“For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, XXVII
Few sentences in Christian thought open a deeper question than this. With a single phrase, “God judged it better,” Augustine suggests that the existence of evil was not a tragic detour in creation but part of the design of divine wisdom itself. If that is true, then the world’s suffering, the fall of humanity, and even the cross belong not to accident but to intention. The line stands like a precipice: one step closer and the entire landscape of God, freedom, and providence shifts beneath our feet.
Augustine begins his Enchiridion not with the problem of evil but with the goodness of God. “The cause of all created things,” he writes, “is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator” (Enchiridion IX). The Trinity, “supremely, equally, and immutably good,” is the fountain from which all being flows. Everything that exists, by existing, is good in some measure. Evil, therefore, cannot be a substance or a rival principle. “What is anything we call evil,” he asks, “except the absence of good?” (Enchiridion XI). Evil is not a thing created but a deficiency, like a wound in the flesh or a crack in stone. When the wound is healed, the evil disappears; it was never something in itself.
But then comes the shock. If evil is only a lack, why would God permit it at all? Augustine’s answer is simple and devastating: “The Omnipotent God…would not allow any evil in His works, unless in His omnipotence and goodness He is able to bring forth good out of evil” (Enchiridion XI). Not only able, but he adds, “God judged it better” to do so. That phrase changes everything. It means that in the wisdom of God, a world where redemption conquers evil is better than a world where evil never existed.
Here lies the seed of what later theologians called the felix culpa—the “fortunate fall.” In a sinless world, humanity might have known God’s justice, but not His mercy. Without sin, there would be nothing to forgive, no cross, no grace. The Fall, then, becomes the dark canvas against which divine love shines most brightly. As Augustine writes, God “made good use of evil deeds, for the damnation of those whom He had justly predestined to punishment and for the salvation of those whom He had mercifully predestined to grace” (Enchiridion XXVI.3).
But if God “judged it better,” then the question remains. Does that make this world, as it is, necessary? Was evil permitted because it was the only path through which His goodness could be fully known? The thought lingered. It had nowhere to go.
Then came Anselm.
Reading Cur Deus Homo brought the question into sharper focus. Anselm begins not with evil but with the necessity of redemption. Why was the incarnation required? Why could God not forgive sin by simple decree? “It is not fitting,” he writes, “for God to forgive sin without satisfaction; for it would leave sin unpunished, and in the order of things nothing less is to be endured than that the creature should take away the honor due the Creator” (Cur Deus Homo I.xiii).
That word fitting caught me. Augustine had spoken of what was “better.” Anselm speaks of what is fitting. Both turn on the same axis. Neither describes constraint from without but coherence from within. Later thinkers made the distinction clear. One kind of necessity is by compulsion, when a will is forced from the outside, like a prisoner obeying a guard or a debtor paying what he must. The other kind is the necessity that follows from the will’s own nature, like a circle by nature having no points. It is not bound but whole. God does not choose arbitrarily. His will must agree with His nature. Once He wills a thing, He cannot will against Himself. The question of necessity begins here, not in what forces God, but in what it means for God to be perfectly consistent with Himself.
To overlook sin would be to act against His own justice. It would make evil harmless, as if falsehood could live alongside truth. Such a world would not be good. So redemption is necessary, not because God was trapped, but because His goodness demands coherence.
The cross, then, was not a reluctant remedy. It was the one act that perfectly fit the nature of God. In Anselm’s logic, divine freedom and divine necessity meet. God is free because nothing outside of Him compels Him. He is necessary because He cannot cease to be who He is. His will and His nature are one.
That realization carries Augustine’s question forward. If God’s will is always in harmony with His nature, then every act of God must reveal what He is. And what He is, above all, is glory. Glory is not an ornament added to His being. It is the radiance of His perfection. Everything He does must display it.
Scripture speaks this way from beginning to end. “My glory I will not give to another,” God declares (Isa. 48:11). “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). Paul says that God acts “to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy” (Rom. 9:23). Creation, judgment, and redemption all serve that end.
The Reformers saw this as the pulse of all providence. Calvin writes that “God has appointed all things for His own glory” (Institutes I.5.6). Jonathan Edwards calls it “a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth.” The movement of history is not random. It is ordered around the self-revelation of God.
If that is true, then redemption cannot be treated as a divine reaction to sin. It is the supreme expression of what God has always purposed to display. Scripture says He “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world… to the praise of his glorious grace” (Eph. 1:4–6). That same glory shines “in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). In His prayer, Jesus says, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you” (John 17:1).
Redemption, then, is not God’s answer to the fall but the plan that gives the fall its place. To make redemption depend on sin would make God’s glory depend on human failure. To see redemption as the fullest revelation of glory makes the fall a permitted shadow, not the source of light.
Scripture does not shrink from that truth. Christ was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). He is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). The plan precedes the fall. The cross stands before creation.
The cross is not plan B. It is the plan. Redemption is not God’s adjustment to history. It is the meaning of history itself.
If God’s will is one with his nature, then his purpose cannot be divided. Creation, fall, and redemption are not separate acts in his mind but one eternal act of will. He does not move from one plan to another. He does not react. He wills all things as one coherent expression of himself.
Aquinas writes, “The will of God is the cause of things, and no cause precedes His will” (Summa Theologiae I.19.4). That truth keeps God from being reduced to a responder within time. He does not look upon sin and improvise. His will stands before all things. Yet that same truth opens another question. If every act of God is eternal and necessary, does He still choose freely? If everything that happens flows from His nature, could it ever have been otherwise?
But that same truth opens another risk. If every act of God is eternal and necessary, does He still choose freely? If everything that happens flows from His nature, can it be otherwise? Theologians call this fear modal collapse—the thought that if God’s will is identical with His essence, then there are no real possibilities, only one necessary world.
This is the edge of divine mystery. Cross it and freedom disappears. Step back, and God’s will becomes uncertain. The answer is not to make divine freedom like ours, but to see that it is of another kind. God’s freedom is not the ability to change His mind. It is the unchanging harmony of His will and His nature. He could not do otherwise because there is nothing better to do.
This is what Anselm glimpsed. God’s necessity is His freedom. This is what Augustine intuited. Evil and good, fall and redemption, all serve a single purpose: to reveal what God is like.