The answer
St. Augustine says, “It is one thing to fight well, which is the case now when the struggle of death is resisted; and it is another thing not to have an adversary, which will be the case when death ‘our last enemy is destroyed’ (cf. 1 Cor. 15:26). Too, that continence itself, when it checks and restrains our passions, at the same time both seeks the good toward the immortality to which we are tending and spurns the evil with which in this present mortality we are contending. Truly, it is the lover and watcher of the former, but the enemy and witness against the latter; it seeks the noble, and shuns the ignoble. Continence would not by any means labor in the checking of desires if it freed us from nothing from which it were fitting to set us free, and if it gained nothing for our good in the fight with evil concupiscence. This the Apostle proclaims: ‘For I know,’ he says, ‘that in me, that is, in my flesh, no good dwells because to wish is within my power, but I do not find the strength to accomplish what is good’ (Rom. 7:18). Now, it is possible for a good to be performed where there is no yielding to evil concupiscence, but the good is completed or perfected, however, when evil concupiscence itself is no more. Again, in the same Epistle, the Doctor of the Gentiles proclaims: ‘For I am delighted with the law of God according to the inner man; but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind’ (Rom. 7:22–23).”814
Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty
Notes
814 St. Augustine of Hippo, On Continence 3.6 (FOTC 16:195–196).