CHAPTER XII
said to be the will that leads him away from evil. This will, then, cannot be the instrument; instead it is the will by which the instrument is affected.
Furthermore, it is obvious that the will as use is never in a man when he is asleep (unless he is dreaming). For this reason, when we say that the will to live justly is in a just man while he is sleeping, we do not understand this to mean the use of the will. The will as affection, then, is neither the will as instrument nor the will as use. And everyone knows also that the will as instrument is different from the will as use, for when I say that I do not have the will to write, no one takes this to mean that I do not have the instru ment for so willing. We may conclude, therefore, that 'will* may mean variously an instrument, an affection, a use.
The instrument of will moves all the other instruments which we freely move--both those instruments that are a part of us (such as our hands, our tongue, our sight) and those that are independent of us (such as a pen or an axe). Furthermore, it causes all our voluntary actions; and it also moves itself by its affections. Hence, we can say that the instrument moves itself.
Now, I said that the instrument of will causes all voluntary actions. But when the matter is considered carefully, we find that it is more accurate to say that God causes everything which human nature or the human will does, for He creates the nature and the instrument of willing together with its affections, without which the instrument does nothing.
CHAPTER XII
A man's every merit, whether good or evil, derives from one or the other of the two affections, which we have called wills. These two wills differ from each other in that the will for what is beneficial is inseparable from the instrument of will; whereas the will for uprightness (as I said above)
was originally separable from the instrument of will--separable, that is, for the angels and for our first parents, and still separable today for those men who are still in this life. These affections also differ in that the will which is the affection for willing what is beneficial is not itself the object that it wills, whereas the will which is the affection for willing uprightness is uprightness. For certainly no one wills uprightness unless he possesses uprightness; and no one can will uprightness except by means of uprightness.
But it is clear that this uprightness belongs to the will considered as instru ment. We mean this uprightness when we define 'justice* as 'uprightness of will kept for its own sake.' And this uprightness is the truth of the will wherein the Lord charges Satan with not having remained steadfast, as I wrote in the dialogue Concerning Truth.
We must now consider how the merits of men--both those merits that lead to salvation and those that lead to damnation--proceed from the two wills which I have called aptitudes, or affections. In itself, uprightness is the cause of no evil, but is the mother of every good merit. This uprightness aids the spirit in its striving against the flesh (Gal. 5:17) and delights 'in the law of God after the inward man' (Rom. 7:22), that is, in accordance with the spirit which strives against the flesh. Even if evil sometimes seems to follow from uprightness, it does not really proceed from it but from something else. Be cause of their uprightness the apostles were a sweet savor to God. (II Cor.
2:15) But the fact that the apostles were also a savor of death unto death for evil men, did not proceed from the justice of the apostles but from the wickedness of those evil men. Wow, the affection for willing what is bene ficial is not always evil, but it is evil when it gives assent to the flesh in its striving against the spirit. (Gal. 5:17)