Paul Speaks for the Weak

… would the One who knows all things have laid on us the yoke of the law, which so well directs what pleases him and trains us toward what is profitable, if he had known that we were caught in the nooses of Fate? Either let our opponents say that God did not know this; or, if they have chosen to think rightly and are deeply afraid to pour ignorance over his ineffable glory, they say that he gave laws, and indeed they will plainly confess that he fixed the penalties for wrongdoers. Then surely he knows that man lives with a free mind and is able to move by voluntary inclination toward whatever he wishes, with nothing to hinder him.

That is why the inspired Paul said that the law has dominion over a person for as long as he lives (Romans 7:1). He does not say such things, then, as though the human mind were subject to the nod of others. Rather, he reasons as a philosopher and examines closely the passions of human nature. He all but digs out with precision the sicknesses that reach inward to the mind, and he brings a charge against the body for its inborn love of pleasure, very fittingly taking on himself the part of one who is still sick with love of the flesh.

For though he himself had been crucified to the world, and the world to him (Galatians 6:14), and was truly worthy of admiration, he still thought it wise not to look to his own gift, but to make the weakness of those not yet like him the necessary subject of his discourse.

So when you hear him say, “For what I am doing, I do not understand” (Romans 7:15), think of certain exceedingly great sinners who suppose that they are living the truly best life, and that nothing could equal the luxury and the fleeting things of this world. They loathe the ways of decency, but they take pride in their own pleasures and wallow in them without restraint. It is of them, I think, that Paul says, “Those who set their minds on earthly things, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame” (Philippians 3:19). These people, carrying out what is base as though it were something highly praised, might fittingly say, “For what I am doing, I do not understand.”

Let them hear, then: “Wake up, you drunkards, from your wine” (Joel 1:5). For just as lovers of drink and the drunken, their clear thinking impaired by the passion, would not know what they were doing while they were drunk, so those whose minds have grown sick from love of the flesh and the most shameful pleasures would not know what they are doing at all. So Paul is explaining to us a disease of the human heart when he says, “For what I am doing, I do not understand.”

But suppose there is someone who offers a tenderer heart, as it were, to the reproofs of conscience, who is grieved that he does wrong, yet is still overpowered by the pleasures that lead to sin, and goes toward wrongdoing as if against his will. He might fittingly say, “For I do not practice what I want, but I do what I hate” (Romans 7:15). How many people, how many times, have admired self-control, and even begun the practice of it, and then been overcome by the goads of loathsome pleasure; and with their mind giving way to the worse, they have committed the …