Canter Bridge

Anger, we are resolutely assured, is not a bad emotion. If societal instruction comes to us in unanimity on any topic, this one surely occupies the top of the list.

It is also true: anger is not in itself a bad thing.

Yet those figures who in the biblical literature are defined by their anger are never worthy of emulation and always potentially or really destructive. In the apocalyptic world of the book of Revelation, the ‘dragon’ appears in the twelfth chapter as a raging character. Indeed, the heavens are summoned to rejoice when he is cast down to earth—as much because they are now freed of his rage as because the ‘Lamb’ is about to have his victory over the dragon—even though the earth is now warned to mourn because the same wrathful creature has fallen onto its plane:

Rejoice then, you heavens
and those who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
for the devil has come down to you
with great wrath,
because he knows that his time is short!

Apocalyptic literature deploys its treasury of images—many of them bizarre—to reassure the struggling righteous that things are not as they appear. The Lord still rules, order has not disappeared forever, the moral inversion by which the wicked persecute the good is not a final arrangement, help is on its way. Within this framework but certainly not exclusive to it, rage comes in as the reaction of the wicked to the certainty that truth will prevail. The ‘accuser’, ‘Destroyer’, ‘Satan’—the all too consequential character described by these names is consumed by his rage precisely because his tactics rely upon impressively scripted Unreality and so his strategy is necessarily doomed.

Human rage, too, more often than not fuels itself by the certainty of failure. Reality and truth are what they are, though they suffer innumerable doubts as the flow of face and time for a moment—as the writers of apocalyptic might have it—obscure the face of them.

Yet evil’s ‘time is short’. Rage is a logical response for those whose program stands on the wrong side of Reality. But it is not good.