1. What the Punishment of the Bad is

a. About the Essence of Punishment or about Sadness

95. About the first [n.94]:

Punishment is ‘a perceivable lack of an agreeable good in an intellectual nature’, or ‘a perceivable presence of a disagreeable evil’ in the same. Now the good of intellectual nature is double in kind: namely the good of advantage and the good of the honorable. The useful good, indeed, which is posited as a third, is reduced to either other of these, according as it is ordered toward it. And although sometimes the ideas of the advantageous and the honorable good come together in the same thing (as in the enjoyment of God in the fatherland), indeed although generally everything honorable is advantageous (but not conversely), yet the supreme advantage is beatitude and it would be advantageous even if, per impossibile, it were not honorable; also, the supreme good is charity and it would be honorable even if, per impossibile, it were not advantageous. Therefore in an intellectual nature there is a double punishment by privation of this double good: the first is called the bad of injustice or of guilt, and it can be called obstinacy in sin; the second is called the punishment of loss, or either loss or damnation.

96. The disagreeable bad in a nature merely intellectual cannot be any operation of that nature taken in itself, because any operation of it at all is agreeable. Indeed, every act of understanding, taken in itself, agrees with the intellect, and every act of willing agrees with the will; and likewise every act of willing-against, taken in itself, agrees with the will, because the will has willing-against as freely as it has willing, and so even when comparing this power with the former [sc. understanding], the operation of one is not disagreeable to the other. So, nothing will be found there [sc. in an intellectual nature] that is disagreeable positively to such nature save a distinct suffering opposite to its operation, or a disagreeable operation - not disagreeable in itself but because it is unwanted; such a passion is sadness. An unwanted operation, and indeed any unwanted thing generally, is cause, when put into effect, of sadness. Such sort of unwanted operation is immoderate consideration of fire, as was said before in d.44 n.7, which is against the command of the will that wills freely to use its intelligence for application now to this object, now to that; but now the intelligence is, contrary to this willing, detained always in intense consideration of fire, whereby it is impeded from perfect consideration of other objects, as was said there [ibid.]

b. About the Four Forms of Sadness

α. About the Privation of the Honorable Good, or of Grace, by Guilt

97. Now the sadness is there [in an intellectual nature] in a fourfold way in genus: double sadness about privation of double good.

One sadness indeed is about privation of the honorable good, or of grace, through guilt. For there is sadness about its own obstinacy in sin, which is the first privation - or at least about the sin committed in life, wherein it is now without remission left abandoned. The sadness is not indeed about this or that sin in itself as the sin is the sort of thing it is, but because the sin is a demerit with respect to punishment of loss; that is, the sadness is not because God is offended, but because, thinking on the fact it was immoderate in appetite, it deprived itself by sinning. And this sadness can properly be called the ‘pain of the worm’, namely sadness arising from remorse about sin committed, not because it is sin but because it is a demeriting cause with respect to the pain of loss.

β. About the Privation of the Advantageous Good, namely Beatitude

98. Sadness about the lack of the advantageous good, namely beatitude - this either has no name but can be called all-absorbing sadness, because that of which the desire is most of all present in nature, and specifically in it along with restraint by the justice it abandoned - the perpetual lack of this object of desire, when perceived, saddens totally by way of absorption; or its name is ‘pain of loss’, taken so as to be transitive in construal, that is pain about loss; for to call the mere lack of what is advantageous the ‘pain of loss’ is an intransitive construal.

γ. About the Double Positive Disagreeable

99. And there is a double sadness about what is positively disagreeable: one about the perpetual detention of fire as definitively locating it [sc. intellectual nature] in a place; another about the detention of the intellect in intense consideration of fire as object. Which two positives, namely two detentions, are not wanted and are therefore disagreeable - not so as to destroy the nature of the power they are in, but in the way it is disagreeable for the heavy to be above and in the way this would be sad for it if it were perceived by it. And these two sadnesses about double detention can be named as follows: the first as ‘penalty of incarceration’, the second as ‘penalty of blinding’ - read as transitive in construal, taking penalty for sadness and the term added in the genitive for the object that causes sadness.

100. In this way, therefore, we have two punishments in genus by privation of a double good, and a quadruple punishment by positing a quadruple sadness, with respect to which there are two positive causes (two unwanted detentions) and two privations (the unwanted and perceived privations).