159. Loving sinners, hating sins
159. LOVING SINNERS, HATING SINS
How do we reconcile all the cursing psalms with the command to love our enemies?
Two things may be considered in the sinner: his nature and his guilt. According to his nature, which he has from God, he has a capacity for happiness, and charity is based on the fellowship of happiness . . . wherefore we ought to love sinners out of charity. . .
On the other hand, their guilt is opposed to God and is an obstacle to happiness. Wherefore . . . it is our duty to hate, in the sinner, his being a sinner, and to love in him his being a man capable of bliss; and this is to love him truly, out of charity. . .
. . . [H]atred of a person’s evil is equivalent to love of his good. . . .
. . . [W]hen our friends fall into sin, we ought not to deny them the amenities of friendship, so long as there is hope of their mending their ways; and we ought to help them to regain virtue more readily than to recover money if they had lost it, in as much as virtue is more akin to friendship than money is. . . .
Objection: The saints . . . desire evil things for the wicked, according to Ps. 9:18: May the wicked be turned into hell. . . .
Reply: Such imprecations which we come across in Holy Writ may be understood in three ways: first, by way of prediction, not by way of wish, so that the sense is: The wicked shall be turned into hell. Secondly . . . so that the desire of the wisher is not referred to the man’s punishment but to the justice of the punisher . . . since, according to Wisdom 1:13, not even God hath pleasure in the destruction of the wicked. . . . Thirdly, so that this desire is referred to the removal of the sin. . . to the effect that the sin be destroyed but that the man may live (II-II,25,6).
We are to love our neighbors—all of whom are sinners. (Ever since Christ’s Ascension and Mary’s Assumption, we have never seen any other kind of human being on this earth.) Therefore we are to love sinners, i.e., love the concrete persons who are sinners. “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” That’s clear—so clear that St. Thomas takes it for granted.
But in the sinner we find different aspects or dimensions. His nature was designed, willed, loved, and created by God and is destined for Heaven as part of the communion of saints, so it is to be loved. But his sin and guilt is not any of those things, and is not to be loved.
Not only is there no contradiction or even tension between the two parts of “love the sinner and hate the sin”, but we are to hate the sin precisely because we love the sinner, as we are to hate the cancer because we love the bodily life it is killing. Thus “hatred of a person’s evil is . . . love of his good.”
Therefore we, like Christ, should not shun sinners but seek them out, even when they fall into sin—especially then—as the good shepherd seeks out the lost sheep, or a parent a lost child. If we should help our neighbors to recover lost money, all the more should we help them to recover lost virtue. We are Doctor God’s nurses, and this world is His hospital.
How can we pray the cursing psalms, which call down curses on our enemies? They do not mean that we should wish evil to sinners. Sins, not sinners, are our enemies. St. Thomas shows us three ways we can use them: (1) as warnings and prophetic predictions rather than wishes—warnings to ourselves first of all (remember the splinter and the log in Matthew 7:3-5); (2) as praise of God’s justice and goodness, not man’s evil, and (3) as a curse on the sin (our own!), not on the sinner (ourselves!).
This third way is the most useful one. These “sinners” and “enemies” are allegories, personifications of our own sins, which are our own worst enemies. They are also allegories for demons, evil spirits who tempt us to sin. These two are our true enemies, our only enemies, and they alone should be hated and willed to destruction. We do indeed wrestle (fight) against evil, but our enemies are not “flesh and blood but principalities and powers of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12).