Since, therefore, the penal order can be considered both in its eternal decree and in its temporal execution, it is of no small advantage to hold thoroughly what its rationale is, whether it be referred to the eternal decree or to temporal execution. But, with Hilary as witness, if a) the penal order is referred to the eternal decree, it must altogether be held that vessels of death are prepared for no others than those who through an impenitent will will themselves at some time establish that they are to be burned. But if b) the same penal order is compared with temporal execution, it ought to be undoubted: 1) that those alone are punished to whom, from freedom of will, malice was more pleasing; and that these very persons 2) are punished only after mercy and patience, that is, are punished only when the effects of mercy and patience have been rendered vain and sterile by the rebellious obstinacy of the will.
From these things it certainly follows: a) that penalties are decreed from eternity for no one, and penalties are finally inflicted in their time upon no one, except one whom God foreknows will be a contemner of mercy and who afterward in fact has contemned mercy; b) that both the eternal decree of penalty and its temporal execution pertain to that will which has foreknowledge as its companion and which is called the second will; c) that the order of mercy and reward therefore belongs to the first and antecedent will; and d) that no others fall away from this order than those who have freely constructed ruin and destruction for themselves against the benevolent will of God. Hence Hilary, explaining Christ’s words in Matthew1, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them falls to the earth without the will of your Father,” first indeed2—
—admonishes that the two sparrows can be understood of the soul and the body, and then3 adds:
But it must be asked how it is one4 of them which will not fall without the will of God. The will of God is that one of them should rather fly away, but the law proceeding from the constitution of God decrees that one of them should rather fall down. But just as, if they flew away, they would be one, that is, the body would pass into the nature of the soul, and that heaviness of earthly matter would be abolished unto the advancement and substance of the soul5, and the body would rather become spiritual; so, when they have been sold for the price of sins, the subtlety of the soul grows heavy into the nature of bodies and contracts earthly matter from the filth of vices, and it becomes one of them which is delivered6 to the earth.
Footnotes
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Matt. X.29. ↩
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Commentary on Matthew, chap. X, n. 18, col. 657. ↩
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Ibid., n. 19, cols. 657–658. ↩
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The “one” which Hilary mentions is referred to the unity of soul and body. For it is customary for him to teach that the soul and the body, which now are two because neither is fully and perfectly subjected to the other, will after the resurrection be one either in glory or in penalty: for either the body will follow the soul, so that, made a participant with it in spiritual subtlety, it may fly away to heaven; or the soul will be drawn to the body, so that with it it may fall to the earth and to earthly heaviness. Hilary therefore signifies this unity from body and soul by the words “one of them.” ↩
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“Hilary must not be thought,” as Coustant warns, “to assert the abolition of corporeal matter, since he wills only that earthly heaviness and other qualities of this kind, which are naturally present in bodies and are burdensome and troublesome to souls, will be absent after the resurrection; so that the resurrection of corruptible bodies into the glory of incorruption does not destroy nature by extinction but changes it by the condition of quality. For it is not another body, although it rises into another condition, as he himself speaks in Tractate on Psalm II, n. 41. See more on p. 357, note 6. But that the foregoing expressions, ‘the body passes into the nature of the soul’ or ‘is abolished into the substance of the soul,’ are to be understood in a manner other than we are accustomed is clear even from what is immediately added, that the soul of sinners ‘grows heavy into the nature of bodies’; to omit for the present what is read below, n. 24, that it is bestowed upon us by baptism ‘that the body itself may pass into the nature of the soul, which comes from the breath of God.’” ↩
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Others: “is thrust.” ↩