Here’s a clip from our Calvin Seven Deadly Sins seminar today–Rebecca DeYoung presenting and a number of seminar participants posing questions on the nature of anger, especially as described by Thomas Aquinas (and to a lesser extent, John Cassian). As usual, this is in note form, gaps, elisions, and all:
Anger/Wrath
More than any other vice, there is a debate over whether this is a vice at all.
Evagrius: anger at a brother is the single dominant obstacle to pure prayer. Like Cassian, he says: get rid of anger altogether. Cassian: you can be angry at your own sin. You can be angry at the demons. For Evagrius, that’s the function of the irascible appetites.
Cassian, p. 196, chap. 6. He is SO categorical against anger! NO exceptions as to utility, etc. Also metaphor re: the blinding effect of anger. “Blinds the eyes of the heart. Obstructing the vision by the deadly beam of a more vehement illness . . . it is irrelevant whether a layer of gold or one of lead or of some other metal is placed over the eyes; the preciousness of the metal does not change the fact of blindness.” Continue reading
Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians
Grateful to the dead 