The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin

our belief that anger is always tied to an objective cause. Something out there makes us mad, and if we can but eliminate whatever that something is, then we shall be at peace again.

One of the formative influences on Christianity was Stoicism.

The avaricious person wishes to obtain that morbidly prosperous state that is beyond desire, beyond fear, beyond need, beyond worry, beyond threat, beyond hope. Avarice is nirvana as imagined by someone who is not yet a Buddha. Avarice is the unenlightened wish for sublime extinction.

For Seneca anger is an emotion that arises when our will finds itself in opposition to the world as it is.

Pride and envy are companions, strongly with each other and more tenuously with the remaining deadly sins, in that both have to do with disproportion. Both have to do with a lack of proper balance within oneself and between oneself and the world.

According to Christian tradition, anger is numbered as one of the seven deadly sins,

all of the other six can lead to anger; or we could say that anger is often symptomatic of the other six.

The worldview of the envious-and to a certain extent, of the lustful and avaricious too-runs counter to God's vision.

But to divest God of wrath out of deference for those abused by anger is ultimately to salve their wounds with despair. It is to describe a God so benign as to be indifferent, so slow to anger that he is always late to save.