“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
Darkness is not manufactured; it is what remains where light is withdrawn. The classical insight is not a verbal trick — it changes what we are asking for when we ask why evil exists.
Before Lucifer's choice, evil existed only as potential: an unrealised possibility inside the structure of freedom. Nothing was wrong, but something could go wrong.
The chapter insists on the distinction because the whole argument depends on it. A potential can be resolved. A substance would have to be destroyed, and with it the freedom that carries it.
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