This week, above all other weeks, we are moved to ask: why did God allow suffering and evil? The principle that answers the question is clear, though mysterious: God judged it better to draw good things out of evil than to permit no evils to exist.

But why would he do that?

As Aquinas says, God permits certain physical evils, that the perfect good of the universe may not be hindered; for if all defect and corruption were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe. To have created matter means God judged the circle of life worthwhile.

Similarly, God could have created perfect angelic beings without corruption, confirmed in grace, with no possibility to choose evil. But God judged it better to create greater possibilities and grades of being, better to glorify his infinite perfection by a more profound image.

This seems little consolation to us: we can see that entropy and corruption and evolution make a multifarious and beautiful canvas of creation; but we rebel against natural disaster, pain and suffering, death and extinction. And yet, this instinct is a reminder of our difference.

Revelation gives the answer: we were not made to fall apart and pass away. Whatever good that defect and corruption were to have, it was not for us, for human beings have immaterial souls that cannot die, the forms of bodies that fittingly ought to manifest that beauty forever.

And this destiny was not just endless life, like a wheel, but life for the sake of eternal joy—to know, love, and serve God forever. This was a destiny that God wanted us to deserve, by judging it ourselves to be worthwhile. But we did not want it, preferring not to serve God.

So enters the other kind of evil: not just evil of inequality and corruption, which are only evil in a certain sense, yet not so from the perspective of the whole; rather, moral evil, which is always evil, the lack of what should be done by someone in the first place, injustice.

God could have immediately condemned all evil agents, which would have been just. But he judged it better to allow moral evil to run its course, to bring forth an even greater good: to conquer evil not only by justice but by mercy, which alone can redeem and make things new.

Justice is great but mercy is even greater. Justice does not make God create the world; mercy does. Justice does not move God to offer his own Son to save us; mercy does. But God is both merciful and just: he is better glorified by also making things right, than by mere clemency.

The best answer is: though God is not the author of evil, he does not simply permit evil either. Rather, he shows his goodness by overcoming it: not by a figurative snap of the finger, but by overcoming every one of its victories by merciful love, until all is made right again.

This doesn't absolve us of responsibility: God fittingly still wants us to deserve it; and so he gives his Son to make us holy by his grace but not without our choice. And if we still choose not to serve, both his justice and his mercy are fittingly glorified in our eternal loss.