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Quote of the Day: Knowledge vs. Hate
“Faith, then, signifies a personal relationship with God; a relationship as yet incomplete and faltering, yet none the less real. It is to know God not as a theory or an abstract principle, but as a person. To know a person is far more than to know facts about that person. To know a person is essentially to love him or her; there can be no true awareness of other persons without mutual love. We do not have any genuine knowledge of those whom we hate. Here, then, are the two least misleading ways of speaking about the God who surpasses our understanding: he is personal, and he is love. And these are basically two ways of saying the same thing. Our way of entry into the mystery of God is through personal love. As The Cloud of Unknowing says, “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love can he be caught and held, but by thinking never.”
— Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way (Kindle Locations 200-207). St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Kindle Edition.
These words have stuck hard with me these past few weeks. Kallistos Ware is, of course, discussing Man’s relation with God here, but this also applies to our relationships with other people. It is easy to hate people, and certainly, some seem more deserving of our ire than others, and yet even in the most irksome of people we can find, if we look for it, commonality sometimes, and we should always find empathy or at least sympathy. And this is not to say that we cannot be angry with someone, or be hurt by them — these are normal reactions when others do hurtful, spiteful, or foolish things to us or to our friends and family, and even to themselves. But hatred is a complete negation of others, and we should be very wary of it. Knowing someone, even in some small but genuine way, should give us pause, and pull us back.
This is part of the November 2017 Quote of the Day series, for November 17.
Published in Group Writing
You recently wrote that you are interested in Eastern Orthodoxy. Is this quote a cause of that interest or a result of it?
It is a result. @jamesofengland highly recommended the book as a good starting point to understanding the basics of Orthodox theology.
Thanks, Skip! As is said in Met. Kallistos’s faith community: Wisdom! Let us attend…
Forgive me but I can’t help notice that tribes that live next to each other hate each other’s guts. Whether it’s the Matabele or Mashona in Zimbabwe or the French and the British in Europe. It seems that knowing each other brings more hatred.
I cannot agree with this. If I got to understand the mind of a ISIS terrorist, I would love him? No, I would hate him all the more, and seek to end his evil with more vigor.
It is a beautiful quote. It certainly is a way of being that I would like to aspire to.
Reminds me of this quote:
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them…. I destroy them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Thanks for trying to bring us along on your journey, Skip.
As Skip mentioned, this conversation is part of our Quote of the Day Series. It’s a daily chance to share a quotation you have found interesting, that you think might provoke discussion, or might be a launching point to encapsulate a vector of thought to point your fellow Ricochetti in a new direction. If you would like to take the lead and start a conversation with a quotation, we still have four openings in November.
Not an accident that it’s written by a very Christian guy! The American-Christian horror at Spartan manliness in that novel is quite an achievement!
Two more remarks. First, oh, yeah, this is American politics now!
Secondly, I just finished watching Fincher’s Mindhunter series on Netflix–not recommended to decent people–& it’s full of the struggle to understand evil without falling into one of two traps, moralism (to deny any humanity to evil people because of what they’ve done) or scientism (to deny humanity to everybody because we’re not really different).
In echoing @omegapaladin, I don’t know if it’s within our ability to love everyone, or maybe put better would be to not hate some. I’m still on my own journey on inviting God deeper into my life, but it seems it’s God’s job to have that level of love and forgiveness for all. We can try, we can even repeat the word of Christ, but is it really within us to forgo hatred?
If someone murdered my daughter, how could I not hate the person until my last breath? Not just “hate”, like “I hate that actor”, or “I hate carrots”, but real, soul ripping hatred, like wake up every morning and want them to die? I think I would have that emotion, in fact I don’t see how I couldn’t have that emotion.
Forgiveness, that’s another thing entirely, I think. Hatred is part of our human condition, I think it came through with the original Sin, all the emotions, all the bad stuff that flooded through and ruined Gods perfection, hatred was a dark part of all that gunk that we’re saddled with.
Can they be said, though, to really know each other, or is their knowledge limited to (forgiving the pun) “tribal knowledge” – that is, stereotypes? They “know” only that the other tribe is ever and always to blame, they don’t know them as individuals, they only know them as rivals. I would posit that is not true knowledge at all.
Not over a murder, but over another wrong, I once did wake up pretty much every morning in the soul-ripping state you describe. It’s precisely because it rips the soul that you can’t sustain it without becoming something diseased and evil.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, people don’t function well when their souls is ripping to shreds. It seems to me the only honorable way out of that kind of hatred, if it never dulls, is suicide – and of course suicide has its own problems if you’re a Christian. You begin to forgive, not to save the wretched character who did the wrong, but because it’s the only hope of saving your own soul.
