Augustinian, Anselm holds that evil and injustice does not have positive being of its own, but instead parasitically corrupts, deforms, corrupts, ontologically lessens the being of the person. In the will, injustice adopts and congeals into definite shapes as recognizable vices, habitual patterns of interconnected emotions, actions, volitions, and even thoughts and verbal expressions (since after all the vicious person does describe and think of their actions, choices, and feelings — though usually wrongly). Vices as specific configurations of injustice — just like virtues as configurations of justice — reside in the will, and nowhere more than in the will-for-happiness.

Within the will as a totality, the will-for-justice ought to regulate the will-for-happiness. In De Casu, Anselm writes of the will-for-justice “temper[ing] the will to happiness so that its excesses would be checked,” and he notes that for a rational being like an angel (or a human being) if its will-for-happiness is stymied in being able to pursue “greater and truer beneficial goods,” it will turn itself to “lesser beneficial goods,” those that still remain with its purview, down to “ whatsoever lowest beneficial goods” it can still enjoy.

Anselm includes among these the “unclean and very base beneficial goods in which irrational animals take pleasure,” hearkening back to the carnal appetites residing in irrational animals, humans affected by original sin, and fallen angels, and the correlated carnal desires experienced by the latter two rational types of beings. (It should be mentioned — this will be more fully discussed in a later post — that Anselm does not view feeling or being impelled by these appetites as itself bad, nor even every case of the will consenting to them. The will is unjust when it “complies inordinately with them,” he qualifies in De Conceptu)

Anselm sketches one example of the condition brought about while the will-for-happiness remains while the will-for-justice is missing.

Injustice is not the sort of thing which infects and corrupts the soul in the way that poison infects and corrupts the body. . . . [W]hen an evil man rages and is driven into various dangers to his soul, i.e. evil deeds, we declare that injustice cases these deeds. Not because injustice is a being or does something but because the will (to which all the voluntary movements of the entire human being are submitted), lacking justice, driven on by various appetites, being inconstant, unrestrained, and uncontrolled, plunges itself and everything under its control into manifold evils — all of which justice, had it been present, would have prevented from happening

Matters do not not always go quite so dramatically as in this De Conceptu passage, of course, but the general idea is clear: without the virtues, or at least the trajectory toward virtue, decisions made directing the will towards it, the will to happiness will pursue its desires, its aims, the beneficial goods set out before and attracting it, out of proportion, prioritizing them unduly in relation to other goods. When one wills in determinate situations, patterns and habitual dispositions get engraved for better or for worse on the will-for-happiness.

Becoming angry is in part the stirring up of the carnal appetites, which direct us to seek revenge, to impose punishment, to seek retribution on another who we think, feel, or imagine to have in some way harmed (or threaten to harm) us, those persons or things which matter to us. It very quickly becomes a matter of the will, however, in more than one way.

On the one hand, once we become angry, we are thrown into a situation in which we are forced to choose what we will do. There are already trajectories in play, not least those steering towards actions typically expressive of anger.

On the other hand, we can also ask the question why we become angry. The answer to this is that someone or something crosses, impedes, competes with, even punishes our own will — our will-for-happiness, directed at some end which the other in some way blocks, deflects, withholds, hinders. A passage in De Conceptu discusses something analogous:

[O]nly what is against one’s will is a punishment for that person; and only something with a will experiences punishment. Now, the members and the senses will nothing by themselves. Therefore just as the will acts in the members and the senses, so in them it is tormented or delighted

What angers one’s brethren, Anselm reminds communities of monks in numerous letters, is when one person wrongly imposes his will against another’s, wanting to have things his way. Poorly formed and directed wills are going to be more prone to this. In fact, one essential component of the monastic life is giving one’s will over to another in obedience, precisely so it can be examined, pruned of its excesses, improved, healed (one finds in Anselm a priority of medical metaphors over juridical ones).

When one is angered, one is thus faced with a choice, a choice which if one understands it rightly — and one of the most difficult aspects of anger is its seductive power to get us to focus only on the immediate situation or if on the larger situation only on those aspects that reinforce and provide greater rational pretext for the anger — bears upon more than just the immediate situation.

