if it had not this natural inertia whereof we have just spoken to give it a kind of repugnance to being moved.  Let us now compare the force which the current exercises on boats, and communicates to them, with the action of God, who produces and conserves whatever is positive in creatures, and gives them perfection, being and force:  let us compare, I say, the inertia of matter with the natural imperfection of creatures, and the slowness of the laden boat with the defects to be found in the qualities and the action of the creature; and we shall find that there is nothing so just as this comparison.  The current is the cause of the boat’s movement, but not of its retardation; God is the cause of perfection in the nature and the actions of the creature, but the limitation of the receptivity of the creature is the cause of the defects there are in its action.  Thus the Platonists, St. Augustine and the Schoolmen were right to say that God is the cause of the material element of evil which lies in the positive, and not of the formal element, which lies in privation.  Even so one may say that the current is the cause of the material element of the retardation, but not of the formal:  that is, it is the cause of the boat’s speed without being the cause of the limits to this speed.  And God is no more the cause of sin than the river’s current is the cause of the retardation of the boat.  Force also in relation to matter is as the spirit in relation to the flesh; the spirit is willing and the flesh is weak, and spirits act...

  quantum non noxia corpora tardant.

31.  There is, then, a wholly similar relation between such and such an action of God, and such and such a passion or reception of the creature, which in the ordinary course of things is perfected only in proportion to its ‘receptivity’, such is the term used.  And when it is said that the creature depends upon God in so far as it exists and in so far as it acts, and even that conservation is a continual creation, this is true in that God gives ever to the creature and produces continually all that in it is positive, good and perfect, every perfect gift coming from the Father of lights.  The imperfections, on the other hand, and the defects in operations spring from the original limitation that the creature could not but [142] receive with the first beginning of its being, through the ideal reasons which restrict it.  For God could not give the creature all without making of it a God; therefore there must needs be different degrees in the perfection of things, and limitations also of every kind.

32.  This consideration will serve also to satisfy some modern philosophers who go so far as to say that God is the only agent.  It is true that God is the only one whose action is pure and without admixture of what is termed ‘to suffer’:  but that does not preclude the creature’s participation in actions, since the action of the creature is a modification of the substance, flowing naturally