while evil things are not part of nature, but everything that is called evil is either
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 1 1 5 except what the Trinity created—this nature was created.5 For this reason it is not lawful to say or believe that the whole creation is consubstantial or co-eternal with God.
3. Again, that all things that God made, however, are very good (Gn 1:31), while evil things are not part of nature, but everything that is called evil is either sin or the punishment of sin, and sin is nothing but the twisted consent of the free will, when we stoop to things forbidden by justice which it is true freedom to abstain from. That is, sin consists not in the things themselves, but in the unlawful use of them. Now the use of things is lawful when the soul remains within the bounds of God's law and subject to the one God in unqualified love, and regulates other things that are subject to it without greed or lust, that is, in accordance with God's commandments. It is in this way, you see, that it will exercise control over them without any trouble or distress, and with the greatest ease and felicity.
The punishment though of sin is when the soul is tormented by created things themselves not being at its service, seeing that it declines to be itself at the service of God; this creation was once upon a time compliant to the soul, when the soul was compliant to God.6 And so there is nothing evil about fire, since it is a creature of God; but all the same we in our frailty get burned by it as our sinsjustly deserve.
Again, that there are sins, however, which are said to be natural, because we cannot help committing them before God's mercy comes to the rescue, after we have fallen into this condition of life through the sin committed by free will.
4. Again, that humanity was made new once more through our Lord Jesus Christ, when God's inexpressible and unchangeable Wisdom herself deigned to take on full and complete humanity and to be born of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, to be crucified, to be buried and rise again and ascend into heaven, which has all happened already; and to come to judge the living and the dead at the end of the age and the resurrection of the dead in the flesh, which is proclaimed as being yet to come; that the Holy Spirit has been given to those who believe in him, that mother Church has been established by him, which is called Catholic insofar as it has been in all respects perfected and is in no way defective and has spread through the whole wide world; that their previous sins have been
He must be referring, in a rather puzzling sentence, to the humanity ofChrist; Christ as man is a creature, created by God the Trinity, and yet he "belongs" to the Trinity. At the back of Augustine's mind, 1 feel sure, is the text of Proverbs 8:22, divine Wisdom, identified with the eternal Logos or Word, saying The Lord created me in the beginning of his work. This was always something of a crux for the Fathers; it seemed to support the Arian error that the divine Word was created, the error against which the Nicene creed introduced the phrase "begotten, not made." The Latin word used here by Augustine, and in his Latin version of this text, is condere, not creare. Jerome got round the difficulty in his Latin Vulgate version by translating the Hebrew verb qanani "possessed me"; modern English versions, RSV and Jerusalem, disagree with him, and revert to "created me." That is, before the fall.