On the Virginal Conception, and On Original Sin: Chapter 5
ON THE VIRGINAL CONCEPTION, AND ON ORIGINAL SIN
Finally, all being is from God, from whom nothing unjust comes. Hence, no being is unjust in itself.
Chapter 5 That the evil that is sin or injustice is nothing Now injustice, like blindness, is absolutely nothing at all. For blindness is nothing other than the absence of sight where sight ought to be; and that absence is no more something in an eye, where sight ought to be, than it is in a log, where sight ought not to be. Nor is injustice some sort of thing that infects and corrupts the soul, as a poison does to the body, or that does something, as it seems to be when a vicious person does evil deeds.When a wild animal breaks its chains and goes on a rampage, or when a helmsman abandons the rudder and leaves his ship at the mercy of winds and waves, so that it wanders aimlessly and drifts into danger, we say that the absence of the chains or of the rudder did this—not meaning that their absence is something or that it did anything, but rather that if they had been present, they would have kept the wild animal from going on a rampage and the ship from running into disaster. In the same way, when a wicked human being goes on a rampage and is driven into those dangers of the soul that are evil deeds, we cry out that injustice does these things. But this does not mean that injustice is a being or that it does anything. It means rather that when justice is absent, the will, to which all voluntary movements of the whole human being are subject, is inconstant, unrestrained, and ungoverned; driven by various appetites, it throws itself and everything subject to it into all manner of evil—and that if justice were present, it would keep all this from happening.
From these considerations it is easy to recognize that injustice has no being, even though ordinary usage calls the affections and acts of an unjust will, which are something considered in themselves,"injustice." By this very same reasoning we understand that evil is nothing. For just as injustice is not anything other than the absence of justice that there ought to be, so too evil is not anything other than the absence of goodness that there ought to be. Now no being, however evil we might say it is, is nothing; and for a thing to be evil is not for it to be something. For any being to be evil is nothing other than for it to lack some good that it ought to have; and for a being to lack a good that ought to be present is not for it to be anything. Hence, for any being, for it to be evil is not for it to be anything.
I have made these brief remarks concerning the evil that is injustice, an evil that is always unquestionably nothing. There is also the evil that is disadvantage,on the basis of which disadvantages are called evils.Disadvantage is sometimes nothing, as in the case of blindness and deafness, but sometimes it seems