The Seven Deadly Sins:
Anger and Sloth
25 March 2007
Today we reach the end of the little series of sermons I have been presenting on the Seven Deadly Sins. As you know, I have been trying to think through these chief forms of sinfulness using Thomas Merton’s idea of the distinction between the true and the false self. Before we get into our final two sins, I would like to go over this distinction again: what is the difference between a false self and a true one? Our true self is who we really are: that is, a spiritual self, a child of God, fully aware of his or her reality in God, awakened to the knowledge and the love of the God who alone knows the complete identity of this self. It is not something we simply are, hidden in us, but is a project: what God is calling us to be, rooted in our deepest spiritual capacity for intimacy with the Almighty. Many if not most people who live around us are unaware of this self—of their true identity—they have not awakened to it to any considerable extent. Maybe they are haunted by its possibility—some movies and books show such people who seem to be hearing an echo of a voice, as Tom Wright put it—but instead, they are in pursuit of a false self, the self they imagine they are, or are trying to become, without any reliance upon or much awareness of God. In other words, sin has alienated them from themselves.
Here is Merton in his own words: “When a person appears to know his own name, it is still no guarantee that he is aware of the name as representing a real person. On the contrary, it may be the name of a fictitious character occupied in very active self-impersonation in the world of business, of politics, or scholarship, or of religion.” Now I want to be fair: it is possible to attain some true self-understanding on one’s own, apart from a relationship with God. It is possible to renounce the illusions of living along the surface of things and to discern the outline of the spiritual self one is meant to become. But the deepest truth about ourselves is what God knows and will show us. We cannot find that without His mercy, and we can only discover His mercy by finding Him.
Merton says that this false self is in the pursuit of various things that it wants to admire in itself. It is fabricating an identity for itself based on the values of the external world around it, that is, things outside itself: money, power, looks, prestige, importance, achievement, success—all things in which it is in competition with other selves. “And all the while,” says Merton, there is nobody there. There is only an illusory, fictional “I” which seeks itself, struggles to create itself out of nothing, maintained in being by its own compulsion and the prisoner of its private illusion.” Of course, this person of the false self is real in the sense that the person embodying this self actually exists—but this person exists as someone alienated from his or her own authentic existence, which only God knows. Imagine, giving one’s whole life to an illusion—and only becoming in the end one’s own mistake.
How can one awaken the true self, that is, the person we are, the one God has created and knows, the one Jesus has redeemed and means to live in the power of his risen life? All true religions are trying to do this. But Merton insists that this true self is somewhat mysterious. That is, there can be no simple way of forcing it out of hiding. Christians have sometimes come on too simplistically, thinking that if only a person could be coerced into praying the sinner’s prayer, he or she could be saved and that was that. But it is possible to turn religion into a project of the false self, too. The Church has many of this kind of alienated self, especially amongst the clergy—thinking more of their own success or privilege or status than of the truth of God or the reality of the Kingdom.
One of the things we must realize is that our age of the world is very detrimental to the emergence of the true self, for it is filled with the kind of noise and frantic activity and shallowness that makes it hard to imagine where to look for an authentic sense of identity. That is one of the reasons for our liturgy and worship style: it is meant to counteract the noise and shallowness of the surrounding world. It is part of a set of spiritual practices which can “produce within ourselves something of the silence, the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart, and the indifference which are required if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable manifestation of its presence.” So, Merton. [All quotations are from The Inner Experience]
I believe we can now go on to our discussion of the last two of our list of deadly sins with a clear idea of where we are going. I want to speak about anger and sloth, today. And in the light of this idea of the true and false self, these two sins appear to be mirror images of each other. Let me explain. We all know what it means to be angry. Anger arises when our inner sense of justice is offended. Now that inner sense may not be very sensible—as when I am angered when I get behind a slow driver on the highway, as if it were my right to go as fast as I wanted. On the other hand, I may occasionally be offended because of a real injustice. For example, I may be falsely accused of a crime or a misdeed that I certainly did not commit. At another level, my sense of justice may be offended at learning that someone I love or know—or even someone I don’t know—has been egregiously mistreated. I have no personal interest in this injustice, but am outraged nevertheless.
What happens in anger? There is an immediate physiological response and a corresponding desire to lash out at the object of one’s wrath—even if it only amounts to muttering to oneself. The feeling is natural, but it needs to be controlled. If not, a harsh word can escape one’s lips and if the person who aroused our anger is nearby and hears the word, a situation has been created in which more anger can be generated. If that person also responds in anger, then one’s own anger can be increased, and before long, an actual fight breaks out—verbal at first, but perhaps coming to blows. You know how the progression works. It is imperative to get the anger under control at the very earliest stages, if you want to minimize the harm that is done. Christians are forbidden to go to bed at night still being angry.
