In her recent book The Image of God: The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Mourning (Stump Reference Stump2022), Eleonore Stump takes up a question she thinks has been unduly neglected by contemporary philosophers of religion: Is the world as good as it would have been had original sin, and all subsequent sin and suffering, not occurred? Stump contends that if we do not answer this question in the affirmative, we are left with a problem – a picture of a world which is a disappointment to God. And, she reasons, such a disturbing consequence – ‘the depressing and distressing condition of creation’ (Stump Reference Stump2022, 9) – could undermine belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good God. In response to this problem, Stump sets out to defend the felix culpa view – the view that the world is even better with the Fall than it would have been without. However, I argue in this article that the felix culpa view has unacceptable consequences regarding God’s desires and will, that we can live with the problem of mourning unresolved, and that we need not affirm the felix culpa view to resolve the problem of mourning anyway.

Stump distinguishes the problem of evil, to which she has already offered a response in Wandering in Darkness (Stump Reference Stump2010), from the problem of mourning, which is the focus of The Image of God. On her view, an adequate response to the problem of evil would show that God is justified in allowing evil in the world, including the Fall of humanity resulting from humanity’s original sin. For instance, suppose that our loving union with God is a great good which outweighs all the evil of the world, but our uniting to God in love is not possible without our having the freedom to reject God and do evil. And suppose we do exercise the freedom to reject God and do evil – but God is justified in allowing us to do so, since we (or some of us) ultimately achieve loving union with God. This is a possible reply to the problem of evil.

Still, we may wonder whether Creation would have been better if it ‘had not been so damaged by human evil’ (Reference Stump2022, 4) – if, say, we had all simply exercised our freedom to love God and do only good. This leads to the problem of mourning: ‘Even if God was justified in allowing a world with a Fall, why is mourning not the right reaction to the way the world is?’ (Reference Stump2022, 7). This characterization of the two problems highlights how Stump sees human (indeterministic) freedom as central to an adequate response to the problem of evil. For a response to the problem of evil that assumed determinism would already make clear that God only allows human sin and suffering to make the world better than it could have been without such evil.Footnote ¹ To put the point differently we may appeal to the distinction Stump relies on, between God’s antecedent and consequent will: ‘God’s antecedent will is what God would have willed if everything in the world had been up to God alone. God’s consequent will is what God actually does will, given what God’s creatures will’ (Stump Reference Stump2022, 4). On this set of definitions it follows that if the whole world were determined by God, God’s antecedent and consequent wills would be identical. But since on Stump’s view they are apparently not – since God does not antecedently will human sinFootnote ² – we are left with a residual worry: ‘why should we not suppose that there is a defeat for God, a sadness, a deficiency of some sort, in the fact that God’s consequent will is different from his antecedent will, that God’s “Plan A” for the world had to be replaced by God’s “Plan B?”’ (Stump Reference Stump2022, 5). This is what Stump refers to as ‘the problem of mourning’. The challenge, then, is to show that mourning is not the proper response to the world – for the Creator (Stump Reference Stump2022, 4) or for created persons, reflecting on their lives and what might have been (Stump Reference Stump2022, 7).

In the remainder of the book, Stump defends an idea she calls ‘Christianity’s response’ to the problem of mourning (Stump Reference Stump2022, 25): the felix culpa view, according to which ‘the post-Fall world and the lives of those in grace in this world are somehow better, more glorious, more of a triumph for the Creator, than the world and those lives would have been had there been no Fall’ (Stump Reference Stump2022, 11). In fact, Stump maintains that all that is needed to respond to the problem of mourning is something analogous to a defence (rather than a theodicy) in response to the problem of evil: ‘consistent stories in which the claims of the felix culpa view are embedded and which are such that no internal inconsistency or uncontested empirical evidence rules out supposing that the stories could be true in the actual world’ (Stump Reference Stump2022, 25). She also narrows her focus from the value of the whole world to that of individual lives, so that the task is to demonstrate that ‘it is possible for any post-Fall life of a human being to be better than that life would have been in a world without a Fall’ (Stump Reference Stump2022, 116). A test for whether a person’s life is better with some instance of evil than without it is whether, looking back, the individual would wish that ‘God had done otherwise with respect to him’ (Stump Reference Stump2022, 242), or rather would understand the evil to be integral to some good and so not wish it away.

