evil does not exist

literally. it’s nothing at all.

The title of this post may sound provocative. But there was a time in the history of the Christian Church when this statement would have flown under the radar. No one in the 3rd or 4th centuries AD would have thought of it as a controversial statement at all, let alone clickbait.

In what follows, I’d like to dust off this doctrine and give it a little shine. Because I think that it provides us a practical framework for thinking about evil in a way that will give its effects far less power in our lives.

Fair warning: there will be lots of quotes from early theologians and digging into ideas that may seem strange to us moderns in this post. My hope is not to be purposefully obscure here. Rather, I hope to bring to light some ideas that I think prove helpful to our understanding of God, ourselves, and the nature of existence. So stick with me; it will be ride worth taking!

God IS

One thing in Scripture that many early Christian theologians gravitated to was the fact that God reveals His name to Moses by saying, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). God doesn’t explain Himself. He doesn’t define Himself. He simply says, “I am.” God exists. He IS.

My favorite early theologian, St. Irenaeus, wrote about 80 years after the Bible was finished (2nd century) that God is the One “Who IS, true God, and for this reason the Word says to Moses ‘I Am HE-WHO-IS.’”¹ In a sense, one could say, that God is Being Himself. Existence derives from and depends utterly upon His power, will, and subsistence. After all, “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3).

St. Irenaeus. My hero.

Indeed, St. Ephraim the Syrian, writing in the 4th century, said,

God is absolute Being. His Being is as glorious as his name. If his name is essentially different from all others, so his origin remains hidden to us all. He is so great that his creatures struggle in vain to understand him, because there is nothing in him that resembles any creature.²

Gregory Nazianzus reflects a similar train of thought.

As far as we can tell, “He who is” and “God” are the special names of the divine essence, particularly “He who is.…” Here we are inquiring into a nature whose being is absolute and not into a being that is bound up with something else. In its proper sense, being is peculiar to God and belongs entirely to him.³

Being belongs to God. His existence depends upon nothing but Himself. He is “absolute being.” Existence “is peculiar to God and belongs entirely to him.”

Saying that God is is not an apologetical assertion meant to convince the skeptical. Rather, it is an ultimate claim, the truest thing a Christian can say about life, the world, anything at all. The is-ness of God is the most fundamental truth that Christians confess. It is the starting point for all right Christian thinking about anything and everything.

evil isn’t

In Christian tradition, God’s is-ness is set in sharp contrast to evil’s nothingness. If God is Being Himself, then evil can only exist as it participates somehow in God’s being. But if there’s one truth that all Christians everywhere have always agreed upon, it’s that God has nothing to do with evil. At most, some Christians historically have confessed that God allows evil. However, even this goes too far down the road of allowing that evil is a thing. It’s more accurate to say that evil does not have existence at all. It is a non-thing, literally nothing. God is; evil isn’t.

evil is a black hole of non-existence.

St. Augustine makes this plain in Confessions, 7.12. He is speaking there of created things that can be corrupted by evil, and explains that anything that can be corrupted cannot, at the same time, become completely evil. This is because, “if they are deprived of all good, they will be nothing at all.” In other words, “as long as they exist, they are (at least somewhat) good.” This is due to the fact that existence itself, remember, belongs entirely to God and is a good thing. Anything that exists must have some goodness because… well, it exists!

So, Augustine writes, “whatever things exist are good, and the evil into whose origins I was inquiring is not a substance, for if it were a substance, it would be good.” He closes this meditation by saying to God, “you made all things good, and there are absolutely no substances which you did not make.” The logic follows that evil is not a creation of God; that it is not a substance; that it does not, in fact, exist.

One hundred years after St. Augustine, Boethius argues a similar point, but does so in an imagined dialogue with Lady Philosophy:

“No one doubts that God holds power over everything,” she said.
“No one of sound mind would have any doubt.”
“But if a person has power over everything, there is nothing he can’t do.”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Surely, then, God can do evil.”
“Not at all,” I said.”
“So evil is nothing,” she said, “since the one who can do everything is unable to do it.”⁴

God can do anything, the argument goes, but is incapable of doing evil. If that is true, then evil must not be anything, since God can do anything and he can’t do that.

if God came to us in Meatloaf form.

In the 4th century, St. Athanasius used the non-existence of evil to explain why humanity needed to be redeemed by Christ. You see, God’s desire for us was that we “should abide” with him in perfect joy, “in incorruptibility,” but when we sinned, we became corrupted by evil and death reigned over us. Evil was dragging us down into the black hole of non-being. When we sinned, we were returned to our “natural state,” and, since we were made from nothing like all the rest of God’s creation, we have “a nature that did not once exist.” Because of our sin and subsequent loss of knowledge of God we began to become “things which exist not,” for “evil is non-being, the good is being, since it has come into being from the existing God.” ⁵

Thus, in Athanasius’s theology, Christ took on our likeness to rescue us from non-being (death resulting from sin/evil). By becoming incarnate in human flesh, He could impart His incorruptible life to redeemed humans and so reverse the effects of sin and death in the cross and resurrection.

In this way of thinking, evil is like a cancer, spreading throughout all humankind, dragging us down into death. Christ, by taking on our flesh, injected the antidote of eternal life into the human blood stream so that the cancer could be eradicated and we would have access to His indestructible Life/Being now and forever.

i think this makes sense of all sorts of things

From what salvation is to the nature of our existence to why obedience is actually important to what it looks like to follow Jesus (or not), I think this way of thinking about God, ourselves, the nature of existence and the non-existence of evil makes sense of all sorts of things. I find this more ancient way of viewing the nature of God and our redemption in Christ (and the non-nature of evil!) a more compelling way of understanding Christianity. And, I think, it goes a long way toward making sense of a sacramental approach to the faith.

I’d love to hear from you! How are these ideas new/challenging/exciting/confusing? Please let me know in the comments!

1. St. Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Preaching, 2

2. St. Ephraim the Syrian, Sermons Against Rash Inquirers, 27

3. St. Gregory Nazianzus, On the Son, Theological Oration, 4(30).18.

4. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 3.12.

5. St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Son, 4.