passage 158 of 360 · book with much acrimony. But the accused won his case in a Synod. > PART TWO (12/80)
Si mala sustulerat, non erat ille bonus.
One would need to have a bent towards perversity to say after this that it is more malicious to leave to someone the whole trouble and the whole blame of his destruction. When God does leave it to a man, it has belonged to him since before his existence; it was already in the idea of him as still merely possible, before the decree of God which makes him to exist. Can one, then, leave it or give it to another? There is the whole matter.
- VII. 'A true benefactor gives promptly, and does not wait to give until those he loves have suffered long miseries from the privation of what he could have imparted to them at first very easily, and without causing any inconvenience to himself. If the limitation of his forces does not permit him to do good without inflicting pain or some other inconvenience, he acquiesces in this, but only regretfully, and he never employs this way of rendering service when he can render it without mingling any kind of evil in his favours. If the profit one could derive from the evils he inflicted could spring as easily from an unalloyed good as from those evils, he would take the straight road of unalloyed good, and not the indirect road that would lead from the evil to the good. If he showers riches and honours, it is not to the end that those who have enjoyed them, when they come to lose them, should be all the more deeply afflicted in proportion to their previous experience of pleasure, and that thus they should become more unhappy than the persons who have always been deprived of these advantages. A malicious being would shower good things at such a price upon the people for whom he had the most hatred.'
(Compare this passage of Aristotle, Rhetor., 1. 2, c. 23, p. m. 446:
[Greek: hoion ei doie an tis tini hina aphelomenos leipesei; hothen kai tout' eiretai,]
[Greek: pollois ho daimon ou kat' eunoian pheron]
[Greek: Megala didosin eutychemat', all' hina]
[Greek: tas symphoras labosin epiphanesteras.]
[196]
Id est: Veluti si quis alicui aliquid det, ut (postea) hoc (ipsi) erepto
(ipsum) afficiat dolore. Unde etiam illud est dictum:
Bona magna multis non amicus dat Deus,
Insigniore ut rursus his privet malo.)
HKB