The Cure for Anger and Impatience

For those who are anxious to be cured of their ailments, a healing remedy will surely not be lacking. So the remedies should be sought by the same means by which the signs of each fault are discovered. For just as we have said that the faults of ordinary life among men are not lacking to those who live alone, so we do not deny that every effort toward virtue, and every means of healing, is at the disposal of all who are cut off from that ordinary life. [a]

Suppose, then, that someone discovers, by the signs we described above, that he is attacked by outbreaks of impatience or anger. He should always train himself in the opposite and contrary things. He should set before himself every sort of injury and wrong, as if someone else were doing them to him, and so accustom his mind to submit with perfect humility to everything that wickedness can bring on him. Often picturing to himself all kinds of harsh and intolerable things, he should keep considering, with all sorrow of heart, how gently he ought to meet them. And so, by looking at the sufferings of all the saints, or indeed at those of the Lord himself, he will admit that every kind of insult, and every punishment too, is less than he deserves, and he will prepare himself to endure every kind of grief.

Now and then he will be called back by some invitation to the gathering of the brothers, a thing that cannot help happening from time to time even to the strictest dwellers in the desert. If he then finds that his mind is silently disturbed even over trifles, he should act like a stern censor of his own secret feelings. He should charge himself with all those hard wrongs which he had been training himself by his daily meditations to endure perfectly, and he should blame and scold himself like this: “My good man, are you the one who, while training yourself on the practice ground of solitude, boldly expected to get the better of every bad quality? Just now, while you were picturing to yourself not only all sorts of bitter insults but even intolerable punishments, you imagined that you were quite strong and able to stand against every storm. How is it that this unconquered patience of yours is upset by the first trial, by even a light word? How is it that even a gentle breeze has shaken that house of yours which you imagined was built so firmly on solid rock? “Where is what you proclaimed when, in a time of peace and in your foolish confidence, you were longing for war: ‘I am ready, and I am not troubled’? And where is what you often used to say with the prophet: ‘Test me, O Lord, and try me; search my inmost parts and my heart’; and, ‘Test me, O Lord, and know my heart; question me and know my paths; and see if there is any way of wickedness in me’? How has a tiny phantom of an enemy frightened off your grand preparations for war?”

With such reproaches and remorse a man should condemn himself. He should not let the sudden temptation that upset him go unpunished, but should chastise his flesh with a harsher penalty of fasting and vigils. By continual pains of self-restraint he should punish his sin of fickleness of mind, and so, while living in solitude, burn up in this fire of discipline what he ought to have driven out completely in the life of the coenobium.

This at any rate we must hold to firmly and resolutely, if we are to keep a lasting and unbroken patience. The divine law forbids us not merely revenge for injuries but even remembering them, and so for us it is not allowed to be roused to anger by any loss or annoyance. For what greater injury can happen to the soul than to lose, through some sudden blindness of rage, the brightness of the true and eternal light, and to miss the sight of him who is “gentle and humble of heart”? What, I ask, could be more dangerous or more out of place than for a man to lose his power of judging what is good, and his standard and rule of true discernment, and, while in his sober senses, to do what even a drunk man or a fool would not be pardoned for doing? So whoever carefully considers these and other injuries of the same kind will readily endure and disregard not only every kind of loss but also whatever wrongs and punishments the cruelest of men can inflict. For he will hold that nothing is more damaging than anger, and nothing more valuable than peace of mind and unbroken purity of heart. For their sake we should think nothing of any advantage, not only in the things of the flesh but even in things that seem to be spiritual, if it cannot be gained or done without some disturbance of this calm.