Though we cannot undo, change, replace, or produce lasting habits of thought, action, or affection wholesale through single choices of the will, each use of the will adds its own weight on one side or another of the balance. This much, every virtue ethics can tell us about choices and habits in general and about anger in particular. If I am hot tempered, given to taking offense too readily, I have some margin of control over whether I remain so, if I choose to choose rightly. And if I don’t, I remain responsible for my character progressively conformed in its viciousness.

What Anselm’s perspective contributes is the additional understanding that in each such choice, I am faced with the alternative:

• either willing in accordance with what measure of the will-for-justice I may have

• or willing in accordance with the dictates and demands of the will-for-happiness.

At times — for instance, when I become angry, and must decide what to do with that anger — inclinations war within myself, and the moral grandeur of the free, rational will consists partly in that, even given the weights these motives bring, the choice remains with me where I set myself, which way I take the will that not only represents but is my deepest self. This alternative exists, of course, so long as I have not entirely lost — or rather thrown away — the will-for-justice, in which case, in its absence, I will follow one or another path set out by the will for-happiness (though some choice remains to me which of these I do pursue).

So, when I become angry, I am posed with a choice whether to retain the will-for-justice, generally by moderating my anger, by not following all suggestions the desire, the emotion makes, or even better by forgiving, by exercising the virtue of patience.

The alternative is to will something more strongly than justice, perhaps the satisfaction in vengeance — even if just imagined, or by proxy through passive-aggressiveness or detraction — perhaps a chance to indulge in an-all-too- human appetite for inflicting cruelty while situating oneself in a narrative as the protector, the righteous punisher, even the rectifier of young souls (as Anselm reproached another abbot for doing).

There are some people who are more at home with others and the world when they are angry, and choose to remain in their anger, to find occasions and reinforcements for that state. Some become addicted to the thrill, the excitement, the intermixed pleasure, pain and desire anger brings and consists in. When one chooses these motives of anger over what justice requires in the situation, injustice sets roots of negativity, of lack, of privation of the good that should be there, within the will.

It is worth pointing out that one desire, one direction, one motive, one tendency that the will to happiness takes determinate shape in can be opposed and even overpowered by another. As a matter of fact, it would be highly unlikely for an unbridled will-for-happiness unregulated by the will-for-justice to be entirely consistent, not divided upon itself. One might forgo taking one’s revenge, even expressing one’s anger — perhaps even putting on a pretense of feigned virtue — so as to attain some good or not to suffer some evil.

For instance, one might deliberately calm oneself in dealing with a difficult customer not because that might be the right thing to do but for the motive of making the sale. One might even put up with another person’s provocative demands not out of genuine patience, let alone a forgiving disposition, but rather just to avoid an outbreak of their own wrath.

Anselm actually considers how the presence and effect of some vices might in effect prevent or rule out other vices. A glutton might moderate his anger so as to keep the dainties and delights coming. A coward might conceal and cover the flames of her ire sufficiently to extinguish them, precisely because she is mastered by fears, perhaps even of anger’s consequences.

Still, one must be careful here. Anselm is not Kant. Note that not every natural inclination of the will-for-happiness that opposes, deflects, mutes, or moderates anger is lacking in justice. It is right, for instance, or as Anselm would say, one ought to feel affection towards one’s family, friends, spouse, young, and if this affection keeps one from doing wrong or is a motive for doing right, it would be silly to deny it any moral value simply because it stems from the (in that respect, rightly-structured) will-for-happiness. The fact that brute animals share in such natural affection in no way diminishes its value or its capacity in the human being to flow into justice.

A few questions remain open at this point. In most of his works, it seems as if the line between justice and injustice in the will is very sharp, so that once justice is lost, it is completely gone. Yet, in the De Concordia and also in certain of his letters, Anselm writes of those who are just in one respect but unjust in another, for instance one who is “chaste but envious.” With anger in particular, we would want to know whether one can be just in some respects but unjust with respect to anger — perhaps working on that shape of injustice to wear it away, to gradually replace it with virtues. We would also want to know whether anger could ever form a positive part of a just will, whether in an Anselmian moral perspective, there could be a situation in which feeling and acting on anger — within certain bounds — could be the right thing and willed as such.

Anger, Temptation, And Weakness Of Will

The mechanism of temptation in the will, and giving in or “weakness of will” is something that Anselm did write a good deal about more generally, and we can use his views to understand how anger fits into this volitional structure of temptation. Let us remind ourselves about the basic Anselmian position on anger?

• He is pretty clear that in most cases, we shouldn’t be angry. or rather, when we become angry, we ought to struggle against it.

• We ought to forgive those who anger us , if we can.

• We ought to make efforts to restrain our anger, or at least to lessen its effects, rather than indulging ourselves in it, harboring it, allowing it to congeal into resentment, rancor, or hatred, or to wax out of control into rage or fury.

• We ought to oppose and punish out of necessity rather than giving in to the anger that can easily carry those past their right limits.

• We ought to avoid angering other people unnecessarily as well, to try to harmonize our wills to theirs if we can do so without sin or injustice to another, and to reconcile with them when we can

These points are what Anselm thinks reason and justice dictate to us. If we want to choose, to will, or even further to love justice, those are the sorts of things that a just person does, the prime example for Anselm being Christ himself, who both taught by his own example and enjoined a way of life involving forgiveness, reformation of the heart, and specific injunctions against harboring or acting on anger. If we possess the will-for-justice — or some modicum of it — we preserve it when angry by not giving way to our anger, by not allowing the will to conjoin itself to the tempting emotion, desire, appetite. Indeed, we even sometimes increase the will-for-justice, the affection, the habitual disposition, by thus using our will rightly, by collaborating with the divine will.

In fact, just as with any of the vices and virtues, we ought to be making efforts to build, foster, and increase what virtues we can, and we ought also to be taking occasions to chip away at, to mortify, to extirpate — or at least not to give into, not to feed — our vices. We cannot produce or efface virtues or vices by a single action or volition. Instead, we have to persevere, choosing rightly or wrongly in multiple similar situations. And, we have generally to do it when it really counts, when we could go either way — when we find ourselves in temptation. And with anger, for some of us, that can occur almost any time we get angry, when we feel the first starting twinges of irritation, when another vexes us, stymies our desires, even does not take seriously what we do, does not share in the human of a joke or jibe.

From the wealth of passages where Anselm discusses or mentions some aspect of the workings of temptation, I’m going to just draw out two sets, both of which apply readily to situations of anger. The first has to do with what the will does when confronted by the “carnal appetites.” As noted earlier, Anselm explores the culpability of the appetites in De Conceptu.

Considered in themselves, not even those appetites which the apostle calls both “the flesh which lusts against the spirit” and “the law of sin which is in our members, warring against the law of our mind” are just or unjust. For they do not make just or unjust the man who experiences them; but they make unjust only the man who consents to them by an act of will when he ought not to.

That is the key point: injustice lies in the consent of the will to the cajolings of those appetites, pushing or pulling, but not determining the will, which is after all self-determining. The carnal appetite which flares into irritability or irascibility suggests to us that we ought not just feel angry, we ought to be angry, we ought to act angry, think angry, will angry, stay angry. He goes on.

For the same apostle says, “There is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk in accordance with the flesh” — i.e., who do not give consent-of-will to the flesh. Now, if these appetites were to make unjust the one who experienced them without consenting to them, then condemnation would result. Hence, it is not a sin to experience these appetites; rather, it is a sin to consent to them [when one ought not to]. . . . Therefore, there is not any injustice in the essence of the appetites; rather, there is injustice in a rational will which complies inordinately with them. For when the will resists the appetites by “delighting in the law of God in accordance with the inner man,” then the will is just.

