296. Why God punishes
296. WHY GOD PUNISHES
If God forgives sins, why does He still insist on punishment? Aren’t these two things opposites?
God does not delight in our sufferings, as appears from Tobit 3:22. . . .
(But) though God does not delight in our punishments as such, yet He does in so far as they are just. . . .
Satisfaction (just punishment) regards both the past offense, for which compensation is made . . . and also future sin, from which we are preserved by it. . . . [P]unishment preserves from future sin because a man does not easily fall back into sin when he has had experience of punishment. Wherefore according to the Philosopher punishments are medicinal. . . (S15,1)
If the scourges (sufferings) which are inflicted by God on account of sin (either in this life or in Purgatory) become in some way the act of the sufferer, they acquire a satisfactory character. Now they become the act of the sufferer in so far as he accepts them for the cleansing of his sins by taking advantage of them patiently. If, however, he refuse to submit to them patiently, then they do not become his personal act in any way and are not of a satisfactory, but merely of a vindictive character. (“Vindictive” refers not to a personal hateful motive but to objective, impersonal, just “vindication”.)
As Augustine observes, even as the same fire makes gold glisten and straw reek, so by the same scourges are the good cleansed and the wicked worsened on account of their impatience. Hence, though the scourges are common to both, satisfaction is only on the side of the good.
Although these scourges are not altogether in our power, yet in some respect they are in so far as we use them patiently. In this way man makes a virtue of necessity, so that such things can become both meritorious and satisfactory (S15,2).
This passage is about the most popular of all arguments for atheism, namely the “problem of suffering”, the apparent contradiction between God’s love, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness and His deliberate willing that we suffer. God’s love is a matter of faith and our suffering is a matter of experience; so if the two contradict each other, faith must be denied, because it is refuted by experience, which cannot be denied.
St. Thomas begins by affirming the data that God, Who loves us, does not delight in our sufferings as such. So if He punishes, it is out of love, not hate. Yet to love someone is to will his happiness, and suffering opposes happiness. But genuine human love sometimes deliberately tolerates and uses sufferings in other people, for instance in surgery, or lifesaving chemotherapy, or parental discipline, which is painful but necessary. The same is true of divine love. For divine love is not another kind of love, another species of love, than the most perfect, honest, deep, passionate and complete human love; it is only that same love, namely the will to the beloved’s greatest good, greatest and truest happiness, but (1) raised to infinity, (2) freed of all imperfections, (3) joined with infinite wisdom, which always knows what the beloved needs the most, deep down, in the long run, as only God and not man can know, and (4) having unlimited power to providentially implement this wisdom and to effect what it sees to be best for the beloved.
The (relatively) innocent often suffer terribly in this world. That is undeniable fact. So take your choice: there are only two possible reasons for this fact. Either there is no God, or there is. If there is, God allows these sufferings. He could stop them. And there are only two possible reasons why He would allow them: because He loves us or because He doesn’t. One possibility is that God allows these sufferings because He lacks even the love we have for each other, for we would not deliberately allow those we love to suffer so. The other possibility is that we are not wiser or more loving than God (what a radical thought!). His answer to Job was essentially that: I’m perfect wisdom and love, and you’re not.
Capish?