Is it fitting to attribute hatred to God? Medieval Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) thought that an affection which in itself involved an imperfection, such as hatred, could not be attributed to God. This view remained unchallenged until the late sixteenth century. The clear inflexion point was the work of the Jesuit Gabriel Vázquez (1549–1604), who argued that it is fitting to attribute hatred to God. Many Jesuit theologians and some Franciscans followed him and even asserted that human hatred is not always sinful. Indeed, Vázquez's intervention occurred almost simultaneously with an innovation by his fellow Jesuits, the biblical exegetes Juan de Maldonado (1533–1583) and Alfonso Salmerón (1515–1585), concerning the moral permissibility of human hatred.
Vázquez was, alongside Francisco Suárez, the leading Jesuit theologian of his generation. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1569 after completing his studies at Alcalá de Henares. A popular and charismatic teacher, he replaced Suárez in 1585 in the coveted theological chair in the Jesuit Collegio Romano. Four years later he returned to Alcalá where the personal and professional rivalry between him and Suárez deepened further.Footnote 1 His most impressive work, an eight volume ‘commentary’ on Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, consists in hundreds of discussions (‘disputations’) arranged in parallel to Thomas’ text. Throughout his life Vázquez's views brought him into clashes with mainstream theological doctrines. These included his views on justification (although not specifically the views reviewed below).Footnote 2
The controversy about hatred between followers of Aquinas and followers of Vázquez concerned both the conceptual question of the nature of hatred and the normative question of whether human hatred could be non-sinful and divine hatred possible. The three questions are closely interrelated. Some authors noted that some of the discussion revolves around labels in that the permissibility of hatred depends on how we define it.Footnote 3 The interdependence between conceptual and normative analysis is in fact an unavoidable feature of discussions on the morality of emotions in general.
Why did Vázquez come to challenge the view that God cannot hate? As I argue below, Vázquez's reasons must be situated within the set of disputes animating the theological clash between Dominicans and Jesuits in the late sixteenth century on the nature of justification.
This article is organised as follows. The first section introduces the main theological conceptualisations of hatred as they developed up to the sixteenth century. This is followed with the survey of some of the reasons why Aquinas and his followers denied that it is fitting to attribute hatred to God. The next section presents Vázquez's challenge to this view, followed by a close inspection of its two central elements: divine displicentia and God's willing badness qua badness (malum ut malum). After discussing a relevant parallel development in biblical exegesis, I address the question of whether the divine hatred defended by Vázquez should really count as hatred. Having laid out the main elements of Vázquez's view and addressed some of the possible challenges to it, I turn to Vázquez's possible motivations for shattering the long-held consensus regarding the impossibility of divine hatred, and trace this to disputes about the nature of the justification of the sinner that pitted Jesuits and Dominicans in a long, multi-fronted theological battle by the end of the sixteenth century, the controversy de auxiliis. I close by arguing for the plausibility of Vázquez's view on divine and human hatred.
Medieval and early modern Thomist arguments against divine hatred
Aquinas characterised hatred as the opposite of love: ‘Hatred is a dissonance of the appetite from that which is apprehended as repugnant and hurtful.’Footnote 4 His foremost commentator, Thomas de Vio Cajetan, O.P. (1469–1534) noted that Aquinas’ characterisation of hatred presents a difficulty. Sometimes when we hate we do not experience a ‘dissonance’ about what is bad, but rather a consonance or agreeableness. When we hate an enemy, for instance, we positively wish him that which is bad for him, and so we find ‘consonant’ that which is bad for the enemy. Cajetan therefore feels the need to expand Aquinas's notion of hatred so as to make it inclusive of this additional sort of hatred, which involves a proactive disposition, namely, to see the hated person suffer harm, rather than only experiencing aversion or repugnance at the thought of him.Footnote 5
Cajetan's analysis was motivated by the characterisation of hatred in Aristotle's Rhetoric, which he cites. Aristotle argued that ‘enmity and hatred should clearly be studied by reference to their opposites’.Footnote 6 Having endorsed Aristotle's proposed methodology, in order to provide a more capacious account of hatred, Cajetan introduced an important distinction between two types of hatred. These are ‘hatred of abomination’ and ‘hatred of enmity’.Footnote 7 These two types of hatred are modelled by Cajetan as the direct opposites of two types of interpersonal love: the ‘love of friendship’ by which we wish good things to the friend, and the ‘concupiscible love’, the love for someone, including oneself, which is motivated by the expected enjoyment or pleasure derived from the relationship. Cajetan's distinction between two types of hatred was probably conceived of as loosely mapping onto Aquinas’ distinction between hating a neighbour's sin, which may be licit, and hating ‘his nature and grace’, which is always sinful.Footnote 8 According to Cajetan, when we hate with the hatred of abomination we do not hate the person as such but only some attribute or thing belonging to the person, just as in concupiscible love we do not love the person as such but rather some attribute of the person, such as beauty, or something that we may obtain from the person, such as pleasure. By contrast, when we hate with hatred of enmity, the object of hatred is the person himself, all of him or her.Footnote 9
