Marriage and Virginity (continued)
leads sinners on to excusing their sins rather than accusing themselves of them, will then be to no avail. If they were to do that, not only would those wounds not be healed, but, even though they are not fatal, they would be present in a serious and deadly way. In this respect, therefore, there is need for an even more wary continence. It has to restrain the proud human inclination that leads to self-approval and the desire not to be found fault with, and the reluctance, when sin is committed, to accept that it is one's own sin, searching with disastrous pride for excuses rather than acknowledging one's guilt with healing humility. It was to restrain this pride that the one whose words I have already quoted above, commending them to you to the utmost, prayed to the Lord for continence. After saying, Place a guard on my mouth, O Lord, and the gate of continence on my lips; do not let my heart lapse into malicious talk (Ps 141:3-4), in order to explain more clearly why he said this, he added, to make excuses for sinning. What is more malicious than those words of evil persons who deny they are evil even when proven guilty of an evil deed they cannot deny? Unable to conceal what was done, and unable to say it did good, and seeing it is obvious they did it, they try to transfer the responsibility for what they did to someone else, thinking to avoid the consequences in this way. By refusing to acknowledge their guilt they add to their guilt, and they do not realize that by excusing instead of accusing themselves of their sins they do not keep away the punishment, but the pardon.
14. There are some who are accustomed to excuse their sins with the plea that fate made them sin, as though the constellations decreed it and heaven sinned first by making those decrees that result in humans then sinning by committing the deeds. Others prefer to attribute their sins to chance. They think that everything comes about as the result of chance happenings, although they also maintain that it is not just by chance and unthinkingly, but by perceiving the arguments, that they hold and assert this opinion. What kind of madness is it that attributes one's argumentation to reason, but makes one's actions subject to chance? Others attribute all the evil they do to the devil and do not accept that they even have any share of it with him. Although they could suspect that he persuaded them with hidden suggestions, they cannot doubt that, whatever their source, they gave consent to those suggestions. There are even some who go so far as to excuse themselves by accusing God. They are wretched because of God's judgment, but are blasphemers by their own madness. The charge they bring against him is that there is a rebellious evil substance coming from a power opposed to him, which he would have been unable to resist if he had not mingled something of his own substance and nature with that rebellious one, thereby causing it to be contaminated and corrupted.†10 They say then that they sin when the evil nature prevails over God's nature.
This is the foul insanity of the Manichees, whose diabolical artifices are so easily undermined by the indubitable truth that proclaims God's nature to be immune from contamination and corruption.†11 What abominable contamination and corruption, however, is rightly ascribed to them, when they hold God, who is supremely and incomparably good, to be subject to contamination and corruption?
God's Omnipotence Brings Good Out of Evil
6, 15. There are also those who make excuses for their sins by blaming God, saying that he approves of the sins. If he did not approve, they say, with his omnipotence he would not allow them to occur at all—as if he allowed sins to go unpunished, even in the case of those whom he rescues from eternal punishment by forgiving their sins. Indeed no one is pardoned and spared the greater punishment due to them without undergoing some penalty, even though much less than the one due to them before. In this way the generosity of mercy is imparted without the rule of justice being abandoned. Even a sin that appears to go unpunished has its own attendant punishment, so that there is no one who does not either grieve at its bitterness or fail to grieve through blindness. Therefore, just as you say, "Why does he permit it, if he does not approve?" I say, "Why does he punish it, if he approves?" And by the same reasoning, just as I acknowledge that the deeds punished by the just God would not happen at all unless they were permitted by the omnipotent God, so you should acknowledge that they should not be committed. Then by not committing the deeds he punishes, we may be worthy to learn from him why he allows the deeds he punishes to occur. As the scripture says, Solid food is for the perfect (Heb 5:14), and so those who have made good progress already understand that it is more characteristic of the divine omnipotence to allow evils that come from the exercise of free will. So great is his omnipotent goodness that he can cause good to come from bad things, either by pardoning or by healing or by adapting them and converting them to good purposes for the benefit of the devout and obedient, or even by avenging them with absolute justice. All these things are good and entirely worthy of the good and omnipotent God, and yet they do not happen except as the result of evil. What, therefore, could be better, what could be more omnipotent than he who does no evil but does good even as a result of evil?
Those who have done wrong cry out to him, Forgive us our debts (Mt 6:12); he hears and