Stump ends up analyzing the stories of Mary Magdalene and the apostle Peter as ‘test cases’ for her defence (Stump Reference Stump2022, 256); and she argues that these stories do, or at least possibly do, ‘embed’ the claims of the felix culpa view. In other words, it seems possible that Mary’s and Peter’s lives were better with the evil they suffered than they would have been without it. And both of them suffered greatly. On the assumption that Mary Magdalene is Mary of Bethany, and also ‘the sinner who crashes the dinner party in the story in the Gospel of Luke’ (Stump Reference Stump2022, 278), Mary experienced significant injustice, marginalization, humiliation, shame, and grief in her life: she was considered by her own community an untouchable (Stump Reference Stump2022, 203); at the death of her brother she felt abandoned by Christ and distressed at the thought that she did not matter to him (Stump Reference Stump2022, 204); and because of her low social status and invisibility within her community, she was prevented from anointing and burying her beloved Christ’s body (Reference Stump2022, 199, 202, 204). Peter’s suffering was due to his own grave sin and subsequent guilt, in betraying Christ in his hour of need. Stump considers Peter’s sin to set ‘some kind of upper bound for human wrongdoing’ (Reference Stump2022, 279), writing, ‘Peter could not have been more disfigured in his sins or more separated from Christ than he was during the time between his betrayal of Christ and Christ’s resurrection’ (Reference Stump2022, 287).

But Stump argues that Mary’s and Peter’s suffering (and Peter’s sin) enabled them to love Christ more deeply, and thus magnified the image of God in them – the image, that is, that Christ revealed in his passion, in accepting suffering for the sake of love (Reference Stump2022, 285). Because of their suffering and separation from Christ, ‘each of them cleaved to Christ with a greater openness to receive Christ’s love and to reciprocate it than they had before’ (Reference Stump2022, 290). While Christ could have spared them much of this suffering – for instance, by revealing to Mary ahead of time that he would resurrect Lazarus (Reference Stump2022, 286–287), or by advising Peter so as to prevent him from betraying Christ (Reference Stump2022, 288), neither of them rebuked him for failing to do so. Stump takes this to show ‘that in their own eyes by the end of the story they have gained something more worth having than what they lost … They do not wish that Christ had done otherwise with respect to them’ (Reference Stump2022, 289). More generally, Stump contends that it is possible that the experience of evil re-forms every human being into ‘a perfection of that person’s true self’ (Reference Stump2022, 28) and that this perfection would not have been achievable without the Fall.

Stump’s response to the problem of mourning raises many questions. Is it really possible, given what we know of Mary Magdalene and Peter, that their suffering magnified the image of God in them? Stump says that Mary ‘would not have cleaved to Christ with such intensity if his relationship to her did not offer her refuge from what she had been accustomed to before’ (Reference Stump2022, 278) and that ‘Peter’s deepest heart’s desire for Christ was strengthened through his ordeal’ (Reference Stump2022, 288), but these claims seem false: both characters are represented as being quite attached to Christ from their first encounter with him, and there’s no reason to think that had their lives not included significant suffering, they would have been less attached to him. I also doubt, even granting Stump’s claims about Mary and Peter, that these claims would generalize to all people, such that it is possible ‘for any post-Fall life of a human being to be better than that life would have been in a world without a Fall’ (Reference Stump2022, 116). Michelle Panchuk has argued, convincingly to my mind, that significant suffering does not tend to ‘promote the kind of psychic integration that allows for interpersonal closeness with God’ (Reference Panchuk2024). Finally, it is unclear how the felix culpa view that Stump sketches meets her own criteria for the permissibility of divinely allowed suffering: ‘for God to be justified in allowing the suffering of a human being when the suffering is entirely involuntary, the benefit defeating that suffering needs to be the warding off of a greater harm and not the achieving of a greater good’ (Reference Stump2022, 17). After all, the benefit described in her defence seems to be a matter of achieving a greater good – the intensification of the image of God in human beings – rather than the warding off of any greater harm.Footnote ³