These two hatreds differ not only as to what is hated but also as to the way the harm to the hated person comes about. When we hate with the hatred of abomination, we do not positively wish evil on the abominated person. Instead, the evils that befall the hated person are, as it were, side effects of the withdrawal from him, depriving him of the benefits that could accrue to him from a friendship. In the case of hatred of enmity, as described by Cajetan, what we primarily feel is not repulsion or abomination towards the person. Instead, we hate out of a negative evaluative appraisal of this person and we wish evil on him. This form of hatred comes very close to the Aristotelian notion of hatred, the essence of which was described by David Konstan as a ‘disinterested desire that harm accrue to another, together with a disposition to make it happen’.Footnote 10
The theological consensus at the time of Vázquez, indeed going back to the patristic period, held that God cannot experience passions, if by ‘passions’ we understand affections which involve bodily change. Being incorporeal, God can only have affections in the will. Further, God cannot have affections of the sort that involves a flaw or imperfection on the part of the person who has them, such as sadness. For this reason, it was argued, God cannot experience hatred. However, if hatred could be conceptualised as not involving bodily change, nor involving sadness or pain (which would be contrary to God's perfection), divine hatred could not be entirely dismissed as a possible divine affection.
Medieval theologians proposed other arguments for the view that hatred is unfitting to God. Metaphysical arguments holding that God as creator would contradict his own will by hating creatures were proposed by Jean Capreolus, O.P. (1380–1444) and Silvester de Ferrara, O.P. (1474–1528).Footnote 11 Here I will skip over their arguments, however, in order to focus on those more directly related to the motivational basis of hatred as an affection, which featured more prominently in the context of Dominican-Jesuit exchanges around the time of Vázquez.
The Dominican João Poinsot (John of St. Thomas) agreed with Aquinas that hate, properly considered, must involve a ‘dissonance’ or repugnance in the appetite with respect to that we which find repugnant or harmful (corruptivum). According to Poinsot, when we experience dissonance this involves the presence of contrariety or resistance to our will.Footnote 12 Such dissonance, he argued, is incompatible with God's omnipotence. So God does not hate. According to Poinsot, God not willing a good or willing ill to someone can be explained without reference to some dissonance or repugnance at the level of will. For example, God may want to see someone punished out of love of justice. At other times, between two good things God chooses one, leaving the other aside, not because he hates it but simply because he prefers the first thing. Poinsot cites Aquinas: ‘Love of one thing is hatred of another thing’, which he understands as conveying that what seems to be hatred of the one thing is really love for the another.Footnote 13 So for Poinsot, what seems to be divine hatred is really the flipside of love.
Poinsot addresses the objection that his thesis seems in principle to be extendable to human beings: just as what seems to be divine hatred is not really hatred, perhaps what seems to be human hatred is not really hatred either. So hatred, it seems, all hatred, may be merely apparent. Poinsot does not think so. In the case of human hatred, it is true that love is always in the background; so, say, I hate a violent person because I love the victim of the violence. However, the causal chain leading to the hatred of the violent person, the proximate cause of this human hatred, is dissonance and repugnance. God, for reasons to be explained below, does not act out of dissonance or repugnance towards the violent person.Footnote 14 So for Poinsot human hatred is real, whereas divine hatred is necessarily merely apparent.
It should be noted, however, that at least in one place Aquinas actually asserts the existence of divine hatred. He writes: ‘Nothing prevents one and the same thing from being loved under one aspect while it is hated under another. God loves sinners in so far as they are existing natures; for they have existence and have it from Him. In so far as they are sinners, they have not existence at all, but fall short of it; and this in them is not from God. Hence under this aspect, they are hated by Him.’Footnote 15 Later theologians saw the sort of divine hatred allowed by Aquinas as falling under ‘hatred of abomination’.Footnote 16 Repelled by the sinner's sin, God may withdraw from him, making the benefits of friendship with God unavailable to the sinner as a side effect. God does not hate sinners ‘as to their nature’, nor does he positively wish them evil as evil. Theological consensus, however, rejected altogether the possibility of divine inimical hatred. One reason for this, found for example in Cajetan, is that inimical hatred was characterised as insatiable and bottomless, lacking measure ex se.Footnote 17 It is unfitting for God's will to have a necessarily disproportionate affection.
