One of Dostoevsky’s most unsettling insights into human nature is counterintuitive.
We live in a world of ceaseless conflict. And when we look for the source of that conflict, we often assume it’s hatred. We hate people and then treat them poorly. It’s because we feel contempt toward others that we sin against them.
But that’s only half the story.
Often it’s the other way around. First, we hurt someone, and only then do we begin to hate them.
Mistreat someone, and over time, your antipathy toward them will grow. Treat someone unfairly, and over time, you’ll feel a growing sense of contempt. The harm comes first. The hatred follows.
A man who berates his wife may not have launched into his first harangues with hatred and animosity. But what started from a lack of love and self-control will eventually turn into seething hatred for her. It’s not the intense hatred that prompts the wrongdoing; it’s the wrongdoing that inflames the intense hatred.
Biblical Record
We see this pattern in the Scriptures. Consider Saul and David. Saul’s jealousy began not with hatred but with insecurity. He was a king rattled by the shepherd boy’s successes. And yet the more Saul pursued David unjustly, the more his obsession metastasized. Every wrongdoing required self-justification. By the end, the man who had once loved David like a son was hurling spears at him and hunting him through the wilderness. The wrongdoing didn’t express preexisting hatred; it generated it.
Then there’s Amnon and Tamar. The text in 2 Samuel 13 is horrifyingly direct: After Amnon violated his sister, “he hated [her] with such intense hatred that the hatred he hated her with was greater than the love he had loved her with” (v. 15, CSB). Amnon wronged his sister, and a cold contempt followed.
Civilizational Pattern
This pattern also shows up in civilizational crises. The Final Solution didn’t begin with fully formed genocidal hatred on behalf of Germans toward the Jewish people. It began with incremental wrongdoings that became so commonplace they barely registered. The German national story was reframed around grievance so that perpetrators could see themselves as the aggrieved masters, the heroes, the wronged party. Wrongdoing against the Jews became commonplace, and then antisemitic hatred swelled in its wake.
The ugliness of American racism didn’t flow from a preexisting fount of hatred toward enslaved black people. No, there were dehumanizing, unjust practices that led to the pervasiveness of irrational contempt throughout society. Centuries of wrongdoing preceded and then reinforced antipathy toward people of color.
Novelist Ken Follett, in Edge of Eternity, put this idea in the mouth of one of his characters: “A man hates the person he has wronged, paradoxically. I think it’s because the victim is a perpetual reminder that he behaved shamefully.”
Heart’s Dark Maneuver
Why does this happen? Because wrongdoing threatens the story we tell about ourselves. We come to hate others because their presence is a verdict that threatens our sense of righteousness.
Pascal diagnosed this tendency:
The self wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt. The predicament in which it thus finds itself arouses in it the most unjust and criminal passion that could possibly be imagined, for it conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and convinces it of its faults.
It’s the “unjust and criminal passion” against the truth that leads to contempt for the person who bears the brunt of our wrongdoing — the one who mirrors back to us our failure to love.
If you look at your life and find you’re in the wrong, you face two choices: Repent and make amends, or harden your heart and reframe the narrative until you’re the good guy. The second path is far more traveled.
This is why Dostoevsky’s Underground Man cannot face the prostitute he gave a glimmer of hope to and then crushed. After wronging her, his resentment intensifies precisely because she represents his own failure. His bad feelings toward her flow from his inability to narrate himself as the suffering but superior man.
It’s also why Stavrogin, in Devils, cannot achieve repentance. His confession chapter (initially suppressed by the publisher) shows a man who has wronged nearly everyone around him and yet cannot surrender his self-image as a figure beyond ordinary moral categories. Genuine guilt would require becoming ordinary. His story ends as it does because death is preferable to such a reckoning.
This is also why we come to hate God. We know deep down we’ve sinned against him in thought, word, and deed. And that knowledge is intolerable to a heart that insists on its own heroism. We cannot be the moral center of our own story if we stand guilty before the One who made us. So the heart makes this maneuver: Rather than hating our sin, we come to hate him for our sin.
Way Out
Repentance is the rejection of that path. It means we stop trying to rewrite the story. We admit we aren’t the hero, and we receive from the One we have wronged most deeply a forgiveness we didn’t earn.
But the gospel does more than remove us from one path. It puts us on another. Just as committing wrongs against someone can lead us toward hatred, a sustained posture of compassion and kindness can move us toward a love we may not feel at first.
In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis observed that there are two kinds of pretending. There’s the bad kind, where the pretense replaces the real thing, and the good kind, where acting in a certain way leads to the feelings being aimed for:
When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.
To love is to will the good of another. Love is an act of the will, not mere sentiment. And this is why Jesus’s command to love our enemies is more than a moral instruction. It’s a kind of supernatural love that does something to us. Bonhoeffer asked, “How does love become unconquerable?” He answered, “By never asking what the enemy is doing to it, and only asking what Jesus has done.”
Love that flows from what Christ has done for us—not in how we feel, not in what others deserve—throws up a blockade against every path that leads toward contempt. It is Christ’s love that breaks the cycle of hurt and hate. Not willpower. Not good intentions. The love that came to us first, before we deserved it, is the only love strong enough to rip up the false story we tell ourselves.
And that is what the gospel makes possible. We can face the people we have wronged—with contrition, with resolve—because Christ has already faced us in our wretchedness and loved us anyway. Our illusion of being the hero of our story fades behind the shadow of the cross.
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