Hatred

Use in the book

The verb supplies a stronger counterexample than a mere absence of reciprocal love: a lover may actually be hated by the beloved. The active participle ὁ μισῶν is the hater, whereas ὁ μισούμενος is the person hated. Their contrast parallels ὁ φιλῶν and ὁ φιλούμενος.

At 213a–c the argument transfers each proposed definition of friend to the corresponding account of enemy. This produces the offensive-sounding result that one can be a friend to an enemy or an enemy to a friend. Keep the direction of the verb visible rather than treating all its participles as the single noun “enemy.” Burnet’s printed wording here includes readings discussed in the edition’s notes.

Places to read

1. 213aΚαὶ ὁ μισούμενος ἐχθρὸς ἄρα — Then the person hated is an enemy too.
2. 212b–c
3. 213a–c

Use in the book

Porphyry interprets Homeric divine beings as sharing desire, anger, hatred, and enmity and consequently being capable of wrongdoing and punishment. Hatred belongs to the attributed susceptibility to passions that supports the inference. The passage does not assert that every divine being in every philosophical account is hateful.

Places to read

1. I.49.53.14Hatred is one of the passions attributed to Homeric divine beings.

Translation in this edition

“Hatred” preserves the distinction from the separately named enmity.

Use in the book

The early predicament is inability to hate or despise someone whom one cannot love or esteem. It records an unresolved relation, not a duty to hate. The long political account argues that even hatred of evil can make people wicked when too strong, too dominant or too isolated among other feelings. Joubert attaches this claim to a partisan causal account of revolutionary violence; the lexicon does not adopt that account as established history. The later requirement that pity enter every good feeling includes hatred for the wicked. It makes hatred’s claimed moral legitimacy dependent on something gentler within it.

Places to read

1. I, p. 33–34, entry 6, ¶1A painful relation remains between failed love and impossible hatred.
2. II, p. 560, entry 4, ¶1Excessive hatred of evil is itself charged with producing evil.
3. II, p. 855, entry 7, ¶1Pity is required even within hatred of the wicked.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves all three too qualifications and the plural hatreds in the pity passage. Beaunier’s suggestion that a cross marks personal memory is explicitly conjectural. No person or episode is identified from that mark.

Revenge

French: vengeance.

The nominal demand for generous acts of vengeance is insistently repeated; generous does not mean more severe. Another note warns that memories and systems can carry vengeance into laws for people not yet born. Its repeated possibilities are not claims about an identified law. Neither witness supplies a license for private retaliation.

Places to read: II, p. 693, entry 4, ¶1; II, p. 780, entry 5, ¶1.

Use in the book

To hate and be hated is described as the greatest misery, because it frustrates the fellowship for which the world serves its inhabitants. Redemption restores persons from both sides of that unhappy relation. Yet hatred of deformity can be the reverse of love for beauty, and the account of Christ’s suffering presents an answering love that does not return hostility. The vocabulary is therefore not a simple prohibition of every aversion. The decisive concern is whether a person’s relation to God and neighbours becomes loving, truthful, and capable of restoration.

Places to read

1. II.4Love of beauty is paired with hatred of the deformity produced by sin.
2. II.36Christ’s voluntary love is set against the hostility and punishment he endures.
3. II.63Redemption frees the soul from the misery of both hating and being hated.

In this edition

“Hatred” may name opposition to sin or a hostile personal relation. Preserve that distinction, especially where divine aversion to deformity is being discussed through the language of love.