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| Evil of Two Kinds, Penal and Criminal. It is Not of the Latter Sort that God is the Author, But Only of the Former, Which are Penal, and Included in His Justice.
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Chapter XIV.—Evil
of Two Kinds, Penal and Criminal. It is Not of the Latter Sort that God
is the Author, But Only of the Former, Which are Penal, and Included in
His Justice.
On all occasions does God meet you: it is He who
smites, but also heals; who kills, but also makes alive; who humbles,
and yet exalts; who “creates2867
evil,”
but also “makes peace;”2868
—so that
from these very (contrasts of His providence) I may get an answer to
the heretics. Behold, they say, how He acknowledges Himself to be the
creator of evil in the passage, “It is I who create evil.”
They take a word whose one form reduces to confusion and ambiguity two
kinds of evils (because both sins and punishments are called
evils), and will have Him in every passage to be understood as
the creator of all evil things, in order that He may be designated the
author of evil. We, on the contrary, distinguish between the two
meanings of the word in question, and, by separating evils of sin from
penal evils, mala culpæ from mala
pœnæ, confine to each of the two classes its own
author,—the devil as the author of the sinful evils
(culpæ), and God as the creator of penal evils
(pœnæ); so that the one class shall be accounted
as morally bad, and the other be classed as the operations of justice
passing penal sentences against the evils of sin. Of the latter
class of evils which are compatible with justice, God is therefore
avowedly the creator. They are, no doubt, evil to those by whom they
are endured, but still on their own account good, as being just and
defensive of good and hostile to sin. In this respect they are,
moreover, worthy of God. Else prove them to be unjust, in order to show
them deserving of a place in the sinful class, that is to say, evils of
injustice; because if they turn out to belong to justice, they will be
no longer evil things, but good—evil only to the bad, by whom
even directly good things are condemned as evil. In this case, you must
decide that man, although the wilful contemner of the divine law,
unjustly bore the doom which he would like to have escaped; that the
wickedness of those days was unjustly smitten by the deluge, afterwards
by the fire (of Sodom); that Egypt, although most depraved and
superstitious, and, worse still, the harasser of its
guest-population,2869
| 2869 Hospitis populi
conflictatricem. | was unjustly
stricken with the chastisement of its ten plagues. God hardens
the heart of Pharaoh. He deserved, however, to be influenced2870
| 2870 Subministrari.
In Apol. ii., the verb ministrare is used to
indicate Satan’s power in influencing men. [The translator here
corrects his own word seduced and I have substituted his better
word influenced. The Lord gave him over to Satan’s
influence.] | to his destruction, who had already denied
God, already in his pride so often rejected His ambassadors,
accumulated heavy burdens on His people, and (to sum up all) as an
Egyptian, had long been guilty before God of Gentile idolatry,
worshipping the ibis and the crocodile in preference to the living God.
Even His own people did God visit in their ingratitude.2871
Against young lads, too, did He send forth bears, for their
irreverence to the prophet.2872
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