Romans 7:19 — Psychological Contradiction
Theme: Theology & philosophy · 2 sentences.
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ROM-001 · Romans 7:19 — Psychological Contradiction
Purpose: Stress-tests will/act gap and habitual compulsive aspect. Paul: "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing." Tests: wi-vo for intentional good, de-vo for acting-against-value, re as habitual aspect for compulsive repetition. The sentence is a four-slot symmetric structure: [want-good | don't-do] / [reject-harm | keep-doing].
S452
la-mi wi-vo / no la-mi ka-ze
Written: lami wivo / no lami kaze
Romans 7:19a — "For I do not do the good I want to do."
Notes
la-mi = I (first-person agent, la- + mi). wi-vo = willed-good / intended-value: wi (purpose/intent as compound root) + vo (value/good). The pre-/ clause establishes the intention. no la-mi ka-ze = I do not do it: no (negation) + la-mi + ka-ze (ka = act + ze third-person referent = act-on-it; the good is anaphorically recalled by ze). The will-act gap is encoded by the syntactic contrast across /: intention on the left, negated action on the right. Note: wi is here used as a compound root (intent), not as the clause-frame particle wi {purpose} action; the dual role is permitted because the internal compound wi-vo = intent-toward-good is semantically coherent regardless of framing.
S453
la-mi no-wi-de-vo / re la-mi ka-ze
Written: lami nowidevo / re lami kaze
Romans 7:19b — "But the evil I do not want to do, I keep on doing."
Notes
la-mi = I. no-wi-de-vo = rejected-harm: no (negation/repudiation) + wi (intent/will) + de-vo (value-decay = moral acting-against-value; de = decay/deterioration + vo = value). The compound no-wi-de-vo = "will-repudiated value-harm" = what I have deliberately not willed. re la-mi ka-ze = I keep doing it: re (cycle/recurrence) as a clause-level habitual aspect marker + la-mi ka-ze = I act-on-it. re as habitual is its first unambiguous attestion in this role. The structure is symmetric with S452: S452 has [intention left, negated-act right]; S453 has [repudiated-object left, compulsive-act right]. The symmetry encodes Paul's doubled contradiction: both slots of the will are active (positive will and negative will), and both produce the wrong action.
Theological note: de-vo (value-decay = moral evil) is chosen over no-vo (privation-of-value = absence of good) to represent Paul's conception of evil here. Paul's "evil I do" is active corruption, not mere absence — de-vo captures the acting-against-value force. The choice reflects Augustinian corruption (de-vo) over privatio boni (no-vo). Both compounds exist; registering the distinction matters for corpus consistency.
Batch Summary
| Entry | Form | Test |
|---|---|---|
| S452 (ROM-001-A) | lami wivo / no lami kaze |
will-to-good / act-gap |
| S453 (ROM-001-B) | lami nowidevo / re lami kaze |
rejection-of-harm / compulsive repetition |
Key finding: The four-slot structure (want-good | don't-do | reject-harm | keep-doing) maps onto two parallel Tonesu sentences with symmetric / internal structure. re as habitual-compulsive aspect marker (first attested). de-vo vs no-vo distinction gives the corpus a vocabulary for Augustinian vs privation accounts of evil.
New vocabulary introduced: wi-vo (willed-good = intentional value pursuit) · de-vo (value-decay = moral evil / despair, dual-register) · no-wi-de-vo (repudiated harm = what one has rejected willing)
Generated from registry/entries.yaml.