Affirmation, Negation, and the Human Question
by Paul Nyssen
The question of why evil exists, if there is a God and if good has triumphed, remains one of the most persistent in human thought. Catholic theology has long held that evil has no existence of its own, that it is merely the absence of good. Augustine and Aquinas both proposed this as a way to
protect the concept of a benevolent Creator. Yet anyone who has seen the face of suffering knows that evil feels like presence, not absence. The street boy, faced with human cruelty, would not recognise evil as a “lack” of good but as something alive and intentional.
If God is all-powerful, then evil must exist with God’s assent — which is to say, as a permitted part of creation. That permission, disturbing as it sounds, may point toward a deeper structure: that negation is not an accident in the order of things but an element of it. Without negation, there would be no growth, no choice, no consciousness. To exist is to be torn between what affirms and
what denies.
Zen philosophy recognises this tension as ceaseless negation. In Dogen’s (the monk who introduced Zen to Japan) words, “the way is attained through loss.” Nothing exists that does not also vanish, and the moment of arising is already the moment of disappearance. In human life, this takes the form of moral and psychological struggle. Negation often disguises itself as affirmation; the act that seems to affirm life can destroy it. Desire can become possession; care can become control. The deception gives negation its power.
Jung recognised the same dynamic in the “shadow self.” The shadow is not merely evil — it contains the vitality and creativity the conscious ego refuses to acknowledge. But when denied or split off, it turns monstrous. Dennis Nilsen’s (serial killer who confessed to the murder of fifteen boys) life illustrates what happens when the shadow takes control. What he could not integrate — his shame, his desire, his need for control — became a consuming negation that used the form of love to express annihilation. In Jung’s words, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The street boy’s struggle is the inverse of Nilsen’s. He lives the same internal conflict but does not surrender to it. He endures it, survives it, and eventually reflects on it. His healing begins when he can see both forces — the affirming and the negating — as belonging to one life, his own. This is not moral resolution but spiritual maturity: the capacity to hold contradiction without acting it out.
In Zen, Musashi’s *Book of Five Rings* describes the “Void” as that which is beyond human knowing but can be known by observing what exists. D. T. Suzuki, interpreting both Dogen and Meister Eckhart, wrote that nothingness is “the coincidence of straightforward affirmation and
ceaseless negation.” Perhaps this is what theology once struggled to name when it spoke of the mystery of evil. The universe itself may be the result of this coincidence — a ceaseless collision between affirmation and negation, being and non-being.
To admit this is not to excuse cruelty, nor to romanticise pain, but to see humanity as part of a greater reality. Within us, affirmation and negation are never at rest. We oscillate, we contradict ourselves, we destroy, and we rebuild. The saints and the murderers are not of different species; they are extremes of the same design. Musashi, who killed his first opponent at thirteen and
survived battle by hiding in a ditch, lived long enough to see beyond combat into the quiet space of the Void. From that silence, he wrote of balance, discipline, and the clear seeing of what is.
Perhaps this, finally, is what my street boy saw: that the human being is a paradox made flesh. To live is to stand at the intersection of affirmation and negation, and to keep walking.