evil as nothingness
I’ve been re-reading around the set texts for the courses I contribute to here in Cambridge. Some of them are texts I know so well I could quote them in my sleep – and that’s a dangerous place to get to, as you can lose your freshness and start missing things because you think you know it too well. It’s a good discipline to go back and try to read again as if you don’t know the text. Often a new angle, or a different aspect, will strike you on a fresh reading.
One of our regulars – unsurprising for anyone who knows their way round modern theology – is Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. There are things I like about Barth and things I don’t. But one of the things I do like is the way he talks about evil as nothingness – not a personified creature (with or without horns and a tail), but more like a kind of cosmic black hole which sucks into itself and negates everything that is loving and kind, positive and good. I have never been face to face with anything that resembles a comic-book devil. But I completely relate to the idea of evil as a kind of vacuum of nothingness.
Here’s a clip from the Big Man himself:
[God] knows the Nothingness. He knows that which he did not elect or will as the creator. He know Chaos and its terror. He knows its advantage over his creature. He knows how inevitably it imperils his creature. Yet he is Lord over that which imperils his creature. Against him, the Nothingness has no power of its own. And he has sworn faithfulness to his threatened creature…
He would rather let himself be injured and humiliated in making the assault and repulse of Nothingness his own concern than leave his creature alone in this affliction. He deploys all his glory in the work of his deepest condescension. He intervenes in the struggle between Nothingness and the creature as if he were not God but himself a weak and threatened and vulnerable creature…. This is how God himself comes on the scene.
—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, 358
10 Responses to “evil as nothingness”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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Have you ever sceen “The Neverending Story”?
The bad guy is this thing called “The Nothing”
This very passage was a seminal insight for me as an undergraduate, and I can remember the late evening sitting in Hull University Library and reading it. Here at last was someone (Karl Barth no less!) articulating what I was feeling and sensing. Here was an explanation for evil which rang true – which was more than ‘personal’ (taking it beyond the ‘person’ with the horns who leads individuals astray)onto an understanding of evil which explains how there are forces in groups(including churches!)and society which unless acknowledged tear all that is good about. Thanks Maggi for the reminder – though I haven’t read these actual words for years they have influenced me beyond measure and made faith in tough situations possible.
..and isn’t that why the cross, with all its mystery is so powerful, for it is the antithesis of a ’sucking-in nothingness’ it is a pouring out, and offering made once and for all…
In my life I’ve encountered loss, loneliness and pain of various types but the only time that I nearly gave up was when I hit empty dispair … at a “vacuum of nothingness”
what a terrifyingly powerful image.
Thanks Maggi.
I’ve always felt intimidated by even the idea of “Barth”, but whenever I read a quote from him I like it. Gonna print this one.
Dana
So, instead of evil being “the devil”, it’s really a Hoover? That sucks…
Sorry, couldn’t resist. On a serious note, I think your post and the commenters really nail it on the head. What’s the worst, most fearsome bad guy in a horror movie? Someone you never really see.
Something seen and tangible can be dealt with and faced down, but nothing, well, that’s really scary.
I’m sorry Maggi but I don’t find the idea of the devil as nothingness as very useful. Evil isn’t merely a lack of good – it can be a positive act, unfortunately. Indeed some mystics and some religions associate God with nothingness or nirvana – a concept that also doesn’t help me much – though I am somehow drawn to e.e. cummings assertion that “All nothing’s only our hugest home.”
Thanks, Maggi — beautiful post!
Neale, you’re right to point out that “evil isn’t merely a lack of good – it can be a positive act”. And Barth doesn’t think that evil is an Augustinian “privation”, an absence of good. He thinks of Nothingness as a mysteriously powerful anti-reality, and he argues that it is far more powerful than any creature. To use Maggi’s metaphor, then, evil is more like a vacuum cleaner than an absolute vacuum, since it has its own irresistible “suction”.
But for Barth, the crucial point is that Nothingness is “real” only as something that God rejects and overcomes. In the death of Jesus, God defeats the Nothingness. And by doing so, he reveals its “reality” as mere emptiness and futility — das Nichtige!
thanks one and all. I don’t think an impersonal view of evil makes it passive at all – hence the image of the black hole sucking things in. Barth puts across the idea of a power that actively negates what is good, rather than merely lacking goodness in itself.
