Reward and Judgment

Among us the prince of the wicked demons is called the serpent and Satan and the devil, as you can learn by looking into our writings. Christ foretold that he would be sent into the fire with his host and the people who follow him, to be punished without end.

For God delays the fulfillment of this because of the human race: he foreknows that some will be saved by repentance, and some even that have not yet been born. In the beginning he made the race with the power to choose the truth and do good; so that all people are without excuse before God, for they were born able to reason and reflect.

Let no one take comfort from fate or excuse what happens by it. Let there be a lot of fortune — the mind is still free; and so a person’s acts, not status, are judged.

What else is fate but what God has spoken (fatus) concerning each of us? Since he can foreknow the material, he also sets the fates according to each one’s deserts and qualities. So it is not birth-chart that is punished in us, but the nature of the character.

Does Christ not free all with equal munificence? Does he not free equally when he calls all equally? He opens the fountain of life to all; no one is forbidden to drink.

If you scorn the gift, why does the one who invites wait? His only part is to set the fruit of his kindness under the decision of your own right (sub tui iuris arbitrio). Plato said the lot of choosing a life is not God’s doing as a cause forced on another; free decision (voluntatis libertas) sits in the power of the one who willed.

God lays necessity on no one; he terrifies no one with bullying fear. Our salvation is not so necessary to him that he gains or loses something if he makes us gods or lets us dissolve into nothing.

This is why someone who would rather go without or die than harm another or snatch something seems foolish — people think a human being is destroyed by death. From that persuasion come the errors of the crowd and of the philosophers.

If after death we are nothing, it is most foolish not to manage this life so that it lasts long and is full of every advantage — and whoever does that must leave the rule of justice. But if a better and longer life remains for a human being — which we learn from great philosophers’ arguments, oracles of seers, and divine voices of prophets — then it is the wise person’s part to despise the present with its goods, since every loss is weighed against immortality.