Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the

province of St Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work as an

assistant director for the Tomistic Institute and this is Pines with Aquinas.

In this episode I would like to talk about anger.

Many of us are familiar with anger, whether personally, existentially, or academically,

theoretically. But I think many folks have difficulty healing and growing beyond the bounds set by anger.

So many of us feel imprisoned by anger, trapped by anger, otherwise compassed about by anger.

So how is it that we're meant to get beyond this point?

How is it that we are meant to use anger as it is intended for our moral flourishing and not to suffer its negative effects.

Well, let's think about it together. Here we go.

In the Christian tradition, typically anger like all the emotions is described as a morally neutral feature of life.

Morally neutral feature of life. That's hard to say.

Now insofar as it is as it's part of our human nature, it's good, but it's neither pitched towards virtue or towards vice, it kind of just is. All right? So anger becomes problematic when it's vicious, but it can actually be

helpful when it's virtuous. So what is it that anger kind of addresses in human existence or in human life?

Basically, anger registers some kind of injury and specifically like

slight, that is to say when someone thinks light of you or where someone thinks ill of you or

when someone fails to think of you and it reacts by seeking vindication.

Now vindication isn't vengeance but vindication is the rectification of justice which has been

upset by the injury.

So anger can be informed by virtues which help to bring about a just order and healthy

relationships but to do so is difficult because anger is super vehement and

as a way of kind of clouding our thoughts and over running our humanity such that we find ourselves

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