Now, evil is either something that actually exists or something that is simply absent.

The non-existent variety may be the absence of an essence, the absence of a perfection that should belong to that essence, or the absence of an act that ought to issue from it—such as the absence of life, knowledge, hearing, sight, speech, reason, or any manner of righteous deed. The latter include knowing God, loving Him, worshipping Him, relying upon Him, turning back to Him, hoping in Him, fearing Him, complying with His commands and shunning His prohibitions, along with every other praiseworthy inward or outward saying and deed. All of these are goods and virtues, and their non-existence is evil and vice. Yet that absence is not a “thing” in the first place so that it would need a maker or an agent to be attributed to God. Rather, it is one of the necessary concomitants of the soul, which is the very reality of the human being, both before it is created and after it comes into existence.

Before creation it is pure non-being, which of course entails this absence; and after creation it is brought forth weak and deficient, stamped with inadequacy and incapacity. Because these matters are privative, they are ascribed to the soul in the way a non-effect is ascribed to the absence of its cause or to the lack of a motive. They may also, from another angle that we shall explain God willing, be ascribed to the presence of something that negates or opposes them.

To sum up: these privative evils and sins do not exist in any concrete sense such that God would be called their creator—for God is the Creator of every existent thing. As for what does not exist, it is sometimes ascribed to…