Aquinas on Anger, II

More needs to be said about the role of 'contraries.' This is a fundamental concept for Aristotelian philosophy. The basic explanation is in Physics I. For Aristotle, contraries explain the possibility of any kind of change or motion at all. This comes out of an inquiry into what is necessary for change or motion to be possible. By Aristotle's time this inquiry had been going on for a while, and he gives an account of what his predecessors had thought about the subject.

(Some of them thought that motion and change just weren't possible. Aristotle has an account of why Zeno et al were wrong, in his opinion.)

The basic idea is that change from one thing into another thing requires that there be two states that are opposed -- contrary -- to each other. A favored example is white and black. A thing can start out as white and eventually become black. But white can't become black: they're contraries. Thus, the universe must contain at least things that are contraries to each other, and also things that are substrates which can move between the contraries. This gives us the basic view of the universe: there are substances (substrates), and accidents (things which they happen to have, but could gain or lose or move between).

The problem that Aquinas is wrestling with in the first article is that anger doesn't seem to have a contrary

I answer that, The passion of anger is peculiar in this, that it cannot have a contrary, either according to approach and withdrawal, or according to the contrariety of good and evil. For anger is caused by a difficult evil already present: and when such an evil is present, the appetite must needs either succumb, so that it does not go beyond the limits of "sadness," which is a concupiscible passion; or else it has a movement of attack on the hurtful evil, which movement is that of "anger." But it cannot have a movement of withdrawal: because the evil is supposed to be already present or past. Thus no passion is contrary to anger according to contrariety of approach and withdrawal.

In like manner neither can there be according to contrariety of good and evil. Because the opposite of present evil is good obtained, which can be no longer have the aspect of arduousness or difficulty. Nor, when once good is obtained, does there remain any other movement, except the appetite's repose in the good obtained; which repose belongs to joy, which is a passion of the concupiscible faculty.

Accordingly no movement of the soul can be contrary to the movement of anger, and nothing else than cessation from its movement is contrary thereto; thus the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 3) that "calm is contrary to anger," by opposition not of contrariety but of negation or privation.

NB that "The Philosopher" in this work is always Aristotle, and "The Commentator" is Averroes (i.e. the Islamic Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rushd). Avicenna, who is of fundamental importance to Aquinas, gets mentioned by name and only once.

This is a weird position, which you can see in part because of the rejection of it in the last paragraph. It would make perfect sense to talk about a movement from calm to anger, and then back to calm as a difficulty is worked out. The presence of the difficulty -- 'the hurtful evil' -- is supposed to produce anger naturally, and it is only by eliminating (or accepting) the evil that you eliminate the anger. 

This is further complicated by the fact that Aquinas has to work it out not in ancient Greek terms but in terms of St. Augustine's account of evil. According to Augustine, evil is a privation rather than something that really exists in its own right. (This is why God can be the all powerful force of Creation, and all Good, but apparent evils still haunt us here.) Thus, the presence of a 'real and hurtful evil' is a sort of impossibility, though one can speak that way about the absence of a longed-for good. 

That's the way to make sense of anger, anyway, according to this tradition. This is also why experiencing anger is appropriate when motivated by real injustice: you're talking about a natural reaction to the failure to live up to God's intent, which a just soul ought to find ugly and outrageous.