“I Do Not Do the Good I Want”

So at daybreak, when the old man had been forced by our intense urging to explore the depths of the apostle’s subject, he spoke as follows: As for the passages by which you try to prove that the apostle Paul spoke, not in his own person, but in the person of sinners: “For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I hate, that I do”; or this: “But if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me”; or what follows: “For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man, but I see another law in my members, opposing the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin that is in my members”: these passages, on the contrary, plainly show that they cannot possibly fit the person of sinners. What is said can apply only to those who are perfect, and it suits only the chastity of those who follow the good example of the apostles. [a]

Otherwise, how could these words apply to the person of sinners: “For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I hate, that I do”? Or this: “But if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me”? For what sinner defiles himself with adultery and sexual immorality against his will? Who plots against his neighbor unwillingly? Who is driven by unavoidable necessity to oppress a man by false witness, or cheat him by theft, or covet another’s goods, or shed his blood? On the contrary, as Scripture says, “Mankind is diligently inclined to wickedness from his youth.” For all are so inflamed by the love of sin and the desire to carry out what they like that they actually watch carefully for an opportunity to commit wickedness, and are afraid of being too slow to enjoy their lusts. They glory in their shame and in the mass of their crimes, as the apostle says in rebuke, and seek credit for themselves out of their own disgrace. The prophet Jeremiah too declares of them that they commit their shameful crimes not only not unwillingly, and not with ease of heart and body, but with laborious effort, so that they come to toil to carry them out, and in their deadly pursuit of sin they are held back even by the hindrance of hard difficulty. As he says: “They have labored to do wickedly.”

Who will say, either, that this applies to sinners: “So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin”? It is plain that they serve God neither with the mind nor with the flesh. Or how can those who sin with the body serve God with the mind, when the flesh receives the incitement to sin from the heart, and the Creator of both natures himself declares that the fountain and spring of sin flows from the heart, saying: “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, adulteries, sexual immorality, thefts, false witness,” and so on? So it is clearly shown that this cannot in any way be taken of the person of sinners. They not only do not hate what is evil but actually love it, and they are so far from serving God with either the mind or the flesh that they sin with the mind before they do with the flesh; before they carry out the pleasures of the body, they are overcome by sin in their mind and thoughts.