And let no one ask why God, foreseeing the human misfortune that would befall humanity through its lack of good counsel, nevertheless proceeded to create the human being, for whom perhaps it would have been more advantageous not to come into being than to exist amid evils. For those who have been deceitfully carried away by Manichaean teachings put forward such arguments in support of their own error, as though by this they could prove that the Creator of human nature is evil.
For, they argue, if God is ignorant of none of the things that exist, yet the human being is in evils, the account of God's goodness could no longer be maintained if He brought the human being into life while knowing that he would live amid evils. For if the activity that accords with the good necessarily belongs to a good nature, then this sorrowful and mortal life, they say, could no longer be traced back to the workmanship of the Good. Instead, one must suppose some other cause of such a life, whose nature has an inclination toward evil.
All these and similar claims seem to have a certain force through their superficial plausibility for those who have admitted the heretical deception deep within themselves, like a dye that soaks in. But to those with clearer insight into the truth, their unsoundness and the ready demonstration of their deception are plainly visible. And here I think it is fitting to bring forward the Apostle as an advocate for the charge against them.
For in his discourse to the Corinthians he distinguishes the fleshly and spiritual conditions of souls, showing, I think, by what he says that it is not fitting to judge good or evil by sensation. Rather, withdrawing the mind from the things that appear in relation to the body, we should discern the nature of the beautiful and of its opposite in themselves. For, he says, 'the spiritual person examines all things.'
I think this is the reason the people who put forward such things have come to invent these doctrines: they define the good by the pleasure of bodily enjoyment. Because the nature of the body, being composite and tending toward dissolution, is necessarily subject to passions and illnesses, and because some painful sensation follows such conditions, they suppose that the making of humanity is the work of an evil god.
For if their understanding looked toward what is higher, and if, removing their mind from its disposition toward pleasures, they examined the nature of existing things without passion, they would not have supposed anything to be evil except wickedness. Every form of wickedness is characterized by deprivation of the good; it does not exist by itself, nor is it contemplated as a subsistent reality. For no evil lies in itself outside moral choice; rather, it is named in this way because the good is absent. But what is not does not subsist, and the Maker of things that subsist is not the maker of what does not subsist.
God, then, is outside the cause of evils, since He is the Maker of things that exist, not of things that do not exist: He created sight, not blindness; He brought forth virtue, not its deprivation; and He set before those who live according to virtue the honor of good things as the prize of moral choice. He did not subject human nature by any violent necessity to what seemed good to Him, dragging it unwillingly toward the beautiful like some lifeless vessel.
If, while the light shines clearly from a cloudless sky, someone voluntarily lowers his sight beneath his eyelids, the sun is not responsible for the fact that he does not see.