Vázquez's intrepid ‘Jesuit’ defence of divine hatred
The view that God is in fact capable of inimical hatred was first defended by Vázquez in 1598.Footnote 18 The first sign of support for this view came in 1606 from Rutilio Benzoni (1542–1613) a bishop and one-time student at the Jesuit Collegium Germanicum, who dubbed Vázquez's position ‘intrepid’. The first criticism of this view in print seems to have been from the Dominican Paolo Nazari (1566–1645) in 1607, followed by Juan de Salas (1553–1612), a Jesuit, in 1612.Footnote 19
Over time, however, Vázquez's view garnered a respectable set of supporters, mostly among Jesuits and, later, some Franciscans. These included Pedro Arrubal, S.J. (c. 1560–1608);Footnote 20 Valentín de Herize/Erice S.J. (1571–1626);Footnote 21 Luis de Ribas, S.J. (1576–1647);Footnote 22 Jean le Prevost (Joannes Praepositus), S.J. (1580–?);Footnote 23 Theodor Smising, O.F.M (1580–1626);Footnote 24 Diego de Alarcón, S.J. (1585–1634);Footnote 25 Jean Martinon, S.J. (1586–1662);Footnote 26 Raffaele Aversa, C.R.M (1589–1657);Footnote 27 Rodrigo Arriaga, S.J (1592–1667);Footnote 28 Francisco Félix de Medina, O.F.M. (1592–?);Footnote 29 Sebastián Izquierdo, S.J. (1601–1681);Footnote 30 Bartolomeo Barbieri a Castro Vetro, O.F.M. Cap. (1615–1697);Footnote 31 Antonio Bernardo de Quirós, S.J. (1613–1668);Footnote 32 Franciscus de Bonae Spei, O.Carm. (1617–1677);Footnote 33 Bernhard Sannig, O.F.M. Cap. (?–1704);Footnote 34 and Marco Maria Struggl, S.M.V (?–1760).Footnote 35
It is important to note that early critics of Vázquez, such as the Dominicans NazariFootnote 36 and Juan Gonzales de Albeda (1569–1622),Footnote 37 presented his view as distinctively Jesuit, by attributing it not only to Vázquez but also to the two other leading theologians of the Society, Luis de Molina (1535–1600) and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). This attribution was inaccurate. In the 1592 work of Molina referred to by these critics, we find but a fleeting assertion that hatred – without distinguishing between its types – can non-metaphorically be attributed to God.Footnote 38 Suárez agreed that God can properly hate, but qualified this by saying that whether he can do so with inimical hatred, as Vázquez had argued, or not is ultimately a semantic question.Footnote 39 It is noteworthy then that, even before Vázquez's view on divine hatred managed to amass any significant support among fellow Jesuits, Thomists rushed to portray it as a Jesuit view.
The thought that drives Vázquez's revisionism concerning divine hatred is that God disapproves not only of the sin but also of the sinner. Evidence of this is provided by biblical passages referring to divine hatred, which, he insists, should not be understood metaphorically, as Aquinas had suggested, but literally.Footnote 40 There are two central elements to Vázquez's defence of divine inimical hatred. The first element is that God, in inflicting bad or harm on the sinner, does so at least partly out of disgust or dislike for the person of the sinner (displicentia). The second element is that, in doing so, God wills what is bad for the sinner under the description of it being bad for him (malum ut malum).
Displicentia and evaluative hatred
Vázquez borrowed the terminology displicentia and complacentia from the Franciscans. Indeed, these are key terms used in discussions of what was called ‘the passions of the will’ conducted by John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308), Peter Auriol (1280–1322), William of Ockham (1287–1347), Walter Chatton (1290–1343), and Adam of Wodeham (1298–1358).Footnote 41
As noted, Aquinas and Cajetan speak, instead, of hate as a ‘dissonance’ of the intellectual appetite with that which is perceived as naturally disagreeing with it. For João Poinsot there is a crucial difference between displicentia and dissonance. One experiences dissonance and therefore hatred, he says, when someone causes a ‘contrariety’ (contrarietas) against me or against my friend (which, in a way, is also a form of contrariety against me).Footnote 42 When, however, the contrariety is caused against someone other than me or someone who is not my friend, this involves an experience of displicentia but not of dissonance or hatred.
