The Seba library treats Malice in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Climacus, John, Bryant, Edwin F., Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.)).
It hates a just way of life. It is the ruin of virtues, the poison of the soul, a worm in the mind. It is the shame of prayer, a cutting off of supplication, a turning away from love
Climacus offers the most sustained patristic anatomy of malice, equating it with the remembrance of wrongs and describing it as a self-perpetuating spiritual pathology that systematically destroys virtue, prayer, and love.
, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 600thesis
nonviolence also encompasses giving up the spirit of malice and hatred, since these produce the tendencies to injure others… The degree of violence is determined by intent
The Yoga Sutras commentary positions malice as an interior intentional state that generates outward violence, making it the volitional root from which injurious action springs and karmic consequence accumulates.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009thesis
God may permit them in their malice to wage war against us in order to teach us greater humility
The Philokalia frames demonic malice as providentially permitted, functioning within a theological economy in which even destructive agency serves the soul’s humiliation and education.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Remembrance of past wrongs: see Malice… Resentment, 148, 190. See Malice
The index of The Ladder of Divine Ascent formally equates malice with the remembrance of past wrongs and with resentment, establishing the term as a nexus of related psycho-spiritual pathologies within the ascetic taxonomy.
, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 600supporting
Catholic theology called the absence privatio boni, deprivation of goodness… principal and more basic is that erotic lacuna, that cold absence
Hillman, drawing on Guggenbuhl-Craig and Catholic privatio boni theology, reframes malice not as the presence of an evil force but as the structural absence of eros — a cold lacuna that underlies criminal psychopathy.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Archetypal evil can neither be cured nor integrated nor humanized. It can only be held at bay… of vindictive victimizing, of destructive suffering, exploitation, physical pain and torment
Hillman argues that malice at its archetypal extreme — willful persecution and vindictive victimizing — transcends therapeutic integration and can only be contained, distinguishing demonic impersonality from the specifically human dimension of evil.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967supporting
The very bottom of hell, according to Dante, is a realm of ice, inhabited by the archcriminals Cain, Judas, and Lucifer… The psychological trait that goes with the iced heart is rigidity, an incapacity to yield
Hillman maps the ‘cold heart’ as the psychological signature of extreme malice, drawing on Dantean imagery to show that rigidity and emotional imperviousness are the affective correlates of archetypal destructiveness.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
even though the spiteful and malicious do not believe this to be so
The Philokalia invokes the malicious as a contrasting social type whose disbelief in spiritual wisdom confirms their alienation from the interior life, treating malice here as a characterological marker rather than a developed concept.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995aside