Perfect Hatred and Unfitting Love (1)
Yes, you read that right; I did not unwittingly flip the adjectives in my title. And No, this article won’t be ending in an irony. I am in fact intending to enjoin you to embrace hatred, of the perfect kind; and shun love, of the unfitting kind. Fret not, for ‘perfect hatred’ is a phrase I have gleaned from the scriptures itself.
22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.1
These are no words of a sinful man. These are the words of David who was contemplating the perfection of God’s knowledge and the marvelousness of his works; ‘for I am fearfully and wonderfully made2’. Why then would David look upon fellow fearfully and wonderfully made creatures and count them his enemies; indeed, hating them with perfect hatred? Does not Jesus enjoin us to ‘Love your enemies3’?
Contradiction?
‘Contradiction!’ The atheist—whose nostrils are hypersensitive to any whiff of incongruity in the biblical corpus—screams. But not so fast. Hate is good when used rightly, and love is bad when used wrongly.
Though we broadly classify attributes like jealousy and anger as sinful passions, it should stimulate your curiosity that these passions are also predicated of God. In Deuteronomy 4:24, Moses introduces God as a jealous God. In Romans 2:8, God is said to have wrath and anger for those who reject the truth and follow evil. At first glance these predicates contradict God’s impassibility and impeccability, but as explained by the medieval doctors of the church, these predications are correct, being metaphoric.
According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, divine passions are said of God according to their effect, not according to their affect. Thus, God is jealous not because he is an impassioned, insecure human husband, but because he cuts a covenant of exclusive, conjugal love with Israel. Similarly, God is angry not because he is boiling over, but because he justly punishes evil doers.
Rightly Proportioned; Rightly Targeted
These “do nothing” Catholics pretend to be avoiding sinful anger, but they forget that there is a vice of deficiency as well as a vice of excess where anger is concerned.
-Edward Feser
The above quote is from Catholic Philosopher, Professor Ed Feser, chiding Catholics for a failure to be outraged by public blasphemies and obscenity. Perhaps they should have taken a cue from Jesus.
When Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers and drove them out of the temple with whips, he was said to have been consumed with zeal for the Lord. This anger, far from being seen as sinful, was branded a righteous zeal.
5 And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and his hand was restored whole as the other.4
When he was described by Mark to be angry, the object of his wrath was rightly identified as the hardness of the heart of the Pharisees. These loath-worthy Pharisees were more interested in scrupulous ceremonialism than the restoration of a man to health.
9 You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.5
The writer of the Book of Hebrews here shows us that Jesus’ animating principle was his love of righteousness and hatred of wickedness.
6 Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.6
Jesus himself is here commending the Church at Ephesus for following in his hatred of the works of the Nicolaitans. So the one who teaches to ‘Love your enemies’, has things that he hates? Rightly so.
It is not persons that he hates—for God so loved the world—but things that are of wickedness. Jesus’ love-hate functioned like a surgical scalpel cutting through the man, loving the man but hating his vices. It is through this scalpel he could command demons and sicknesses out of men. Not needing to burn down the temple because of pollution, he simply drove out its money-changers. Jesus loved and hated in such a way that was renovative.
St. Augustine puts it succinctly:
Wherefore the man who lives according to God, and not according to man, ought to be a lover of good, and therefore a hater of evil. And since no one is evil by nature, but whoever is evil is evil by vice, he who lives according to God ought to cherish towards evil men a perfect hatred, so that he shall neither hate the man because of his vice, nor love the vice because of the man, but hate the vice and love the man. For the vice being cursed, all that ought to be loved, and nothing that ought to be hated, will remain.7
Be Perfect, as Your Heavenly Father
When Jesus enjoined his audience at the sermon on the Mount to new heights of love, it was with a surgical precision that cuts out cancerous growths and heals the man. The kind of love Jesus described was not a catch-all, inclusive embrace of both vice and virtue. It was of that kind of calipered exactness Jesus’ listeners heard from which Jude instructs to:
23 save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.8
Jesus himself had come to remind the Church of Ephesus of this. You have got to hate the work of the Nicolaitans just like I do. Hence, we must learn how and what to hate—hating proportionately and to the right target. The proper object of hate is evil, and boy must we burn with indignation at its slightest sight. As my favorite Eastern Orthodox philosopher Twitter(X) mutual puts it:
As with anger, if you do not hate evil, you become lukewarm to it, apathetic or indifferent, and to be indifferent to evil is to benefit evil, because it is the nature of evil to spread as far as it can unless actively countered and opposed.
-Eve Kenainan
While I will spend the better part of the second part of this article to dissuade you from love, of the unfitting kind; for now I would like you to go about your business with perfect hatred.
Psalm 139:22
Psalm 139:14
Matthew 5:44
Mark 3:5
Hebrews 1:9
Revelation 2:6
Augustine, City of God, Book XIV, Chapter 6
Jude 22