About hate

‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone’: we are all of a same sinful substance, a same matter susceptible to this abscess, evil, and we are, in consequence, all joint partners in evil, in a way that is doubtless indirect but none the less real; it is as if everyone carried in himself a particle of responsibility for all sin. Sin then appears as a cosmic accident, exactly as is the ego on a larger scale; strictly speaking, he is without sin who is without ego and who, thereby, is as the wind of which no man can ‘tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’.

If God alone has the right to punish, it is because He is beyond the ego; hatred means to arrogate to oneself the place of God, to forget one’s human sharing of a common misery, to attribute to one’s own ‘I’ a kind of absoluteness, detaching it from that substance of which individuals are only so many contractions or knots.

It is true that God sometimes delegates his right of punishment to man in so far as he rises above the ‘I’, or must and can so rise; but to be the instrument of God is to be without hatred against man. In hatred, man forgets ‘original sin' and thereby loads himself, in a certain sense, with the sin of the other; it is because we make God of ourselves whenever we hate, that we must love our enemies.

To hate another is to forget that God alone is perfect and that God alone is Judge. In good logic one can hate only ‘in God’ and ‘for God’; we must hate the ego, not the immortal soul, and hate him who hates God, and not otherwise, which amounts to saying that we should hate his hatred of God and not his soul.

Likewise, when Christ says that it is necessary to ‘hate’ one's ‘father and mother’, that means that it is necessary to reject whatever in them is ‘against God’, that is to say the attachment which serves as an obstacle in respect of ‘the one thing needful’. Such ‘hatred’ implies for those whom it concerns a virtual liberation; it is then, on the plane of eschatological realities, an act of love.

(In Gnosis- Last Chapter 'Of the Cross')