In the De Humanibus Moribus, Anselm not only distinguishes three parts — suggestion, delight (delectatio) and consent — of the sequence leading from the appetite’s temptation to the culpable and unjust consent of the will to the temptation; he sketches a vividly illuminating metaphor

Out of these three, suggestion is like a heavy dog, delight like a light and sharp-toothed puppy, but consent like a strong and massive dog. Now, the heavy dog when it hears someone nearby moving past it, barks once or twice after them, but then quiets down if one keeps heading in the same direction. But, if one looks back and antagonizes the dog now barking, even if it does not bite, it will chase one. Now, the light and sharp-toothed puppy, chases aggressively and, unless it has been quickly smacked back, it bites very sharply. The strong and massive dog then chases and, unless a great force overwhelms it, it strangles a human being. So, one should not look back at the heavy dog, and one has to quickly smack down the puppy, but the massive dog must be overwhelmed in a manly way.

And, similarly if the suggestion of sin strikes the mind, one who is moving away from the love of present things towards eternal things soon leaves them behind, if he firmly holds to his intention. But, if paying attention to it, he accepts the suggestion into himself, and he turns it over and over in thought, antagonizing it as it were, then very often it attacks, although it does not wound when it is suggestion on its own. But, if it is turned over for a while, the heavy dog turns into the puppy, i.e. suggestion into delight, which attacks aggressively and, unless it is quickly rejected, wounds the soul. . . . For unless the delight is pushed away, the puppy turns into a massive dog, i.e. delight passes over into consent, which seizing hold of the soul kills it, unless a great force overcomes it. . . . Therefore, let us not pay attention to suggestion, let us quickly repress delight, and let us strongly overcome consent.

Anger poses considerable dangers once it arises, since the angered person does tend to focus on the occasion of their anger, the situation, the insult or injury done to them, its unjustness, the wrong state, motives, habits, priorities, and so on of the other person. Anger is painful, but also contains a sort of pleasure as well, a “high”, a “kick”, and can easily become the sort of delight discussed here. Very quickly, the will — particularly in someone whose will-for-happiness is already poorly ordered and structured, beset and weakened by vices — can succumb to the attraction of that delight, and give its consent — or rather take into itself and make its own that motive of anger, elaborating it in further thinking, in talk, and in action, all of which once more even if just a little restructure the will in its habits, its affective structures. The next time, it will that much harder to resist the progression from suggestion to consent, it will occur more “naturally,” feel “right”, even though anger — through the will’s consent to it — instantiates and gives flesh to injustice.

The second set of passages highly relevant here come from the De Libertate (and would be further filled out by relevant passages from De Casu Diaboli and De Concordia), in which Anselm has to make sense out of how the will, which is so completely free that nothing can coercively determine its choice (not even God) can give into temptation, thereby giving up the justice and freedom which it possesses, permitting itself to be then bound into a servitude it cannot afterwards on its own shake off. He frames this in terms of the “force of temptation”

Teacher. What is this force?

Student. The force of temptation.

T. This force does not turn the will from uprightness unless the will wills what the temptation suggests.

S. That’s right. But the temptation by its own force compels the will to will what it is suggesting.

T. How does temptation compel the will to will?: in such a way that the will is indeed able to keep from willing, though not without great difficulty (molestia), or in such way that the will is not at all able to keep from willing?

S. Although I must admit that sometimes we are so pressured by temptations that we cannot without difficulty (difficultate) keep from willing what they suggest, I cannot say that they ever pressure us to the point that we cannot at all keep from willing what they advise.

T. Nor do I know how it can be said. For if a man wills to lie in order to avoid death and to save his life for a while, who will say that it is impossible for him to will not to lie in order to avoid eternal death and to live endlessly? Hence, you ought no longer to doubt that this powerlessness-to-keep-uprightness which you say is in our will when we consent to temptations is the result not of impossibility but of difficulty. For we are accustomed to say that we cannot [do] a thing, not because the thing is impossible for us [to do], but because we cannot [do it] without difficulty. But this difficulty does not destroy freedom of will. For it is able to beset the will though the will dissent, but it is not able to vanquish the will unless the will consent.

When anger “forces” us to do something, to think something, to say something, Anselm would say that it does not actually determine the will. The will determines not only itself in the present, but also the future effects that giving into or resisting temptation, strengthening or weakening virtues or vices, cooperating with God’s will or falling into the trap of self-will, impose on that same will.

