Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1996, Side 161
151
guishes evil from good and advises the king to avoid the former and
pursue the latter. However, the king, who is extravagant, authoritarian
and dictatorial, ignores the advice of his counsellor and follows his own
will. The king avoids good and becomes infatuated with evil, and the
counsellor eventually falis silent, relents and allows himself to be di-
rected by the king. The Icelandic author’s lively comparison of the will
and reason to a king and counsellor (Spec. Pen. 330-343) appears to
have been inspired by the more terse reference to this traditional meta-
phor in C7Y Il.lvi. 77A, 32-39:
Liberum arbitrium, ut ait Augustinus, est facultas rationis et voluntatis, qua
eligitur bonum gratia existente, malum gratia desistente. In hac diffinitione
simul ponitur ratio, et voluntas. Ratio quidem ut consiliarius, voluntas au-
tem, ut imperator. Nam ratio dicit aliquid esse bonum vel malum, voluntas
dicit, fiat.
The author reiterates that to commit a mortal sin one must consciously
avoid good and knowingly choose evil, so that both one’s will and
reason consent to and become infatuated with sin. It is noted that as a
result, the love of sin removes from its lodging-place divine love, which
is called caritas\ for Capital sin and the love of God can never coexist in
anyone’s breast, which is called the lodging of the soul. This type of
conscious and deliberate sin is called ‘mortal’ because it kills the soul;
and anyone who dies in mortal sin cannot be helped, for out of the tem-
poral end of his life he has contrived for himself eternal death (Spec.
Pen. 344-353).
The author then remarks that although all sins which oppose God and
His love outright are termed ‘mortal’, nevertheless, he notes, some are
more grievous than others, ‘according to the way they are distinguished
in this little note which is called Speculum Penitentis, that is to wit “the
mirror of a sinner and penitent’” (Spec. Pen. 355-357: ‘eptir 'pvi sem
Jjær greinazt j {jesse notula er kallazt speculum penetentis J?at er at
skilia spegill syndvgs mannz og jdranda’). It is not clear whether the
author’s reference to ‘this notula which is called Speculum Penitentis’
describes the Icelandic tract at hånd (whence the name given to the text
by its editors),34 or an unidentified source for the treatise as a whole, or
for this passage in particular. Jonna Louis-Jensen has already surveyed
34 See Pedersen and Louis-Jensen, ‘Speculum penitentis’, p. 200.