And therefore, so long as the vices are being commanded, there is not full peace, for both those which resist are subdued by a perilous battle, and those which have been conquered are not yet triumphed over in secure ease, but are still held down by an anxious rule. In these temptations, then, of all of which it is briefly said in the divine words: Is not the life of man upon earth a temptation? — who will presume so to live that he need not say to God: Forgive us our debts, save the man puffed up? Nor indeed a great man, but one inflated and swollen, whom He resists by righteousness who bestows grace on the humble. Wherefore it is written: God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
Here, therefore, in each individual, righteousness is this: that God commands the obedient man, the soul the body, and reason the vices even when they resist, either by subduing or by resisting them; and that from God Himself both grace for merits and pardon for offenses are sought, and for the good things received thanksgiving is rendered. But in that final peace, to which this righteousness is to be referred and for the attaining of which it is to be held, since our nature, healed by immortality and incorruption, will have no vices, and since nothing in any one of us will be at war either from another or from himself, there will be no need that reason should command the vices, which will be none;
but God will command man, the soul the body, and there will be there so great a sweetness and ease of obeying as there is felicity of living and reigning. And this, there, in all and in each, will be eternal, and it will be certain that it is eternal; and therefore the peace of that blessedness, or the blessedness of that peace, will be the supreme good. But of those who do not belong to that city of God there will be, on the contrary, everlasting misery, which is also called the second death, because neither can the soul be said to live there, which will be estranged from the life of God, nor the body, which will be subject to eternal pains; and for this reason that second death will be the harder, because it will not be able to be ended by death.
But since, just as misery is contrary to blessedness and death to life, so war seems to be contrary to peace, it is rightly asked, as peace has been proclaimed and praised among the ends of the good, what or what kind of war, on the contrary, can be understood among the ends of the wicked. But whoever asks this, let him attend to what is harmful and destructive in war, and he will see that it is nothing else than the mutual adversity and conflict of things. What war, then, can be conceived more grievous and more bitter than where the will is so opposed to passion and passion to will that such enmities are ended by the victory of neither, and where the force of pain so conflicts with the very nature of the body that neither yields to the other?
For here, when this conflict occurs, either pain conquers and death takes away sensation, or nature conquers and health removes the pain. But there both pain remains to afflict, and nature endures to feel; for neither fails, lest the punishment should fail. To these ends of the good and the evil, the former to be sought, the latter to be shunned, since through judgment the good will pass to the former and the evil to the latter — concerning this judgment, as far as God shall grant, I will dispute in the following volume.