Anger, Anger of God

See also: Insult, offense.

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Jesus speaks harshly toward the Pharisees who continue their sins and persist in their errors (example of Divine anger) - James Tissot, Brooklyn Museum.

The word anger comes from the Greek kholê, bile. It was supposed to be caused by the heating of this bile.

In the work of Maria Valtorta, the word anger covers three different meanings:

• The anger of God, or divine anger. It marks the limit reached by Mercy which gives way to Justice. Mercy is a barrier to Divine Justice.
• The anger of man, one of the seven capital sins, which makes him Confession-worthy.
• The anger of Satan, another way to designate his rage.

The anger of God and Mercy

God is defined as fundamentally tender, merciful, slow to anger, and full of love.

Ex 34:6-7: He passed before Moses and proclaimed: "The Lord, the Lord, God tender and merciful, slow to anger, full of love and truth, who keeps his faithfulness to a thousandth generation, bears fault, transgression and sin, but lets nothing pass, for he punishes the fault of the fathers on the sons and grandsons, up to the third and fourth generation."

Psalm 102 (Hebrew 103), 8-11: The Lord is tenderness and pity, slow to anger and full of love; he is not forever in court, does not maintain his reproaches endlessly; he does not act towards us according to our faults, nor repay us according to our offenses. As the heaven dominates the earth, strong is his love for those who fear him.

Joel 2:12-13: And now — oracle of the Lord — return to me with all your Heart, in fasting, tears and Mourning! Tear your hearts and not your clothes, and return to the Lord your God, for he is tender and merciful, slow to anger and full of love, renouncing punishment.

Being slow to anger thus does not mean it is excluded. God is love, says Saint John in 1 John 4:16. Love, which is incarnated in Jesus-Christ, is for everyone. It is without limit but is excluded by the will of man who persists in his rejection.

Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but blasphemy Against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And if anyone says a word Against the Son of man, it will be forgiven him; but if anyone speaks Against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the world to come.

The barrier of Mercy which ends where Justice begins concerns every man, but also Humanity. All must face the final ends: eternity of delights or eternity of punishments, according to choice. Eternal hell is indeed the fruit of a decision and not a punishment. The final term that Zephaniah 1:14-15 describes as the "day of wrath" for impenitence and that a hymn celebrates:

Dies iræ, dies illa, Solvet sæclum in favílla, Teste David cum Sibýlla ! Quantus tremor est futúrus, quando judex est ventúrus, cuncta stricte discussúrus !

Day of anger, that day It will dissolve the world in ashes, David attests, and the Sibyl. What a tremor is to come, when the judge will arrive, to strictly examine all!

The writings of Maria Valtorta have a certain eschatological scope: they place our era within the course of centuries. It is in this spirit that they must be discovered. They are to be related, for the theme of this article, to this prophecy of Jesus entrusted to Saint Faustina (1905-1938):

Speak to the world of my Mercy. Let all humanity learn to know my unfathomable Mercy. It is a sign for the last times. After will come the day of Justice. While it is still time, let men have recourse to the source of my Mercy.

John Paul II, Polish like Sister Faustina, published an encyclical on Mercy, the second of his pontificate, and instituted Divine Mercy Sunday in the octave of Easter. It is also appropriate, for a good understanding of the dictations of Jesus to Maria Valtorta, to remember this prediction of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, also Polish. In his spiritual writings he wrote:

The Modern Times are dominated by Satan and will be even more so in the Future. The battle Against Hell cannot be waged by men, even the most intelligent. Only The Immaculate has received from God the Promise of Victory over the Demon.

The anger of Man

Anger is ranked among the seven capital sins, so named because they generate sins. Pope Gregory the Great attributes six "daughters" to anger: quarrel, outburst of spirit, outrage, clamor, indignation and blasphemy.

A capital sin is fought by the virtue it contradicts. For Saint Paul, it is love. But Saint John Chrysostom seems on the contrary to legitimize anger:

He who does not get angry when there is cause for it commits a sin. Indeed, unreasonable patience sows vices, fosters negligence, and invites evil not only by the wicked, but even the good themselves.

How to understand this apparent contradiction? Did Jesus sin when he got angry Against the merchants of the Temple?

No, of course not: we have just seen the foundations of the "anger of God". The boundary between holy (or sound) anger and the capital sin lies in what carries it: either the love of God and of the brother, as Saint Paul says, or immodest self-love. Pride and anger, which make one Confession-worthy, can sometimes give reprehensible outbursts the appearance of "holy anger" which are only Violence and disguised intolerance.

