What kind of anger deserves the fires of Hell?
Our Lord teaches that anger can be a grave sin against the order of charity he came to establish, and merit eternal punishment in Hell.
Our Lord teaches that anger can be a grave sin against the order of charity he came to establish, and merit eternal punishment in Hell.
Editor’s Notes
In this section, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ reveals the increasing gravity of different kinds of anger
That supernatural brotherhood deepens our obligations of charity and renders anger more culpable.
Why even a word of contempt may merit damnation, when it violates the peace of Christ’s kingdom.
He shows us that to wound a brother is to rebel against the law of divine charity itself.
For more context on this section, and its place in the Gospel and the Liturgy, see the previous part.
See also here:
The Gospel Law as to Anger
The Sermon on the Mount (To the End of the Lord’s Prayer)
Chapter V
St Matt. vi. 20-30
Story of the Gospels, § 32
Burns and Oates, London, 1878
The ‘council’
Besides the local, and in some sense, inferior tribunals, there was the great council of the nation, which sat at Jerusalem, and to which it may have been possible to appeal in the former cases.
The sentence of this tribunal was heavier and more solemn, it was more of a religious character, and the punishment which it inflicted seems to have been that of stoning, as in the case of St. Stephen, and to have set a special brand upon the name of those on whom it was carried out.
Our Lord then applies the sentence of this higher tribunal to the second degree of the sin of anger, which differs from the former in two respects, in that it is expressed in words, and not confined to the heart, and that it implies a kind of contempt and execration of the person with whom we are angry.
Thus he that saith to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is in danger of the judgment of the council, the highest earthly tribunal which was known to the chosen people of God. For the expression of anger is, as the Scripture says, like ‘the letting out water.’ When anger is confined to the heart in which it is conceived, it injures only the person who feels it and the person towards whom it is felt. To express it is to enter on a sort of ‘private war,’ which may rage to an indefinite extent, and which is an injury to the public peace as well as to the persons concerned.
It is right, therefore, that such expressions of anger should be considered as a public wrong, such as might be punished by the tribunal which had it in charge to protect the peace and general good of the holy nation.
The last degree of anger
There remains yet a further degree of the sin of anger, which involves not only its outward expression in words, but something more heinous even than interior contempt, inasmuch as it implies the desire that the person with whom we are angry may be alienated from God. It practically amounts to a distinct imprecation of God’s anger upon him.
Our Lord most probably uses, in each case, the very lightest words which would express the thoughts and wishes which He meant to condemn, for this is the way in which Holy Scripture usually speaks. But the distinction between the several kinds of judgment and wrath is easily grasped.
The measure of guilt which is allotted to the last corresponds exactly to that distinction. In the first case, our Lord teaches that the guilt of deliberate anger is worthy of the same punishment as the act of murder itself. In the case of deliberate anger, expressed in words which convey contempt and ill-will, He allots what was a severer judgment than the last, both in the manner in which death was inflicted, and also on account of the character of the tribunal from which the sentence came. In this case the tribunal represented the whole of the chosen nation, and had a sacred as well as an universal character.
So far there is no difficulty in understanding the passage. But, in order to find, for the third form of the sin of anger, a still more terrible punishment, our Lord could name nothing less than the chastisement inflicted by God Himself upon His enemies, the ‘gehenna of fire.’ But this exactly answers to the third and gravest phase of the sin, which appears to include, as has been said, the formal wish that the person against whom anger is conceived may be numbered amongst the enemies of God, and exposed to chastisement and reprobation from Him.
Thus a deliberate angry imprecation, such as is only too commonly to be heard when men who know something about God are quarrelling, is worthy of that sentence which the utterer would inflict on the object of his wrath. His words imply the desire that his enemy may be treated by God as the object of His eternal wrath, and he himself shall have that same measure meted out to him.
Our Lord regards men as brothers
This whole doctrine of our Lord is best understood by giving its due force to the relationship under which He regards both the parties in the case of anger. For He introduces as His own and insists upon throughout, the term ‘brother.’
The first murder that was ever committed was that of a brother, and the cry of ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ is the cry of degenerate and corrupt man, wishing to dispense himself from the obligation of brotherly love and duty in order to indulge his passions. The natural relationship between man and man is that of brotherhood, however distant may be the link by which any two men are actually united in a common parent.
In the order of supernatural elevation of which our Lord is the Author by means of His Incarnation, this relationship is renewed by a closer and nobler tie, because we are made children of the Father Who is in Heaven, and all brethren one to another in Jesus Christ.
This relationship gives new force and sanction to the duty of charity, and in consequence, a deeper and more lurid colour to the sin of anger. It places the subject and the object of anger so close together that the passion which separates them becomes a violation of natural piety on a higher line, and a sin against God, the Author and Father of the new creation, as well as the Author and Father of the natural order. It enforces on the brethren in the new family of our Lord the observance of His own peculiar law of charity, and the imitation of His own example of the tenderest and most self-sacrificing love.
The same relationship sheds a new light also on the stages of the sin which have been considered, and on the judgment severally pronounced upon them by our Lord. The interior passion is still worthy of the same punishment as the outward act—that is the common law in the kingdom of our Lord. The outward expression of anger and contempt becomes a sin against the peace of the whole Church, and so its guilt is represented as parallel to that of a crime which is liable to the severest sentence which the representative council of the ancient people of God could inflict.
As to the third case, it cannot but be one of the blackest acts of malice to desire that a person against whom we feel anger may be alienated from and under the ban of the God of infinite charity, Who has shown Himself so loving and compassionate in the formation of the supernatural brotherhood in which our Lord has collected us, and a sin of such malice is most justly doomed to the loss in itself of that love and those privileges, of which it has ventured to desire the forfeiture in others.
This is the state of separation from God by mortal sin, the corresponding punishment of which is found in the eternal fires of Hell.
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The Gospel Law as to Anger
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Thanks for this article. It has been very useful to my Catholic understanding of the world.