The Remedies for Anger: How Aquinas Says a Father Becomes Meek

The Remedies for Anger: How Aquinas Says a Father Becomes Meek

Part 1 ended on a diagnosis, and a diagnosis you cannot act on is just a better class of complaint.

So: two questions to open with. Why do two men, given the same provocation on the same Tuesday evening, produce reactions of wildly different size? And what exactly is a man supposed to do between now and the next time it happens?

The tradition has answers to both, and the first one is more interesting than it looks.

Why you flinch harder than the next man

The perception of an injury is not a fixed quantity. The same remark lands differently on different men, and the tradition offers two distinct reasons for that. They are worth keeping apart, because they call for opposite responses.

The first is temperament. The older psychology held that any faculty working through a bodily organ has a disposition, an arrangement of matter that determines how strongly it responds to its object. A man of one temperament feels the pleasure of a good meal keenly; another enjoys the same meal and is barely moved by it. Extended to anger, the more tender-hearted a man is, the more readily he registers a slight as an injury at all.

I want to be careful here. The four-temperament scheme is pre-modern psychology, not clinical description, and it is useful the way a rough map is useful. It tells you that reactivity has a physical floor and that the floor differs between men. It does not license diagnosing your wife, and it certainly does not excuse anything.

The second reason is woundedness, and it is a different thing entirely.

The image the conference uses is exact. Put a knife through your hand, let it half heal, then touch it lightly. The pain is enormous and completely out of proportion to the pressure applied, and there is nothing wrong with your sense of touch. The wound is doing the amplifying.

Psychological injury works the same way. A man carrying an unhealed one will perceive an ordinary provocation as an outsized injury and move to anger at a speed that baffles everyone including him, because the faculty that reads situations for threat has learned associations it will not unlearn on request.

That distinction produces the first real fork in the road. A man who is wounded needs healing before he needs a virtue programme, and a virtue programme applied to an unhealed wound mostly produces a man who is angry and also ashamed. A man who is not wounded needs something else, which is where the tradition gets uncomfortable.

Mortification, or the death of getting even

Go back to the structure of anger: pain at the injury, plus desire for vengeance. Now remove the second half and see what is left.

What is left is sorrow. Just the ache of having been wronged, with nothing attached to it, because desire is always aimed at some future good to be obtained and you have stopped trying to obtain anything. You are simply willing to carry it.

Do that repeatedly and something is built. The word for it is mortification, from mors, death: the desire for vengeance is what dies. I should note that this is Pauline and patristic vocabulary rather than Aquinas's own term in the treatise on anger, so I am not putting the word in his mouth. The mechanism is his. The name comes from elsewhere.

And meekness turns out to depend on it. You cannot decline to pursue vengeance if you have never practised carrying an injury without doing anything with it. The capacity has to exist before the virtue can use it.

The exemplar the conference reaches for is Our Lady through the Passion, and the point it makes is a good one. She is not shouting at soldiers. She is also not, as certain films would have it, collapsing. She sorrows, fully, and the sorrow is under government, because a life of small mortifications had already built the capacity by the time the largest one arrived.

That is the uncomfortable bit. Nobody builds this on Good Friday. It gets built on ordinary Tuesdays, in things too small to mention.

Meekness is not going easy

There is a second virtue in this neighbourhood and confusing the two costs fathers a great deal.

Clemency moderates the punishment. Meekness moderates the passion. Aquinas separates them in the same article where he asks whether they are the same thing, and concludes they are not: clemency mitigates external punishment, meekness mitigates the interior movement of anger (II-II q.157 a.1).

The practical distinction is this. Clemency is what lets you go easier on a child who is actually sorry, for that child's good rather than for your comfort. Meekness is what determines whether the sentence you were about to hand down was ever a sentence at all, as opposed to a discharge.

And the order runs one way. You cannot develop clemency first, because a man who has not governed the passion is not mitigating a punishment when he goes easy. He is just further along the same swing that produced the punishment.

Every father knows the difference from the inside. The correction you deliver at 6 p.m. on Tuesday while still hot is not the correction you would have chosen at 8 p.m. once the house is quiet, and the child can tell which one he received. That gap is not a discipline problem. It is a meekness problem wearing a discipline problem's clothes.

Two Hail Marys

I have twin toddlers, and the specific shape of my own problem is refusal.

Not one big refusal. All of them, all day, on a loop. Let's have lunch. Let's pack up. Let's go to bed. Every one of those is a negotiation, and the ones that get me worst are the times they are visibly struggling with something and will not let me help. I am standing right there. I could fix it in four seconds. No.

By about the fourth round I can feel the thing Aquinas is describing. The injury registering. The heat arriving before I have decided anything. The sentence assembling itself.

So I close my eyes and pray two Hail Marys. Slowly, with a long exhale on each. That is the entire strategy.

Here is what I did not expect. Most of the time it is not that they comply by the end of the second one. It is that I have stopped needing them to comply now. The gap was never really about them deciding. It was about me waiting long enough for them to decide.

Which makes me think she is not doing the thing I asked her to do. I ask her to move them. She seems to move me instead. Possibly both, and I am not going to pretend I can tell the difference from the inside.

The unplanned benefit is that I am getting several decades in over the course of a day, which is more of the Rosary than I was managing on purpose.

What this looks like on Tuesday at 6 p.m.

The conference gives six remedies. They are not a programme so much as six places to push.

Work on humility. This is the one that carries the most risk of being misread, so I will state it carefully below. In its right form it is the recognition that you are not owed exemption from difficulty, and that a man with your record has no standing to be scandalised by mild mistreatment. The tradition's concrete instrument here is the Litany of Humility, which takes about three minutes and is properly unpleasant the first several times.

