Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Hatred, Aquinas insists, is not a primal force but a parasite. It feeds on attachment. You cannot despise something unless you first care about a good it threatens or distorts: justice, truth, your community, your own sense of order. The line has the cool, scholastic click of a syllogism, but its aim is pastoral and political at once: to demystify hate by dragging it back to the heart.

In Aquinas's moral universe, the emotions are not embarrassing glitches; they are directed movements of the will toward perceived goods. That matters in the 13th-century context, when Christian theology is being welded to Aristotelian psychology into a system that can explain everyday experience without surrendering to chaos. By making love the cause, Aquinas keeps human passions legible and, crucially, governable. Hatred becomes an error in aim: not an alien poison entering from outside, but a misfiring response to something you genuinely value.

The subtext is bracingly modern. Our fiercest cultural animosities often look like pure negation, but they are usually love in disguise: love of status, purity, nation, tradition, belonging. Aquinas offers no easy absolution - if your hatred is caused by love, you can't pretend you're merely reacting; you're confessing your priorities. The sentence works because it refuses the flattering story that hate is only ever the other side's pathology. It locates it in the same place we keep our ideals, and forces the uncomfortable question: what, exactly, are you loving so much that you are willing to hate for it?