I spent a good bit of my time today and yesterday, and probably will spend a good bit of tomorrow as well, putting together my notes and a handout for a presentation that I'll be giving in an online conference coming up, which has to do with anger from psychological and philosophical and other perspectives.

And I've been allotted 15 minutes to talk about the topic that I have, you could say, signed up for, and that is early Christian thinkers on anger. This is something that I have talked about quite a bit and presented about in a variety of formats in the past, but never with this sort of brevity. The closest that I've come to it was a guest sermon that I was invited to give at a Unitarian Universalist church many years ago. And I think I got around 20 minutes for that.

And it's a somewhat different question. You could say that I'll be presenting to here, which includes fellow philosophers, psychotherapists and people who aren't necessarily sold on the usefulness of looking at religious thinkers. So I've got to set it up in a rather different way. I have to skip over an awful lot because when we say early Christian thinkers, I mean people from the second century all the way well into the fifth century. And as it turns out, there's a lot of them to begin with.

And there's a lot that they have to say about the emotion of anger. Some of them even have entire chapters of treatises or homilies or letters that are all about anger. And you might say, well, why is that the case? So this leads me into the topic that I really want to talk about. All of that was basically pretext.

Some of you may know that in the past, one of my big areas of research, and I actually published an entire book about it, was the topic of Christian philosophy, the book that I published 14 years ago at this point was about a particular debate that took place in the 1930s, largely between French-speaking philosophers, but it touched on the long, long history of the interactions between Christianity and philosophy broadly construed in a number of different thinkers.

So we talked about some of the ancient texts, philosophers who thought that there was something to this new religion, some of them were actually converts to it, but who had a philosophical background as well. At the time that I was working on that book, Pierre Hadot and his explicit phrase “philosophy as a way of life” weren't really that much on my horizon. I'd heard about him. There were other people who were talking about him, but I hadn't read him at the time. Subsequently, I have read quite a few of his works, including Philosophy as a Way of Life.

And interestingly, he has an entire chapter of that book devoted to, here's the chapter title, “Spiritual Exercises and Christian Philosophy.” And he is not a Christian himself, I think, but he's certainly attracted to all modes of thought in which you have what he calls “spiritual exercises”. We often call these “philosophical practices”. Michel Foucault called these “technologies of the self”. Other people have called them by different names, but they're all basically the same thing.

And one of the things that I'm going to talk about in my presentation that I think is really, really fascinating (so this is what I want to share with you today) is Hadot points out that philosophies were around as ways of intentional living for hundreds of years before Christianity emerges on the scene, and develops into a community and cultural force within the ancient world.

And so a lot of these early Christian writers are pretty conversant with Platonic, Stoic, Aristotelian, Skeptic, Epicurean, Cynic philosophy, as well as others, and they know about philosophical practices because they actually advocate them and discuss them. One of the things that Hadot thinks is particularly distinctive to this new movement of thought, Christianity, is that there are a number of passages from their religious texts, from the scriptures.

And by the way, as a side note, what we think of as the Bible was not formed as such as at the time that a lot of these people are writing, ta biblia is plural and means the books. And it wasn't completely agreed upon until the late 4th century, which books were in, which books were out. And books generally didn't mean something bound together in one single volume, but actually a bunch of books that you carried around with you, often in the form of scrolls. So a very, very different conception of what you would read and reference.

And they would do a lot of reading, but they'd also do a lot of memorizing and meditating upon passages. So here's what Hadot says. There are certain passages that that they took as being really, really important, whether from the earlier Hebrew scriptures that Christians will then call the Old Testament, or from the newer scriptures, the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Book of Acts, and actually even things that are no longer within the canon, like some of the letters of the very early bishops.

They would connect together spiritual exercises or philosophical practices with particular scriptural passages, and the goal was to bring them into a sort of fruitful connection to each other. How does this bear out in terms of anger?

I will just give you one really, really prime example that almost all of the heavy hitters in this early movement of Christian thought are going to reference, and that is a particular set of passages from what we nowadays call the Sermon on the Mount, which is found in the Gospel of Matthew. This is really important stuff for early Christians because this is conveying teachings from the guy himself, Jesus, the Christ or anointed one who they come to see as God incarnate.

And what does Jesus teach? Well, a bunch of different things in the Sermon on the Mount. It's a very rich text, but there is a very important set of passages discussing anger, where Jesus is going to say to them, “the law says to you, you shall not kill, but I say to you,” and then he's going to give three sort of injunctions.

The person who is angry with his brother - and some of the manuscripts say without cause, and others don't - is going to get into one level of trouble, you could say. It's being condemned as something bad.

And then there's this second one, anyone who says “Rache” to their brother, and that's a bad thing to say, is going to have a higher level of condemnation and punishment. And then finally, anyone who says “you fool” is going to be threatened with hellfire.

And this was an important passage. You could say it was a puzzling, enigmatic passage that drew people in and made them say, well, what is actually going on here? So they were drawn into thinking about and explaining things. What is meant by this? What the significance of it is. And you know, there's an increasing level of seriousness. And the idea there is that somehow by engaging in this emotion and the actions that come out of it, you are doing something that is bad for yourself but also bad for the other person. You're not literally murdering them, but you're doing something similar.

And there are some follow-up verses as well when it talks about not bringing a gift to the altar and expecting it to be accepted. if your brother or sister has something against you, you've got to go get reconciled with them and you should try to settle things with other people.

So, this ties in with all sorts of conceptions that are coming from philosophy, but being used to explain this set of verses that early Christians thought were quite revelatory and important. There are many others as well that you can find throughout, you know, he book of Proverbs or Sirach (sometimes also called Ecclesiastes). And even in the Psalms, we have letters from Paul, you know, James as well, where there are verses about anger.

And what they did, these early Christian thinkers, is they used those not in the way that people do these days as proof texts where they say: “Well see, here's the answer. It's in the Bible.” Now we don't have to think anymore. No, it worked the other way. These were, you could say, fertilizers of human rational thought. And that's one way to use religious writings to employ them to encourage people's thinking, deepening their thoughts, engaging in ongoing discussion, connecting things together. And that is eminently philosophical.

It might not be recognized as philosophy. And some people might say, oh well, you violated some sort of norm of philosophizing by bringing in a passage from a religious text. Now, that itself is something that would be a huge assumption that you probably want to look at. If you find that attractive, you want to wonder where you got that idea from and whether all philosophers buy into it. And the answer is No. But what we're going to find is that there's a number of really interesting insights that even if you don't buy into Christianity at all, even if you have negative feelings against it, you could read and and get something out of it. You could, so to speak, secularize and find it to be productive.

So that's a little bit about what I'm going to be talking about. I think there's many other instances, and this ties in, as I mentioned, with this notion of Christian philosophy that got set out by a number of the members of this Christian philosophy debate in the 1930s. The idea is that revelation can be productive when human reason takes it in and and works on it using its own powers, so to speak, and deriving something from it. I think there's many instances of this.

And by the way, it's not confined just to Christianity. You could do this as earlier Jewish thinkers were doing, like Philo of Alexandria with the Torah or other writings. You could do this with Buddhism, you could do this with Hinduism, but we don't need to belabor the point. So that's a bit about what I'm going to be doing in just a matter of days and the kind of work that I'm doing to prepare for it and the thoughts that are going into my mindset and the one I'll share with others in this conference during my 15 minutes that they'll give me.

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