Article
Creed
Seven Deadly Sins
8 min read

Anger: the dragon’s wrath

In the fifth of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, James Mumford encounters Anger, and reflects that its object is no mere object.

James Mumford

James Mumford is an author and journalist writing on a range of subjects – ethical, political and literary.

Illustration of a burning wick

I think you’d like me if you met me. I’m not quite as charming as my father. I’m fairly genial, though, and not unduly narcissistic. (I’d ask you questions about yourself). But come not between the dragon and his wrath.

Usually strangers. Always men. Playing football. Driving. Public transport. A minor infraction, that’s all it takes. Some guy pushes past me onto the tube from which I’m trying to alight. He’s ignoring the custom (and nauseatingly repeated instruction) to let the passengers off the train first. Certainly, this chap has been naughty. It’s not nothing, what he’s done. In the cold light of day, can’t we evaluate his behaviour as careless and a touch selfish? But the thing is, I never see it in the cold light of day. To me, in the heat of the moment, it’s as grave a violation as if he’d bullied my little brother.

I scowl back at the stranger. He sees my indignation. What does he do? He smirks, of course. And what do I do? Turn away and get on with my day, recognizing that, in the grand scheme of things, it couldn’t matter less? Nope. I lock eyes with the guy. It’s a duel now. Through the tube’s translucent closing Perspex doors, I stare into the exultant face of my enemy. Furious. 

Often as not my anger seemingly erupts from nowhere. That is, I don’t only get into these kinds of fracas when I’ve skipped breakfast. Or when I’m already having a bad day, already enraged (in which case a stranger’s infraction would be merely the last straw). No, no. Usually, I’m feeling just fine before incidents like this. I can thus say of my anger what Juliet says of Romeo’s love:

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,

Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

[Before] one can say, ‘It lightens.’

Even if my knowledge that this rage is rooted deep in childhood experiences doesn’t make its resurgence seem any less abrupt.

~                                                                           

Famously, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn’t discount The Law; he radicalizes it:

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times: ‘You shall not commit murder; and whoever commits murder shall be liable to judgment.’ Whereas I say to you that everyone who becomes angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment…

I used to think this was an instance of rabbinic exaggeration. The phenomenological truth of what Jesus is saying, its fidelity to lived experience, eluded me. But reflecting more unflinchingly on my own anger, I now understand Jesus’s warning to be dreadfully accurate. I used naively to assume murderers are all monsters, sadistic sociopaths straight of Silence of the Lambs or Primal Fear. Today I realize that the difference between me and most murderers – those poor bastards eking out their life sentences out of sight and out of mind in our maximum-security prisons – comes down to one thing. Not character. Luck. I've been lucky enough to lose most of my fights. 

Yet hidden away in Jesus’s warning is a profound revelation. τῶ ἀδελφῶ αὐτοῦ. It’s there in the Greek. ‘Everyone who becomes angry with his brother’. Not ‘becomes angry with another’. Nor ‘becomes angry with his neighbour’. Nor even ‘becomes angry with his enemy’. No, right at this moment Christ decides to insist upon, to remember, the fundamental fraternity of human beings. Which suggests that what is most deadly about the sin of anger – when it’s acted upon, that is, when anger becomes a sin (Eph. 4:26) – is the forgetfulness, the blindness, the obstruction of vision, which goes with it. What is forgotten in fits of rage? Anger forgets that its object is no mere object, no mere thing, no mere item. I forget that the intended target of my wrath is in fact my brother. In anger you lose sight of the face. You become blind to the stranger’s reality, to what remains true about him, to his persistent identity whatever he has done. You forget that he is still related to you in the most intimate way. That this guy on the tube, or this person who has hurt you, or this person who bears ill-will towards you, remains a someone, not a something. Remains a person. Remains a creature of the God who loves in freedom. Flesh and blood like I am. But spirit too… destined, like I am, to be united to Christ.

In anger you lose sight of the face. You become blind to the stranger's reality, to what remains true about him, to his persistent identity whatever he has done. You forget that he is still related to you in the most intimate way. 

Perhaps this still all seems too abstract. Someone who makes it real is the novelist, J.M. Coetzee, whose brilliant, harrowing novel, Disgrace (1999), tells the story of a professor of literature, David Lurie. In the aftermath of an affair with a student, David resigns from his position at a University in Cape Town and retreats to his adult daughter Lucy’s remote small-holding in the uplands of the Eastern cape. David’s rural exile, however, is not fated to be a peaceful one.

