Somebody says it in a meeting about a person who is not in the room, and the temperature drops, and everybody moves to the next thing. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is not in the Bible. Gandhi wrote it down in his autobiography inside quotation marks, because it was already old when he got to it, and the oldest known Christian version was a rule written to a convent about its own members.
What Gandhi did with it
Gandhi puts the line in his autobiography, in a chapter about officials in the Asiatic Department in Johannesburg whose corruption he had exposed and tried to get prosecuted.
Man and his deed are two distinct things. Whereas a good deed should call forth approbation and a wicked deed disapprobation, the doer of the deed, whether good or wicked always deserves respect or pity as the case may be. ‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.
Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV
Notice the quotation marks. He is passing on a precept he inherited, and he is candid that almost nobody keeps it. Notice also what he did with it. He went after those men in public, and afterwards he did not stand in the way when they applied for posts, so the precept cost him twice.
The meeting at the top of this page
I was the one who said it. Everybody nodded, we moved to the next item, and I remember feeling that I had been the reasonable one.
It cost me nothing. That is the difference I couldn’t get past once I noticed it. Gandhi used the sentence to make himself do a hard thing for men he had beaten in court. I used it to buy an exit from a hard conversation, and both of us were quoting the same words.
Augustine wrote it to a house of nuns
The oldest known Christian form of it is in a letter of Augustine’s, and the standard English gives it as acting “with due love for the persons and hatred of the sin.”
Letter 211 is addressed to a monastery. Augustine wrote it to women who were demanding a new prioress; the one they had was his late sister’s successor. The bulk of the document is house rules. How to obey. How to own a fault out loud. How to correct the sister next to you, and how to take it when she corrects you.
The sentence about loving persons and hating the sin is one line inside a manual for people who cannot get away from each other. It sits in the clause about handling one another’s faults, in a list that runs observing, forbidding, reporting, proving and punishing.
We have turned it around to face out. In its first home it told you what to do about the person in the next room whose failure you are stuck with. In ours it usually tells somebody outside the building what we think of them.
The psalm that will not do the split
Scripture is less tidy than the formula, and the clearest case is a psalm that almost nobody quotes to the end.
Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
Psalm 139:21-22 (KJV)
Them. Not their deeds. The man writing that is not separating the sin from the sinner, and the psalm is in the book anyway, seventeen verses below the lines about God knowing your words before you speak them.
Then comes the turn, and it is the reason to read the psalm whole.
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Psalm 139:23-24 (KJV)
He has just asked God to look at his enemies and found them wanting. The next thing out of his mouth is a request to be looked at himself, and he is the one who asked for it.
Where the examination gets pointed
That direction is the pattern. Paul tells the Galatians that the man doing the restoring watches himself while he does it in case he is next. He tells Rome to let love be without hypocrisy and to abhor what is evil, in a paragraph that also says to bless those who persecute you. Jesus puts the beam in your own eye before the speck in anybody else’s, which is a whole article of its own.
The nearest the New Testament comes to the formula itself is a strange verse in Jude, where the instruction is to snatch people out of a fire, with fear, hating even the clothing stained by the flesh. Hatred does appear there, aimed at a garment, while the person wearing it is being carried out.
Jesus is not asking for a sorting at all. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you, in Luke 6:27-28. Four instructions, and every one of them is pointed at the person rather than at the behavior.
People usually reach here for the woman brought to Jesus in John 8 and for neither do I condemn you. Most modern Bibles print a note on that passage. The New International Version brackets it: “The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53 to 8:11.” Nothing in this article stands or falls on it, and I would rather say that than quietly use a text with an asterisk on it.
None of which makes the formula wrong. It is simply a great deal easier to say than the thing Augustine asked of those women, or the thing Gandhi made himself do in Johannesburg, and the way to tell which one you are doing is whether it cost you anything.