However, I will concentrate not on these aspects of Stump’s account, but instead on a problematic implication of the central claim of Stump’s felix culpa defence that the world is generally better with sin and suffering than without.Footnote ⁴ Stump denies that there is a best of all possible worlds, or that God must will a better world over a worse one, since there will always be a still better world (Reference Stump2022, 18). Yet, it seems to follow on her view that God wills or desires the world with the Fall over one without. We can get at this implication in a number of ways. First, we may concentrate on the language Stump uses to describe the realization of our true selves. It is not simply a consolation to God, in the sense that while the world is marred by sin, at least there is some silver lining to cheer God up a bit. Rather, it is a victory for God: the world is ‘more of a triumph’, ‘more of a success’ (Reference Stump2022, 10), and ‘more glorious’ (Reference Stump2022, 11) than it would have been without the Fall. Stump writes, ‘the creation with its history of sin and suffering is more worth celebrating than the creation would have been had there been no Fall’ (Stump Reference Stump2022, 15, emphasis added). While Stump begins with the worry that the fallen creation might be a disappointment to God, the language she uses to describe her felix culpa view makes it seem that God would have been disappointed had there been no Fall, since this would have been less of a success (or in other words, more of a failure) for God! And so, the Fall seems to be something that God desires or wills, on Stump’s view.

Another way to this conclusion is to begin with the assumption that God wills the perfection of humanity, or the intensification of the image of God in us. But this perfection is not possible without the Fall; and so it seems that God must will the Fall as a means to our perfection. Above I interpreted Stump as suggesting that God does not antecedently will, but only consequently wills, human sin and suffering. Recall how she defines these terms: ‘God’s antecedent will is what God would have willed if everything in the world had been up to God alone. God’s consequent will is what God actually does will, given what God’s creatures will’ (Reference Stump2022, 4). Stump might reason that God does not antecedently will sin, since on her view sin is not ‘up to God alone’, but ‘what God’s creatures will’. However, a critic might note a crucial difference between Stump’s view and others according to which God cannot be said to antecedently will sin. For instance, consider the free will defence that is a common response to the problem of evil. On this view, God wills the good of human freedom, and this capacity makes possible human sin, which will occur, perhaps predictably, if God grants humans freedom. God prefers a world with free creatures and without sin. But it is up to humans, and not God, to bring about a world with the good (human freedom) and without the evil (human sin). Contrast this with Stump’s view, according to which the Fall and subsequent suffering are integral to our becoming perfected in the image of God. On Stump’s view it is not up to humans to bring about a world with the good (the perfection of humans in the image of God) and without the evil (the suffering caused by human sin). Without sin, there could be no human perfection. And so even though human sin is not up to God, a critic might reason that given God’s preferences, that if it were up to God, God would will it, for the good that it would bring about; and so on Stump’s view, God antecedently wills human sin.

However, Stump may have a way to avoid the conclusion that on her view, God antecedently wills sin. The question is whether from the fact that a person prefers some end that can only be achieved by a certain means that are not up to her it follows that the person would will those means if it were up to her. Suppose, for instance, that I have a dear friend with a serious drug addiction which I prefer for her to overcome, knowing that she will not do so unless she makes some (free) choice that leads her to experience serious harm as the result of her addiction.Footnote ⁵ Does it follow that, if it were up to me, I would make it the case that she makes such a free choice? It’s not clear one way or another. First, there is the difficulty of imagining that I could will this – just snap my fingers and make the counterfactual true. This is so far from my ordinary experience of moral agency that I don’t have any intuitions about whether or not I would do this, if I could. Then there is the fact that it is also far from my ordinary experience to be completely confident that there is only one means to a certain end, rather than hope for some alternative and better way. As long as I could hope that my friend would overcome her addiction without making a choice that would lead her to serious harm, I doubt that I would snap my fingers and make it the case that she brought herself to harm. But on the felix culpa view, God is supposed to know with certainty that our perfection is not possible without the Fall. Perhaps if I had similar certainty, and I was used to making things the case by fiat, I would will my friend’s choice that would lead to her overcoming the addiction! In any case, it seems clear that I would desire not only my friend’s overcoming of the addiction, but also (ex hypothesi) the only means possible for this to occur. And so we may at least conclude that on Stump’s view, God desires the Fall for the good that it makes possible.

