# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S79
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith etc.   79

have likewise been brought to completion;) so they never had evil outside of themselves — for in the sense in which the good is something absolute, the former is not anything at all; it is indeed only negative in the divine thought, not, as

though for that very reason a possibility of falling had taken place only in creatures of the world, because they themselves were created out of nothing. Only let it not be forgotten here that their abstract metaphysical theory also carried within it the necessary corrective, in that the Fathers, penetrated by the terrible earnestness of sin, constantly equated privatio with corruptio, depravatio, and perversio, describing evil not as a merely passive lack but as a destructive antithesis (cf. note *, p. 75f.); and when the Scholastics formed the formula, "Deus concurrit ad materiale, non ad formale actionis malae," this, even as adopted by the Lutherans, could only have the sense in which those passages cited above from Melanchthon's Loci must be understood. Cf. Quenstedt I, p. 531f.: "Concursus est actus providentiae divinae, quo Deus influxu generali (see above, p. 358, at the end) in actiones et effectus causarum secundarum qua tales se ipso immediate et simul cum eis et juxta indigentiam et exigentiam uniuscujusque suaviter influit —. Modum quod concernit, concurrit Deus cum naturalibus ad modum causae naturalis, cum causis liberis per modum causae liberae." For the orthodox of every age, sin has simply been more than a mere lack, contrary to the divine order, in the inner spiritual depth of man or angel — more than a partial being-in-the-right within that depth, a failure of creaturely efficacy to which God, too, would have wished to contribute; (some have wished to conclude from this that the above term "concurrere" is not predicated of the actio bona in the same way, just as "adjuvare," strictly taken [in Melanchthon and others], could allow no freedom of choice;) it is certain that the absence of a reality, a position, of the affirming moment that was required by the Creator at this point, was, according to them, at the same time a decisive self-perversion; for how else could they have made the distinction between a permitting and a determining primal will, while nevertheless describing His cooperation as one that is active precisely where the created powers are, that does not go beyond them or tear itself loose from them, but rather, by virtue of the divine condescension that lies in the creation of a world of finite beings, remains in inseparable unity with the creature and pervades its actions from within? If evil, taken metaphysically, were indeed in everything that exists purely negative — something belonging to the metaphysically good which is not yet adequate to the full idea of the good — then moral significance would altogether lose its validity and would be transformed into mere semblance, and the self-imputation of guilt into an untruth, for this would then be only the beginning of every development that leads a created thing to its goal. Satan, too, remains cosmologically good, insofar as, according to his essential being — which can subsist only in God — he contributes as a part to the metaphysical goodness of the universe as a whole; but he has made himself unfit to attain the degrees of perfection, the sum of the effects possible in him, that would have corresponded to the purpose of his having been created; consequently, considered in himself, he is no longer metaphysically good at all, and, because his action was meant to be governed by a holy law of his life, yet he lusted after becoming, in his own way, the cause of himself (as only God can be), he has become evil in the ethical sense as well; whereas all substances which are not themselves free, though corrupted by free beings, can never be called morally, but only metaphysically, evil. But even if one wished to understand by the formale actionis malae not a mere simple negation of determinacies — which lies in the very concept of every finite being capable of a relative perfecting, and which constitutes the various gradations of the visible and the supersensible in the realm of nature — for omnis determinatio est negatio; no, one should see privation as what it is: the lack of some reality that had originally been created as innate to an ens; if, in doing so, one at the same time denies the perverse affirmation that the latter, in its own freedom, itself