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| Whether It is Just that the Punishments of Sins Last Longer Than the Sins Themselves Lasted.
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Chapter 11.—Whether It is Just
that the Punishments of Sins Last Longer Than the Sins Themselves
Lasted.
Some, however, of those against
whom we are defending the city of God, think it unjust that any man
be doomed to an eternal punishment for sins which, no matter how
great they were, were perpetrated in a brief space of time; as if
any law ever regulated the duration of the punishment by the
duration of the offence punished! Cicero tells us that the laws
recognize eight kinds of penalty,—damages, imprisonment,
scourging, reparation,1515
| 1515 “Talio,” i.e. the
rendering of like for like, the punishment being exactly similar to
the injury sustained. | disgrace, exile, death, slavery.
Is there any one of these which may be compressed into a brevity
proportioned to the rapid commission of the offence, so that no
longer time may be spent in its punishment than in its
perpetration, unless, perhaps, reparation? For this requires that
the offender suffer what he did, as that clause of the law says,
“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”1516
For certainly it is possible for
an offender to lose his eye by the severity of legal retaliation in
as brief a time as he deprived another of his eye by the cruelty of
his own lawlessness. But if scourging be a reasonable penalty for
kissing another man’s wife, is not the fault of an instant
visited with long hours of atonement, and the momentary delight
punished with lasting pain? What shall we say of imprisonment?
Must the criminal be confined only for so long a time as he spent
on the offence for which he is committed? or is not a penalty of
many years’ confinement imposed on the slave who has provoked his
master with a word, or has struck him a blow that is quickly
over? And as to damages, disgrace, exile, slavery, which are
commonly inflicted so as to admit of no relaxation or pardon, do
not these resemble eternal punishments in so far as this short life
allows a resemblance? For they are not eternal only because the
life in which they are endured is not eternal; and yet the crimes
which are punished with these most protracted sufferings are
perpetrated in a very brief space of time. Nor is there any one
who would suppose that the pains of punishment should occupy as
short a time as the offense; or that murder, adultery, sacrilege,
or any other crime, should be measured, not by the enor
mity of the
injury or wickedness, but by the length of time spent in its
perpetration. Then as to the award of death for any great crime,
do the laws reckon the punishment to consist in the brief moment in
which death is inflicted, or in this, that the offender is
eternally banished from the society of the living? And just as
the punishment of the first death cuts men off from this present
mortal city, so does the punishment of the second death cut men off
from that future immortal city. For as the laws of this present
city do not provide for the executed criminal’s return to it, so
neither is he who is condemned to the second death recalled again
to life everlasting. But if temporal sin is visited with eternal
punishment, how, then, they say, is that true which your Christ
says, “With the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be
measured to you again?”1517
and they do not observe that
“the same measure” refers, not to an equal space of time, but
to the retribution of evil or, in other words, to the law by which
he who has done evil suffers evil. Besides, these words could be
appropriately understood as referring to the matter of which our
Lord was speaking when He used them, viz., judgments and
condemnation. Thus, if he who unjustly judges and condemns is
himself justly judged and condemned, he receives “with the same
measure” though not the same thing as he gave. For judgment he
gave, and judgment he receives, though the judgment he gave was
unjust, the judgment he receives just.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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