When Augustine says ‘Who would dare to believe or assert that it was not in God’s power to ensure that neither Angel nor man would fall?’ this just seems to me like very poor metaphysics. Why did such a profound philosopher lapse already into voluntarism?
For the mystery of evil is the mystery of a defiance of omnipotence itself. Because that is eventually shown to be as impossible as it really is one has to believe in apocatastasis as the Bible teaches. Eriugena had to correct Augustine here.
Augustine’s profound sense of the absolute power of God and his proximity to everything without need of mediation just because if his transcendence eventually and sadly made him forget that God’s will and power is not a maximum degree of merely ontic, finite force.
It is manifest as love which apparently anything might resist and yet nothing really does. There’s a lot in Augustine that should have led him to see this (eg his Platonic insistence that God can be fully and suddenly manifest even as mystery) but somehow he didn’t or forgot it.
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