One afternoon soon after David arrives on the farm, three strangers arrive – two men and a teenager – and enter the premises under the pretences of wanting to use the phone. Without further ado, the strangers knock David to the floor. When he comes to moments later, he finds himself locked in the lavatory. ‘His child is in the hands of strangers’. Eventually he’s released. They want his car keys. Whereupon he’s doused in methylated spirits. ‘The scrape of a match, and at once he is bathed in cool blue flame’. David manages to get to the toilet bowl in time – to extinguish the flames – and survive. But when he rouses, he finds the car stolen, the dogs shot and his daughter gang-raped.

This appalling incident, so difficult to read, happens in Chapter 11, roughly half-way through the novel. Which means that Coetzee leaves the reader completely wedded to the father’s quest for justice for nearly the rest of the story. Because Coetzee refuses to satisfy the quest. The regional police won’t act. And Lucy, impregnated, won’t press charges. It’s only in Chapter 23 that one of assailants reappears. By which time the reader is baying for blood. It’s the teenager, whom David discovers peeping at Lucy through the bathroom window. The whole passage warrants quotation:

The flat of his hand catches the boy in the face. ‘You swine!’ he shouts, and strikes him a second time, so that he staggers. ‘You filthy swine!’

More startled than hurt, the boy tries to run, but trips over his own feet. At once the dog is upon him. Her teeth close over his elbow; she braces her forelegs and tugs, growling. With a shout of pain he tries to pull free…

The word still rings in the air: Swine! Never has he felt such elemental rage. He would like to give the boy what he deserves: a sound thrashing. Phrases that all his life he has avoided seem suddenly just and right. Teach him a lesson, Show him his place. So this is what it is like, he thinks! This is what it is like to be a savage!

He gives the boy a good, solid kick, so that he sprawls sideways.

An extraordinary moment. Coetzee has his readers in the palm of his hand. Because (at least at the beginning of the passage) we too feel David’s ‘elemental rage’. We want what David wants: to pulverize the kid who raped his daughter. But suddenly, during the course of the passage, Coetzee starts to humanize the kid. (‘More startled than hurt, the boy tries to run, but trips over’). Both the kid’s clumsiness and then ‘shout of pain’ remind us that, whatever he’s done, the kid remains a human being. So, the reader is made to feel conflicted, vengeful still, but now protective too. Starting to fear rather than desire that the kid will be ravaged by the dog and beaten witless by the father. In other words, the reader is beginning to remember. The boy remains David Lurie’s brother.

~

In his rousing war-time sermon, ‘The Weight of Glory’ (1942), C.S. Lewis writes that ‘the load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back’. What does he mean by this? Lewis is exhorting me to remember, continually to bring to mind, something I have forgotten about the stranger on the tube I will never meet again. Lewis is exhorting David Lurie to remember something he has (more understandably) forgotten about the boy sprawled in front of him at his mercy. Lewis writes:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship… There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

For me, then, anger management does not just involve, as Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy manuals have it, becoming more self-aware. No, efficacious anger management means becoming more other-aware. In the moment, right there on the tube, what I need most desperately is to think more not just about myself – who I am. I need to think more about who he is.

My prayer is that I learn to apprehend more vividly the identity and destiny of the person with whom I am here and now entangled, enmeshed, at odds. 

My prayer, therefore, is not just that I become increasingly sensitive to my own internal state or what it is in in my own present or past that predisposes me to anger. My prayer is that I learn to apprehend more vividly the identity and destiny of the person with whom I am here and now entangled, enmeshed, at odds. That I can perceive him as my brother, however momentarily estranged from me he is, one who belongs to the same family. Who, as he smirks and scowls and menaces me – also bears the weight of glory. Dealing with anger requires what Simone Weil, and after her Iris Murdoch, call ‘attention’. As Murdoch puts it in The Sovereignty of Good (1970): ‘It is in the capacity to love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists’. Anger management is about being liberated from fantasy – the fantasy that my adversary is a mere mortal. Christ’s call to peace – to see the object of my anger as my brother – is ultimately a call for a reality check.

Related articles

Essay
Creed
Middle East
Monastic life
Royalty
9 min read

Edward I and the monk from China

A tale of a Chinese priest meeting a medieval monarch sheds a different light on the extent of Christendom. Benjamin Sharkey tells the surprising tale of the historic Asian church.

Benjamin Sharkey

Benjamin is a DPhil student in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He is researching the experience of Christian communities in medieval Central Asia.

A medieval illustration of two sets of monks seated and facing each other. One gestures towards the sky
A 13th Century depiction of a meeting between Latin and east Syrian clerics.
AtlasAtlas des Croisades, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of 1288, outside the city of Bordeaux in Gascony, a small group of travellers approached the city walls. The inhabitants of the city gathered, curious to meet this collection of strange looking clergymen who were clearly far from home. The strangers told them that they had come from ‘over the eastern sea’ with letters and gifts from the ‘Mongol kings’ and the Patriarch in the east. Such strange reports, from visitors emerging from the unseen world over the horizon, a world known only from fantastical stories, deserved the immediate attention of the king.  