Stump explicitly denies this conclusion, writing in a footnote,

I agree heartily with Stump’s premise here: we must not affirm that God desires that creatures of his do evil. And if by ‘desire’ she means that God judges it good in itself, and so wants it for what it is, then we can affirm with Stump that on her view, God does not desire sin, or suffering for that matter: for both are intrinsically bad (Stump Reference Stump2022, 242, 299). But the point still stands that on Stump’s view, God has a preference that sin occur rather than not, for the good that it makes possible. Using the terminology from the doctrine of double effect, we can say that on the free will defence – in which God allows human sin for the sake of human freedom – human sin is like a (foreseeable) side effect of God’s will to create free creatures. But on Stump’s felix culpa defence, the Fall is like the means to the end of perfecting the image of God in humanity. I use the word ‘like’ here because the doctrine of double effect applies to cases of causal agency – to agents, that is, who cause certain means in order to bring about their desired ends. In Stump’s defence, God does not cause human sin. But given that God prefers a world in which humanity is perfected in the image of God, and God knows that it is only through the Fall that this perfection is achievable, he must also prefer human sin as the means to the end that he prefers.

While Stump is at pains to show that God in no way prefers sin, her own presentation of the story of Peter’s betrayal suggests otherwise. As mentioned above, Stump thinks that Christ could easily have prevented Peter from betraying him. And she implies that Christ knew that he had the power to do this – otherwise the question of why Peter did not blame him for failing to do so wouldn’t even make sense. But, Stump thinks, Christ chose not to take action that would have ‘spared [Peter] his betrayal and his grief’ because, though he could have, Peter ‘would have been a person in whom the image of God was less fulfilled in consequence’ (Reference Stump2022, 288). Such comments suggest that Christ chose not to intervene because Christ preferred the situation in which Peter sinned and so was ultimately transformed more into his true self.

While Stump’s defence is not a deterministic one – God does not determine everything that happens in the world, and in particular God does not determine sin – it is similar to deterministic defences and theodicies in an important respect. Consider two fierce critics of deterministic models of providence. First, here is Timothy O’Connor, critiquing Derk Pereboom’s theological determinism: ‘[The view] entails that God purposely stitches the world together in such a way that the evildoer’s heart is darkened in just the right way and to the right degree that he purposes (with relish) to commit some horrible act toward another’ (Reference O’Connor, Timpe and Speak2016, 135). O’Connor goes on to reason that ‘the morally good person resists any identification with gross wickedness in [herself] or in others and instead sets herself against it’ (2016, 136) – implying that on a deterministic view, God is not set against human sin, but instead is to be in some way identified with it. Peter Byrne similarly critiques a deterministic theodicy proposed by Paul Helm thus:

On Stump’s view, of course, God does not ‘stitch the world together’ in such a way as to ensure evildoing; God does not ‘bring about’, ‘plan’, or ‘purpose’ human sin so that good may come. And so God cannot be ‘identified with’ sin in this way. And yet, God cannot be totally opposed to sin, either. If we can only become our true selves in a world where monstrous evil occurs, and God desires that we become our true selves, then God seems to be rather like someone cheering on evildoers from the sidelines. While Stump asserts that sin is intrinsically bad, it should be noted that the determinist can (and does) assert the same. But for both, the occurrence of sin still seems something to celebrate – indeed, felix culpa literally means happy fault – because it brings about a more glorious world. And this implication is against the spirit of the Pauline injunction Byrne appeals to in the quote above. It is not just impermissible (for creatures or the Creator) to cause sin to occur that good may come, but also to antecedently will or desire or prefer that sin occur that good may come.Footnote ⁶