Vázquez may have thought that basing hatred on dissonance, as Aquinas did, would not allow him to defend the view that God can hate. By contrast, basing hatred on displicentia would allow him to do so because God, it seems, can definitely feel displicentia, so long as this disgust is conceived of as an affection that does not involve sadness.Footnote 43 Vázquez's more impersonal, less self-centred, understanding of hatred seems in this respect to be closer to our conception of hatred than Poinsot's. In fact, this is one of the differences between hate and anger: one can hate people who have done nothing directly against oneself or against people one loves, while to be angry at them seems less fitting. For example, it seems fitting to hate a celebrity who turns out to be a vicious sexual offender but less fitting to be angry at him (since one does not know him personally).
After showing that God is capable of hatred of abomination, Vázquez goes on to show that He is also capable of inimical hated. To do so he argues that when punishing the sinner, God does not merely will the harm inflicted as punishment but rather simply insofar as harm is bad for the sinner.
That God is capable of inimical hatred can also be shown: it is not so much that God wants the punishment of the man who sins as he wants that which is bad for him and does so out of disgust against him [ex displicentia ipsius]. Therefore, this [will] proceeds from inimical hatred, as can be gathered from the very definition of inimical hatred. Moreover, it is clear that it is out of disgust against this person that God wants what is bad for him. Even though this person [considered] as a human being and a creature of God does not disgust [God], he disgusts him, however, as tainted by sin. Note however, that in order for the willing of something bad to a creature to qualify as hatred it suffices that the sinner disgusts God because of some feature of him and because of this moves his [i.e. God's] affect [affectus] to will something bad as bad for him [i.e. for the sinner]. It is not a part of the rationale of inimical hatred that the bad thing willed to the person be bad [to him] because of that feature of the person which causes the disgust,Footnote 44 but [only] that this bad thing be genuinely bad for him and the bad thing is willed out of disgust under this or another feature.Footnote 45
Perhaps Vázquez's point can be illustrated by a common experience. Consider someone seriously odious, say someone notorious for his demeaning treatment of women. You learn that a safe fell from a fifth floor onto his car (not to be overly dramatic, assume he was not in the car at the time). On hearing this your first reaction might be ‘Great!’, and you might simultaneously think he deserved it as a punishment for his conduct. It seems phenomenologically likely, though, that the stronger positive reaction is not the one triggered by the thought that the odious person got what he deserved, but simply that something bad happened to this odious person. Perhaps in such cases it is true that what moves the will more intensively is harm under the description of its being bad to the odious person than bad under the description of its being deserved by him. Vázquez's point is that God wills the harm the retributive punishment consists of not so much under the description of its being a just punishment but rather because it is simply harmful to the hated person. A possible confirmation for Vázquez's intuition is provided by the opposite case: your friend wins a prize of a Caribbean holiday for working very hard at his job. At first you welcome this news because the holiday is simply good for your beloved friend. The fact that the friend justly deserves this prize also makes it welcome, but may not be the thought that accounts for the initial positive reaction.
For Vázquez, God's willing harm to the sinner results from his appraisal of the kind of person he has become by sinning. He gives the example of a judge ‘who punishes a man who committed a shameful action (flagitium) insofar as this is just and he detests that shameful man’ and that he ‘truly and properly has inimical hatred, not out of disgust [displicentia] for the person insofar as he is that [specific] man, or some other private reason, but because he is a shameful man, and insofar as this hatred concerns this, it is according to virtue’.Footnote 46
Vázquez's evaluative notion of hatred rooted in displicentia at the person of the sinner allows him to reject Cajetan's view that inimical hatred is in its essence bottomless and incapable of proportion, and, for that reason, unfitting to God. Cajetan's thought is that hatred is worse than anger because, while anger is disproportionate to the injury or offence suffered by the angry person, it is not even clear in relation to what hatred could be disproportionate to.Footnote 47 Yet Vázquez believes that this is wrong. Hatred is a reaction to something, namely to the ‘moral ugliness’ of the sinner. So we can speak of hatred that is proportional to how much a person merits disgust. In other words, we can make sense of the assertions that John hates Peter beyond what is fitting, and that Ludwig hates him just in the fitting measure.Footnote 48
Vázquez's emphasis on displicentia is meant to buttress the view that when a person does a shameful action that action makes him/her a shameful person. Vázquez is in a way echoing the Aristotelian view that our actions do not only operate outwardly, but that we also self-constitute as persons through our actions.Footnote 49 As Vázquez says, what makes sinners hateable is that ‘through sin we deform His [God's] image in us’.Footnote 50 This element, as we will see below, is central to understanding Vázquez's purpose in rehabilitating hatred.
