By Daniel B. Gallagher
Surrounded by a culture of growing political violence, we all must feel at least a minimum dose of anger. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t feel it.
The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, deserves recognition for admitting it on Friday: “In the last 48 hours, I have been angrier than ever… and when anger took me to the limit, it was actually Charlie (Kirk)’s words that made me step back… Charlie said: ‘When people stop talking, that’s when violence arrives.’”
Unwittingly, the late Kirk summarized the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which, simply put, is: “it’s not about whether you feel anger, but what you do with it.”
For Aquinas, anger was the most complex of the “passions of the soul” (passio animae). He teaches that anger involves sadness and hope, that its object is a mixture of good and evil, and that it involves both the irascible and the concupiscible appetite.
We won’t go into those technicalities now, but suffice it to say that, for Saint Thomas, anger has a particularly important relationship with reason. Anger is reasonable insofar as it hopes or “trusts” in a just punishment for an injustice (spes puniendi).
The problem is that anger hopes for that punishment imperfectly, since, if left to itself, it derails in determining what kind of punishment should be applied. Anger listens to reason when it tells it that an injustice has been committed, but it does not “hear it perfectly” (non perfecte audit) (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 158, a. 1), and therefore it impedes the correct use of reason.
This imperfect use of reason in the case of anger allows Thomas to distinguish it from hateful fury (odium). Governor Cox made a similar distinction when speaking to young people after Kirk’s assassination: “You are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage. It feels like rage is the only option. But with those words (Kirk’s), we are reminded that we can choose another path.”
For Saint Thomas, choosing that other path involves recognizing that anger is reasonable, but also admitting that it is an imperfect use of reason. When we are angry, we rightly hope for a just punishment, but we determine disorderly what punishment seems just to us.
Something unique about anger, according to Aquinas, is that it is the only passion that has no direct opposite (cf. ST I-II, q. 23, a. 3), neither in the sense of having a specific contrary passion in more or less, nor in the sense of an opposition between good and evil. “Anger,” Thomas says, “is caused by a difficult evil that is already latent in it.” In simple terms, anger is, prima facie, more justified than other passions.
Although anger has no contrary in a strict sense, Aquinas holds that the contrary emotions of hope (spes) and sadness (tristitia) are essentially involved in it.
Hope is present insofar as the angry person hopes to be vindicated, and sadness insofar as they suffer from a received injustice. We can better manage our anger when we recognize that it is a mixture of both passions.
Saint Thomas believes that anger consists precisely in the confluence of sadness for having been hurt and hope for vengeance. If there is no hope for vengeance, we feel only sadness. And if we remove sadness from anger, what remains is joy: that is, joy from the certainty that vengeance has been or will be carried out.
Thus, in the face of an evil like the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, we can resign ourselves, and then the passion will simply be sadness (tristitia), or we can try to overcome or vindicate the evil. But if we act guided by raw anger, then—as Saint Thomas teaches—the punishment we hope for will be unjust.
I know this line of thought is demanding, but once again, the key is that we are justified in feeling anger precisely because an injustice has been committed, and that injustice cries out for vindication.
If the “different path” proposed by Governor Cox resembles what Aquinas teaches, it must take us all the way, that is, it must also encompass the means by which we seek to repair the evil suffered. That different path reinforces Kirk’s argument that the best we can do to avoid violence is to keep talking.
Finally, Aquinas’s careful analysis of anger is not without suggestions for remedying it. He privileges the virtues of meekness, patience, and prudence. They are the same virtues that can restore the atmosphere of mutual respect essential for civilized discourse, the kind of atmosphere that might have prevented Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the chain of political attacks—frustrated or consummated—that afflict our nation.
At the same time, if we read Saint Thomas carefully, we see that meekness and patience are deeply Christian virtues, because they are only perfected in perfect charity.
Christ’s teaching to be meek like Him (cf. Mt 11,29) and that of the book of Sirach that nothing makes us more pleasing to men than meekness (cf. Eclo 3,19), might make us think that meekness and patience are the greatest virtues. But Aquinas teaches that they make us pleasing to God and men only “insofar as they concur with charity, the greatest of the virtues, toward the same end, namely, the mitigation of our neighbor’s evils” (ST II-II, q. 157, a. 4).
As difficult as it may be, it would be hard for Christians to find a better response to the violence surrounding us. And as citizens, we would hardly find a nobler reason to embrace Kirk’s exhortation: keep conversing.
About the author:
Daniel B. Gallagher is a professor of philosophy and literature at Ralston College. Previously, he was the Latin secretary to Popes Benedict XVI and Francis.