2. Whether the Punishment of the Bad is from God, or about the Four Penalties

a. About the First and Second Penalty or Punishment

101. About the second article [n.94]:

The first penalty [n.97], namely the continuation of guilt without intermission, which continuation can be called ‘obstinacy’, does not have God for positive cause. For just as guilt, when committed, does not, as guilt, have any positive cause, so neither does it to the extent that guilt as guilt is continued; and, as guilt, it is the first penalty, according to the remark of Augustine Confessions 1.12 n.19, “You have commanded, Lord, and so it is, that every sinner should be a punishment to himself;” and there was discussion of this in Ord. II d.7 n.92. Now this guilt, as continued, is from God as negative cause, namely as not remitting it. He is not, however, the first cause, but the will itself voluntarily continuing it is the demeritorious cause that God does not remit it - or at least the will itself, when it committed it, demerited, though it not always continue it after the act of the sin.

102. The second penalty likewise, since it is a privation, has no positive cause, but does have God as negative cause, because having him as not conferring beatitude; but this ‘not causing’ of God’s has another cause, a cause of demerit, in the [one punished], namely guilt, whereby it was said [n.97] that this advantage is not conferred on him.

b. About the Third and Fourth Penalty or Punishment

103. But the two unwanted punishments, namely the two detentions [n.99], are from God, because they are positive realities and consequently good.

And the first detention is from God immediately, at least as it is perpetual, because although fire may detain a spirit as if formally, yet it does not effectively locate him in place, namely neither by effectively detaining him in this ‘where’ nor by prohibiting him from that ‘where’; nor does a spirit locate himself, at least not perpetually. Therefore God is immediately cause of this definitive, perpetual detention.

And of the other detention, namely of the intelligence in intense consideration of fire, the proximate but partial cause is the fire. Now God is the remaining and immediate cause, because according to the common order of causes, an object should, in acting on someone’s intelligence, have a causality subordinate with respect to his will; but here the object is not subordinate to the will of the spirit himself, rather it moves against his will, as if immediately subordinate to the divine will.

104. These four sadnesses, then, since they are positive effects, are from God, but all are so mediately, namely through the medium of apprehension of the unwanted object.