But suppose the anger is not contained and it goes beyond the vehement outburst and the passionate response to the anger of others? Already there is sin, insofar as we have felt and expressed malice towards others. But what if we do not fight our anger and instead allow it to simmer and fester? What if we nurture grudges and plan revenge? Then anger becomes deeply rooted in us—we become angry people, resentful and sullen. Our language becomes worse. It is not long before we explode at relatively minor provocations.
Now what is it that chiefly causes our anger? Mostly it is when we are thwarted in some way from attaining things we wanted. What is it that we want? Well, the list can be endless, but usually the things we want are those that are associated with the image of ourselves as we want to be. In other words, isn’t most of our anger aroused by the failure of that false self of ours to get what it wanted as part of its attempt to fabricate an identity in competition with other people? Someone else gets the honor I wanted and so becomes thought of as an important person when it was I who wanted to appear important—even though I did not need the award. Even in my example of driving behind someone going slow on the highway, my anger is based on the falsity of a self that thinks it is the center of the world. As we pursue an identity that is false, we are bound to be frustrated since the identity itself is unreal. That may be why we hear so much these days about people “reinventing themselves.” If ever there were an illusory notion, this is it: that we can try out different false selves and keep reinventing until we find one we like—never actually discovering our true self—and becoming increasingly angry in the process.
As we begin to discover the authentic, the true self God knows us to be, one of the things we can learn or find along with it is a deep patience. Patience springs from a profound reliance upon God, a true knowledge of him, a sustaining inner peace. This results in a detachment from all of the things the false self was so intent on gaining and grasping to itself. All of the things of the world are still there, but we are not controlled by any of them. We can appreciate, love, use, and detach from them, because our reliance is upon God. With this awareness of who we truly are in God growing in us, we can let go so many of the things that caused our angry outbursts. We learn a deep love of others and even a love of ourselves in God which is detached from the competition which drives the world around us. We can cut the root of anger by abandoning the false self.
Henry Fairlie, as you know, one of the moralists I love to quote, [The Seven Deadly Sins Today] says that our societies keep us angry through three false ideas they present to us: First, a false idea of what our rights are; Second, a false idea of what knowledge we ought to have; and Third, a false expectation of what we can become. These three false notions are easily believed by the false self. The false self is likely to imagine that it has a right to what everyone else seems to have. The false self also supposes that it ought to be able to know everything that is important and in a complicated world like ours, there is too much to know. And finally the false self readily supposes that it can have or be anything it wants. The frustration of each of these three expectations creates anger.
I wonder how much of my own anger could pass the reality test? That is, when anger is aroused, can I make a case that it corresponds to an injustice in which I am not personally interested, in which my false self doesn’t have some kind of attachment? There will always be elements of that old falsity clinging to us, I fear, until we are wholly remade in the resurrection. But meanwhile, there is much of the false self that can be put to death and much of the true self that can be found: enough to eliminate anger as a serious problem if we were serious about it—at least in our interpersonal relations.
But what about social injustice? What about those egregious violations of human rights that make any just person outraged? Don’t we have a right to be angry at some things? Perhaps we have a right. Whether it is prudent and useful or not is another question and whether we are justified in malice towards those we consider perpetrators is also questionable. Human wrath never furthers the justice of God. If we want to do something about injustice, it will take more than anger. It will take a love of justice and a willingness to get to work—detached from a need to see tangible results. It is possible to take refuge from actual work for social justice in a continuous anger about injustice. What is easier than to be angry with the government? Such anger doesn’t so much motivate social action as it provides an excuse for not doing it. Or else, the action will tend towards destructiveness, for malice is at the heart of anger—the desire to see someone else suffer.
But having mentioned excuses, we now come to what seems to me the ultimate rationalization: sloth—the deadly sin of indifference. It seems to me to be the mirror image of anger, for if anger is aroused when the false self cannot get what it wants, sloth arises when the false self finally realizes that it is not going to get what it wants. This should lead to the abandoning of the false self altogether, but the slothful person retains his falsity, while refusing either to work anymore at it or to expend any energy to escape it, either. And so, finally, a lack of zeal turns into full despair, an unwillingness to do anything at all, since “all is vanity” and there is “no profit to anything done under the sun.” [Ecclesiastes] In anger one turns the frustrations attendant on fabricating the false self outward toward others; in sloth that frustration is turned inward and saps all effort, all joy, from one’s own life.
