Anger and Dehumanization in the Middle Ages

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Paper for the “Premodern Animal Emotions” conference at the Academy of Athens

My paper today isn’t about animals as such. It’s about the relationship of reason to emotion, and belongs, like my third book project as a whole, to exploring the limits and complications of the concept of reason, the preeminent quality through which humans have been typically distinguished from nonhuman animals.

My special concern today is anger. Anger is typically taken as anything but rational, usually dreaded as the enemy of the impassive judgment and care with which the ideal rational subject ought to comport themselves. An instance of this common understanding, old enough to offer itself as a foundational example, comes from the first-century Biblical Book of Wisdom, canonical to some Christians, Roman Catholics included.[1] In its chapter on the “infinite treasure” Wisdom has given King Solomon, we are told that Solomon has knowledge of:

the revolutions of the year, and the dispositions of the stars, the natures of living creatures, and rage of wild beasts, the force of winds, and reasonings of men, the diversities of plants, and the virtues of roots.

Wisdom’s list is a sequence of what might be known, comprising such things as the future and human character (through the stars), health (through roots and plants), and a general competence in natural history, includes only one contrasted pair: beasts to humans, one thoughtful, the other unconstrained. The few references to this passage in medieval Latin commentary tend just to quote it entire, with scarcely any exegetical attention. The iras bestiarum was just a known thing, as much a fact as human cogitationes and the medicinal virtues of roots.[2]

The Book of Wisdom’s presentation of anger as inherently, even thoughtlessly bestial contributes in a pedigree that runs well into our own era. We can contrast this straightforward opposition to what has happened to the historical study of anger in the hands of Barbara Rosenwein and the scholars that have come to cluster around her work. For these scholars, anger is not an unconstrained bestial emotion, but one with a social function, a continuation, as von Clausewitz said of war, of policy by other means. Powerful secular people, like warriors and kings, could get things done with anger, as it could make and defend communities and be brandished deliberately as a sharp and frightening form of diplomacy;[3] and although religious people may have had their pious and philosophical objections, even they could put it to use. Angry Benedictine monks, as Lester Little has shown, might curse not only local potentates who had wronged them by withholding or stealing land the monks thought theirs; they might even curse their own saints, whose statues they would escort temporarily to the courtyard to be ritually humiliated, to shame their holy protectors into living up to their obligations.[4] Certainly these powerful people would characterize anger they didn’t condone as irrational or bestial; but their own anger could be justifiable as just another way to get things done, as rational as any tool.

Even if the praiseworthiness of anger depends upon social status, anger may still have a rational use for everyone. The evolutionary psychologists take anger as a general human adaptation that must have a positively adaptive purpose, as otherwise it would not have persisted in our species for millennia.[5] In such analyses—where anything that is must be useful—although our individually experienced anger may well frustrate our personal capacity to exercise reason, anger itself has to be useful because it remains with us, and therefore must be yet another expression of evolution’s secret and unerring rationality. In short, insofar as anger can be functional, goal-oriented, and even deliberative, whether by individuals or by the unconscious and relentless reason of the species, anger could be rational.

I have no intention of disputing any of the scholarship I’ve just summarized. The historical study of anger has done great work so far. My talk aims rather to further tease out anger’s relationship to reason. Anger may be an efficient means to realize a goal; it may have some use in contributing to the success of our species, or our genes, whatever “use” or “success” in such a context may look like. And any intellectual history of anger should pause to admire how medieval analyses of anger developed under the scholastics, who, as they did for everything, concocted taxonomies, in this case, splitting the subrational passions from the affections – that set of emotions inaccessible to irrational beings – and further divvying anger into its irrational and rational forms.[6] This too was a “rational” understanding of anger. Nonetheless, despite modern scholarship’s identification of anger’s rationality, and despite medieval science’s finding a place for anger amid its own rational frameworks, medieval people themselves – as Rosenwein and her field absolutely know – often tended to think of anger much more warily, as the enemy of social bonds and of reason itself. Anger could be useful; some elements could be winnowed out and identified as praiseworthy; but classical and medieval writers often understood anger as the most derationalizing emotion, that is, as the one most opposed to our humanity. As I will show, though, the ultimate aim of medieval thought on anger was not to eliminate it; it was to rationalize it. Such rationalization, however, when realized perfectly, resulted not only in a human split entirely from the bestial; it results in a human that, in some way, seems split from the human itself too.