Saint Paul thus expresses the duality between the holy and the reprehensible:

For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh. Indeed, there is a conflict that prevents you from doing all that you would like. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law. You know well to what Actions the flesh leads: misconduct, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts, intrigues, divisions, sectarianism, envy, drunkenness, orgies and other things of the same sort. I warn you, as I have before: those who commit such Actions will not inherit the kingdom of God.

And just after, he opposes the Virtues which fight these tendencies. He also reiterates his exhortation not to give "a foothold to the devil", for that is how Satan leads us to sin:

If you are angry, do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger. Do not give place to the devil [...] Let no evil talk come out of your mouth; but if there is need, let it be good and constructive speech, beneficial to those who listen to you. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, who has marked you with his seal for the day of your deliverance. Bitterness, irritation, anger, outbursts or insults, all these must be eliminated from your life, along with every kind of wickedness. Be kind and tender to one another. Forgive one another, even as God forgave you in Christ.

In "The Gospel as it was revealed to me"

• Every man who gets angry Against his brother deserves to appear before the judge; the one who says to his brother: Fool! (...) But I say to you: "Do not get angry" because you are subject to a higher judgment which takes even immaterial Actions into account. The one who insulted his brother will be condemned by the Sanhedrin. But he who has called him a fool and thus harmed him will be condemned by God.
• When then has a storm ever done Good with its lightning and hail?
• Anger and Pride are two bad companions, Judas. They lead to delirium, and he who raves sees things that do not exist, says what he should not.
• Whoever wants to be my disciple must imitate me. I tolerate and forgive. I am gentle, humble and peaceful. The children of anger cannot stay with Me because they are children of the world and of their passions.

In other works of Maria Valtorta

Notebooks 1943

• Catechesis of June 9: You even guessed the origin of this great darkness in the pain which, for your Good, overwhelms you. Yes. Living in me and for me, you unleash the angers of the Enemy, who, unable to do anything else, tries to frighten you by making your Future even darker than it already is. But do not be afraid; I am with you.
• Catechesis of June 13: (The Holy Spirit) is, so to speak, the eternal and divine Apostle who tirelessly preaches to souls the Doctrine of Christ, who enlightens and explains it to you. But if he is badly homily-delivered, if the doors of hearts close at his approach, if he is received with anger, he does what I say to my Apostles: he leaves and his Peace returns to him while you are deprived of it.
• Catechesis of June 24: I could terrorize sinners with a terrible vision in which I would appear as the angry God who judges and punishes. And sometimes I have done so to conquer certain hearts that I really wanted for myself and that I could only win by this means. But these are rare cases. I prefer to attract with Love. And he who has a guilty liaison with the demon cannot feel Love.
• Catechesis of July 5: When the king comes, he will no longer recognize his abandoned garden; he will angrily tear out the weeds, crush the slimy animals, pick the flowers that remain and bring them into his palace, erasing the garden forever. Now, listen to the explanation. The king is Jesus Christ. The garden is his militant Church. The gardener is my Peter, and his helpers are the priests. The flowers and plants are the faithful consecrated, the baptized.
• Catechesis of July 7: "Bread-food" for those whose spirituality is embryonic to the point that it is already much if they know how to ask God for food to satisfy their stomach. There are those who do not ask for it, but take it with violence, complaining Against God and their Neighbor. God looks at them with anger because they trample the precept from which the others flow: "Love your God with all your Heart, love your Neighbor as yourself".
• Catechesis of July 13: But charity is never separated from suffering, since, being a holy thing, it unleashes the anger of the Enemy.
• Catechesis of August 4: For you have a will and if you will not, the Enemy cannot. So it is you who kill your spirit. And upon him who kills his spirit, truly, truly, I say to you, my voice, as a Father denied by his child, as a King dispossessed by his subject, will ring out with just and terrible anger to pronounce condemnation.
• Catechesis of August 5: This anger of the nations is the prodrome of my anger, for it must be so. Painful hour for you, my poor children, who endure it, but it is inevitable that it come, for all must be accomplished, the good and the evil, on earth before my hour comes. Then I will say: "Enough" and I will come in Judge and King to take the kingdom of the earth also and judge the merits and sins of men.
• Catechesis of August 6: My Blood, which my Enemies and my accusers have Called upon themselves with anger, has not lost its double quality of forgiveness and of condemnation.
• Catechesis of August 20: War, famine, epidemics, instruments of military homicide - which are worse than the wild beasts mentioned by the beloved - earthquakes, signs in heaven, eruptions from the bowels of the earth, miraculous calls to mystical paths of small souls moved by Love, persecutions Against my Disciples, greatness of soul and baseness of the body, nothing is lacking in the signs from which you can deduce that the moment of my anger and my justice is near [...] Peace, my chosen! A little longer and I will come.
• Catechesis of August 22: When the time of anger comes, humanity will have reached the perfection of vice.
• Catechesis of September 24: You suffer all the ruins that overwhelm you because you are not humble and you are not gentle. Neither in families, nor in your occupations and professions, nor in the wider framework of Nations. Pride and anger dominate you and are the cause of so many of your crimes.
• Catechesis of September 29: You come out of God angry, children Confessionglés by your bitterness, and you fall into the pool of Satan. You are in his pool up to your neck and you do not want to cling to Faith, spiritual mooring that divine Goodness has thrown to you, shipwrecked.
• Catechesis of November 6: You can well reject the signs that I send you from Heaven and laugh at heavenly warnings. You can continue to believe that everything is permitted to you. At the moment you least expect it, I will reveal to you a sign before which you will fall in terror, and the anger you throw Against the defenseless will fall back on you. This sign is me. When I appear, not on earth, the time is not yet come, but spiritually to the children of anger and to the father of extermination.
• Catechesis of November 17: But you, who are now grown, what will you do when Against you rises, proportionally to the evil you have done, the anger of God and of the oppressed?
• Catechesis of December 5: If you do not listen to me, in all justice I will not listen to you, and you will no longer have me for God, Father and Savior. You will then know the anger of the Lord, full and inexorable and, having refused the bread of the Word of God, you will bite the dust and, like beasts without food, you will tear each other apart, dying in horror to then know an horror still more terrible and eternal.
• Catechesis of December 15: My Good-beloved who live enclosed in the circle of my arms as in the enclosure of the ancient tabernacle, I give you my command in these times of anger, coming not for you, but for the sins of the world.
• Catechesis of December 29: And the word of the Lord is addressed to you in these terms, even if you do not want to hear it, because it makes your Heart tremble with fear and pity for the days reserved to you and your brothers and sisters who, on the day of terrible anger, will not have me in their Heart to comfort them and will see only the horror of Satan, hear only the blasphemies of Satan, and know only the despair of Satan.

