Anger, Despair, Spiritual Warfare

For someone who is easily prone to anger, it is supposedly the messed up circumstances of the outside world they encounter which is provoking their outbursts, this is a natural matter of cause and effect, but of course they are simply primed to see and then respond to these triggers. The flawed external world serves to both apparently justify the unhappy inner state, and also to find release from it with these outbursts. If the habitually angry person didn’t have the release of their outbursts, that person could hardly live with themselves - thus that brilliant expression and image of “letting off steam”, where otherwise the machine could explode with the unreleased build up of pressure!

Similarly the grave danger with something like despair, which again apparently falls within the fieled of cause and effect. The despair justifies itself as the natural outcome of external circumstances - one’s own or the world in general - and the very intensity of the inner despair also serves to prove itself or justify itself as truth. “Such-and-such is so bad, therefore this despair is the legitimate result.” It even can masquerade as virtuous, and prey on one’s sensitivity to bring one down.

And this despair is a much more serious threat because it is denied what could be called the cathartic release of the angry state, and this self-containment can lead on eventually to even suicide - which energetically is the soul and culmination of despair. This is the awful catharsis the inner logic of despair allows itself.

With all this is seen how to be alive is to be engaged in spiritual warfare, of forces which manifest in our thoughts and emotions, which if pushed far enough to their core, end in victory or defeat of ourselves.  St Isaiah the Solitary says in The Philokalia, “Be attentive to yourself, so that nothing destructive can separate you from the love of God. Guard your heart. The first virtue is detachment. At the time of prayer, we should expel from our heart the provocation of each evil thought.” 

Without that detachment and silence, the provocation runs riot as with the two energies talked of above. This dynamic of provocation, far from crude or primitive, is such a key to our inner dynamics.