It is also possible, however, that this sin can become powerful in the life of someone who has begun to take steps towards his or her true identity in God. The old monks of the desert were the first to describe this. It affected them just as they were beginning to make real spiritual progress. A genuinely converted person, for example, finds it relatively easy to stop stealing or cheating on his wife, if those have been his sins. But as he begins to live the Christian life, he will see that sin is rooted fairly deeply in his heart and will have to be struggled with over the long haul. The false self is a nasty piece of work whose tentacles wrap around all of the secret places of our hearts. Putting it to death and allowing the new person God wants us to be to come to life is a long process. That is when we are tempted to despair of the process of sanctification and to lose interest in prayer and devotion. It seems too hard for a whole life-time. That is sloth. So, perhaps, one drifts away from Church or settles for being only a nominal church-goer. Although, as Garrison Keillor put it, “Going to Church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car.”
Of course, sloth can keep a person from ever beginning, but it often turns up at times of major disappointment or failure to achieve one’s goals. When good works don’t seem to do any good, when prayer seems ineffective and dry, when the poor don’t seem to get helped for all the alms one has given, when abortions are still legal after all the protests, when the war is still going on, then one is tempted to do one of two things: look out after one’s own interests and let the wider world go its own way; or, seek out some new therapy or religion for an emotional experience. That is sloth. It also means that the false self has not been overcome. It is the false self that is in despair over lack of success. The true self does what it does out of a sense of response to the divine initiative and grace, does its work with all its heart, and detaches from results, leaving those altogether to God.
The true self isn’t unwilling to expend effort, it simply doesn’t invest itself in outcomes. At least this is what Merton says. I struggle with this one. Maybe I am too affected by the prevailing success paradigms of our contemporary world. The false self is always talking outcomes and that is one reason it is prone to sloth. It finally gets tired of expending the effort—of course, it would, since the way the effort is expended is directed towards a false end, namely, its own ability to think well of itself for what it has done. Sloth can take many forms. It can be sheer bodily laziness. Then there is an intellectual form of it, manifesting itself in the unwillingness to work at thinking in order to arrive at truth. Opinions can merely be taken ready-made from the media. Moral sloth is seen in putting off unpleasant duties or any obligations that involve effort—repaying loans, returning courtesies, volunteering time for community services, standing up for the truth. Then there is spiritual sloth, neglect of prayer and worship. The odd thing is, that, except for bodily sloth, most of these kinds of sloth can hide beneath “a whiffling activity” of the body, as Dorothy Sayers put it.
She also went on to give a more expansive definition of sloth: "In the world it calls itself tolerance, but in hell it is called despair. It is the accomplice of other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive only because there is nothing it would die for."
The poster child for the false self is probably Calvin of the cartoon strip. In one of them Hobbes asks: “How are you doing on your New Year’s resolutions?” Calvin replies, “I didn’t make any.” Then he goes on to explain: “See, in order to improve oneself, one must have some idea of what’s ‘good.’ That implies certain values. But as we all know, values are relative. Every system of belief is equally valid and we need to tolerate diversity. Virtue isn’t ‘better’ than vice. It’s just different. I refuse to be victimized by notions of virtuous behaviour.” Upon which Hobbes observes, “I don’t know if I can tolerate that much tolerance.”
One of the tricks of sloth is to make you think that things are already lost and that it makes little difference what you do. That is not true, of course. We may not see how our faithfulness can make a difference, but then we are not called to understand the big picture. We are to serve God, do what is right, love our neighbors as ourselves, and leave things to God. As Chaucer’s Parson put it in the Canterbury Tales, “Against this rotten-hearted sin of sloth, should a man exercise himself to do good works, and manly and virtuously take courage to do well, thinking that our Lord Jesu Christ repayeth every good deed, be it never so little.”
All of this doesn’t mean, of course, that the true Christian, one who has begun to discover his true self in God, is so detached from the reality of this world that nothing in it affects him. Nothing I have said means that the true spiritual self does not know what is really going on here. Rather, I mean that that the reality of a sinful world, and even the residual sin in one’s own life, neither provoke anger or despair. Instead, the true self has found a store of love and patience and zeal and energy to go on serving the God who alone truly knows who he or she is. She has abandoned herself to the divine providence and waits for God to lead her. He has found peace and joy in the midst of the despair and hostility all around him.
May God grant that this be so for all of us. Amen.