Evils That Are Really Afflictions

Sometimes Holy Scripture, using terms loosely, is accustomed to put “evils” for “afflictions.” This is not because these are properly and by nature evils, but because they are thought to be evils by those on whom they are brought for their good. For when divine judgment reasons with people, it must speak with human language and human feelings. When a doctor, for the sake of health, quite rightly cuts or cauterizes those who are suffering from inflamed ulcers, those who have to bear it consider it an evil. Nor are the spur and the whip pleasant to an unruly horse. Moreover, all discipline seems bitter at the time to those who are disciplined, as the apostle says: “Now all discipline for the present seems to bring not joy but sorrow; but afterward it yields the most peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.” And: “Whom the Lord loves he disciplines, and he scourges every son whom he receives. For what son is there whom the father does not correct?” [a]

So evils are sometimes used to stand for afflictions, as where we read: “And God relented from the evil that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.” And again: “For you, Lord, are gracious and merciful, patient and very merciful, and ready to relent from the evil,” that is, from the sufferings and losses you are forced to bring on us as the wages of our sins. And another prophet, knowing that these things are profitable to some people, prays like this, certainly not out of any grudge against their safety but with an eye to their good: “Add evils to them, O Lord, add evils to the proud of the earth.” And the Lord himself says, “See, I will bring evils upon them,” that is, sorrows and losses, by which they will be disciplined for the present for the health of their souls, and so will at last be driven to turn and hurry back to me, whom they scorned in their prosperity. So we cannot possibly claim that these things are evil in their own nature, for to many they lead to their good and offer occasions of eternal bliss. And therefore, to return to the question raised, all those things that are thought to be brought on us as evils by our enemies or by anyone else should not be counted as evils, but as things indifferent. For in the end they will not be what the one who brought them on us in his rage and fury thinks them, but what the one who endures them makes them.

So when death has been brought upon a saint, we ought not to think that an evil has happened to him, but a thing indifferent. Death is an evil to a wicked man, while to the good it is rest and freedom from evils: “For death is rest to a man whose way is hidden.” And so a good man suffers no loss from it, because he suffers nothing strange. By the crime of an enemy he only receives, and not without the reward of eternal life, what would have happened to him in the course of nature. He pays the debt of human death, which must be paid by an unavoidable law, with the interest of a most fruitful suffering and the recompense of a great reward.