Not only does the felix culpa view generate an ethical problem for God’s willing or desiring or preferring sin, but it also generates a problem for our own attitudes toward sin. In previous work (Vicens Reference Vicens2012), I argue that the belief that God determines sin leads to a problematic sort of doublemindedness, since we are supposed to be regretful over our sin, and yet, on the assumption that God determines it for some greater good, we should also be glad that we sinned. Stump’s view, while not deterministic, leads to the same problem, for we should be glad that sin makes possible our perfection in the image of God. In arguing for the felix culpa view, Stump cites much Christian tradition, including the following: the Lord’s prayer ‘does not include a petition that the person praying be spared suffering’ (Reference Stump2022, 11); Paul in his letters and the apostles as described in the book of Acts celebrated their sufferings, understanding them to contribute to their glory (Reference Stump2022, 12); Christ referred to his own crucifixion as his glorification (Reference Stump2022, 12); and early Christians did not pray that they would be spared persecution, but rather expressed pride over, and gratitude for, the martyrs’ endurance (Reference Stump2022, 13). However, all of this is compatible with the idea that, while the Fall did not make the world better, still, given that it did occur, one can benefit from suffering, and so one should not go to great lengths to avoid it. Furthermore, as Stump notes, the Lord’s prayer does involve a petition to be delivered from evil, which is traditionally taken to mean sin (Reference Stump2022, 12), and while the early Christians were (sometimes) unconcerned about suffering, they certainly were concerned that the persecuted ‘bear up under torture’ (Reference Stump2022, 13), meaning that they not be brought to sin. But if their sinning would, as Stump hypothesizes, enable them to cleave more to Christ and so more fulfil the image of God, why should they pray so fervently that this not occur? There is little evidence in the Bible or the early Christian tradition of such a double-minded attitude toward sin, even if Christians have sometimes celebrated the opportunity to suffer.

Is there any way to maintain the felix culpa view while avoiding the implication that God wills or desires or prefers sin? Mark Murphy has suggested a way. In his book God’s Own Ethics: Norms of Divine Agency and the Argument from Evil, Murphy addresses a parallel problem of how he might avoid saying that the God who intends the evolution of rational animals also intends the natural evil that is integral to the process of evolution by natural selection. Murphy writes the following:

Setting aside Murphy’s temporal language – since while God might not intend things at distinct times, his intentions might follow a logically serial order – we can put the idea as follows: God intends some good G₁ with the foreseeable side effect of evil E. God is justified in allowing E because G₁ outweighs E and is not possible without allowing for the possibility of E. But since E is not necessary given G₁, it might still be disappointing to God that E occurs, if the world would have been better without E. But as it turns out, the world is not disappointing to God, because E causes some other good G₂, which was not possible without E, and the world is better with the combination of E and G₂ than it would have been without either. So the actual world, with E, is a victory for God in the sense that it’s better than it would have been without E – even though God did not intend E.

Applying this schema to Stump’s defence, we can begin by asking what might be substituted for the variables G₁ and G₂ above (assuming that E is the Fall and all subsequent sin and suffering). One possibility is that G₁ is libertarian freedom. But if God is supposed to be justified in allowing evil on the basis of G₁, then libertarian freedom won’t do – at least, not for Stump. On her view, for God to be justified in allowing evil in a person’s life, and so, for the problem of evil to have a satisfactory response, the suffering that a person experiences as a result of evil must be ‘defeated’ in that person’s life. Stump writes, ‘To say that [an individual’s] suffering was defeated for her is to say that there was a benefit from her suffering, that that benefit came primarily to her, that it would not have come without her suffering, and that it significantly outweighed her suffering’ (Reference Stump2022, 5). But the good of libertarian freedom alone does not meet these conditions – for instance, there is no necessary connection between libertarian freedom and suffering. And indeed, Stump does not appeal to the bare good of libertarian freedom in her response to the problem of evil. Using the example of Harriet Tubman, she writes that ‘her suffering was defeated for her in the luminous excellence of her life; through her suffering she became the person so many people, me included, are now glad to honor’ (Reference Stump2022, 5). Thus Stump suggests that G₁ is human excellence. But then, G₁ does not seem conceptually distinct from G₂, which is also supposed to be human excellence, or the perfection of one’s true self.