Notebooks 1944

• Catechesis of January 15: Since the cursed burned with all Fires, except the fire of God, the fire of God's anger burns them for eternity. Yet in this Fire there is also an icy cold.
• Catechesis of January 16: It is I indeed who have conquered death after having created it, who made it a blessing, and not a curse, for the man who dies in me since, the Father's anger being annulled by the blood shed by my cross, death is no longer a separation but communion with your Father with whom I, the Firstborn, have reconciled you by uniting your hands to mine, pierced for you.
• March 25: The end will resemble the beginning. The circle closes by joining the two dark stumps to each other. The new flood, in other words the anger of God, will come in another form. But it will always be anger. Faithful to my word, I will send no more flood. But I will allow satanic forces to send the flood of Satanic cruelty.
• April 9: The only thing I can do and do, out of pity for the saints, rare as flowers in the desert, who pray still, truly pray, and do not show habit and hypocrisy, is to hold back the Father's anger.
• October 20: What love! What experience! What patience! What gentleness! What charity, in a word, is needed to heal Souls, make the sick healthy, deliver the poisoned, give shape to those who no longer have any! If one acts with harshness, intransigence, impatience and not with love, one causes greater harm by provoking hardening, anger, distance from the physician and from the educator, in short from the Good.

Notebooks 1945-1950

• December 30, 1945: The anger of God is terrible!!! I heard it only once more, in that old dictation Against Mussolini and Hitler, in January 1944, if I am not mistaken.
• July 14, 1946: Happy are those who know how to forgive in expiation of all their hardness of heart and their sins of anger.
• Catechesis of December 30, 1946: If the disobedience to God's order and its consequences could transmit, to innocents, evil in all its forms, from lust, greed, anger, envy, Pride and Avarice, if this transmission blossomed early into fratricide provoked by Pride, anger, envy and Avarice, what deeper decadence and what stronger domination of Satan would this second sin not have caused?
• Catechesis of February 18, 1947: Satanic anger always unleashes Against the prey that escapes its hunger and Against the conquests of God.
• Catechesis of October 31, 1947: It is I who tell you this, the eternal Lord who defends the humble, the little ones, and who, in anger, tramples the Proud and the hard of heart.
• Catechesis of December 31, 1947: This time of anger and Darkness makes us so Confessionglés, deaf, stupid regarding Charm, that we can no longer even give a pale image of what eternal Charm is: Jesus, the Virgin, the saints... and we make... monsters that reflect the rigid hardness of our souls dead to Love...
• Catechesis of August 16, 1949: When I hear this hypocritical and absurd phrase: "If it is the work of God, he will take care of it and make it triumph," which is a challenge to charity, wisdom, justice as well as a screen to hide their contrary will - so boldly, so Proudly and even so cowardly opposed to mine - , I would like in a burst of holy anger to come down to earth and repeat the gesture by which I cleared the Temple of its exchangers, thieves and merchants.