Anger can place us in situations of more or less difficulty, where we have to sacrifice some other thing that we want in order to do what is right. We might want to saying a cutting word to the person who angers us, or even strike another to teach them not to push us around. We might want to maintain our feeling of pride, our habit of following own will and its desires. Cleaving to justice might require us to endure, to resist, to persevere, to go through the motions without feeling loving towards the other.

But on its own, the feeling or reaction of anger can never do more than tempt us. It is choices of the will that decision by decision, day by day, year by year, produce its lasting structure for better or for worse. If one is addicted to anger, weak when faced with it, succumbs too easily, that is a matter of the will-as-affectio — and has to be addressed as such.

Anselmian Remedies for Anger

In terms of the history of ideas and of moral life, Christianity contributes a rich and challenging perspective upon anger. The task of the Christian moral theologian or philosopher is not only to follow counsels and dictates provided by relevant scriptures, by the example and words of Christ, the saints, even those around one who are better disposed in relation to anger. It is to bring additional illumination to our understanding of this tricky, seductive affective response, one so apt to subvert the very rationality and justice that should in some cases block or censure anger, and in others moderate, rightly direct, or temper it. The Doctor of Bec makes such contributions, and here we’ll look at those that have to do specifically with virtues and vices.

In order to be rightly disposed with respect to the emotion of anger one will inevitably and unavoidably feel many times during the course of one’s life, what virtues have to be cultivated? What vices have to be rooted out? And, how is this effected? For Anselm, a very significant component of this consists in the contribution made, “form[ing] and reform[ing]” us, by grace bestowed by God. But he also has and articulates a very clear understanding that grace works in many cases through our own — and others’ — willing (or even unwilling, or less than entirely willing) cooperation with that divine action. That is what I am going to focus upon here: what parts do we have in this process?

What vices are relevant? It is notable that anger — conceived of and discussed as one main vice by many other Christian authors — does not come in for any thematic treatment as a vice by Anselm. He includes it with other related sins and vices in several listings during discussions of De Simultidinibus. In his similitude of the heart and its thoughts as an ever-grinding mill, the Devil tries to damage the human being’s heart by arousing harmful thoughts and emotions

So, if at some time he discovers the human heart empty of good thoughts, he immediately fills it up, if he can, with bad ones. Of these evil thoughts, some of them wear away the human heart, like anger and envy; others gum it up and pollute it, like gluttony and prodigality; others take possession of it, like vain things that are not greatly damaging

Anger is likewise listed with envy in another discussion, where the three main currents of vice that flow from self-will, [wrongly ordered] enjoyment (delectatio), exaltation (exaltatio, raising oneself up and over others), and curiosity. All three of these involve a wrongly ordered will, one in which there is injustice

And from these come all the other ones. For indeed, from enjoyment are born prodigality, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, gluttony of the belly, drunkenness, and other vices of this sort. And, from exaltation, vain glory, envy, anger, dejection, greed, and other like things. But from curiosity, restlessness, murmuring, detraction, and other such vices.

When he plays with the metaphor of the monk as an old testament priest, carrying out animal sacrifices, it is not anger named as such that he mentions, but rather “the lion of cruelty, the wolf of rapaciousness, the bull of wildness,” all of which could well be effects of anger, sorts of vicious dispositions anger flows or transmutes into — though of course, they could also similarly arise from hatred, envy, greed, or vain glory.

Returning to the relationship of anger to self-will, and the specificity of anger as an emotional response, and also a vice, that can flow from exaltation from placing oneself above others, there is a dynamic, mutually reinforcing on both sides. As Anselm says, while self-will or pride, is the ultimate root of all other vices, the other vices, once existent, once taken shape in the will, in their turn minister to self-will. It is for this reason that vices in the soul ready the ground for further corruption, for new shapes of self-will in additional vices or even in further configurations of the same vice.

If we think about what anger does, how it works, what it feels like, what our experience of it yields, we notice that it exhibits a tendency to isolate us, to make us yet more self-centered, to stick up for our rights, our own will, our desires. It tends to make us less attentive to others and their needs and desires — we also end up doing things, saying things, thinking things that are possibly hateful, do others harm, that make us worse.

