Felix culpa

The phrase comes from the Easter Exsultet, the ancient liturgical hymn of the Easter Vigil in the Roman Catholic Mass: "O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem" — "O happy fault, that merited such and so great a Redeemer." The idea is that without the fall there would have been no need for redemption, and without redemption we would not have received the gift of God entering human history in Christ, which is a greater good than an unfallen but unredeemed existence.

Augustine gestures at the idea, but it became explicit in medieval Catholic theology and was later developed by Aquinas and by the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton in Paradise Lost, where the archangel Michael tells Adam at the end of the poem that the fall will produce "goodness infinite, goodness immense." Modern philosophers of religion, most notably Alvin Plantinga, have used a version of felix culpa as a theodicy — an answer to the problem of evil.

Plantinga's move: a world containing the incarnation and atonement is vastly better than a world without them, and the incarnation and atonement presuppose a world containing sin. So the best feasible world God could create is one in which creatures sin and are then redeemed, and the evil of sin is a necessary precondition of a much greater good. On this view, the fall is not just compatible with divine goodness; it is required by it.

The objection is that this logic can justify too much. If the greater good of redemption requires sin, it seems like we should pile up more sin to get more redemption. Paul saw this objection coming in Romans 6:1 ("Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!"), but the theodicy does not obviously escape it. A second objection is that the felix culpa reasoning makes the fall instrumentally necessary, which compromises the classical doctrine that creatures sinned freely and could have done otherwise — if God needed the sin to happen for redemption to be possible, then it had to happen, and the freedom looks illusory.

For a secular reader, felix culpa is worth knowing because it is one of the few theodicies that takes the scale of Christian redemption seriously as a moral datum. It is also a striking example of how a theological framework can turn what looks like the central problem (why is there evil in a good God's world?) into its central answer (because otherwise the greatest good could not exist). Whether the move succeeds is a hard philosophical question and an important one.