In the Easter vigil mass, Catholics the world over celebrate "The Exsultet" with boisterous clamor to make sure -- in the most important celebration of the liturgical year -- that every Catholic Christian realizes that original sin was "A Happy Sin" -- a "felix culpa" -- for without that original sin, we would have remained unconscious, and in our comfortable unconsciousness as intellectually, morally and emotionally inert as grazing ruminants.
Idyllic in its own way but "eh..."
Blessedly, great good can come from evil -- often, good actually needs evil as its predicate -- a circumstance occupying the "tail" of the same coin whose "head" insures that "imposition of The Best" results in evil.
Consider the Easter Exsultet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exsultet - traditionally sung by the vigil mass celebrant whose full-throated clamor competes with acolytes instructed to ring their bells as cacophonously as possible.
In this remarkable prayer -- this sonic duel -- the following passage cuts to the quick of the human condition, and (for me) expresses the most satisfying of all theodicies: how evil -- even great evil -- can elicit good - even great good. The summum bonum.
"This is the night
when Christ broke the prison-bars of death
and rose victorious from the underworld.
Our birth would have been no gain,
had we not been redeemed.
O wonder of your humble care for us!
O love, O charity beyond all telling,
to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!
O truly necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault
that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer!"
Smarmy Christians will do their best to deny the existential relationship between good and evil but they can be no more successful in this than those who would deny that Judas' betrayal and Yeshua's subsequent slaughter were necessary to open The Conduit of Grace at the Sacred Heart of Christianity.
You can see this same relationship between "biblical" good and evil in The Book of Job where on the very first page, God and Satan sit down together very much like business partners cutting a deal. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%201&version=NIV
***
Here is a beautifully sung version of the Easter Exsultet as translated in the new Missal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyEAsiDjFP4
Blessedly, great good can come from evil -- often, good actually needs evil as its predicate -- a circumstance occupying the "tail" of the same coin whose "head" insures that "imposition of The Best" results in evil.
Consider the Easter Exsultet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exsultet - traditionally sung by the vigil mass celebrant whose full-throated clamor competes with acolytes instructed to ring their bells as cacophonously as possible.
In this remarkable prayer -- this sonic duel -- the following passage cuts to the quick of the human condition, and (for me) expresses the most satisfying of all theodicies: how evil -- even great evil -- can elicit good - even great good. The summum bonum.
"This is the night
when Christ broke the prison-bars of death
and rose victorious from the underworld.
Our birth would have been no gain,
had we not been redeemed.
O wonder of your humble care for us!
O love, O charity beyond all telling,
to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!
O truly necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault
that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer!"
when Christ broke the prison-bars of death
and rose victorious from the underworld.
Our birth would have been no gain,
had we not been redeemed.
O wonder of your humble care for us!
O love, O charity beyond all telling,
to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!
O truly necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault
that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer!"
Smarmy Christians will do their best to deny the existential relationship between good and evil but they can be no more successful in this than those who would deny that Judas' betrayal and Yeshua's subsequent slaughter were necessary to open The Conduit of Grace at the Sacred Heart of Christianity.
You can see this same relationship between "biblical" good and evil in The Book of Job where on the very first page, God and Satan sit down together very much like business partners cutting a deal. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%201&version=NIV
***
Here is a beautifully sung version of the Easter Exsultet as translated in the new Missal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyEAsiDjFP4
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