Also characteristic of the affective response of anger is the desire to bend the other’s will to our own, to attain a sort of false concord through domination of others — if only in the relatively mild form of wanting to be acknowledged as right, as having been unjustly offended, as having responded correctly and reasonably through one’s anger

What virtues bear particularly upon anger? Five come to mind, two of which are more specifically, though not exclusively, focused on anger, three of which are much broader in scope, more architectonic, in Anselmian moral theory. The two which more particularly apply to anger include the one rendered by various English words: gentleness, mildness, and meekness, which Anselm tells us in Letter 37, “is the inseparable companion” of the other virtue, “patience.” As we see in his Life and in his Letters, Anselm himself displays these virtues to admirable extents, enacting them, exemplifying them, as well as exhorting others to learn and practice them. But he does not discuss them thematically, as he does the three other virtues of justice, humility, and love.

These three virtues may be said to undergird and orient all the other virtues in various ways, and they intersect with, reinforce, and contribute to each other. I’m not going to discuss these three in great detail here, because they will be topics explored in future posts on Anselm. Instead, I’ll very briefly sketch how justice and humility help to dispose a person well towards anger, and return to gentleness and patience in light of humility and justice, connecting all of these with another state Anselm talks about, concord or harmony, which has to do precisely with the will in relation to others’ wills. The will is where all of these virtues reside, and it is, I suspect, precisely because they so illuminate the structures and directions of the will — that portion of ourselves so absolutely central to Anselmian moral theory — that justice, humility, and love do get much more thorough and detailed treatment by Anselm in his writings (though perhaps not in his oral teachings and conversations).

Anger takes umbrage at what it perceives as injustice. Does it do so justly? It thinks itself a just response to injustice towards oneself or one’s own by another, and this is precisely one of anger’s seductive traits, that it wrenches our almost always imperfect — and thus vulnerable — sense of justice away from right objects, orderings, and orientations, placing the will in an occasion of temptation, an opportunity for seduction by strong forces and feelings that drive us to seek revenge, to harden our hearts, to ball our hands into fists, to thicken our voices and either darken or bleach our visages.

Justice for Anselm is not simply a set of rules or an abstract principle. It is something that ought to be present in the will, more and more deeply engrained in our being. It ought to be not only a disposition to judge rightly, but to feel rightly, a desire, an affective disposition to will and to do what one ought to. Because we are beings who are in development, who exist in time, with our own histories, our networks of relationships, our successes and failures behind and ahead of us, justice in a full sense also includes a choice to use the will to improve the will through one’s other choices, extending even so far as choosing to do what will assist us on the way to feeling, to desiring, to responding affectively as we ought to.

Justice requires, among other things, aligning one’s will with God’s, willing what it is that God wills for us to will, rather than choosing pride, self-will. This affects the totality of the human person:

[T]he soul is opened to the inclination of the virtues and to willing what should be preferred, memory to the remembering what ought to be remembered, thought to thinking what ought to be thought upon, understanding to distinguishing what should be willed or remembered or thought. And, the mind is raised up to charity, is disposed to humility, is strengthened towards patience, and is opened to the other virtues that should be generated.

All of these will aid the person confronted by their own anger — and indeed the anger of others (which has a tendency to awaken our own in response) — in handling it better, in bringing anger moment by moment, occasion by occasion, more fully within the limits justice places upon it. For some justice will perhaps even more positively enjoin them to gradually replace angry thoughts, angry desires, angry feelings in both the body and the soul — and the will that consents to these — with responses stemming from nascent virtues of patience, mildness, love. That is, in Anselm’s view, what a fuller understanding of justice reveals.

In the development of the virtues, Anselm is very clear that in his view humility is just as fundamental as justice or as love. In Letter 189, he notes that:

the more a man advances in this virtue, the more he is raised on high — and also in the other virtues.

In De Simultudinibus, he likens humility to

pure soil or ground . . . whose nature is suited to the other virtues and like a firm foundation sustains them. For, the other virtues are able to subsist, so long as they retain the foundation of humility.

He also identifies “seven levels of humility, by which one attains to its perfection” (of which I will provide a fuller discussion in a later post).