Indeed, it seems that Stump’s responses to the problem of evil and the problem of mourning are one and the same. Referring back to the condition on a satisfactory response to the problem of evil mentioned above – that the benefit to an individual could not have come without her suffering – Stump writes,

Stump goes on to note that her own response to the problem of evil largely follows Aquinas’s, and so raises the problem of mourning. This means that for Stump, there is no G₁, or good which meets the outweighing condition and justifies God in allowing the Fall, apart from G₂, the good that the Fall makes possible. Thus, Murphy’s suggestion would not seem to help Stump, since, as Murphy notes, ‘what is important is that G₁ is judged to be a worthwhile end, such that it is worth seeking even though E flows from it and even apart from G₂ being able to be realized through E, such that the agent would (or might well, or could) aim at G₁ even apart from the prospects of G₂ being realized thereby’ (Reference Murphy2017, 118).Footnote ⁸

While Stump’s interest in offering a resolution to the problem of mourning is understandable – who wants a mournful God? – I wonder if we should resist the urge to do so. There is a reason the problem of evil has troubled philosophers and religious believers for millennia, while the problem of mourning hasn’t received much attention before the publication of Stump’s book. After all, the problem of evil, on what I take to be the most cogent formulation of the problem, concerns God’s goodness to every person he has created, and the meaningfulness and worth of their lives.Footnote ⁹ The problem of mourning, in contrast, seems like something we could live with unresolved. Suppose, for instance, that the actual world is not better than it would have been had no sin ever occurred, and that we human beings are not made better – more loving, and so more perfected in God’s image – than we would have been in a world without the Fall. (This isn’t necessarily to say that the world or human beings are worse without the Fall: the world/human beings with and without the Fall might be equally good; or perhaps they are incomparable.) But suppose it’s true that God allows all this evil for some great good that outweighs the evil, not only for the whole world but for every individual he has created. Isn’t this enough?

Stump insists that we cannot accept that God might be saddened by the fallen state of his creation. In considering the case of Harriet Tubman, whose suffering she takes to have been ‘defeated … in the luminous excellence of her life’, Stump notes that something sorrowful remains:

Stump suggests that it would be comforting – to Tubman, and to God – to know not only that given the Fall she could not have received the benefit of excellence without suffering injustice, but that the Fall itself made this benefit possible. However, I find this thought not comforting, but disturbing, for the reasons given already: it would mean that God considers the world with all its terrible injustices committed against Tubman and other slaves to be more a victory, more worth celebrating, and so on, than a world without any injustice. If I were Tubman, I think I would prefer to view the Fall and all subsequent sin and suffering as something that God sorrows over. And it should be noted that divine sorrow over human sin is a common biblical theme.

