B. To the Principal Arguments

183. However, the first argument to the question [n.16] contains the difficulty how sin is a punishment, since every punishment is from God.

184. One response [Bonaventure] is that although what punishment is is not always from God, yet, insofar as punishment brings order to guilt, it is in this way from God, because the order itself is from God.

185. On the contrary: if punishment is not some being that can be from God, then neither is guilt; therefore neither is the relation founded on either extreme from God, and so there is no order there that can be from God.

186. Further, by parity of reasoning guilt could be from God and be an effect of God; for guilt is set in order by punishment as punishment is set in order by guilt, and yet no one allows that punishment is nothing.

187. Therefore one can give a different response [from that in n.184], that a punishment is merely the lack of a good suited to an intellectual nature, just as also is the lack of the vision and enjoyment of God; punishment can in another sense be said to be something positive and yet something unsuited to such a nature, just as excessive heat is something positive and yet is unsuited to flesh.

188. All punishments can in this second sense [n.187] be posited as from God, because they are something positive. And it is about these that the citation from Retractions 1.26 [n.16] must be understood; for it says “among the good works of God,” and good works are those positive things, although they are bad for the punished because they are disagreeable to them.

189. But punishments in the first way [n.187] are not from God as efficient cause (for they cannot have efficient causes), nor from him as deficient cause first but only because of a defect of the created will in some act of sin, God’s will not now acting along with the created will so that it have the good which, as far as depends on himself, he would have cooperated with it for. Such punishment therefore is from God, not by inflicting or effecting it, nor by being first deficient, but by desertion - that is, by deserting the nature that is deficient and leaving it in its defect and in everything consequent to the defect, wherein are included many lackings of perfections suited to such a nature. So the punishment, therefore, that is sin is not from God as efficient cause or as first deficient, but only from him as deserting the will by reason of the will’s first demerit, and the will - deserted by God - falls into a second demerit.

190. To the third argument [n.18; the second argument, n.17, has no response in the Ordinatio] the answer is plain from the same point, that if punishment were inflicted by God it would not be a greater evil but a lesser one - so that the second sin is a punishment that is inflicted by the will sinning and by God only as by his deserting the will.