On the Nature of the Good

Contents

Reading pages: 1–32 · 33–47 · 48

1. 1God is the highest and unchangeable good, and every other nature, spirit or body, is good and comes from him, made from nothing.
2. 2Augustine addresses those who, troubled by evil and mortality, posit a second nature not made by God, and starts from their own admission that every good is from God.
3. 3Measure, form, and order are the general goods in all created things, and God, the source of them, is above them all; where they are absent there is no nature.
4. 4Evil is nothing but the corruption of a nature's measure, form, or order; a corrupted nature is good as nature and evil as corrupted.
5. 5A higher nature, even corrupted, can remain better than a lower one that is uncorrupted, as corrupted gold is better than sound silver and any spirit better than any body.
6. 6A nature that cannot be corrupted is the highest good; one that can be corrupted is still good, since corruption harms only by removing good.
7. 7Rational spirits cannot be corrupted unless they will it; if they abandon obedience they are corrupted willingly by sin and unwillingly by punishment, which is justice.
8. 8Lower creatures, neither happy nor miserable, are still good and so ordered that their passing away forms a temporal beauty, like syllables in a well-made speech.
9. 9God's remission of punishment shows his goodness and his exacting of it shows no injustice; even a punished nature keeps some measure, form, and order and so some good.
10. 10Corruptible natures exist because God made them, and are changeable because he made them from nothing; to make them equal to what is born of God would equate nothing with God.
11. 11God's nature cannot be harmed, and no nature under him is harmed unjustly: the unjust will belongs to the wrongdoer, but the power to harm is permitted by God.
12. 12Those who posit another nature would avoid their blasphemies if they held to their own admission that all goods, great and small, come only from God.
13. 13Augustine lists the goods, life, power, health, memory, understanding, beauty, peace, and above all measure, form, and order, that come from God and without which no nature remains.
14. 14Lesser goods are called by contrary names in comparison with greater, as an ape's beauty is called ugliness beside a human's, though the ape has its own measure and harmony.
15. 15Corruption diminishes only good, so a nature is good; contraries like slow and swift, silence and voice, darkness and light show that the lesser term is a lack of the greater.
16. 16Privations such as darkness and silence also have their fitting place, as God made darkness as fittingly as day; in the hymn of the three youths light and darkness praise God.
17. 17No nature is evil as nature; evil is the diminishing of good, and if all good were removed no nature, including the Manichaean one, would remain.
18. 18Formless matter (hyle) is not evil, since its capacity for form is a good and it too comes from God; Mani's hyle, a former of bodies, amounts to a second god.
19. 19God, who said “I am who am,” truly is because he is unchangeable; nothing is contrary to him except what is not, so every nature is good and from God.
20. 20Pain exists only in good natures resisting loss; worse evils are painless, like rejoicing in iniquity, and the Lord's dead flesh, though wounded, did not see corruption.
21. 21Small things are called “moderate” because some measure remains in them, and even excessive things, under God who arranged all by measure, number, and weight, are held within some measure.
22. 22God is not said to have a measure, lest he seem to have an end, nor to be immoderate; he may be called the highest measure if that means the highest good.
23. 23An “evil” measure, form, or order is one that is less than it should be or unfitted to its thing; wherever there is some measure, form, and order there is good and nature.
24. 24Augustine confirms from Scripture that God is unchangeable, that the Son begotten of him is what he is, and that the Son, through whom all things were made, was not made.
25. 25Augustine rejects the quibble that because “nothing” stands at the end of John 1:3 it must be something that was made, showing that word order makes no difference.
26. 26God made from nothing, through his Word, all that he did not beget of himself, as Paul, 2 Maccabees, and the Psalms attest.
27. 27Things “from” God are not all “of” God: creatures are from him because he made them, not of his substance, and God needed no pre-existing matter.
28. 28“All things from him” means natures, not sins, which vitiate nature and come from the will of sinners, as Rom 2:3–6 shows.
29. 29Although all things are in God, sinners do not defile him, for his Wisdom reaches everything in purity and God cannot be defiled.
30. 30God made even the least, earthly goods, as Paul shows in praising the ordering of the body's members, an order found in all animal flesh.
31. 31Scripture shows that punishment belongs to God's judgment, that sins are forgiven through Christ who died in our nature, and that God is both good and severe without injustice.
32. 32Even the power of the harmful is from God and serves to test the good and punish the wicked, as with Job, Peter, Paul, and Judas; the devil is punished for his own evil will.
33. 33The evil angels became evil by sinning; they are kept for the last judgment and meanwhile are confined in the lower, murky air, which Scripture also calls heaven.
34. 34Sin is not desire for an evil nature but desertion of a better one: Adam desired a good tree but deserted the better Creator who forbade it.
35. 35God forbade the tree to show that the rational soul must be subject to him, and named it the tree of discerning good and evil because disobedience would teach the difference by punishment.
36. 36Not even thorns and thistles are evil natures; sin is using a good badly by deserting the better, as Paul says of those who served the creature rather than the Creator.
37. 37If all natures kept their measure, form, and order there would be no evil; those who misuse goods do not defeat God, who uses their evils well by ordering them justly in punishment.
38. 38Even the eternal fire is not an evil nature; its torment is an evil only to the damned, as light pains sore eyes.
39. 39The eternal fire is not eternal as God is, since it had a beginning and is changeable; only God's unchangeable immortality is true eternity.
40. 40No one can harm God's nature, and God harms no one unjustly nor lets harm go unpunished, as Paul says.
41. 41The Manichaeans' two natures put many goods in their highest evil (the princes of darkness have life, memory, beauty, order) and many evils in God's own nature, which Christ must heal and free.
42. 42Augustine argues that Mani's teaching that divine souls are bound for ever in the globe of darkness makes God condemn part of himself, and he quotes the Fundamental Epistle to show its contradictions.
43. 43Augustine argues that on Manichaean premises God's nature already contained great evils before any mixture, necessity, a cruel will, ignorance, or misery.
44. 44Augustine reports the Manichaean teaching that the divine substance is bound in all things and freed partly by the seduction of the powers of darkness, quoting at length from Mani's Treasury.
45. 45The Manichaean elect claim to free the divine substance by eating; since they say it is bound also in seed, their own premises lead to the obscene practice alleged against them.
46. 46Augustine quotes Mani's Fundamental Epistle on the making of Adam: the prince of darkness gathers light by making his companions couple, devours their offspring, and begets the first man.
47. 47Augustine argues that Manichaean doctrine logically requires an obscene ritual that some are reported to have confessed in court, and calls on Manichaeans either to renounce Mani or to admit what his books imply.
48. 48Augustine closes with a prayer to the patient and merciful God that more Manichaeans may be freed through baptism or repentance, since the keys of the kingdom in the church leave no one beyond hope.