|
23. With this much said, within the necessary brevity
of this kind of treatise, as to what we need to know
about the causes of good and evil--enough to lead us
in the way toward the Kingdom, where there will be
life without death, truth without error, happiness
without anxiety--we ought not to doubt in any way
that the cause of everything pertaining to our good
is nothing other than the bountiful goodness of God
himself. The cause of evil is the defection of the
will of a being who is mutably good from the Good
which is immutable. This happened first in the case
of the angels and, afterward, that of man. 24. This
was the primal lapse of the rational creature, that
is, his first privation of the good. In train of this
there crept in, even without his willing it,
ignorance of the right things to do and also an
appetite for noxious things. And these brought along
with them, as their companions, error and misery.
When these two evils are felt to be imminent, the
soul's motion in flight from them is called fear.
Moreover, as the soul's appetites are satisfied by
things harmful or at least inane--and as it fails to
recognize the error of its ways--it falls victim to
unwholesome pleasures or may even be exhilarated by
vain joys. From these tainted springs of
action--moved by the lash of appetite rather than a
feeling of plenty--there flows out every kind of
misery which is now the lot of rational natures.
25. Yet such a nature, even in its evil state,
could not lose its appetite for blessedness. There
are the evils that both men and angels have in
common, for whose wickedness God hath condemned them
in simple justice. But man has a unique penalty as
well: he is also punished by the death of the body.
God had indeed threatened man with death as penalty
if he should sin. He endowed him with freedom of the
will in order that he might rule him by rational
command and deter him by the threat of death. He even
placed him in the happiness of paradise in a
sheltered nook of life [in umbra vitae] where, by
being a good steward of righteousness, he would rise
to better things.
26. From this state, after he had sinned, man was
banished, and through his sin he subjected his
descendants to the punishment of sin and damnation,
for he had radically corrupted them, in himself, by
his sinning. As a consequence of this, all those
descended from him and his wife (who had prompted him
to sin and who was condemned along with him at the
same time)--all those born through carnal lust, on
whom the same penalty is visited as for
disobedience--all these entered into the inheritance
of original sin.
Through this involvement they were led, through
divers errors and sufferings (along with the rebel
angels, their corruptors and possessors and
companions), to that final stage of punishment
without end. "Thus by one man, sin entered into the
world and death through sin; and thus death came upon
all men, since all men have sinned."(44) By "the
world" in this passage the apostle is, of course,
referring to the whole human race.
27. This, then, was the situation: the whole mass
of the human race stood condemned, lying ruined and
wallowing in evil, being plunged from evil into evil
and, having joined causes with the angels who had
sinned, it was paying the fully deserved penalty for
impious desertion. Certainly the anger of God rests,
in full justice, on the deeds that the wicked do
freely in blind and unbridled lust; and it is
manifest in whatever penalties they are called on to
suffer, both openly and secretly.
Yet the Creator's goodness does not cease to
sustain life and vitality even in the evil angels,
for were this sustenance withdrawn, they would simply
cease to exist. As for mankind, although born of a
corrupted and condemned stock, he still retains the
power to form and animate his seed, to direct his
members in their temporal order, to enliven his
senses in their spatial relations, and to provide
bodily nourishment.
For God judged it better to bring good out of evil
than not to permit any evil to exist. And if he had
willed that there should be no reformation in the
case of men, as there is none for the wicked angels,
would it not have been just if the nature that
deserted God and, through the evil use of his powers,
trampled and transgressed the precepts of his
Creator, which could have been easily kept--the same
creature who stubbornly turned away from His Light
and violated the image of the Creator in himself, who
had in the evil use of his free will broken away from
the wholesome discipline of God's law--would it not
have been just if such a being had been abandoned by
God wholly and forever and laid under the everlasting
punishment which he deserved?
Clearly God would have done this if he were only
just and not also merciful and if he had not willed
to show far more striking evidence of his mercy by
pardoning some who were unworthy of it. |