Anger in Dominican and Franciscan pastoral and homiletic literature before 1350
By: by Marc B. Cels.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 339
ISBN-13: 9780494158814
Description: This dissertation explains the approach of Franciscan and Dominican Latin pastoral manuals and homiletic resources when dealing with the sin of anger and places it within the context of medieval moral teaching about the emotion. The introduction briefly surveys the historiography of the emotions and current approaches to the study of emotion and justifies a method for investigating prescriptive teachings about anger using mendicant pastoral sources. Chapter one explains the generally negative Classical, biblical, patristic and ascetic traditions about anger from which the mendicant compilers drew. Chapter two treats the scholastic synthesis of Christian and Aristotelian psychologies of emotion and anger by Thomas Aquinas which presents a more positive view of the passion than did the ascetic tradition. Chapter three considers the treatment of anger within confessors' manuals that digested canon law and theology. Compilers drew upon scholastic theology, particularly that of Thomas, in order to determine mortal forms of spiritual sins such as anger. Chapters four, five, and six examine discourses on anger within hortatory and homiletic manuals, namely treatises on the vices and virtues, compendia of theology, collections of distinctiones and  exempla, and model sermons. These practical manuals hearken back to ascetic tradition by encouraging the avoidance of anger as a noxious vice rather than promoting a moderated passion. Avoiding scholastic abstractions, compilers use a variety of rhetorical strategies to exort the faithful and appeal especially to their self-interest on a variety of levels thereby turning the self-asserting impulse of anger against itself.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2703.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

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