Detach from the redress you are owed. Not from justice. From your claim on it. This is the specific muscle, and it is why the virtue is hard: you are not being asked to decide the wrong was fine, you are being asked to stop requiring that it be put right for you.

Practise mortification. Small, unremarkable, unmentioned. Carry one thing per day without doing anything about it. The conference's blunt observation is that men with anger problems very often do not know how to suffer well, and the two facts are the same fact.

Detach from the thing that got hit. Sometimes the injury is to you, sometimes to something you have attached yourself to: your competence, your schedule, your authority in front of the children. The size of the anger tracks the size of the attachment, which is diagnostic information you can use.

Work on gentleness in speech. Not on feeling gentler. On the actual words, on Tuesday, in the kitchen, at volume. Speech is downstream of the passion but it is also a training input, and it is the one you have direct access to.

Go to the Sacred Heart. The historical devotion attached to this virtue, for the obvious reason that Our Lord identifies it in himself and tells us to learn it from him. The Litany of the Sacred Heart is the standard instrument, and it asks the same thing of you that sustained silence does. Ask your guardian angel for the one thing you most need and cannot manufacture: to see it happening while it is happening, rather than twenty minutes afterwards.

Humility and meekness work as a pair, and they work on different appetites. Meekness governs the reacting part, whether the injury moves you and how much. Humility undercuts the whole business earlier, by removing the pleasure that made the imagined vengeance attractive in the first place.

The strong man

The conference closes on a question from the floor, and it is the question this whole topic exists to answer. Isn't the popular picture of a man precisely the one who gets angry? Rough, hard, quick to fire?

The answer is a straight inversion. "A real man is disciplined internally." Anger that runs a man is not a display of force. It is the absence of government, which is why it is unpredictable, and unpredictable men are not strong, they are simply expensive to be around.

St Joseph is the case that settles it. Not because he was stoic, and I want to be careful not to flatten him into a masculine mood. Joseph is meek in the precise sense: told difficult, disorienting things by God and by circumstance, he does not react, he obeys, and everything he does with his considerable strength is aimed at protecting the two people entrusted to him. The strength is entirely present. It is just pointed somewhere.

The test the conference offers is a good one to keep. Real strength means it does not much matter what is happening. You can still do what you have to do.

Which is exactly what a house needs from its father at 6 p.m. on a bad Tuesday. Not intensity. Predictability.

What this does not settle

Several things, and I would rather name them than leave them under the rug.

Where righteous anger legitimately begins. Aquinas is clear that anger under right reason is praiseworthy, and equally clear that we are unreliable judges of our own case. The conference's warning is the honest one: when we are angry we find it very easy to believe our indignation is the righteous kind. I do not have a clean test for this and I do not think one exists.

The hard line between humility and tolerating mistreatment. The phrase you deserve this is spiritual counsel about how a man holds his own injuries before God. It is not, and must never be turned into, counsel to remain in a situation where someone is being harmed. Humility governs your interior response to a wrong. It does not oblige you to leave the wrong in place, and where there is abuse the obligation runs the other way: get help, involve the people whose job it is, act. Anyone who has been handed this teaching as a reason to stay silent has been handed it wrongly.

Whether temperament claims hold up. The four-temperament framework is a useful rough map with no clinical standing, and I have used it as such.

Whether any of this substitutes for healing. It does not. If the wound is doing the amplifying, the wound is the work, and that may need more than a virtue programme.

And the honest one: I have a strategy and I still lost my temper this week, because having a strategy and reaching for it are two different acts and the second one is the hard one. The tradition's claim is that the appetite is trainable, over years, in small things. I believe that. I am about four days into believing it this particular time.

Two questions to close on. What is the smallest injury you could carry today without doing anything about it? And who in your house is currently organising themselves around your temper?

Harvey 🐑

Key takeaways

  • The size of a perceived injury varies by temperament and by unhealed wounds. They are different problems and need different responses.
  • A man carrying an unhealed wound needs healing before he needs a virtue programme.
  • Mortification is what is left when you subtract the desire for vengeance from anger: sorrow, carried, with nothing done about it.
  • Meekness presupposes mortification. You cannot decline vengeance you have never practised declining.
  • Clemency moderates the punishment; meekness moderates the passion (II-II q.157 a.1). Meekness comes first.
  • The six remedies: humility, detachment from the redress owed, mortification, detachment from what was hit, gentleness in speech, devotion to the Sacred Heart.
  • Anger that governs a man is not strength. It is the absence of interior government.

Is it wrong to punish a child while angry?

The tradition's concern is not that you feel anger but that the anger, rather than reason, is setting the size of the response. A correction chosen while the passion is running is likely to be a different correction from the one you would choose an hour later, which is the practical case for meekness preceding clemency (II-II q.157 a.1).

What is mortification, in plain terms?

Accepting an injury and carrying the sorrow of it without pursuing any redress. Repeated, it kills the reflex to get even. The term is Pauline and patristic rather than Aquinas's own vocabulary in his treatment of anger, though the mechanism it names is his.

Does being meek mean letting people walk over you?

No. Meekness governs the interior passion, not your obligations in justice. It does not require you to leave a wrong in place, and it never requires anyone to remain in a harmful situation. It changes who is driving your response, not whether you respond.

How long does it take to acquire meekness?

The tradition treats it as habituation, built through repeated small acts over years rather than through a decision. The relevant claim is that the reacting appetite is trainable at all (I-II q.56 a.4), not that it is trainable quickly.

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