[O]ne who remains in the valley of pride, blinded by ignorance of him or herself, is often beset and abused by all sorts of vices. But, one who, leaving pride behind, begins to climb by the levels of humility, the more of them he or she climbs, the more, the ignorance being dissipated, he is opened to knowledge of himself. And indeed, the vices do not attack him, but instead the very good people, that is, the virtues, approach him. But when he should climb to highest level of humility, he rests with these very virtues in clear knowledge of self.

Indeed, as Anselm says a bit later, the full cultivation of the virtue of humility does not bear merely behavioral fruit, but epistemological, giving its bearer “perfect knowledge of self”

What does humility consist in? Knowing one’s true worth in relation to others — and possessing such knowledge, not just as a thought, but rooted effectively and affectively in one’s will. This not only assists one when one experiences anger, but helps to prevent anger from arising, since one will not as easily take offense if one does not regard oneself and one’s desires, one’s own will, as more important than other rational creatures of the Creator. As Anselm writes in Cur Deus Homo — a work in which he notes the example Christ gives us of patience, humility, and justice:

[R]evenging yourself in no way falls to you, since you are not your own possession, nor is he who injured you your own or his own possession, but both of you are servants of the one Lord who made you from nothing. And, if you retain avenging yourself for yourself, in pride you assume for yourself judgment over the other person — and this belongs solely to the Lord and Judge of all

Letter 285 provides a contrast between humility and pride useful here in thinking about anger. There are three kinds of pride, Anselm says there:

• in judgement, “when one thinks of himself more highly than he ought”

• in will “when someone wants to be treated differently and more highly than he ought”

• and in action “when a man treats himself more highly than he ought.”

He goes on to say that:

the lightest is the one which is in deed alone because it is done only through ignorance. . . that which is in the will alone is more to be condemned because it sins consciously. The one which is in judgement alone is the only one that cannot be cured because it does not disclose itself and appears just to itself.

Now, these can occur singly, as well as in combination with each other. It is particularly interesting to note the self-reinforcing nature of judgement. It lends to itself the appearance of being just, of being right, of accurately depicting things as they ought to be depicted. Again, we should highlight that anger includes several judgements: a judgement that one or one’s own has been injured or slighted; a judgement that this was wrongly or unjustly done; a judgement that one ought to seek and impose redress; a judgement that one is right in all of this, that one feels rightly, that one is rightly judging the situation and what justice demands — and that anyone else who sees things differently is judging wrongly.

Humility, Anselm says, correspondingly exists in these three modes as well: action, will, judgement. But, he reserves the term “humility” for their combination. One who possesses humility will be geared towards patience, if not towards a forgiving response that returns good for evil to one who slights, who offends, who contravenes one’s will, who threatens. . . at least a response that rightly holds one’s emotional response of anger in check. This is a response which inserts something between feeling and action, even between one moment of the feeling and another, intensified, more bitter, more self-justifying moment of the feeling — if not a conscious thought expressed in language and associated conscious resolution of the will, at least a volitionary and inferential pause.

Humility, among other things, decouples the automatic movement from “he injured me” (a fact) to “he wronged me”, from “he interfered with my desires or hindered my activity” through “my desires or my activity are more important than those of others to he wrongly interfered with me” — and from all of these to “he must pay!”

The dictates of justice and the practice of humility also lead to what Anselm calls “concord” or “harmony” (concordia). This has to do specifically with the will in relation to the wills of other people, and is particularly at issue in monastic communities. I’ve written about this elsewhere:

Anselm tells monks that they must “strive wholeheartedly to keep peace among yourselves.” He notes that at their basis, discord and violence are matters of the disordered will: “Strife. . .is about the will of each individual, as each one says, ‘Not as you will, but as I will.’” Anselm identifies the most basic precondition for concord: “This you can only follow and preserve if each one of you does not try to make another carry out his will but always, as long as it is according to righteousness and the will of God, to promote the will of another.”