Willing malum ut malum
The second central element of Vázquez's view on hatred is his assumption that it is possible to will bad qua bad, malum ut malum. Whether it is possible for the will to will something sub ratione mali was a thorny matter which had pitted Thomists, who denied this possibility, against theologians grouped by Vázquez under the name ‘nominalists’, who defended it.Footnote 51 Vázquez defends a position that he presents as being neither that of Ockham nor that which he attributes to ‘some recent Thomists’ by whom he probably meant Bartolomé de Medina, O.P. (1527–1581).Footnote 52 He argues that we can both will something bad as bad and will it because of some further good, sub ratione boni.
Vázquez distinguishes between the willed thing (res volita) and the reason for willing that thing (rationem volendi). When we hate with inimical hatred the thing we will, the res volita, is bad qua bad, even though the reason for willing it may be some other good.Footnote 53 Vázquez takes some Thomists to use a parallel between the operation of sight and that of the will in order to deny that we can will bad qua bad.Footnote 54 According to Ferrara, in the operation of sight we can distinguish between that which makes something fall under the power of sight (a ratio communis, which moves sight to see something) and that which accounts for the fact that we see this rather than that (a ratio terminativa). When we see something, we see it by virtue of its being ‘coloured’. ‘Colour’ here refers not to a specific colour such as red, blue or green, but rather refers, as was standard in medieval philosophy, to ‘the light reflected by the surface of the opaque body to the percipient’.Footnote 55 So reflected light is the ratio communis of sight, that which enables us to see something at all, while it is a specific colour such as white or black (Ferrara's examples) that accounts for the fact that we see something as white or as black.
Ferrara then applies this account of the operation of sight to the operation of the power of will. What moves the will to will something is the further good this thing contributes, so whatever we will is always willed sub ratione boni (this is the ratio communis of the will). Bad considered as bad can be a ratio terminativa, in the same sense that black is the ratio terminativa in the case of sight. So Ferrara allows a sense in which the will can will what is bad qua bad, but it does so only as ‘illuminated’ by a final good that makes it attractive. Medina endorses this argument and on its basis asserts that whenever we hate someone and wish them harm, we hate them for the sake of some further good, something that is good for us in some way.Footnote 56
Vázquez replies by pointing to a difference between the operation of the power of sight and the power of the will.Footnote 57 In the operation of sight we can distinguish between that which is seen (res visa) – he gives the example of a wall – and what makes it possible to see it (the ratio videndi) namely the light reflected on the wall (the ‘colour’). The wall is seen through, or by virtue of, something that is an accidental feature of it, namely its being illuminated (it is not part of the nature of the wall to be illuminated). The thought seems to be that when one sees, say, a tomato, one does not just see the tomato as such, but rather the tomato as illuminated. However, in the operation of the will things work differently. When we will something bad for someone, such as his death, we will this, says Vázquez, ‘distinctly and per se and in se’, ‘expressly’; what we will is the ‘thing itself’ (res ipsa) ‘even if the reason for willing [ratio volendi] is some goodness apprehended in the thing that we will’.
Vázquez's argument may be put thus: in the case of vision, the fact that something reflects light is the cause of our seeing it and determines how we see it (so that we do not just see it because it is illuminated by the sun, we also see it as illuminated by the sun). In the case of the will, the good which is furthered by something that we will is the cause of our willing that something but does not determine how we will – or the object of the will (so we will to eat the tomato because it contributes to the good of health, but what the will is willing is the tomato itself, not the tomato as “illuminated” by its contribution to health).
The fact that we will something bad, such as someone's death, because of something else that is good does not mean that it is not actually this bad (or harm) which the will takes as its object. What is being willed is the bad or harm as bad or harm even if we will this bad or harm because it is connected to some further good.
As he engaged Medina's parallel between will and visual perception, Vázquez took advantage of the occasion to ridicule his view that hatred does not involve actively willing evil to the hated person but rather simply not willing his good. Vázquez quips that whoever believes this simply ignores the nature of hatred.Footnote 58
Jewish hatred: Maldonado and Salmerón
The rehabilitation of divine hatred was not the only contributing cause to the rehabilitation of hatred towards one's neighbour. We should mention a possible additional contributor: a novel scriptural interpretation proposed shortly before Vázquez's discussion of the divine attributes, by a fellow Jesuit exegete.
In his Commentary of Matthew, published in 1596, Juan de Maldonado discusses the passage in which Jesus tells a group of Pharisee scribes, ‘You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you’ (Matt 5:43).Footnote 59 Catholic commentators of this passage usually argued that Jesus was correcting a misinterpretation of the Pharisees of the Jewish law, a law which did not, in fact, command or allow you to hate your enemy.
