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The tree is the soul, that is, the man himself; the fruit is the man’s works. An evil man therefore cannot work good works, nor a good man evil works. Therefore if an evil man would work good things, let him first become good. But as long as he continues evil, he cannot bring forth good fruits.
The good is the right relation between all that exists, and this exists in the mind of the Divine, or some heavenly realm. The good is the harmony of a just political community, love, friendship, the ordered human soul of virtues, and the right relation to the Divine and to Nature. The characters in Plato's dialogues mention the many virtues of ...
[5] The third virtue is also commonly referred to as "charity", as this is how the influential King James Bible translated the Greek word agape. The traditional understanding of the difference between cardinal and theological virtues is that the latter are not fully accessible to humans in their natural state without assistance from God. [6]
The Early Church Fathers were influenced by Philo [4] (c. 25 BC – 50 AD), who saw Moses as "the model of human virtue and Sinai as the archetype of man's ascent into the 'luminous darkness' of God." [38] His interpretation of Moses was followed by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor.
For goodness is the light of the mind, and, similarly, evil is the darkness of the mind." [23] [11] Thomas Aquinas concluded, in article 1 of question 5 of the First Part of his Summa Theologiae, that "goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea". [5]
[11]: 27 The Bible primarily speaks of sin as moral evil rather than natural or metaphysical evil. [11]: 21 The writers of the Bible take the reality of a spiritual world beyond this world and its containment of hostile spiritual forces for granted. While the post-Enlightenment world does not, the "dark spiritual forces" can be seen as "symbols ...
The distinction lies both in their source and end. The moral virtue of temperance recognizes food as a good that sustains life, but guards against the sin of gluttony. The infused virtue of temperance disposes the individual to practice fasting and abstinence. The infused moral virtues are connected to the theological virtue of Charity. [16] [14]
This distinction is echoed by some modern open theists, e.g. Gregory A. Boyd, who writes, "Divine goodness does not completely control or in any sense will evil." [ 8 ] Aquinas partly explained this in terms of primary and secondary causality , whereby God is the primary (or transcendent) cause of the world, but not the secondary (or immanent ...