Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.
Read Chapter 11
Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
Therefore, if anger has held out with most shameful boldness in the heart of any one of you until these holy days, now at least let it depart. [Thus] your prayer may proceed in peace and … may not stumble, tremble, or become mute under the pricking of conscience when it has come to that passage where it must say, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive also our debtors.”
In Scripture the spirit is continuously called “heart.” The passage therefore means: Even if we sometimes are caught up in anger, this “anger” should not be allowed into the “heart,” so that the anger does not become a permanent condition. And when suddenly a desire comes up in the part of the soul which deals with desire, this desire should not be transferred to the spirit and to the part of the soul that deals with reason. Otherwise it becomes a permanent condition and not just an affect or a precondition for this affect, but simply evil.… If “anger is banished from your heart,” you will not do evil through the members of your body. Whoever is caught by anger often fights and may even decide to kill. Thus, if you “banish anger from your heart,” then evil, which comes about through deeds, will vanish as well.
Put sorrow far from your flesh and sadness from your thoughts, except only that for your sins you should be constant in sadness. Cease not from labor, not even though you are rich, for the slothful person gains manifold guilt by his idleness.