Maldonado challenged the accepted view and determined that Jesus was actually speaking of the Old Law which, according to him, commanded one to hate one's enemies.Footnote 60 The ensuing exegetical controversy also questioned the force of the positive commandments in the Old Law concerning one's positive duties towards enemies, for example the duty to return to your enemy an ox that has been found wandering about (Exod 23:4). Did the Israelites have such duties towards all enemies, including enemy nations (for instance returning an ox belonging to a Canaanite), or only to personal enemies from within the people of Israel?Footnote 61
Maldonado scandalised his colleagues by arguing that the view they favoured, according to which Jesus was correcting a mistaken Pharisee legal interpretation rather than referring to the Old Law as such, was also the one that had been embraced by most heretics. It is hard to say why Maldonado chose to be so provocative. Perhaps it was just another display of his alleged ‘most virulent’ temper.Footnote 62 It is in fact true, however, that Jean Calvin (1509–1564) held the interpretation attacked by Maldonado.Footnote 63
Three years later, another important Jesuit exegete, Alfonso Salmerón, followed and developed Maldonado's view, albeit in a less provocative style.Footnote 64 According to Salmerón, God allowed the Jews to hate their enemies on account of ‘the hardness of their heart’ and their infirmity. The Jews were not only allowed but actually commanded by God to hate enemy idolatrous nations. While it is true, he noted, that the effects of hatred, such as killing unjust enemies, can be motivated by affections loftier than hatred, such as zeal for justice, given the rudimentary character of the people of Israel and their incapacity to distinguish between nature and blame (culpa), they were allowed (and indeed commanded) to be moved by hatred in performing these actions. This observation must be understood in reference to the terminology used in Aquinas’ discussion of hatred: the Israelites were unable to hate the sin without hating the sinner (and so were allowed to hate him).Footnote 65 Salmerón remarks, however, that the Israelites’ license or even obligation to hate did not extend to personal enemies but only to enemy nations or, as they were called, ‘public enemies’ (hostes publicos). The sort of hatred allowed to the Israelites was a permissible surrogate for the morally optimal motivation, which is the zeal of justice.
Maldonado and Salmerón's exegesis had a direct impact on theology. Theologians such as Gilles de Connick, S.J. (1571–1633), Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza, S.J. (1578–1651), and Emanuel de la Concepción, O.S.s.T. (1627–1700) saw it as supporting the view that hatred of fellow human beings need not always be sinful.Footnote 66 If the Old Law allowed and commanded hatred, this must mean that hatred is not intrinsically evil. God could not have allowed or commanded something that is intrinsically morally evil.
But is rightful hatred hatred?
Vázquez and those who agreed with him held that there is a form of permissible inimical hatred which is accessible to human beings. This view, however, poses the problem, noted for instance by Juan de Salas, of distinguishing permissible inimical hatred and the affective attitudes that usually motivate the implementation of justice.Footnote 67 In other words, perhaps permissible inimical hatred is not hatred at all, but just a righteous zeal of retributive justice.
How then is God's inimical hatred to be distinguished from his zeal of justice? Arriaga poses the question in the context of his discussion with de Coninck. He dismisses the opinion that in willing something bad to the damned, God seeks the implementation of equality.Footnote 68 The good pursued by God is the satispassio, which means wishing that the sinner may endure pains and torments to an amount equal to the pleasure obtained by his past sinful exploits. The good sought by God in punishing the damned in hell formally consists in this suffering and in no other thing. Arriaga gives the example of restitution of a debt. The goal that you pursue by restituting the debt is not something other than restitution itself, such as implementing justice or restoring an equality between you and the person to whom you restitute. Although restoration of equality between the debtor and the creditor logically supervenes that completion of the restitution, this is not primarily what you seek.
The French Jesuit Jean Martinon proposes a different answer. He argues that the difference between the desire for punitive justice and righteous inimical hatred is not that in the first case we wish evil qua evil for a person in order to promote some extrinsic good, such as justice or deterrence, whereas in the case of righteous inimical hatred there is no further good in view. Instead, the difference lies in the diverging motivational sources of these affections. At the basis of righteous inimical hatred there is a ‘just and reasonable (rationabilis) disgust (displicentia)’.Footnote 69 We wish bad or harm to the person we are reasonably disgusted by. Even though we will this harm also because it is fitting and agrees (conveniens) with ‘the right order of things’, this is really, we might say, a concomitant effect.
