An Autonomy Defense of Evil
AMDG
It was entirely fitting that the Father would breathe the Spirit over the deep despite the risk that some of that goodness could possibly get coopted by finite agents for ends other than becoming Christ as intended by the Trinity.
While that divine permission made it possible for us to parasitize creation’s goodness for perverse ends, it never became tantamount to a divine intent that we’d do so. Such a moral modal collapse between the divine antecedent & consequent wills could only ever have occurred had those unintended, incidental evil consequences been permitted to become disproportional to the intended divine ends. They weren’t (at least in my view per Maritain’s apokatastenai).
So, since finite creatures have only ever been allowed to suffer mere transitory consequences & ephemeral purgations, such punishments have remained just.
Contrastingly, any eternal punishments of finite creatures would have been prima facie unjust, since such everlasting sufferings would have been manifestly disproportional. Divine permission would, then, have become tantamount to intent & the antecedent-consequent will distinction would, indeed, have suffered a moral modal collapse (cf the game theoretic argument of DBH).
Yes, even protologically, we were gifted such edenic (sub-eschatological) journeys to become both ever more Christ-like (participatorily) & the Totus Christus (perichoretically). Co-creatively, we were made with – not only free natural inclinations, but – autonomous self-appropriations (cf Wahlberg).
It’s not our rational freedom that could ever be or ever could have been diminished by the lights of glory in visions beatific. It’s a much richer notion of self-determination that we’re co-creatively self-appropriating, temporally & historically, by the lights of experience & faith, those lights affording us an autonomy ordered toward ever-enhanced degrees of divine intimacy with ever-expanded divine aesthetic scopes.
God made time so everything wouldn’t happen all at once!
He titrated His divine life blood for us so we wouldn’t suffer the drowning & intoxication of swallowing, at once, Her ocean of love!
Our earthly sojourns provision us with divine dimmer switches, whereby we progressively adjust to His glorious illuminations.
If, at first, we look through a glass darkly, it’s so we’ll not be blinded by gazing immediately at the Son, Whom, after ten thousand years, we, ourselves, will bright-shiningly reflect.
Without the historical interruption of our protological-eschatological edenic journey to the greater glory of God, while there would be no sacrifice, whatsoever, of our free rational inclinations & enjoyment of beatitudes, there could be some sacrifice of the optimal maximization of the overall divine intimacy to potentially be enjoyed by all rational creatures. That’s to say that, what’s at stake, will never be any sacrifice of the divine intrinsic perfections & aesthetic intensity. What’s playing out historically, rather, is an expansion of the divine aesthetic scope & ad majorem Dei gloriam by those who’d thus magnify the Lord & rejoice in God, our Savior, as He, Who is mighty, has done great things and Holy is His Name.