A Defence of Hate

And a lesson in how to hate well

Today we approach a difficult subject - but let us do so with boldness.

One of the aspects that I’ve found most interesting about Andrew Isker’s new book ‘The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation’ is his philosophically rigorous rehabilitation of the concept of hatred.

It is not Christlike to hate, you have been told. But this is simply not true. To love a thing is to hate its opposite. I love the innocence and purity of children; therefore I utterly hate pedophilia. I love my wife; therefore I hate to see her mistreated.

That is what must be understood by the Christian in the current age: the lifestyle that is idealized and glamorized and highly sought after by all—the cosmopolitan, independent, urbane, hip, affluent young person free from all responsibility—is one you must learn to hate. That is the end to which the murder of children, the abandonment of all sexual mores, and the destruction of the household is dedicated: so that you can live on Pleasure Island without ever turning into a donkey.

This call to rediscover hatred’s proper place is provocative, and - if valid - strikes at the heart of the smothering and artificial ‘moral’ system that is everywhere forced upon us, which holds all forms of hatred as a terrible evil, instead preaching universal tolerance.

Our task in this edition of Becoming Noble will be to determine if Isker’s call is valid.

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— Frederic Leighton, An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877)

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The place of hatred in the post-Christian right wing philosophical project is unquestionable. Nietzsche - in his Aphorisms on Love and Hate - goes so far as to entreat his readers not just to entertain hate, but to actively cultivate it.

We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from earliest youth; if education or chance give us no opportunity to practice these feelings, our soul becomes dry and unsuited even to understanding the tender inventions of loving people. Likewise, hatred must be learned and nurtured, if one wishes to become a proficient hater: otherwise the germ for that, too, will gradually wither.

But does hatred have its place in the heart of the good Christian? One wouldn’t think so from the common contemporary portrayal of the faith. Yet if we turn to the seminal texts in the pre-modern history of the church we find a different attitude entirely. Consider Fr. Lorenzo Scupoli’s influential 1589 treatise The Spiritual Combat:

Consider then, beloved, the cause of all this anguish, borne by our Crucified Redeemer and Lord, and you will find that it is nothing else but sin; therefore the genuine and principal way of showing the sympathy and gratitude which He demands of us… is to be sorry for our past sins purely from love to Him; to hate sin with a hatred beyond all other hatred, and to fight manfully against all His enemies and our own evil inclinations…

Indeed - like Nietzsche - he goes so far as to suggest practical methods for the cultivation of hate, which he considers to be an essential part of an iron faith. In the below passage he describes his method for strengthening discipline in the face of temptation, which is achieved by exposing oneself -in controlled fashion - to the sources of temptation and summoning disdain and hatred for them, training one’s will to reject them with greater and greater intensity.

…by recalling to memory and exciting anew within you those thoughts which led to the temptation… until you are conscious of the feeling again; then resist with a stronger will than before, and with greater force repress the feelings. And because, unless we thoroughly hate them, we are still in danger of being overcome by fresh attacks from our enemies—however successful we may have been in resisting them from a sense of duty and a desire to please God… drive them far from you, not only with dislike but with disdain, picturing them to yourself as worthy of hatred and abhorrence.

One is reminded of Proverbs 8:13:

The fear of the Lord hateth evil: I hate arrogance, and pride, and every wicked way, and a mouth with a double tongue.

But hatred is, of course, a dangerous plaything. It would be irresponsible to demand that we summon it without a rigorous philosophical framework with which to bind and control it. Here we must turn to Aquinas.

St. Thomas explains - in accordance with Andrew Isker’s view above - that love and hatred exist at opposite ends of a spectrum. In Aquinas’ understanding, love is when one’s appetite (desires) are naturally directed towards something that is perceived as suitable (good) for oneself. Hatred is the opposite: when one’s appetite is naturally dissonant with something which is perceived as bad for oneself.

…each thing is naturally attuned and adapted to that which is suitable to it, wherein consists natural love; so has it a natural dissonance from that which opposes and destroys it; and this is natural hatred. So, therefore, in the animal appetite, or in the intellectual appetite, love is a certain harmony of the appetite with that which is apprehended as suitable; while hatred is dissonance of the appetite from that which is apprehended as repugnant and hurtful. Now, just as whatever is suitable, as such, bears the aspect of good; so whatever is repugnant, as such, bears the aspect of evil. And therefore, just as good is the object of love, so evil is the object of hatred.

Given this, St. Thomas advances the view that hatred of evil is good and just - because evil is bad for you and your appetite should not be directed towards it.

Does this view, then, lend itself to a complete re-affirmation of the modern cliché ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’? This phrase was, after all, derived from a letter of St. Augustine.

No. I believe that St. Aquinas would detest the way that this trite, reductive phrase (devoid of context) has come to dominate our understanding of how we should relate to our brothers caught up in evil.

‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’ is catastrophically disempowering. It directs hatred solely towards grand abstractions that we can never truly defeat (sin, evil). In so doing, it totally robs hatred of its rightful power to influence how we relate to and interact with the men that we share this existence with.

The phrase lacks a central nuance that Aquinas elucidates.

Aquinas clarifies that it is evil to hate that which is ultimately good: ie. that which has been given by God. Since man is a creation of God, it is thus evil to hate his central nature. We must love - not hate - our neighbor’s being - but that does not imply we must love the aspects of him that have departed from God’s creation and goodness. Indeed: we must hate this evil in our brothers.

Hatred is opposed to love… so that hatred of a thing is evil according as the love of that thing is good. Now love is due to our neighbor in respect of what he holds from God, i.e. in respect of nature and grace, but not in respect of what he has of himself and from the devil, i.e. in respect of sin and lack of justice.

Consequently it is lawful to hate the sin in one's brother, and whatever pertains to the defect of Divine justice, but we cannot hate our brother's nature and grace without sin. Now it is part of our love for our brother that we hate the fault and the lack of good in him, since desire for another's good is equivalent to hatred of his evil. Consequently the hatred of one's brother, if we consider it simply, is always sinful.

Men are not opposed to us in respect of the goods which they have received from God: wherefore, in this respect, we should love them. But they are opposed to us, in so far as they show hostility towards us, and this is sinful in them. On this respect we should hate them, for we should hate in them the fact that they are hostile to us.

This distinction is absolutely central to navigating the modern environment in our pursuit of victory. This is because our enemies engage in a devious trick: they attempt, at every stage, to conflate man’s sin and identity - to bind his sin into his very essence and soul - through the creation of ‘identity groups’.

If we accept this modern view and concede that we are not allowed to hate any aspect of the sinner, we are thus also conceding that we are not allowed to hate the sin itself - for the sin and the person have become one. We are accepting that hating evil is hating our brothers themselves.

Thus the system degrades not just our ability to love - by breaking the bonds of marriage, family, and faith - but our ability to hate. We must regain this power.

If, as we have suggested, there is a righteous spectrum from love to hate, and we disallow ourselves from inhabiting with the hateful end of the spectrum, only two modes remain: love, and the midpoint of the spectrum, apathy.

Are we really to move through this world engaging the Good with love and the Evil with apathy? No - this is not acceptable or just. The trained instinct towards apathy is a hostile force imposing docility upon us. It is the product of the post-modernism that is the ultimate conclusion of the Liberal project.

Hate is a powerful force and source of energy that we need to turn the tide. As Isker states:

…we lack the courage and fire of our spiritual predecessors. We are not courageous enough to truly hate the things we ought to hate, nor bold enough to love the things we ought to love. We become seduced by the harlotries of the Trashworld we must hate. This world attacks and seeks to quench the fire that is within you at every turn. You must see Donar’s Oaks everywhere that need to be felled. And you must summon the will to fell them. With men of great passion and desire, led by the Spirit of God you will see empires set aflame.

But like all powerful forces it must be controlled and treated with respect. Without carefully imposing our will on this force, it will control us, and lead us down dark and harmful paths.

Uncontrolled hatred means moving into a purely ‘responsive’ mode, wherein our thoughts and actions are determined entirely by our enemies - because we are so blinded that we seek to combat them head-on at every turn, and we thus lose our freedom to act according to our independent will.

Heidegger, in What is Called Thinking?, notes:

…just as there lies concealed in all hatred the abysmal dependence upon that from which hatred at bottom always desires to make itself independent but never can, and can all the less the more it hates.

Or, as Nietzsche - for whom independence of thought and value was so important - concludes:

Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.

What then is the proper mode of hate?

Hate should be understood as the cultivation of the most steadfast, absolute, uncompromising rejection of evil. When you gaze upon evil, do so with the greatest disdain. Greet evil with the same coldness with which it greets you.

To give evil either more or less of a reaction than utter contempt grants it power over you; greet it with any degree of warmth and you open the door to your seduction; greet it with unconstrained energy you give it a degree of control over you by allowing it to determine your reaction.

One narrative body that understands well how man should react to evil is the universe of Warhammer 40k.

My armor is contempt. My shield is disgust. My sword is hatred.

— Motto of the Adeptus Astartes

It may seem childish to bring this franchise into our discussion, but it is worth noting the staying power of the Space Marine in the popular imagination for the last few decades.

Specifically, I think there is something very instructive in the aesthetic of these imagined warriors. They are portrayed as massive, heavy, and immovable. The sense of steadfastness this conveys is central to the viewer’s belief that these men could combat the most horrific forces of chaos and evil, without quarter or compromise.

That too is our spiritual task. We must hate, and hate well.

I will end with a section of Ecclesiastes 3.

All things have their season, and in their times all things pass under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to destroy, and a time to build. A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather. A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.

A time to get, and a time to lose. A time to keep, and a time to cast away. A time to rend, and a time to sew. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. A time of love, and a time of hatred.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann