The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

2. Vitium in some of its forms is, as Nonius says, "perpetua et
insanabilis atque irrevocabilis causa," "a cause which works always,
beyond healing and beyond revoke."
3, and last. Vitium is privative, yet the privation is productive of positive
misery. Blindness is not a thing, but the want of a thing. When the first
blindness took place, there was no creation of blindness, but the mere
privation of that light which was given in the first creation: The absence of
an arm is not a thing, but the defect of a thing; God did not create
blindness or armlessness, nor does a man become a creator by making
himself or his child armless or sightless. These conditions are in themselves
but negations, yet what positive ill results from these negations. The
ignorance of the blind, the helplessness of the maimed, result from these
privative vitia. Though blindness be, per se, not something, but nothing,
though the want of an arm be nothing, the deep grief is that where
something should be there is nothing. The sophistry, therefore, that mere
negation, mere defect, is inoperative, is exposed even by nature, for lack of
operation is often the greatest of ills, and to say that because original sin is
not substance or essence there can be no result from it, is in the last degree
shallow and false. This point has been felicitously stated by Melanchthon:
"It is useful to mark clearly the difference between the things created by
God, and sin, which is the disturbance or confusion of the divine order:
hence it is rightly said, Sin is a defect or privation...And here lies the
answer to the sophistical question, Inasmuch as a defect is nothing, that is,
is not a positive thing, how can God be angry at nothing? The answer is,
there is a broad distinction between nothing privative and nothing
negative. For nothing taken in the privative sense requires a subject, and is
a certain destruction in that subject, on account of which that subject is
rejected, as the ruins of an edifice are a destruction or scattering of parts in
the mass. Thus Original Sin is a defilement and confusion of the parts of
man, and God hates it, and on account of it is angered at the subject. In
disease nothing has the sense of privation, inasmuch as the subject
remains, and disease is a certain disturbance in the subject. The wounded
man looks upon his wound sorrowfully, and knows