Edward I, the Duke of Gascony and King of England had been resident in Bordeaux for the last two years, overseeing the affairs of his duchy. Assembling his court, he welcomed these visitors from the east. The leader of the travellers was a monk named Rabban Sawma. He was a Uyghur Turk from China. He presented to Edward letters and gifts from the Mongol ruler of Persia, the ilkhan, Arghun, a great-great-grandson of Genghis Khan, and from the patriarch, Mar Yahbalaha, the head of the Church of the East. 

As a young lord, Edward had taken the crusader’s oath to go and fight to attempt to regain Jerusalem for Latin Christendom from the rule of unbelievers. Jerusalem had fallen from crusader control in 1244 after the city had been sacked by a large force of Kipchak warriors, nomads from the Central Asian steppes who had been displaced by the expanding Mongol empire. Arriving in 1271, Lord Edward managed to break the siege of the port-city of Acre, one of the last cities held by the King of Jerusalem. Over the next two years, however, his small force accomplished little, mostly skirmishing with herdsmen and burning houses and crops. His time in Acre came ignominiously to an end when he was stabbed with a poisoned dagger by one of his Muslim courtiers leading to lengthy and painful surgery. He left the dream of reaching Jerusalem behind him. Returning from crusade, Lord Edward was greeted with the news of his father Henry III’s death, heralding the start of his own reign. It wasn’t until 1274 that he finally reached England for his coronation. There in Westminster Abbey, he was invested with the splendour of Christian kingship. He swore on the gospel books to uphold and dispense justice and, having been anointed, he was dressed by the bishops in priestly robes and given a sword for the defence of the weak and ‘constraining those who do wrong to the Church’. Now, here in Bordeaux, these new visitors represented something quite outside his experience.  

When we dig (literally, archaeologically), we consistently find the evidence of Christian communities that no text ever told us about. 

Edward would have been familiar with the stories of Prester John. Reports of a grand and mysterious figure, a Christian ruler somewhere in the east who was both a priest and king, had begun circulating in the mid-twelfth century and were still current in European imaginations, especially as they tried to make sense of the new world that was opening up to them through contact with the Mongols. While there was not really any great Christian king in the Mongol empire, this legend does reflect the (correct) sense of medieval Europeans that a whole world of Christianity was going on beyond their horizon. 

Many historians today believe that until perhaps as late as the fourteenth century there were more Christians outside than inside Europe. Yet, in our books of global church history these believers rarely get more than a slim chapter, unrepresentative of their large share of the historical Christian demographic and experience. Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages there were significant numbers of Christians across Asia and Africa, in Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt; Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia; India, Central Asia and China. Christians had been present in China as early as the sixth century, with significant numbers elsewhere much earlier. Meanwhile Egypt and many other areas of the Middle East had predominantly Christian populations until at least the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, which continued to makeup significant minorities into the twentieth century. In the Middle Ages these areas were global centres of population and development. Bordeaux was one of the largest cities in Europe at the time with a population of nearly 30,000 but cities like Alexandria, Baghdad, Merv (in present-day Turkmenistan) and Samarqand (in present-day Uzbekistan) were among the biggest in the world with populations in the hundreds of thousands, far larger than any in Europe. Present in the historical record of all these urban centres were Christian communities. We find them scattered across the textual record, although for many of these regions this record is far patchier than for medieval Europe, but when we dig (literally, archaeologically), we consistently find the evidence of Christian communities that no text ever told us about.  

Most Christians throughout history have lived outside Europe and North America, in pluralistic societies, ruled over by and living alongside non-Christians. 

By far the largest group of Christians outside Europe was the Church of the East. This church, once termed, inaccurately, Nestorian, was entirely distinct from the Eastern Orthodox churches but had rather grown out of those early churches that had been founded to the east of Judea, outside of the Roman empire in Persian ruled Mesopotamia. They soon rapidly grew to include communities across Asia, from Syria to China, and India to Mongolia. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, was the primary language of worship, prayer, and literature in these communities but the gospels, psalms and hymns were often translated into local vernaculars. Growing up outside the Constantinian revolution, which had seen the ushering in of the conception of Christian kingship with the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, and never succeeding in converting the Persian Shah or any other significant rulers, these eastern Christians had no experience of existing in a Christian state. Throughout the Church of the East, Christians always lived in pluralistic societies. The patriarch, the head of the church, was indeed for most of the Middle Ages based in Baghdad, also the seat of the Muslim Caliph, from where he oversaw the affairs of more communities than the Pope in Rome. 

