If God alone has the right to punish, it is because He is beyond the ego; HATRED means to arrogate to oneself the place of God, to forget one’s human sharing of a common misery, to attribute to one’s own ‘I’ a kind of absoluteness, detaching it from that substance of which individuals are only so many contractions or knots. It is true that God sometimes delegates his right of punishment to man in so far as he rises above the ‘I’, or must and can so rise; but to be the instrument of God is to be without HATRED against man. In HATRED, man forgets ‘original sin’ and thereby loads himself, in a certain sense, with the sin of the other; it is because we make God of ourselves whenever we hate, that we must love our enemies. To hate another is to forget that God alone is perfect and that God alone is Judge. In good logic one can hate only ‘in God’ and ‘for God’; we must hate the ego, not the ‘immortal soul’, and hate him who hates God, and not otherwise, which amounts to saying that we should hate his HATRED of God and not his soul. Likewise, when Christ says that it is necessary to ‘hate’ one’s ‘father and mother’, that means that it is necessary to reject whatever in them is ‘against God’, that is to say the attachment which serves as an obstacle in respect of ‘the one thing needful’. Such ‘HATRED’ implies for those whom it concerns a virtual liberation; it is then, on the plane of eschatological realities, an act of love. (GTUFS: GnosisDW, Of the Cross)
If love takes precedence over HATRED to the point that there is no common measure between them, this is because absolute Reality is absolutely lovable; love is substance, HATRED is accident, except in the case of creatures that are perverse. There are two kinds of HATRED, one legitimate and one illegitimate: the first derives from a love that is the victim of an injustice, such as the love of God crying for vengeance, and this is the very foundation of all holy anger; the second kind is unjust HATRED, or HATRED that is not limited inwardly by the underlying love which is its raison d’etre and which justifies it; this second HATRED appears as an end in itself, it is subjective and not objective, it seeks to destroy rather than to redress. Both the Koran and the Bible accept that there is a Divine Anger; and thus also a human “holy anger” and a “holy war”; man can “hate in God”, according to an Islamic expression. Indeed, objective privation permits or demands a privative reaction on the part of the subject, and the main thing is to know whether in a particular case our pity for a given human substance should prevail over our horror for the accident that makes the individual hateful. For it is true that from a certain point of view, one must hate the sin and not the sinner; but this point of view is relative, and does not prevent one from being sometimes forced, as a matter of proportion, to despise the sinner to the extent that he identifies himself with his sin. We once heard it said that whoever is incapable of contempt is likewise incapable of veneration; this is perfectly true, on condition that the evaluation is correct and that the contempt does not exceed the limits of its sufficient reason, subjectively as well as objectively. Just contempt is both a weapon and a means of protection; there is also such a thing as indifference, certainly, but this is an eremitical attitude that is not necessarily practicable or good in human society, for it runs the risk of being wrongly interpreted. Moreover, and this is important, a just contempt is necessarily combined with a measure of indifference, otherwise one would lack detachment and also that fund of generosity without which anger cannot be holy. Seeing an evil must not cause us to forget its contingency; a fragment may or must trouble us, but we must not lose sight of the fact that it is a fragment and not totality; awareness of totality, which is innocent and divine, in principle takes priority over everything else. We say “in principle”, for contingencies retain all their rights; this amounts to saying that serene anger is a possibility, and even a necessity, because in hating an evil, we do not cease to love God. (GTUFS: EsoterismPW, The Nature and Role of Sentiment)