Question XXXIX. Whether the Lord can inflict, even on the innocent, the punishments by which the souls of the guilty are tortured in this or the future age?

In this age [life], the punishments [are] indeed of this kind: the removal of divine grace, the subtraction of divine aids, the bites and anguishes of conscience; but in the future [age] there is the punishment of loss, and of sense, [both] purgatorial [and] eternal. First, therefore: the Lord can inflict none of these punishments on anyone ordinarily, unless a fault reside in him. Because either these are wont never to be snatched away from a man except [as a consequence of] the contrary sin, or [they are] never [inflicted] except [as] following a preceding fault. And this [is] clear enough as to the individual [punishments]. And this is [what] St. Augustine teaches (in the cited question 8): “It is not to be believed [that], by the punishments which are inflicted after death, one can be condemned for another.” And afterward: “invisible punishments, which cannot but harm, and cannot profit — no one, with God [as] Judge, pays [them] for another’s sins.” Again (q. 9): “It is not to be believed that the sons of Achan, for the sin of the father — of which they were innocent — [were], even after death, burned with the punishment of infernal fire. For that death, indeed, which awaits all, although it come from the first [original] sin, yet, because we are so born that we must necessarily die, [it] is, when hastened, useful to some. Whence it is read of a certain [man], ‘He was snatched away, lest malice change his understanding.’” St. Gregory (ch. 31, bk. 15 Morals): “In the flesh, sons are sometimes punished even from the father’s sin. But, original sin being blotted out, they are not held, in the soul, by the wickedness of [their] parents.” Secondly: If the sole absolute power of God be considered, he could surely withdraw grace and aids from a man, and inflict the torments both of temporary and of eternal fire; but neither would they have the account [nature] of a true punishment — which is the companion and consequent of some sin — nor is the divine power now to be considered [in that way], but in that way in which he has decreed and is wont to act: [namely] that on an undeserving [person] such great and such horrible miseries be not imposed. And this latter [view] Scotus holds (bk. 4, dist. 41, q. 1), Marsilius (1, dist. 49), and in the same place Gabriel, Gregory, and others of that scholastic family — which [thing] those do not deny who first assert that [other view], the Thomists. And so, concerning the evils of this life, which are punishments not in respect of the innocent, but of the guilty, Boethius speaks (bk. 4, prose 5).