By the time that Rabban Sawma made his journey to Europe, there were Christians throughout the Mongol empire (the largest empire until then ever seen). These included many Mongol queens, Khatuns, such as Sorqaqtani Beki, the mother of Kublai Khan, as well as many ordinary Mongols. Christianity had been present in Mongolia for at least a century by the rise of Genghis Khan in the early-thirteenth century and was very popular among many of the tribes he subordinated.  

Christianity for well over the first two thirds of its existence then was not a majority European faith and today it is again not majority western. Most Christians throughout history have lived outside Europe and North America, in pluralistic societies, ruled over by and living alongside non-Christians. The western experience is not just unrepresentative of Christianity today but unrepresentative of Christianity in the past. Christendom has been only a small part of the Christian experience. 

There in Bordeaux, near where the Garonne flows into the Atlantic, the king of England knelt as the monk who had grown up not far from the banks of the Yellow River began singing in Syriac. 

This was the experience of the monk who stood before Edward I. Rabban Sawma had grown up near Khanbaliq, ‘the city of the khan’ (present day Beijing). When still in his early twenties, out of ‘the love of his Lord’ he had become a hermit, living in a cave near a mountain spring, in the manner of many Chinese Taoist, Buddhist, poet and artist ascetics. People would regularly make the day’s journey from the city to come to hear him preach. He was later joined in his secluded life by another young man with a desire to lead a life for Christ named Mark. The two had lived together for some time when one day Mark shared with the older hermit his desire to visit Jerusalem. Together they set out on the long and perilous journey to see Jerusalem and all the sites of the life of Jesus. Like a reverse Marco Polo they travelled west across the Mongol Empire, sometime in the early 1270s, perhaps indeed at the same time as Marco Polo, taking the opportunity for long distance travel which the continent-spanning Mongol empire had made possible. 

When the two monks eventually reached Iraq they were told that fighting between the Mongols and the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, who then controlled Jerusalem, had made travelling the final part of the journey impossible. So they settled down in Iraq until the time might come when it would be safe to make the journey. Such a time never came but while they were in Iraq they became involved in the life of the church and when in 1281 the patriarch died it was with some surprise that Sawma’s young companion Mark found himself chosen by the bishops to be the new patriarch. He chose the new name Yahbalaha.[3] He was the first believer from the more eastern regions of the church to be chosen as patriarch, reflecting the greater involvement such believers were able to have in the life of the whole church under the Mongols. In 1287 the Mongol ilkhan Arghun, seeking to use the European desire to regain Jerusalem to coordinate attacks against his enemy in Egypt, asked Yahbalaha to provide a Christian messenger to go to Europe with gifts and letters for its Christian kings. Yahbalaha recommended his mentor Sawma, also providing him with his own letters of friendship for the Europeans. 

A year later, having visited the cardinals in Rome, who had quizzed him on his beliefs and been left perfectly satisfied that he shared the same beliefs as them, and in Paris the King of France, who had shown him around the rapidly expanding city with its sprawling universities, Sawma met the king of ‘Inglatar’. In their audience Edward’s attention was particularly caught by the reference in the ilkhan’s letter to Jerusalem, having again taken the crusading oath only the spring before. But Sawma was far more interested in using his trip to see artefacts associated with characters from the gospels, to hear stories of heroes of humility and of the miracles God had worked in the lives of saints, and to observe the novelty of life in a predominantly Christian society. 

In the evening Sawma was invited to lead the king in worship. There in Bordeaux, near where the Garonne flows into the Atlantic, the king of England knelt as the monk who had grown up not far from the banks of the Yellow River began singing in Syriac:

‘Teshbuhta l-alaha ba-mrawme’ ‘Glory to God in the highest…’

On the altar Sawma broke the bread and made the sign of the cross over the chalice of wine. As he broke up the bread he sang: ‘Abun d-ba-shmaya’ ‘Our father in heaven…’ Edward and some of his courtiers and clerics might have recognised the prayer and tried to repeat the strange words or to follow along reciting in Latin. The king and his courtiers approached and Sawma served them. The king of England and the Chinese monk together participating in the divine mystery of Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice. 

  

Further reading and notes 

For the text of Rabban Sawma’s journey to Europe:  

Borbone, Pier Giorgio. History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma (Hamburg: tredition, 2021). 
 

Rabban means ‘our master or teacher’, a term related to Rabbi which was an honorific used for monks. Ṣāwmā means ‘fast’ and is a shortened version of the name Bar Ṣāwmā, meaning ‘son of the fast’, often given to a greatly longed for child, as was the case with Rabban Sawma. 

Mar meaning ‘Lord’ was a term of respect applied in the Church of the East to senior clerics and saints. 

Yahbalaha means ‘God has given’, with ‘alaha’ being the word always used in Syriac for God. As with Sawma it is a name given by parents in thankfulness for the child. Mark chose it as a name borne by two previous patriarchs, perhaps recognising his appointment as a gift from God. 

 

Related articles