When A Civilization Is Ripe For Its Fall

In the first article of my last entry, Beginnings of Thoughts on American Politics and Religion, I made mention in the last paragraph that North American Christians should be thanking right-wing Christian groups for preserving the voice (and therefore the power) of Christian conscience in North America. Now, I may disagree with the Christian Right or the Moral Majority, but I do thank them for showing some gusto that many Christians have lost.
I was reminded of this as I was reading one of my favorite books today. Joseph Pieper's The Four Cardinal Virtues is an absolute treasure, and it is especially helpful for people who have grown up in a Christianity that is supposed to view sex as moderately good at best and to view anger as an absolute evil.
The quote I am getting to comes from a chapter called "The Power of Wrath" in the section on Temperance. Pieper says that wrath is in fact a Christian virtue if it is exorcised properly. Wrath as a virtue, says Pieper, is the energy necessary to do good and fight injustice. Other forms of anger are evil. "Anger is 'good' if, in accordance with the order of reason, it is brought into service for the true goals of man [i.e. justice, goodness,etc.]" (p. 194). Quoting St. Thomas he writes, "Reason opposes evil the more effectively when anger ministers at her side" (p. 194).
And now comes the quotation that I have been providing such a long preamble for, which itself is something of a preamble for its last paragraph that I want to highlight:

It is particularly in reference to overcoming intemperateness of sensual desore that the power of wrath acquires a special importance.
Aquinas, it is true, also says that an acute temptation to unchastity is most easily conquerable by flight. But he likewise knows that the addiction to degenerate pleasure-seeking can by no means be cured through a merely negative approach, through convulsively "shutting one's mind" to it. Thomas believes that the deterioration of one power of the soul should be healed and supplemented by the still undamaged core of some other power. Thus it should be possible to subdue and, as it were, to quench the limp intemperance of an unchaste lustfulness by attacking a difficult task with the resilient joy generated in the full power of wrath.
Only the combination of the intemperateness of lustfulness with the lazy inertia incapable of generating anger is the sign of complete and virtually hopeless degeneration. It appears whenever a caste, a people, or a whole civilization is ripe for its decline and fall. (p. 196)

Now, I'm not predicting the fall of North America or anything, but it might be helpful to remember that Christians sometimes need to get angry (virtuously), and to speak out to people who are doing injustice and allowing injustice. Although this might take great courage for a people who seem bent to a non-Christian niceness, and although our pluralistic society tends to beat the voice out of us (how ironic, as its voiced intention is to do otherwise), we must commit ourselves to God's ways, and to helping our earthly society by encouraging goodness, justice, temperance, courage, etc. And as salt, we will help to preserve.