In order to make sense of this claim we should remember that inimical hatred was conceived of as the opposite of friendship. The good that you wish to your friend may coincide with that which the good merits as a matter of desert, but this is not the reason why, as his friend, you wish him this good. Rather you wish him this good simply because you love him based on finding him a virtuous or agreeable person. Similarly, when we wish evil for someone out of hatred, it is not because he deserves it as punishment but simply because we want him to suffer badness. If the love of justice intervenes in the willing of evil toward a person motivated by inimical hatred, it may both supply a further independently based motivation for willing him evil and perhaps also act as a constraint, by telling us not to will more evil to this person than he deserves.
Hatred and the justification of the sinner
What led Vázquez to rehabilitate hatred by arguing that it is fitting to attribute inimical hatred to God? Here is a tentative suggestion. Let me recall the significative fact that, from the very outset, Dominican critics perceived Vázquez's doctrine as a Jesuit doctrine. At the time of the publication of Vázquez's work, Dominicans and Jesuits were in the midst of a series of disputes which taken together were called ‘Congregations de Auxiliis’, spanning from 1582 to 1607.Footnote 70 The theological fire was fanned by the publication in 1588 of Molina's provocative Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, one of the aims of which was to reconcile human freedom and divine grace. Dominicans charged that this work allotted too much power to human free will, making Molina suspect of Semipelagianism. Jesuits counter-charged that some Dominican views on grace, as could be found for instance in Domingo Báñez, O.P. (1528–1604) were dangerously close to those of the Calvinists.Footnote 71
But de auxiliis also concerned itself also with what had been one of the main doctrinal points of contention between Catholics and Protestants, namely justification: the process by which the sinner reconciles himself with God. For the sake of simplicity, we may say that most Catholic theologians thought about ‘justice’ (that which enables the process of justification, which includes the remission of sins and reconciliation with God) as a really existing attribute in the sinner. At the other extreme, Protestant reformers tended to see justice not as a real attribute of the sinner but as imputed by God. Hence the distinction between iustitia inhaerens and iustitia imputata. Reformers held an ‘extrinsicist’ view of justification, whereas Catholics, to use Alister McGrath's useful terminology, emphasised the ‘factitive’ and transformational nature of justification, which, in this view, involved the actualisation of something real in the person of the sinner.Footnote 72 As we will see, some Dominican views on justification were considered by Vázquez as involving a veiled extrinsicism.
The Council of Trent aimed to sharpen the Catholic doctrine of justification so as to contrast it with the Protestant view. In the Sixth Session, held in January 1547, agreement was reached that the
disposition [to justice] and preparation precede the actual justification, which consists not only in forgiveness of sins but also in the sanctification and renewal of the inward being [renovatio interioris hominis] by a willing acceptance of the grace and gifts whereby someone from being unjust becomes just, from being an enemy becomes a friend, so that he is an heir in hope of eternal life.Footnote 73
According to Trent, the interior renewal which is an essential part of justification consists in being transformed from an enemy into a friend of God. There must be a change in the person of the sinner. Why the need for this change? For Vázquez, part of the answer is that the deletion of sins cannot consist only in an external divine condonation of the debts or punishments by divine favour.Footnote 74 This view falls entirely in line with the general Jesuit tendency to see justification as involving primarily a real change in the person reconciling with God rather than being, as it were, operated from the outside.
According to Vázquez, the sinner makes himself deserving of divine hatred, and becomes an enemy and adversary of God. The friendship has been dissolved by the offence and the sinner warrants being hated. Vázquez goes on to argue that God may or may not punish the sinner, but if he does punish him, the fact that the punishment would not be unjust is not by virtue of God's will or God's making it so, but by virtue of the very acts of the sinner which have made him unworthy of divine love and deserving [dignum] of divine hatred. He adds ‘as things are in reality [de re], so they relate to the divine will, either in the mode of an object of hatred, or in the mode of an object of love’. And, he continues:
For that very reason God cannot through his will simply consider someone as man who has offended him, loathed, enemy and adversary, but he [the sinner] must himself though his actions make such his nature, so that he is capable of being called those things.Footnote 75
The same realist stance animates Vázquez's rejection of the view that dispenses with the need for a mutation on the part of the sinner as a requirement of justification, a view based on the analogy of God and a king. A king can, in this rejected suggestion, benevolently love a subject who offended him without there being a change in the person of the subject.Footnote 76 Vázquez rejects the analogy on the grounds that a human king can do this because he can change his way of thinking about the person without any correlative change at the level of the person. However, unlike the human king, God does not change his way of thinking about the person if the person himself has not changed. Even in the case of the king and the subject, notes Vázquez, the change in the king's perception of the subject will not affect the hatred that the subject deserves on account of his offence.