So: medieval writers were especially suspicious of the complex of feelings, orientations, emotions that we typically gather under the word “anger.” Geoffrey of Vinsauf characterizes anger “as a most frightful manifestation of uncontrolled emotions” and Roger Bacon’s Opus Major warns that “anger reduces reason to insanity and madness”;[7] Peter of Limoge’s enormously popular Moral Treatise on the Eye leads off its section on anger with “anger agitates the eye of reason”;[8] while Aquinas calls it “of all the passions…the most manifest obstacle to the judgment of reason.”[9] Amid such condemnations of anger, it is not terribly difficult to find those that call anger especially bestial: bestial, specifically, rather than “animal”: no one is ever “angry like a sheep.”[10] Instead, the angry are feral in their rage, like wild carnivores, occasionally mad like dogs, and sometimes like wild boars. Thus Galen’s work on anger holds that “Man alone, as compared with other things, has the special gift of reason; if he casts this gift aside and indulges his anger, he is living and acting like a wild animal rather than a man.[11] When he translated an account of the martyrdom of Saint Julia, the Old English writer Cynewulf characterized a tyrant’s rage as follows: “he went mad in his mind like a wild animal.”[12] The Ancrene Wisse, a Middle English guide to anchorites, warns that anger causes us to lose our mild-heartedness, then our human nature, then transforms us into beasts, and finishes by turning us into wolves.[13] And the treatment of anger in John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme portrays melancholy, one of anger’s daughters, as “just like an unreasonable beast.”[14] All this should be familiar, even tediously familiar, as much in line with the passage from the Book of Wisdom that opened my paper as it is with modern habits of animalizing anger.

But medieval writers tended to compare anger more often to madness than they did to bestiality, not to the absence of reason but to its misplacement, an interruption in what we should be. Anger for them was not so much bestial as it was a lapse in human control. Thus Alcuin of York’s widely read moral treatise On the Virtues and Vices calls anger “one of the eight principle vices,” which, if uncontrolled by reason, turns “into a raging fury.”[15] He offers here no comparisons whatsoever to animals. Similarly, Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles calls anger “an unreasoning disturbance of the mind, or, according to another definition, a temporary madness of an excited mind, burning with the desire of revenge.”[16] Before it embarks on its brief animal comparisons, the Ancrene Wisse concurs when it calls anger a “brief madness.”[17] The same is true for another popular moral treatise, La Somme le Roi, which says that an angry person acts “like a mad man, careless about what vessels they break.”[18] And John Mirk’s versified Middle English guide for parish clergy instructs the priest to ask penitents if “you have ever been so wrathful that you have lost your wits.”[19] Defendants in English law sometimes drew directly on these ideas by claiming that they had committed acts of violence in a hot flash of anger, and therefore in a temporary madness, which, as such, insulated the defendant from the guilt that could fall only on the mentally responsible: this was an early version, then, of what’s sometimes called in the United States the “panic” defense.[20]

They could defend themselves in this way because irrational anger could be excused: it arrived, suddenly, departed suddenly, and left the person, ideally, a little ashamed of having trashed their kitchen. But the presence of reason would not necessarily have saved them, or their victims, from anger, for medieval thinkers just as well recognized that faulty anger could too be a product of reason, and indeed a far worse fault than thoughtless anger. The Summa on the Vices of William Peraldus, Aquinas’s moral philosophy, and Middle English works like Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale — not a narrative, but rather a massive prose treatise on the virtues and vices — and La Somme le Roi, all of these hold that wrath is a fault only if it remains with after deliberation.[21] The fault was a terrible one, capable of leading the rationally angry subject into cruelties that none could commit but a maliciously rational subject. Thus, like most other emotions, anger had its irrational and rational modes. It could be bestial, but not necessarily, and even when rationalized, it should be experienced cautiously, for even rational anger, or especially rational anger, could be a deadly sin.

