CHAPTER VI
Therefore, for any being to be evil is not for it to be something.
I have been discussing that evil which is injustice and have shown that it is undoubtedly nothing at all. There is, of course, another kind of evil, namely the evil of disadvantage--for disadvantages are called evil. Sometimes these disadvantages are nothing (e.g., blindness and deafness), and sometimes they are something (e.g., grief and sadness). But I think I have sufficiently shown in The Fall of Satan that justice is uprightness of will kept for its own sake, that injustice has no being since it is only the absence of a required justice, that every being is from God, and that nothing comes from God except what is good. Moreover, I have discussed the notion of justice still more fully in the dialogue Concerning Truth.
CHAPTER VI
That Nevertheless When God Punishes a Man for Sin, He Does Not Punish Him for Nothing There are certain people who, when they hear that sin is nothing, are accustomed to ask, 'If sin is nothing, then why does God punish a man for sin-for no one should be punished for nothing?' Although this is a small question, some kind of answer should be given to them because they do not really under stand what they are asking.
Now although it is true that the absence of justice is nothing both where there ought to be justice and where it ought not to be, yet God rightly punishes sinners on account of something and not on account of nothing. For as I have shown in the Cur Deus Homo, God both exacts from recalcitrant sin ners the honor due to Him which they were unwilling to repay freely, and He separates these sinners from just persons by an appropriate arrangement so that nothing disordered might exist in His kingdom. /Thus God punishes for
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