The Long Shadow of Wrath

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.