Wow, well said. Your reply made me sit back in my chair and say “ooooh, well, huh…dang it, they’re right”
I suppose it’s easy to just say I’d hate that murderer until my last breath, but God would work on me no doubt. I didn’t mean to come off as flippant. This was a great post with some great replies!
Beautifully said, Midge, and I agree with all of it, except for the part about suicide being honorable. Wouldn’t an honorable person just double down on prayer in that kind of situation? I have lived a charmed existence, so I am hesitant to speak out here, but the idea that suicide-outside of very rare occasions in war-can sometimes be honorable seems wrong to me.
One of my cousins was murdered in 9/11. She was 31 years old, and the mother of two babies. Recently, the husband of a girl I grew up with committed suicide; he was in his 50’s, and his children are mostly grown. The wake and funeral of the man who killed himself was infinitely worse than what we experienced after 9/11. I don’t say that lightly. Suicide is far and away the hardest way to lose someone; it isn’t always possible for us to always love everyone, but if you love anyone, please don’t kill yourself.
I always knew that suicide was horrific, but I had no idea just how bad it really was until I knew someone who was touched by it.
A friend of mine (not a close friend, but still a friend) hanged himself shortly after he graduated from college. Those who knew him well were utterly gutted.
I don’t want to derail the thread too much, but what I intended to express is that living in that kind of hatred, with no expectation of reprieve, is a kind of living suicide – your body remains technically alive, yet you’re killing yourself nonetheless. To react to that hatred with prayer is to already expect that, in the rightful course of things, your heart will change somewhat, so you can leave that state of “living death” behind.
I attended a funeral of a friend of my wife’s family, a younger man who killed himself. It was the most somber event I think I’ve ever attended, what do you even say to these grieving parents? The young man was also a non-believer and full of a lot of negative emotions from what I hear.
The quote represents not only a wrong idea but a dangerous one. It echoes the Left’s illusion that education/knowledge forces goodness, whereas evil is born of ignorance; thereby disregarding or at least diminishing the role of free will.
Love drives us to seek knowledge of the beloved. We are more inclined to learn about those we love. But knowledge does not always result in love.
We should willfully love our enemies in hope that familiarity will present opportunities for harmony and friendship. We should also be prepared to be hated in return.
Mr. Miller, you had better start again & read the quote without all these voices in your head. It is a statement about the relationship between your hateful attitude & the knowledge you pretend to have. In a small way, your response is the sort of thing it is concerned about…
I should think that it takes effort to sustain it. It’s probably easier to actively hate someone for a week when they’ve done something reprehensible, then not really think about them much until the next time they act up. The statement in the OP is a good general principal, but it is possible to know someone well, understand their thought process, and still hate them. Some people are hated, not because of a lack of understanding, but because they do hateful things.
I find it much easier to forgive, or at least extend the benefit of the doubt, to people whom I don’t know very well or at all. The closer I am to someone, and the better I know them, the more difficult it becomes, because it just seems to me that the people I know ought to know better. I really struggle with this.
For instance, I find it relatively easy to forgive Islamic extremists who were raised in totally different cultures and essentially brainwashed from birth. When I look at them, all I can think is, “There but for the Grace of God go I”. Don’t get me wrong: I want them dead, but I do not qualified to judge them in a spiritual sense. I want them dead for the same reasons I would want a fire in my home to be extinguished, but I don’t hate them.But people who were raised in the West who support terrorism, especially people who were not even raised Muslim? People like the wife of one the Boston bombers? I find myself seething with hatred for her. I try to pray for her and people like her; but I am not sure that I really succeed at it. Like I said, this is something I struggle with.
This is beautiful, Skipsul. Thank you. Truly.
There is a lesser hate that requires conscious nourishing in order to persist. Most of our hate, I think, is this lesser hate, a sort of pet hate – tame, and requiring feeding and care to stick around.
But there is a greater hate that, maddeningly, requires neither care nor feeding – indeed, requires considerable work to banish – a wild “berserker” hate that owns you, rather than the other way round. I don’t think it’s normal to feel the greater hate unless you or those you love dearly have been catastrophically wronged. Murder, assault, rape, divorce, destruction, betrayal, that sort of thing… It is exhausting. It may come and go, but not at your pleasure. Merely taming that down to pet hatred takes some willingness to forgive.
