Nothing Good Dwells in My Flesh

The original curse of God has made us fleshly and condemned us to thorns and thistles, and our father has sold us by that unhappy bargain, so that we cannot do the good we want. We are torn away from the remembrance of God Most High and forced to think about what belongs to human weakness. Burning with love of purity, we are often troubled even against our will by natural desires we would rather know nothing about. So we know that in our flesh no good thing dwells, that is, the perpetual and lasting peace of this meditation we have been speaking of. Instead there comes about in us that miserable and wretched division: with the mind we want to serve the law of God, since we never want to take our gaze off the brightness of God; yet, surrounded as we are by the darkness of the flesh, we are forced by a kind of law of sin to tear ourselves away from the good we know. For we fall from that lofty height of mind to earthly cares and thoughts, to which the law of sin, that is, the sentence of God which the first offender received, has not without reason condemned us. [a]

That is why the blessed apostle, though he openly admits that he and all the saints are bound by the constraint of this sin, still boldly declares that none of them will be condemned for it. He says: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.” That is, the grace of Christ frees all his saints day by day from this law of sin and death, under which they are constantly forced to come against their will, whenever they pray to the Lord for the forgiveness of their trespasses. You see, then, that it was in the person not of sinners but of those who are truly saints and perfect that the blessed apostle spoke this saying: “For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I hate, that I do”; and, “I see another law in my members, resisting the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which is in my members.”