Wrath (Ira)

Wrath, ira, is inordinate anger, the desire for vengeance carried past what justice allows. The tradition is careful not to condemn anger as such: Aquinas holds that anger at wrongdoing is a passion of the irascible appetite that can be rightly ordered, and that a failure to be angry at what deserves it is itself a defect, so the vice lies in the excess, the misdirection or the duration. The scriptural texts read here are Ephesians 4:26, be angry and sin not, and the accounts of the cleansing of the temple, which the tradition cites as an instance of righteous anger. Cassian treats ira at length as the vice most destructive of monastic community, since it makes prayer impossible; his remedy is not suppression but the removal of the occasions of anger and the refusal to let it stand overnight.

The Apophthegmata Patrum, the collected sayings of the Desert Fathers compiled from oral tradition in the fourth and fifth centuries, preserves a much-repeated account of Abba Ammonas, who reported that he had struggled against his own anger for fourteen years before mastering it, an anecdote later spiritual writers cited as evidence that overcoming wrath is a slow discipline of habituation rather than a single decisive victory, consistent with Cassian's own insistence that the vice is uprooted gradually, through the patient removal of its occasions, rather than suppressed by a single act of will.

Wrath is the vice most directly connected to the harms the moral tradition was designed to restrain, and it has the widest cross-traditional treatment. Buddhist analysis places dvesha, aversion or hatred, among the three root poisons alongside greed and delusion, and the Dhammapada opens with a sustained treatment of the futility of hatred repaid with hatred. Stoic philosophy produced in Seneca's De Ira one of the most searching ancient treatments of the passion, arguing that anger is never useful and always a form of temporary madness, a stronger position than the Christian one. The virtue set against wrath in the popular scheme is patience, which the tradition understands as the capacity to bear provocation and suffering without being deformed by them, not as passivity. The demon assigned to it in the 1589 scheme is Satan or Amon.

The philosophical dispute behind the Christian position runs deeper than the tradition's own texts state directly: Seneca's Stoic treatise De Ira argues, across three books addressed to his brother Novatus, that anger is never rational and never useful even when provoked by real wrongdoing, while Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics takes the opposing view, that a complete absence of anger at what deserves it (aorgesia) is itself a deficiency of character rather than a virtue. Aquinas's classification of wrath as a vice only in its excess, rather than a passion to be eliminated altogether, sides explicitly with the Aristotelian position against the stricter Stoic ideal some earlier Christian ascetic writers had found more congenial.