CHAPTER VIII
THE PLIGHT OF MAN AFTER THE FALL
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."43 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.
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43 Rom. 5:12.