Or it could be the highest virtue. The Biblical God is often angry, and if God could be angry, then anger must have a perfectable form. We have the early medieval monk Cassian allowing for acceptable anger to be directed inwardly, against our own faults, which means feeling anger on behalf of the virtues, which are universal, not personal values. Augustine in turn allowed anger to be turned outwards too, “to the use of righteousness,” as when anger is used to correct a sin or a sinner: this likewise is anger made righteous by serving a universal value.[22] And in his influential consideration of anger in his massive moral commentary on the Book of Job, Gregory the Great followed and refined Augustine by distinguishing sinful rage from righteous “zeal,” an enormously important word in the medieval theory of rational anger.[23] With Augustine and Gregory, reason is not necessarily anger’s enemy: it is, ideally, its guide or master, as it is the right guide or master of all worldly things. Our anger is correct when we act not in service to ourselves but when we act zealously, in service to universal and absolute virtues.

The goal, then, is not the elimination of anger, but its control, and its depersonalization. Despite the common contrast of emotion to reason, and with that, a common contrast of animal to human, medieval thought on emotion followed other axes of division, as emotion could be impersonal or personal, rational or irrational, virtuous or otherwise, categories that could all be variously independent of one another, or variously entangled. The love of God for creation may be almost unrecognizable if compared to the love one person might feel for another. So too with anger. While anger could be felt irrationally, by beasts and the mad, it also had its lingering, deliberative forms, like malice, which were particular to rational beings. Malice, though, might be thought of as both deliberative and irrational, not because it was unthinking – it evidently thought, perhaps excessively so – but because it was directed at entirely personal satisfactions. What anger, like any emotion, required for virtue was therefore not rational purging but rather elevation to the impersonal. It needed to be governed, as the angry self also required government, as each submitted themselves to abstract, impersonal virtue.

The problem was therefore not anger itself but unruliness. The correction or avoidance of this loss of control was often analogized to regimes of discipline carried out against enslaved people or domesticated animals. Seneca’s treatise on anger, the most sustained study of the subject from the classical and medieval periods, warns that in anger, reason, which should have the reins, freni, instead becomes a slave to what pushes it along.[24] Slavery is not the problem here, certainly not for Seneca. Rather, the problem is the slave or the bridled thing not remaining in its position of due obedience. Galen’s own work on anger likewise uses a domesticating metaphor when it argues that “just as we exercise our horses and dogs in the practice of obedience, we must also cultivate obedience in our soul.”[25] And Gregory the Great’s Moralia winds up its argument with a passage that could hardly be more thickly metaphorized as domination: zeal is anger “subjected to reason,” remaining in “the mind’s control,” “restrained,” so that we are our own “conquerors.”[26] The purpose of such anger is not just to conquer the self; it aims to bring the world in line with the merciless purity of purpose we demand for ourselves. Anger, properly cultivated, is an ordering mechanism, used to domesticate both the inner self and the rest of the world.

With virtuous anger, it is as if the bestial itself has been domesticated as a kind of guard or attack dog, present in all its terror, but now in service to perfection. The result is not the absence of violence, but the cool liquidation of all rebellion. Nothing precludes the virtuously angry from enacting the most terrible cruelties, so long as they are enacted rationally, which is to say, impersonally, as if done to just anyone, for the sake of a social order presumed in advance to be imitative of universal, eternal rationality. Such dramas of unemotional punishment are common in classical and medieval discussions of righteous anger. Galen repeats his father’s advice never to beat a slave while angry: slavers should instead wait until the passion subsides, and then use “a rod or whip to inflict as many blows as they wished and to accomplish this act with reflection.”[27] Seneca similarly praises Plato for never beating his slaves while angry: instead, if he was upset, he had a nephew do the beating on his behalf.[28] Seneca also guides the ruler in appropriate capital punishment or torture: it should be carried out without any lingering anger over the crime, but only to warn others away from any future fault. And John of Salisbury’s twelfth-century Policraticus approvingly repeats a story about how Plutarch responded to a slave when the slave rebuked him for anger while he was being flogged: on the contrary, replied Plutarch, one must imagine clause by clause, between blows: “my eyes are not wild nor my face upset, nor am I shouting frightfully, nor am I beginning to erupt with frothing and redness, nor do I speak scandalously or obscenely, nor finally do I quiver all over with rage or gesture wildly.”[29] However calm they are, and however much they claim not to be angry, they must be acting angrily. But their anger is depersonalized, so that they are, in some sense, absent from the scene. The man who beats, tortures, and executes acts virtuously only if they act not as themselves but only as an uncanny manifestation of preexisting, unchanging, and perfect values: hence their unearthly calmness, their placid self-satisfaction, their pious, almost amnesiac assurance of the justice of what they do.

