HATRED

As a passion or emotion, hatred is the exact opposite of love. It is the reaction of repugnance of an appetite toward an object conceived as an evil. As a sin it is the opposite of Christian love or charity, or, in other words, it is a voluntary hostility to God and the children of God. Since love of others supposes a true love of self (Mt 22.39), hatred of God and of fellow man presupposes a false love of self, which is truly a form of self-hatred. Charity is the highest Christian virtue and the source of every other virtue, and consequently hatred of God is the gravest of sins, for it is directly and immediately corruptive of charity. It is accounted by theologians as a special sin against the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of love.

The hatred contrary to charity is an act or habit of will essentially opposed to the benevolence of charity. It is therefore voluntary and deliberate, and should not be identified with feelings of hostility or antipathy or repugnance that arise spontaneously on the sense level and not infrequently are stubbornly resistant to voluntary control. Feelings of this kind may be quite involuntary, and they are not essentially associated with any malevolence of will. They may exist in persons whose deliberate attitudes and behavior are unexceptionable when measured by the rule of charity.

The formal object of charity is God, first in His own person, and then in His relationship to men. The formal object of hatred, as opposed to charity, is also God, but God as seen under the aspect of evil. God is all good, indeed goodness itself, and seen as He truly is He cannot be hated. He can nevertheless appear to man as an evil, as when He is considered to be the cause of things man sees as odious to himself, or as forbidding sin, or inflicting punishment.

Hatred of neighbor always involves hatred of God, for just as charity toward one's fellows is identifiable with charity toward God because it loves the realization of the divine good in neighbor, so also hatred of neighbor rejects the divine good and its realization. Hence, "he who says he loves God and hates his neighbor is a liar" (1 Jn 4.20). One must not hate even his personal enemies or the enemies of the church, since all men in this life are potentially at least members of Christ's Mystical Body (1 Tm 2.4), and hence to hate any other person is to hate Christ (cf. Mt 25.41–46).

Indirectly and by inference there is an element of hatred of God in every mortal sin, for one who sins mortally deforms the image of God. However, this is hatred only in a relative and attenuated sense, for the sinner does not commonly detest the divine good except in the sense that he values it less than he does some created good.

Those with charity hate the evil that deforms, whether it be sin or error. Thus, just as God hates deceit and pride (Prv 6.16–19) and other sins, so do the saints (Ps 96.10). One must, however, love the sinner while he hates the sin, as did Our Lord (Mt 9.11, 13). One must not confuse error with the person who errs, whether in morality, religion, philosophy, or in any other respect.

Bibliography: b. hÄring, The Law of Christ, tr. e. g. kaiser, 3 v. (Westminster, Md. 1961–) v.2. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible, tr. and adap. by l. hartman (New York 1963). d. von hildebrand and a. jourdain, True Morality and Its Counterfeits (New York 1955). a. m. henry, ed., Man and His Happiness, tr. c. miltner (Chicago 1957).

[j. m. giannini]