Once hate is pet-sized and tame, you can feed it or starve it. But while it’s still wild, not going out of your way to feed it doesn’t keep it from feeding: it just eats you. It’s not a madness that gets you out of responsibility for your actions, but you do have to invest a lot of energy in keeping its wildness at bay.
Aaron, Fr. Kallistos – as Skip said – is referring to relationship with God (Who is big enough to absorb our anger/hatred/lack of forgiveness, and return it to us as Love at its fullest) and justice viewed as no human being’s finitude can. I think the ‘danger’ here lies in making oneself the arbiter/exponent of the Infinitude of God; as those of all stripes are wont to do…Peace.
There has been something about this I have been wanting to say, but didn’t articulate it in my own mind until now. When we hate others, we are judging them: we are judging people whom we are not qualified to judge. We aren’t qualified to judge anyone, not even ourselves. When someone decides that suicide is the answer because they hate, or at least think they hate, someone so much that the hatred will never dull, that person is rendering a judgement against themselves that they are not qualified to make. We all have to do our best to judge ourselves in order to function in life, but we are not qualified to make the final judgement.
People are often not good at judging themselves. Often, we are too easy on ourselves, often, we are too hard on ourselves. If someone has a conscience which is refined to the point where they believe they have to commit suicide in order to maintain their honor, they don’t need to worry about their honor. They think they do, but their thinking is distorted. In a culture where many of us are far too easy on ourselves, it is tempting to go to the other extreme, but not a good idea.
This hasn’t been my experience of people who have actually gone ahead and spent a bunch of time with ISIS members in settings where genuine engagement is possible.
That isn’t to say that they don’t seek to end the evil with vigor, but that they tend to see the individuals involved as people. The two aren’t incompatible; General Lee, for instance, does not appear to have hated individual soldiers fighting for the Union, and had a great affection for many of the officers in particular, but this did not make him a mild opponent of them on the field. Eisenhower wasn’t all that anti-German, but he was more than a little keen to see the German threat to the world diminished.
For a better understanding of South African tribal hostility, I’d really recommend Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters. The level of ignorance about even neighboring communities can be pretty incredible, and the motivations of those who were not ignorant quite a lot more complicated than hatred. There hasn’t been a lot of Franco-British hatred for centuries (rivalries and often dislike, sure). Back when there was a lot, there was also considerably more ignorance, although the story of the Hartlepool Monkey Hanging may be apocryphal.
It’s easy to overstate the degree of correlation between hatred and violence. We all know liberals, racists, and/ or conspiracy theorists who hate conservatives, Christians, some ethnic group, and/ or “them”, but who confine their abuses to misuse of power, verbal abuse (either direct or in the form of slander), other kinds of rudeness, or even just stewing. The UK doesn’t have a lower homicide rate than the US because it’s a less hateful place, nor the US than Mongolia solely because the US is a less hateful place. Giuliani didn’t bring down the rate of atrocities in New York by making New Yorkers more loving people. Instead, there’s a broad swathe of social and political factors that shape this stuff; hatred is often one of those, but it is not the whole thing.
Not hating others does not mean believing that they will not hate us. Kipling’s hymn to American engagement with the world is a pretty great text for this. When we go out to bring prosperity, justice, democracy, and freedom to those who lack those things we learn about them and our appreciation of them as humans grows. That does not in any way mean that we should expect them to be uniformly grateful.
We should be loving, but a loving and respectful treatment of, say, Ethiopians, has in the past involved cutting off aid to a vile communist regime there. Our love for the Somali people was expressed when we supported the current Ethiopian government’s invasion. Both were intended to, and both actually did, yield greater opportunity for harmony and friendship, but there are certainly Somalis and Ethiopians who will hate us with their dying breath as a result of those loving decisions.
We should love our enemies, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t understand our enemies. Pseud (I feel like we all know the author of the Cloud well enough to use first names) wasn’t suggesting that we live in a safe space if only we could see things clearly.
That said, it’s certainly true that there’s a reasonable amount that one can know about a person without being compelled to fully know them as a person. Metropolitan Kallistos is not saying that any amount of knowledge is incompatible with hate, merely that there is a ceiling placed on one’s knowledge of someone as a person by hate.
What about taking action against the person who has wronged you? Is that not honorable? See them brought to justice, work to break their ideology / prevent other cases, etc. Forgiveness is all well and good, but turning a genuine hatred into a drive to end a great evil is the stuff legends are made of.