When we hear the word “Rage” we think something loud and obvious; we think red-hot anger and raised voices; we think clenched fists and things being slammed. And that’s right —in part. Sometimes Rage looks like these things.
Sometimes, however, Rage takes other forms —forms to which we are blind because we inhabit them every day. Sometimes Rage looks like cold calculation, naked power, slow violences, and systemic mechanisms of manipulation.
Classically understood ‘Rage’ names the sins that spring from a despair over our lack of control. We want everything ordered according to our will. When things are not so ordered we, often, rage. Rage rues the God who gives and takes away (Job 1:21). We want to exercise some measure of dominion over the hand of God.
Rage oscillates between a laying a tight miser’s grasp on the world and the careless emptying of the world from the hollow of the hand. Rage refuses the open upward-raised palm that can both receive and release. Rage, thus, takes many forms:
Most addictions and binges fit under the banner of Rage. In our attempt to control x we surrender our control over to the thing to which we are addicted; the Latin ‘addictus’ means just this, to be dictated.
Quiet manipulation often is a kind of Rage: “he will not marry that Girl” and “she will go the best school” and “are you sure you want to do that?” are all phrases said under the disastrum of Rage.
All the YOLO moments are also species of Rage spurted-out in moments of despair; even most instances of the sudden Fall, of the unexpected one-night-stand type of moment, are very rarely “Lust” or “Gluttony” in the truest sense. They are more frequently wrathful “damnitalltohell” moments where we demand that “this at least I will choose to do” or “if I can’t control x then why bother caring about y?”
One final note to make is the way in which Rage always invokes a dead body, a corpse. Rage always happens over a dead body. The ancients saw the figure of Achilles as the epitome of Rage when he dragged the dead body of Hector around the walls of Troy. Over that dead body was Rage exercised. What’s interesting about contemporary forms of Rage is how it locates one’s own body as the corpse. We say, “over my dead body will such-and-such take place.” Modern neurosis names the self as the site of death in the exercise of control. We all believe ourselves to be martyrs —witnesses to our self-erasure. Renee Girard was correct, like the Gadarene madman it is not heretics’ bodies but our own we wound when the Penthean fit is upon us (Matt. 8:28-34; Mk. 5:1-20; Lk. 8:26-37; cf. Girard, “The Demons of Gerasa,” 1990; Euripedes, The Bacchantes).
Now I want to consider, for a moment, David’s census as such a moment of despairing Rage. His heart grows hard (like pharaoh), and he wants to make sure that he maintains control over the kingdom. He exerts this control by sending Joab, commander of his army, to count the number of the fighting men (2 Sam. 24:1-9; 1 Chron. 21:1-6). This breaks the commandment of God (Deut. 17:16), and incurs God’s judgement (2 Sam. 24:10-17; 1 Chron 21:7). Israel has become a “House of Bondage” like the Egypt they had left long before —a kingdom ruled by numerical governance and statistical predictability: “Guards! operate on this algorithm: too many Hebrews, less an integer of ethnically Egyptian birth-rates, qualified by numbers of males physically capable of being conscripted for military service.”
This is quite different than the census the Lord had Moses make (Num. 1). Why? Because the goal of the Mosaic numberings, like other numberings in the Bible (e.g. Gen 46:8-27; Ezra 8:1-20), was not governance-by-number, but a show of God’s faithfulness. These others display a confidence in the faithfulness of God, that He is the One who has made His People fruitful and that he will be the Good Shepherd who knows the number of sheep in his fold, the number of hairs on your head, and the falling of each sparrow from the sky (Luke 12:6-7).
The two forms of counting are opposed in almost everyway.
One, born of Rage, reduces people to number precisely to prevent one relying on God’s provision —which is the essence of both fascism and camp. (Sally Fields’ “you like me”, Andy Warhol’s lithographs, Mussolini’s fasces, Stalin’s statistical evaluation of human suffering, and Facebook ‘likes’ all operate on the same wrathful algorithmic logic).
The other, born of trust and wisdom, sees multiplication as evidence of God’s provision. “Look what God has done!” it says. (Bonhoeffer’s resistance, the films of Terrence Malick, the reduction of Gideon’s fighting force to three hundred, and the author of 1 Chronicles, all show their numbers from a compelling fidelity to the God of Israel).
In an age run ever-increasingly by Rage in the form of algorithmic governance (in everything from social media to the SOFA measures used to determine what kind of care COVID patients received), we must be the kind of people whose use of numberings is anchored in God’s faithfulness, not in our anxiety. For some trust in chariots or the number of fighting men or the probabilistic predictions about the behavior certain population groups, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God (Ps. 20:7; cf. Ps. 33:17, 147:10; Prov. 21:31).