Anger

 

In their desert “cities,” the monks wanted to create a new world. They sought a harmony of human relations free of the greedy grasping that pervaded the towns and villages they had left behind. Some stories gently mock their former world. One tells of two old men who had lived together many years and never fought. One said to the other, “Let's have an argument like other people do.” But the other said, “I don't know how to have an argument.” So the first told him, “Look, I'll put a brick between us. Then I'll say, `That's mine.' Then you say, `No, it's mine.'” So the first monk put the brick between them and started the argument: “That's mine.” The second played his part: “No, it's mine.” The first immediately relented: “Okay, it's yours. Take it.” So the two gave up, unable to argue.35 This quaintly expressed the desert ideal. But the reality was otherwise. Modern readers often imagine that for monks, sexuality posed the great struggle. But ancient sources indicate otherwise. Anger, not sex, figured more prominently.

The challenge was human relations.36 The world the desert fathers had left behind had intricate codes of retribution and vengeance. Augustine tells how such codes even crept into the piety of ordinary urban Christians: “Each day people come to church. They bend their knees, touch the earth with their foreheads, sometimes moistening their faces with tears. And in all this great humility and anguish, they pray: `Lord, avenge me. Kill my enemy.'”37 Although the desert fathers had withdrawn from normal town and village life, they could not as easily abandon its fierce ethic. One story tells of a monk who had been the victim of some injustice. He went to Abba Sisoes and told him that he was going to get his revenge. Sisoes did not deny that the monk had been wronged, but begged him to leave vengeance to God. But the brother was adamant: “I cannot rest until I get vengeance.” So Sisoes told him, “My brother, let's pray.” Raising up his hands, Sisoes prayed, “God, we don't need you. We can avenge ourselves.” The brother heard Sisoes's prayer and fell at the old man's feet and begged forgiveness.38He recognized in that instant that anger and vengeance presupposes a godless world, a world in which the crude violence of human justice replaces the wisdom of God's.

Prominent figures mention their battles with anger. Abba Isidore the Priest once went to market to sell his goods, but when he felt anger overwhelming him, he fled; John the Little dropped his handiwork on the road, furious with some talkative camel driver.39 Abba Ammonas admitted the depth of his struggle: “I have spent fourteen years at Scetis asking God night and day that he give me the grace to conquer anger.”40 Anger sometimes erupted among the monks themselves because of harsh or hurtful remarks. Some monks once saw Abba Achillas spitting blood out of his mouth. When asked about it, Achillas answered, “It was the words of a brother who had hurt me. I fought not to let him know it, and I begged God to take them away from me. And the words became blood in my mouth and I spit it out. Now I am peaceful and have forgotten the hurt.”41 In the Apophthegmata, one finds frequent admonitions against the loose tongue. The desert fathers recognized how easily gossip could rend the fabric of a community. Abba Hyperechius, for instance, compared the whisperings of a gossip to the whisperings of the serpent that drove Eve from Paradise.42And he insisted that it was better to eat meat and drink wine than to feast on a brother's flesh with slander.43 Of course, the desert fathers recognized that one did not always need words to strike out at one's neighbor. As Abba Isaiah once put it, “When someone wants to render evil for evil, he can hurt his brother with a single nod of his head.”44 One tactic was to flee into greater solitude. There is a story of a monk who was often angry and became convinced that the solution was to leave his desert community: “I will go, and live somewhere by myself. And since I shall be able to talk or listen to no one, I shall be tranquil, and my passionate anger will cease.” So he went out further into the desert and took up residence in a cave. One day, he went to fill his terracotta jug with water. When he set it down, it fell over and the water spilled out. He refilled it. Again it fell over. A third time he filled it and a third time it spilled. He went into a rage. He picked up the water jug and flung it down. When it shattered, he came to his senses. He recognized that the battle lay not with others, but with himself. So he packed up his things and returned to his old community.45  The desert fathers recognized that a nonviolent world began with a nonviolent heart. Once a monk asked Abba Poemen how not to repay for evil for evil. Poemen explained that passion—of which anger was one kind—had four levels. First it welled up from the heart; then it flashed into visibility in the face; it might then come to expression in words; finally it played itself out as evil in deeds. So he advised that one get to the root of the problem, the heart, and seek to purify it. But Poemen was a pragmatist. He knew such interior purification was not always possible. And his concern was to stop the last step: evil acts. So he advised that if anger flashes across one's face, don't speak; if one must speak, then cut short the conversation.46 Poemen did not hold to what one hears among talk-show psychologists: that it is best to let it all out, to stand one's ground, and if necessary get in someone's face. For him and the desert fathers, the first step toward a less violent world was silence, biting one's tongue. But the real solution was interior, locating the inner fury in the heart.

In the Apophthegmata, discussion of anger often appears under the heading of self-mastery. But the desert fathers sometimes located the antidote to anger's fury in the virtue of humility. As Graham Gould has noted, they thought of humility as “the capacity to resolve situations of conflict by renouncing your own right to expect reparation or penitence when you have a grievance against someone.”47 This is best summed up in one of the anonymous sayings.
237 When an old man was asked what humility was, he answered: “If you forgive a brother who has wronged you before he is penitent towards you.”48

from the book Desert Christians An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism by William Harmless