This is an interesting question. In our Western tradition, we’ve associated God with Being. Our ideas of Being are usually positive; fullness, goodness, infinity, totality, etc. It could be said much of Christian theology essentially sees God as the One, perfect, complete, unchanging, supreme being.
Augustine borrowed this idea to a large extent from Neo-Platonic Philosophy, including Plato and Plotinus. Both these philosophers envisaged the supreme reality in terms of the Good, the One, and the Forms. Plotinus however is more mystical than Plato and emphasized the soul’s union with the One by looking inside ourself, which was adopted by Augustine himself in his own journey into his interior self.
However, there is another tradition in Christianity which sees God as more than Being. The Greeks, especially the Cappadocians, Denys, and Maximus Confessor describe God as being beyond Being. What this means is that it is wrong to think of God as another being, or the supreme being in the chain of universal being. God is the creator and sustainer of being.
Meister Eckhart and Erigena and also Denys are daring in that they take this to a more radical conclusion. At some points they see God in terms of nothingness, but rather a nothingness which is not an empty void, but rather as a formless and infinitely rich reality. Essentially they see God as the ineffable, infinite formless One who becomes many. This view of God or Reality has a lot in common with eastern religion, especially Buddhism and Hinduism.
In my view a more sober view is taken by John of the Cross and the Cloud of Unknowing. These mystics emphasize the darkness of God in terms of God being above all concepts, and hence above all forms. When the soul approaches God it learns to see things spiritually, outside of positive concepts and images, and into God’s being, which because of its infinity, is nowhere and in no place. It also learns to see the created world in terms of emptiness, in relation to the creator, since God creates the world from nothing, and in the end it returns to nothing as it is not eternal in itself. However this makes it easier to see God’s glory in creation and also how God’s own being creates and shares in the universe by participated or radiated goodness, and how also the human soul can take part in the goodness of God.
I do not see the darkness of God in terms of created things or concepts as something to be frightened of, it is only frightening if we are not used to God’s overwhelmingly bright glory and light in this life.
This is an interesting question. In our Western tradition, we’ve associated God with Being. Our ideas of Being are usually positive; fullness, goodness, infinity, totality, etc. It could be said much of Christian theology essentially sees God as the One, perfect, complete, unchanging, supreme being.
Augustine borrowed this idea to a large extent from Neo-Platonic Philosophy, including Plato and Plotinus. Both these philosophers envisaged the supreme reality in terms of the Good, the One, and the Forms. Plotinus however is more mystical than Plato and emphasized the soul’s union with the One by looking inside ourself, which was adopted by Augustine himself in his own journey into his interior self.
However, there is another tradition in Christianity which sees God as more than Being. The Greeks, especially the Cappadocians, Denys, and Maximus Confessor describe God as being beyond Being. What this means is that it is wrong to think of God as another being, or the supreme being in the chain of universal being. God is the creator and sustainer of being.
Meister Eckhart and Erigena and also Denys are daring in that they take this to a more radical conclusion. At some points they see God in terms of nothingness, but rather a nothingness which is not an empty void, but rather as a formless and infinitely rich reality. Essentially they see God as the ineffable, infinite formless One who becomes many. This view of God or Reality has a lot in common with eastern religion, especially Buddhism and Hinduism.
In my view a more sober view is taken by John of the Cross and the Cloud of Unknowing. These mystics emphasize the darkness of God in terms of God being above all concepts, and hence above all forms. When the soul approaches God it learns to see things spiritually, outside of positive concepts and images, and into God’s being, which because of its infinity, is nowhere and in no place. It also learns to see the created world in terms of emptiness, in relation to the creator, since God creates the world from nothing, and in the end it returns to nothing as it is not eternal in itself. However this makes it easier to see God’s glory in creation and also how God’s own being creates and shares in the universe by participated or radiated goodness, and how also the human soul can take part in the goodness of God.
I do not see the darkness of God in terms of created things or concepts as something to be frightened of, it is only frightening if we are not used to God’s overwhelmingly bright glory and light in this life.