The moral theology of niceness – and anger
Can you be too friendly, or not angry enough? According to St Thomas Aquinas, yes, wrote Edward Feser on his blog. Anger, Feser said, is “nature’s way of prodding us to act to set things right when they are in some way disordered. “The absence of anger in cases where it is called for is, for that reason, a moral defect, and a habit of responding to evils with insufficient anger is a vice.” To quote St Thomas, while too much anger is a vice, “lack of the passion of anger is also a vice”. As for being friendly and affable, St Thomas “notes that just as one can be deficient in this trait and thus difficult for others to get along with, it is also possible to go too far in the other direction.” Always being amiable and eager to please becomes a vice when it stops someone from pursuing some good or avoiding evil. Since it’s sometimes necessary to be less than affable, St Thomas wrote, “if a man were to wish always to speak pleasantly to others, he would exceed the mode of pleasing, and would therefore sin by excess”. Today, Feser writes, Catholics can easily forget these truths. “The stern gravitas of the fathers, Doctors, and saints has with many churchmen been replaced by a back-slapping, glad-handing affability.” Even when there were threats to the faith, they tried to be as friendly as possible – but this “appeasement” had only intensified opposition to the Church. If bishops face more serious persecution in the near future, it will be “precisely because they did not speak and act boldly and consistently enough when bad press was all they had to fear.”