Even further, as Anselm writes to another set of monks, “You will be able to foster and maintain [mutual] love if each one strives not to bend the other to his will, but to bend himself to the will of the other.” Another letter contains similar advice, warning that in a true community not only must one not contravene the wills of others, but even permit oneself to be used by them: “whoever does not permit, nor wish that the other members, and even the whole body, make use of him as their own member, I do not see how he can prove himself a member of that body.”

If this advice is followed, of course, anger is much less likely to arise in those who choose to strive for concord of wills, for they will not sense their wills being contravened or resisted by others. And likewise, they will less often give offense to the others of their community.

A last question has to be asked: How do we in fact get better? How do we move from vicious dispositions with respect to anger towards virtuous dispositions? To some degree our wills can be shaped by rewards or punishments imposed by others. In fact, Anselm fully recognizes the usefulness of this — why the monastic life also cultivates the virtue of obedience. But, this can only go so far. In fact, what is needed is that the human person comes to recognize and to choose what ought to be done, step by step, decision by decision — to “take ownership,” as we say in contemporary parlance, of her or his continued moral development.

As we have seen above cultivating humility, a proper understanding of oneself and of others, is absolutely essential. Likewise cultivating the virtue of justice — tempering the will-for-happiness by developing and deliberately maintaining the will-for-justice — and the virtue of charity are needed. Patience and gentleness also require specific attention. One has to choose these patterns of response — not only in action, but also in thought, in word, in emotion, in will — in determinate situations, for by making such choices, when we face temptations to slide down the easy path of anger instead, we build the virtues, we wear away the vices.

Anselm stresses the importance of paying close attention to our thoughts and emotions, good and bad. Given how anger works, this is particularly important. the angry person imagines their revenge, turns over in his mind the insult, injury, injustice, recalls to mind patterns of the behavior of the angering person or others like them, considers responses, justifications, and condemnations — in short dwells on and within their anger, by will, by thought, by action, by word, by all the Anselmian dimensions of truth.

To be wrapped in one’s anger like that is to live out a sort of untruth, enough truth to anchor in, not enough to be reality, but enough to intervene in it, to continue the provoked emotional response, to become irritable, to further engrave the patterns of habit. And in doing so, we will and do — and also become — what we ought not.

He also emphasizes in a number of Letters as well in other places (e.g. in his similitude of the heart as a mill) that what we occupy ourselves with lies at least in part in our choice, within the scope of our will. Anselm is very realistic about the dim prospects for banishing thoughts or emotions by sheer will-power, as the advice he gives indicates:

Do not struggle with wicked thoughts or with a wicked intention, but when they molest you do your utmost to occupy yourself with some useful thought and intention until they disappear. For no thought or intention is ever driven out of your heart except by some other thought or intention which does not agree with it. . . . Do not grieve or be sad because they molest you, as long as . . . you do not submit to them, lest in a moment of sadness they return to your memory and renew their irritation. . . . [B]ehave in the same way in the face of any unbecoming emotion of the body or soul, such as the sting in the flesh of anger or envy or vainglory. For such feelings are most easily quenched when we refuse to indulge in them or to think about them or to carry out anything at their suggestion.

He says something similar in the Dicta Anselmi:

For just as one operation excludes another operation that is different in kind from it, so a thought drives out a thought, and a willing drives out another willing. . . . And so, when I think about something useless, I don’t think about a usefulness, and when I should think about something useful, I will drive out the uselessness. And so likewise in this, when I have a bad will about something, I cannot in the same respect hold a good will towards that same thing. . . .So, whoever desires to have a good will or thought, as soon as they perceive a bad one, let them take back up the good one, hold to it, and by its presence he will drive out the bad one.

Later in that same work, he sketches these workings of substitution not only in thought, or volition, but in connected action, framing this in terms of conception, pregnancy, and birth. He provides a caution as well, with which we will end here:

One who is provoked to anger, if he patiently endures and gives in return pacifying words, from that good seed he conceives patience and his soul is impregnated, and so bears a good fruit. One who endures whatsoever injury and rationally gives in return good for evil, he conceives by that good seed. . . . and brings forth good offspring. Indeed one who is easily moved to anger, who is offended by a small thing, who gets all worked up, who joins in quarrels, who does injury. .. in the time of birth brings forth a bad child.