Abba Joseph teaches that a Christian’s first priority is to prevent anger from arising in a relationship. By this teaching, Abba Joseph does not mean simply that we should avoid open conflict with other people, which is to say, avoid anger ‘s most obvious outward symptoms. Indeed, pretending one has ceased to be angry by doing things like isolating oneself, stewing in silence, or being what we moderns might describe as “passive aggressive” and trying to silently provoke others is, for Abba Joseph, a sign that a person’s anger has not really been addressed and alleviated.8 Instead of being satisfied with such behaviors, the Christian seeking a friendship based on genuine love will seek always to earnestly let go of any anger that might arise, doing so on the level of her inner self. Only in this way will she wholly remove the “first cause-dissension, which is born mostly out of fallen and earthly things.”9
Anger, then, must be eradicated from the inner man if friendship is to grow. Abba Joseph offers some advice on how to do this. For him, the ability of a person to let go his or her anger can be cultivated especially by the exercise of discretion, one of the key virtues we discussed in chapter one. The Christian, even when genuinely wronged by another person, must call her mind to the kind of love that she knows can exist between two people devoted to virtue.
First, a monk who has been struck by any kind of injustice ought to maintain his tranquility—not just that of his lips, but that of his heart-to the very depths …. Nor, stewing in his present state, should he bring up the things that his seething anger and his irritated mind suggest in the heat of the moment. Instead, he should recall the gift of his former love, and picture in his mind the renewal of peace …. Thus he will fulfill these words of the prophet: “in wrath remember mercy” [Heb 3.2].10
Ultimately, to turn our minds immediately to the thought of Christian love whenever we are angry is to begin to make manifest that very quality of love, and doing so chases anger out of the soul at its very outset. What is more, it transforms moments of anger into motivations toward anger’s complete opposite, namely, love. Instead of an impediment to Christian friendship, anger that is met with discretion becomes a spur to love, and thus a tool in the pursuit of purity of heart.
This point is very important because, in concert with the words of the other three most recently quoted passages, it implies something critical about Abba Joseph’s understanding of anger. For
him, anger and love exist within a mutually exclusive dichotomy. They cannot overlap one another, and cannot take up the same space within the Christian soul at the same time. Where anger is present, love is absent, and vice versa. This is why, for Abba Joseph, to bring the thought of genuine Christian love to mind through discretion pushes out anger as a direct consequence.
And so your mind, expanded by long-suffering and patience, will have within it a space for healthy reflection, in which the acrid smoke of your anger (however it has been received and accumulated) can be diffused.11
Here, Abba Joseph is counseling that in the mind that has deliberately created a space for love, anger is immediately swallowed by that love when the two meet. The greater the space in the mind devoted to love, the fewer places there are for anger to take root and grow.
In light of this, perhaps the best way for us to think about Abba Joseph’s teaching on love and anger is co picture human beings as creatures whose minds constantly reside somewhere between two distant poles, moving backward and forward. These poles are anger and love. As the mind moves toward love, it moves away from anger, and vice versa. The mind, moreover, can never direct itself to both at once—it must constantly choose which to pursue in every moment of every relationship. There is no doubt about which state Abba Joseph thinks we ought to seek.
~Daniel G. Opperwall, A Layman in the Desert
8 Conf. 16.XV-XX.
9 Conf. 16.IX. Abba Joseph acknowledges that among Christians anger can also have a second cause, chis being disagreement over spiritual or religious questions.
10 Conf. 16.XXVI.2.
11 Conf. 16.XXVII.2.