Stump might reply that the problem of mourning is not concerned with this kind of sadness, which is like a judgement about the intrinsic disvalue of sin, but instead with a judgement about the value of the whole world, sin included. In other words, she might mean that what we cannot accept is that God is ultimately disappointed with the world, given the Fall. But I don’t see why, if we reject the assumption at the heart of the felix culpa defence that the world is better with the Fall and all subsequent sin and suffering than it would be without, then we must accept that God will be disappointed with the world in the end. In heaven, there will be no more sin or suffering, and because of this ‘mourning … will be no more’ (Revelation 21:4). Because God will make all things new, the re-creation will be at least as good as it was before the Fall. Indeed, it will be infinitely good! Stump thinks that a test for whether a particular person’s life is better with some instance of evil than without it is whether, looking back, the individual will not wish the evil away. But such a test could be passed even without the felix culpa assumption. Suppose the conditions Stump lists for a satisfactory response to the problem of evil are met for an individual: though she suffered greatly in her life, it turns out that there was a benefit from her suffering, the benefit came primarily to her, given the Fall it would not have come without her suffering, and it significantly outweighed her suffering. Let us imagine that her greatest suffering was the untimely death of a beloved child, over whose loss she grieved for years. And suppose, with Stump, that the benefit to this individual is that her love for God and other people was greatly deepened in and through this loss – but suppose, contra Stump, that this benefit might have been possible without the suffering, if there had been no Fall. And now let us imagine this individual in loving union with God and other blessed saints in heaven – including her beloved child. Will she, in all eternity, spend time ruminating on what might have been – regretting the Fall and the corruption of humanity that led to the (temporary) loss of her child? I doubt it, for her joy will now be complete. Indeed, at the end of her book Stump gives a similar reason for thinking that the existence of (a populated) hell does not re-introduce the problem of mourning: ‘The rejection of God’s love on [a hardened sinner’s] part cannot take away from God and the others united with God the great good of love that is reciprocated’ (Reference Stump2022, 304).

Stump also introduces into her discussion of hell another reason that might be appealed to here for thinking that there will be no mourning in heaven, even if the felix culpa view turns out to be false. She reasons that if God were to mourn over the corrupt state of a hardened sinner in hell and yearn for what he might have been, God would be taking ‘as the object of his affections a non-existent person’ – ‘a figment of God’s imagination’ – rather than the actual person, which would not be loving (Reference Stump2022, 302–303). I am not sure such a response helps with the problem of hell (and perhaps Stump does not, either, since she goes on to rephrase the problem and offer another response – the one mentioned above). But we might appeal to the basic idea here, that of loving the actual rather than the merely possible, to address the main problem of mourning – not over the existence of eternally damned individuals, but over sin and suffering in this life. Consider, then, not an unrepentant and damned sinner, but a person whose life is shaped by sin and suffering in ways that end up making a positive contribution to her life. Suppose, for instance, that a person’s husband was unfaithful to her early on in their relationship, but they recommitted to each other and had a long and loving marriage thereafter; or suppose that they lost a child in infancy, and that because of this loss, they decided to have another child, who they came to love dearly. Was the individual better off with the marital infidelity, or the death of that first child? Perhaps not. Perhaps she would have had an equally strong marriage without the infidelity, and if her first child had survived, she would have loved him as much. But would she, looking back, wish these evils hadn’t occurred? Perhaps not. Take the child case: if her infant hadn’t died, she never would have had that second child – an actual person with whom she is in an actual loving relationship. And something similar might be said about her marriage, and the person she and her spouse have become as a result of what they experienced and worked through: perhaps each loves who the other has actually become because of their actual, shared history.

Does this leave us with a problematic sort of doublemindedness, similar to what I have argued Stump’s felix culpa view entails?Footnote ¹⁰ No, for there is an important difference. Whereas Stump claims that the world is better with the Fall than without, I have not described these hypothetical cases this way: the comparison is not between a better child or marriage and a worse one, but between an actual child or marriage and a merely possible one. One does not, in the cases I’m imagining, regret the death of one’s first child while judging that one is better off having suffered that loss because one has this second child instead. Rather, one’s joy at birthing and raising a healthy second child eventually eclipses one’s grief over the loss of one’s first, without necessarily involving any comparative judgement about the two.

This suggests that Stump has a way out of the problem of mourning (if she wants one) without endorsing the felix culpa view. She may reject the assumption that in order for a world with sin and suffering not to be a disappointment – to God or to created persons – it must be better than it would have been without such evil. For we can reject this assumption and still not wish our lives had gone differently or mourn the world God has made. We may judge the world, and our lives, to be good, such that joy will be ‘the right reaction to the way the world is’.