Can we skip this chapter? It kind of stinks.
Continuing his discussion of why bad things happen to good people and vice-versa, Augustine comes up with three propositions, one of which he spells out in more detail than the others:
1. Nobody is really good. "For though they are very far from being shameful and ungodly criminals, they still do not find themselves ... entirely unacquainted with fault.[...]" True enough, and evidence for the non-dualistic reading of "good people" and 'bad people" in this whole section.
2. Seemingly good people don't spend enough time correcting obviously bad people. This is the really annoying proposition, and Augustine goes on about it at great length. You know that "Christian" brother-in-law who makes family gatherings such a pain by telling everybody else what they are doing wrong with their lives? Augustine sounds just like him, and indeed Augustine may have helped to create and empower generations of censorious and self-righteous Puritans. If he's in Hell now, this is probably why; it's hard to imagine anything much worse he could have done in his life, including the way he got religion and abandoned the mother of his child.
3. As a test of piety. Do we, like Job, love God even when there is reward? God seems to be curious.
They say two out of three ain't bad, and I don't mind his first and third propositions. But that second one is a doozy. The idea that God punishes us for being too lenient with [other] sinners seems to fly in the face of God's own forbearance with them, described in Ch. 8. It actually makes me wonder whether he knew where he was going with this argument, or just throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck.
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