Uncontrolled anger is like a beast or madman. Lingering, thoughtful anger can be still more dangerous, and even this has something of the bestial in it, for, as the Middle English pastoral manual Jacob’s Well observes, wrath is a wolf, which in “his malice waits his time to be avenged on he who had aggrieved him.”[30] Reason subjects all this to control for service to a universalized ideal. Anger does not disappear, then; rather, its force and aims are channeled towards ends that have nothing to do with the needs or passions of any individual. Reason and emotion are not opposites; emotion is not necessarily animal, and not necessarily without virtue. But Anger is rational and therefore praiseworthy only if carried out in the service of impersonal abstractions, for the sake of a kind of deindividualized love for the perfect order of things. One end goal of anger management, then, combines the internal domestication of the self with the depersonalization and even dehumanization of the properly angry agent, who is virtuous only so long as they feed their own will to the maw of their love of justice, to make themselves its puppet, a conduit, a concrete expression of the universal.

I wrote this talk—at times literally—in the margins of Derrida’s penultimate seminar, on the death penalty, which returned often to the entangled relations of the claim to reason and the justifications for capital punishment, which so often demands life for life, a calculation that exchanges the incalculable (a human being) for the incalculable (life itself), leaving, once the arithmetic is finished, only nothing, or worse, except the conviction that justice has, in some way, been done. In speaking of the “alliance between reason, universal rationality, and the machine, the machinality of its operation,” Derrida asked his seminar to be aware of how:

the effect of cadaverous coldness or rigor as in rigor mortis is also or first of all the manifestation of this power or of this claim to the power of reason: it is the allegation of an imperturbable rationality rising above the heart, above immediate passion, and above the individual relations between men of flesh and blood.[31]

I have in mind, as well, ongoing police raids on our students, my students, and the justifications of the powers-that-be: the claim that they themselves are solely responsible for what has been done, that they have made the decisions in the interest of what they know to be best, a hierarchical justification that is often combined with the simultaneous claim that they had no other choice but to do what they claim to have decided to do. They are responsible, as the decider; they are not responsible, because circumstances and the abstract logic of social order forced their hand. These are among the modern avatars of the rationally angry subject, the zealot, whose human touch seems lost in the loftiness of their abandonment to the supposed universal.

I have more to say of course, but time constraints require me to stop here. I’m happy to say more about this division between irrational and rational anger, to elaborate on the paper you’ve just heard, or to say more, if you’re curious, about the story of Erkenbald of Bury, whose terrible justice inspired my whole line of reasoning. For the time being, thanks for listening, thanks for having me here, and I’m looking forward to our discussion.