Throughout it is clear that what matters for Vázquez is that divine hatred is based in a real quality in the sinner, his having made himself deserving of hatred through his own actions, and that this makes him not just no longer a friend, but an enemy of God. Because of a real quality in the sinner, his having through his actions made himself into an object of hatred, a change is needed to renew the friendship with God. According to Vázquez this requires a profound and demanding change in the person of the sinner.
Vázquez also considers a different way of arguing that justification can be achieved without real change in the sinner. This soft extrinsicism can be found, according to Vázquez, in the view held by Scotus, Ockham and Gabriel Biel (1425–1495), that God can increase the value of the inherent justice of a person, just as the sovereign can increase the value of metallic currency through legislation, making the metallic currency worth more than the metal of which it is made. In such a way, God increases the value of our grace or justice, enabling the remission of sins. Therefore, the process of justification can take place without a real change in us, but rather through what Vázquez calls ‘extrinsic constitution’.
Dominican theologians such as Domingo de Soto (1494–1560) and Diego Álvarez de Medina (1555–1632) made moves similar in some ways to these. They distinguished between grace considered as something physical in the genus of entities and grace ‘in the genus of grace’ or, as others added, considered in ‘its moral dignity’.Footnote 77 Therefore, although a person's grace considered as a physical quality may remain unchanged, it may grow ‘morally’, that is, as to its worth or dignity in the eyes of God. This Dominican view meant, according to Vázquez, that eventually a person's justification did not depend on his justice or grace but, ultimately, on an ‘extrinsic favour’ of God.
One argument for this Dominican view (which Vázquez rejects) is that, since a person's justice may coexist with mortal sin, justification must require an act of acceptance by God or a condonation of the offence and the guilt, in addition to the person's justice. Vázquez rejects the premise that a person can at the same time be in sin and be just and holy. Whoever is in sin cannot but disgust [displicere] God as an adversary and an enemy, and whoever has justice cannot but be liked by God and be considered a friend.Footnote 78 One cannot be friend and foe of God at the same time.
We see then that Vázquez, in his attempt to repeal views which eliminate or reduce the need for real change in the sinner as a requirement of justification, conceptualises the relationship of human beings to God in binary terms, either as one of friendship or enmity and, correlatively, as involving either love or hate. What matters to Vázquez for the purposes of attacking what he takes to be a Dominican view is not so much defending God's actual hating of the sinner, but rather that the sinner merits being hated because of some real quality present in him. It is this quality, the being deserving of hatred, that must be removed in other to enable friendship with God. Such renewal of friendship will not happen without real change; it will not happen by God thinking somehow otherwise about the sinner, or condoning his sins, or reevaluating (in the sense opposite to the devaluation of a currency) the merit of his acts.
Conclusion
Vázquez's interest in hatred is connected to his thinking about justification through the prism of friendship and enmity. Renewal of friendship requires personal change. What we like about a friend is him, his personhood. Although the friend's actions may dissolve the friendship, the renewal of friendship does not demand solely the amendment of the noxious effects of his actions, or reparations, or even apologies, but him becoming again a person we can like. As Vázquez says, without this change, acts by the offended friend that promote the good of the ex-friend do not signal a resumption of friendship, but should instead be construed as acts of benevolence towards an ex-friend.
Friendship requires love, but not just any love. It requires a love that fits or is warranted by the real qualities of the friend. Vázquez rightly sees this feature of friendship as a ground to reject accounts of justification that in one way or another do not base God's love of the person being justified on a real quality of the person, because such accounts have difficulty in presenting justification as the process by which we become (again) real friends of God.
Vázquez's view on God's hatred is therefore integral to the general outlook that sees relations between God and human beings as based on fittingness between God's affections and the real qualities of individuals. Insofar as human beings can through their actions become odious qua persons, and insofar as affections are apt when fitting to the qualities found in their object, it should possible for hatred to be non-sinful. For it would be paradoxical to say that while it is fitting for me to hate an odious person, at the same time it is morally wrong for me to do so.
Aristotle believed, perhaps reflecting common Greek values, that hatred can be an appropriate and even praiseworthy emotion.Footnote 79 Christian theologians before Vázquez regarded hatred as sinful. Vázquez bringing hatred back into the potentially non-reprehensible affections may be considered a setback for moral progress in the emotional domain. Nevertheless, once we read Vázquez closely we see that what he is doing is not so much rehabilitating hatred as an affection to be commended in the hater, but rather helping us see that there may be moral value in realising that we may sometimes be deserving of being hated, as this realisation will propel personal change.Footnote 80
