Restraining the Beast in Us - by TPO

Restraining the Beast in Us 

by TPO

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John Sutherland: “Wrath”,  [“The Seven Deadly Sins: A Celebration of Virtue and Vice”, Edited by Rosalind Porter] …

" Classical moralists were, in general, against anger …. Plutarch’s thinking is summed up by the translated title of his treatise, Of Meekness, or How a Man Should Refrain Choler. Anger management is the ticket. Plutarch’s objection is frigidly rational. Wrath is a ‘short madness’ which clouds the mind and precipitates rash action, always later regretted. He concedes that ‘moderate anger is useful to courage’ but moderate anger is, most would say, a contradiction in terms. We would do as well to talk of moderate lechery. It’s a sum-zero thing.

Seneca, the grand theorist of the Stoics, is even firmer in his opposition. If Plutarch saw anger as something to be curbed, like an unbroken horse, which might – once ‘moderate’ – be useful, Seneca was all in favour [sic] of exterminating the beast and getting on with life without it. As he writes in A Treatise on Anger:

     You have importuned me, Novatus, to write on the subject of how anger may   be allayed, and it seems to me that you had good reason to fear in an especial  degree this, the most hideous and frenzied of all emotions. For the other emotions have in them some element of peace and calm, while this one is wholly violent and has its being in an onrush of resentment, raging with a most inhuman lust for weapons, blood, and punishment, giving no thought to itself if only it can hurt another, hurling itself upon the very point of the dagger, and eager for revenge though it may drag down the avenger along with it. Certain wise men, therefore, have claimed that anger is temporary madness. For it is equally devoid of self-control, forgetful of decency, unmindful of ties, persistent and diligent in whatever it begins, closed to reason and counsel, excited by trifling causes, unfit to discern the right and true – the very counterpart of a ruin that is shattered in pieces where it overwhelms. But you have only to behold the aspect of those possessed by anger to know that they are insane. "

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“They that have power to hurt and will do none"

by

William Shakespeare

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They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;

They rightly do inherit heaven's graces

And husband nature's riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence.

The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,

Though to itself it only live and die,

But if that flower with base infection meet,

The basest weed outbraves his dignity:

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.