You lose your temper over something small, say what you can’t take back, and then lie awake going over the argument.
Some monks once visited an old monk named Agathon in the Egyptian desert to see whether they could make him lose his temper. They had heard how carefully he kept his mind from being stirred up by anything. They told him they had heard he was sexually immoral and a boaster, and he said yes, he was. When they called him a chattering old man, he agreed with that too. But when they called him a heretic, Agathon answered, “I am not a heretic.” They asked why he had accepted every insult but that one. He told them the first insults did his soul good. Another monk of that desert, named Moses, taught the same: bear disgrace humbly in Jesus’ name and show Him your weakness, and He will become your strength. But heresy, Agathon said, means being cut off from God, and he did not want to be cut off from God. His visitors marvelled at how carefully he guarded his soul.
Why does one sharp word make me so angry?
In the 500s an abbot near Gaza named Dorotheos told his monks that anger grows the way a fire does. Anyone lighting a fire starts with one small ember. The sharp word someone says to you is that ember, and if you let it pass, it goes out. But suppose you start thinking, “Why did he say that to me? I’ll tell him a thing or two. If he hadn’t meant to hurt me, he wouldn’t have said it. I’ll be sure to hurt him back.” Now you’ve laid kindling on the ember, and the smoke it gives off is the turmoil you feel. Even then it can be put out, if you keep quiet, say a prayer or bow to ask forgiveness from the heart. Keep feeding it, though, and your heart grows hot, until the fire is a heap of burning coals. Left long enough, anger hardens into a grudge, the way charcoal from a dead fire keeps for years and won’t rot even when it’s soaked. “It is one thing to pull up a small blade of grass,” he said, “and another to uproot a great tree.”
Is it other people who make me angry?
The monk John Cassian lived among the desert monks of Egypt in the 390s. He admitted that monks like him sometimes blamed their brothers for their own bad temper and longed to live alone, where nobody would provoke them. Yet when Cassian did live alone, he grew cross with his pen for being too thick or too thin, and with a flint that was slow to spark when he was hurrying to his reading. A pen can’t insult anyone, so the anger had been in him all along. He decided that our calm can’t depend on other people being perfect. It has to come from our own patience.
Is it ever right to be angry?
The Bible doesn’t forbid every kind of anger. Paul wrote, “‘Be angry, yet do not sin.’ Do not let the sun set upon your anger, and do not give the devil a foothold” (Ephesians 4:26-27). The Gospels show Jesus angry too. A man with a withered hand was in the synagogue one Sabbath, and some there were watching to see whether Jesus would heal him, so that they could accuse Him. “Jesus looked around at them with anger and sorrow at their hardness of heart. Then He said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ So he stretched it out, and it was restored” (Mark 3:1-5).
The Fathers disagreed about it. Most of them, Augustine of Hippo among them, held that anger at a real wrong can be good. Augustine wrote that in Christian teaching “we do not so much inquire whether a pious soul is angry, as why he is angry.” Cassian, like Clement of Alexandria, took the strictest line. He taught that we “ought never to be angry at all, whether for good or bad reasons,” and he read Paul’s “Be angry” as anger at our own faults. Where each of the Fathers stood is set out in what the early Christians said about anger.
Even so, Augustine warned a friend how easily anger fools us, since “no one who is angry considers his anger to be unjust.” The prophet Jonah shows it. God sent him to warn the city of Nineveh, and when its people turned from their evil ways, God spared them (Jonah 3:10). What made Jonah furious was God’s own mercy. “I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger” (Jonah 4:1-2). God answered with a question, “Have you any right to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4). Jonah went out and sat east of the city to see what would happen to it. God made a vine grow to shade his head, and at dawn the next day He sent a worm to kill it, then a scorching east wind while the sun beat down on Jonah’s head (Jonah 4:5-8). Then God asked, “Have you any right to be angry about the plant?” “I do,” Jonah replied. “I am angry enough to die!” (Jonah 4:9). The book ends with God’s answer: “You cared about the plant, which you neither tended nor made grow. It sprang up in a night and perished in a night. So should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well?” (Jonah 4:10-11).
What to do when you feel it rising
The plainest advice comes from Ambrose, the bishop of Milan who baptized Augustine. He told his clergy, “First, then, calm your mind. If you can not do this, put a restraint upon your tongue.” His third step was to make peace. David’s prayer for that second step is in Psalm 141: “Set a guard, O LORD, over my mouth; keep watch at the door of my lips” (Psalm 141:3). The Orthodox Church still sings the same psalm at Vespers, its evening service.
Before you answer, look for your own part in the quarrel. Dorotheos told his monks that if they had blamed themselves at the start and let the first word pass, instead of answering one word with two or five, they would have been spared all the rest. For the times you’re angry with someone and the turmoil won’t settle, he gave a prayer to say first, which asks, “As You once rebuked the stormy sea, so now rebuke the turmoil in our hearts.” He told them to speak to the person only once their hearts were calm.
Make peace before you sleep, as Paul says. Agathon said he had never gone to sleep angry with anyone, and had never let anyone go to sleep angry with him. Ambrose wanted our quarrels to be like boys’, since boys fall out quickly and soon make up as better friends than before.
When anger is hurting people
If your anger has turned to threats or violence, or nothing you try is working, see a doctor, who may be able to refer you to an anger-management course or to counselling. Keep praying while you get that help, and bring your temper to your priest and to confession.