Book of Azariah

• Sexagesima Sunday: For the comfort of your painful observations of powerlessness to be untouched by Satan who, in his anger, violently assaults you precisely because he cannot drag you where he would like, listen to the Lord’s response to the apostle discouraged by the lashes of Evil: "My Grace is enough for you, for my power is well measured in weakness."
• 4th Sunday after Easter: One must respond with goodwill to God's will, that is, be "quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger." Slow to anger because the anger of man does not accomplish the justice of God.
• 4th Sunday after Pentecost: Remember all that if the prayers of the just and of the Full of Grace will accelerate many years the coming of Christ, which is a great Grace, this acceleration of the times of the end of the world, whose faults are innumerable, will be the greatest disgrace from which humanity will suffer, because it is the anger of the Lord that will strike.
• 19th Sunday after Pentecost: This is the application of Paul's teaching: "Are you angry? You can and must not sin." One cannot prevent the "self" from suffering for a received offense, but there is no sin in it. On the other hand, sin occurs when one returns offense for offense by lacking charity.
• Feast of Christ the King, 20th Sunday after Pentecost: Also be prudent with words. How many sins are committed by speech! Licentious words, gossip, angry words, vain words... Watch your tongue, to make it an organ of praise to God and edification of your brothers, and not an instrument to hurt or make noise.

Lessons on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans

• Lesson No. 3: No need for lightning for (God’s anger) to be manifested. No need for cataclysms, no floods. It is enough that God abandon you, and you already give yourselves death, anguish, despair. The anger of God, the true, immutable anger of God, more than by punishments, is manifested by abandoning you to yourselves. What you call God's anger, that is to say Wars, the atrocious means of destruction, cataclysms and pestilences, are not really anger without return, or absolute anger. They are reproaches, calls from an offended Father, but still eager to grant forgiveness and help to his guilty children.
• Lesson No. 6: It is Love that tells you: "Those who accept to be victims of holocaust are the legions of archAngels that repel demonic legions. They keep the world in place by appeasing God's anger. Those who accept to be hosts are imitators of Christ, and among the most authentic. Those who sacrifice generate sons to the Lord their God".
• Lesson No. 17: In the centuries after Christ, Mary is always Peace and mercy for Humanity. With the increase of sins, with the growth of the clouds of divine anger and satanic smoke, Mary is always the one who scatters the clouds, disarms the lightnings, and throws her mystical bridge to humanity fallen into the abyss, so that it can rise by a gentle path to its Good.
• Lesson No. 22: No one was without Imperfections. Even John, who was the seraph of the Disciples of the Master, was not perfect. He was prone to anger, like his brother, and earned the nickname "son of thunder" […] Before the most holy nakedness of the King of kings who stripped himself even of his divine immortality to know death and To Save man, John forever laid down the garment of anger.

In fundamental Christian texts

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church

• CCC 1765: The passions are numerous. The most fundamental passion is love caused by the attraction of Good. Love causes the desire for absent Good and the hope to obtain it. This movement ends in the pleasure and joy of possessed Good. The apprehension of evil causes hate, aversion and fear of coming evil. This movement ends in sadness of present evil or anger opposing it.
• CCC 1866: The vices can be categorized according to the virtues they thwart, or linked to the capital sins that Christian experience distinguished after Saint John Cassian and Saint Gregory the Great. They are called capital because they generate other sins, other vices. They are Pride, Greed, envy, anger, impurity, gluttony, sloth or acedia.
• CCC 2259: Scripture, in the account of the murder of Abel by his brother Cain (cf. Gn 4: 8-12), reveals, from the beginnings of human history, the Presence in man of anger and concupiscence, consequences of original sin. Man became the enemy of his fellow man.
• CCC 2262: In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord recalls the precept: "You shall not kill", he adds to it the prohibition of anger, hatred and vengeance.
• CCC 2302: In recalling the precept: "You shall not kill", our Lord demands the Peace of Heart and denounces the immorality of murderous anger and hatred: Anger is a desire for revenge. "Desiring revenge for the evil of the one to be punished is illicit"; but it is commendable to impose reparation "for the correction of vices and the maintenance of justice" (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 2-2, 158, 1, ad 3). If anger goes so far as to deliberate desire to kill the Neighbor or to seriously harm him, it seriously opposes charity; it is a mortal sin. The Lord says: "Whoever is angry Against his brother shall be liable to judgment."

Notes and references

Note: Quotations from the work of Maria Valtorta on this page currently use machine-translated text and will gradually be replaced by the official English translation. Until then, the official translation may be consulted through the reference link provided with each quotation.

Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992).