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.