  1. Pierre-Maurice Bogaert, “The Latin Bible, c. 600 to c. 900,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 2: From 600 to 1450, ed. E. Ann Matter and Richard Marsden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 70. ↑
  2. The Greek original is thymoús thiríon (θυμοùς θηρíων). ↑
  3. See especially Kate McGrath, Royal Rage and the Construction of Anglo-Norman Authority, c. 1000-1250 (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019). ↑
  4. Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). ↑
  5. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, “Looking Back at Anger: Wrath in Anglo-Saxon England,” The Review of English Studies 66, no. 275 (2015): 426–27. ↑
  6. Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae, q. 46, art. 4, “Whether anger requires an act of reason?” Guides to Aquinas on anger include Artur Andrzejuk, “The Problem of Affectiones in the Texts of Thomas Aquinas,” Rocznik Tomistyczny 1, no. 11 (2022): 181–92; Matthew R. Boulter, “Aquinas on Anger,” in Righteous Indignation: Christian Philosophical and Theological Perspectives on Anger, ed. Gregory L. Bock University of Texas at Ty and Court D. Lewis (Lanham: Fortress Academic, 2021), 85–96; Stephen Loughlin, “Similarities and Differences Between Human and Animal Emotion in Aquinas’s Thought,” The Thomist 65, no. 1 (2001): 45–65; Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae 22–48 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 268–86. For a less devotional treatment of Aquinas than usual, Henrik Lagerlund, “The Systematization of the Passions in the Thirteenth Century,” in Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages, ed. Margaret Cameron, vol. 2, The History of the Philosophy of Mind (New York: Routledge, 2018), 157–77. ↑
  7. Qtd. in Albrecht Classen, “Anger and Anger Management in the Middle Ages: Mental-Historical Perspectives,” Mediaevistik 19 (2006): 26 and 30. ↑
  8. Peter of Limoges, The Moral Treatise on the Eye, trans. Richard Newhauser (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012), 82. ↑
  9. ST 1a2ae q 48 art3. ↑
  10. The only “angry cow” of the longer Middle Ages I know is from Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene, where the aggrieved Adicia, widow of a wicked Sultan, reacts to the death of her husband “like an enraged cow, / That is berobbed of her youngling dere” (V.8.46). ↑
  11. Galen, On the Passions and Errors of the Soul, trans. Paul W. Harkins (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1963), 43. ↑
  12. Translation quoted from Bremmer, “Looking Back at Anger,” 441., “wedde on gewitte | swa wilde deor.” The Latin original lacks the animal comparison: Michael Lapidge, “Cynewulf and the Passio S. Iulianae,” in Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr., ed. Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O′Brien O′Keeffe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 164, “Et cum haec uidisset praefectus, iratus scidit uestimenta sua et cum gemitu uituperauit deos quare non inuicem portuerunt illam ledere, quibus et ipsis iniuriam fecesset.” ↑
  13. “Sone se he leoseth mildheortnesse, he leoseth monnes cunde, ant wreaththe, the forschuppilt, forschuppeth him into beast, as ich ear seide. Ant hwet yef eni ancre, Jesu Cristes spuse, is forschuppet into wulvene?” CITATION GOES HERE ↑
  14. John Gower, The Complete Works of John Gower: The French Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899); William Burton Wilson, “A Translation of John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme” (PhD Thesis, Miami, Florida, University of Miami, 1970. ↑
  15. Quoted from Classen, “Anger,” 25. ↑
  16. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue, I: 213. ↑
  17. Robert Hasenfratz, ed., Ancrene Wisse (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), III.32, “Ira furor brevis est. Wreaththe is a wodschipe.” ↑
  18. From Arthur Brandeis, ed., Jacob’s Well: An Englisht Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, EETS o.s. 115 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1900), 92, “faryst as a wood man, & recchyst neuere what vessell þou brekyst,” which gets this passage from La Somme le Roi. See also Graydon and Morris, Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, I.30, “Vor þe man is oþerhyl zuo out of his wytte: þet ha beat and smit and wyf and children and mayné. and brekþ potes and coppes ase ha were out of his wytte. and zuo he is,” and similar passages in Emmanuelle Roux, ed., Two Middle English Translations of Friar Laurent’s “Somme le roi,” Textes vernaculaires du moyen âge 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 13 and 77. ↑
  19. John Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. Edward Peacock, EETS o. s. 31 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1868), ll. 1139-40. ↑
  20. Elizabeth Papp Kamali, “The Devil’s Daughter of Hell Fire: Anger’s Role in Medieval English Felony Cases,” Law and History Review 35, no. 1 (2017): 155–200. ↑
  21. Brandeis, Jacob’s Well, 98–99, is typical of these: “Ȝif þi wretthe be wyth-oute delyberacyoun and wyth-oute consentyng of resoun, it is venyal synne; Ȝif it be wyth desyre of wreche, it is dedly synne.” ↑
  22. City of God, IX.5, 84. ↑
  23. CITE complete needed: Book V.xlv.78-83 — note to self: get Cistercian Press Moralia translation Vol 1., see if Brepols has good ed], ↑
  24. Seneca, “On Anger,” 20. ↑
  25. Galen, Passions and Errors, 46. ↑
  26. PL 75: 727A-B: “subdita rationi,” “mentis dominium,” “restringat,” “victor suus.” ↑
  27. Galen, Passions and Errors, 39. ↑
  28. Seneca, “On Anger,” 73. ↑
  29. Quoted from Classen, “Anger,” 28. For more on slavery and corporeal “punishment” in classical writing about anger, Harris, Restraining Rage, 317–36. Slavers were chiefly concerned with their own dignity and with preventing revolt; the well-being of enslaved people was only incidental to their concerns. ↑
  30. Brandeis, Jacob’s Well, 90. ↑
  31. Derrida, Death Penalty, vols. 1, 48. ↑
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