To feel wrathful is not just to be angry, but to be vengeful, determined to make others suffer in retribution for one’s own suffering. It’s possible to seethe in anger, but to do nothing. Wrath demands action.
There’s an undertone of bending in the concept of wrath, whose cousins include the words wrestle, wring, wrench, wrangle and writhe. The person who feels wrath may be bent by its force as much as the target of wrath, however.
Gods are often depicted as wrathful, typically because they feel insulted by someone’s words, or because human worship of them hasn’t been sufficiently sacrificial. The Bible warns that “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness,” and that “the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity”.
Really, though, what grounds do any gods have to be genuinely wrathful? In the old stories, nothing but their vanity is injured by any human actions. They’re above it all, and could be forgiving and understanding of human mistakes, if they wanted to be.
The stories of old gods reveal wrath to be, whether in humans or in their divine projections, a symptom of a personality that is puffed up to the point of fragility. Wrath may involve a display of power, but it also reveals a lack of self-control and a failure to perceive the bigger picture.
Yes, people do cruel things that make us want to hurt them in return, but the very impulse to harm others in our wrath should be a reminder that we aren’t so different from those we seek to punish.
