God and Satan – Affirmation and Negation
Not long ago I watched a panel discussion about a famous exorcism case. On the panel was a Jesuit priest — an academic, someone who had spent his life studying God. At one point he said three things that surprised me, coming from a Catholic clergyman.
First: we cannot truly ‘know’ God. The gap between human understanding and whatever God is, is simply too vast.
Second: because of that, all theology — the formal study of God — is ultimately speculative. It is educated guesswork dressed in careful language.
Third: we only have human words with which to talk about God, and those words are almost certainly not up to the job. Take the word ‘create’. Did God ‘create’ the universe? Or did something else happen entirely — something for which we don’t yet have a word?
I found that refreshing. Here was a man of faith admitting that the map is not the territory.
God in the Image of Man
Any religion, ideology, or political system has to be explainable to its least sophisticated follower. How do you describe God to an illiterate peasant two thousand years ago, or to a five-year-old today? You use what they already understand. God is like a father. God is like a king. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. He sits on a throne.
The problem is that this works too well. We end up not with man in the image of God, but with God in the image of man — a very powerful man, sitting in judgement, who created the universe for reasons that, if we’re honest, don’t hold up to much scrutiny, and who will throw you into eternal fire for infractions that in any human court might earn you a modest fine.
This picture of God creates a problem that theologians have wrestled with for centuries, and that atheists frequently and reasonably point to. If God is all-good and all-powerful, and created everything, then why does evil exist? Why do children suffer? Why do innocent people die in agony? Is God watching for entertainment?
Many theologians have tried to resolve this by arguing that evil is not a thing in itself — it is simply the ‘absence’ of good, the way darkness is the absence of light. That’s a reasonable position. And yet many of those same theologians also believe in a personal Satan — a being with horns, a tail, and apparent free time.
You can’t quite have it both ways.
Starting with what God is not.
There is a long tradition in theology called ‘apophatic’ or ‘negative’ theology, which simply means defining something by what it is ‘not’, rather than what it is. It sounds fancy, but it’s actually the most honest approach available to us when dealing with something that exceeds our understanding. I’ll use it here: whatever God is, God is almost certainly not a man on a throne with human emotions and a preference for being flattered.
What can we say more positively? We can say that whatever underlies existence probably does not share our limitations of time and space. It is not bound to a location. It did not have a beginning. In Zen Buddhist tradition, this underlying state is called the “Void” — and before you tune out, stay with me, because this is where it gets interesting.
The Void — Nothing That Contains Everything
The Void, in Zen thinking, is not simply emptiness in the way we normally picture it. It is better understood as a state in which ‘existence’ and ‘non-existence’ are both present at once — a kind of tension between “it is” and “it is not.” If that sounds abstract, think of it like this: before a coin is tossed, it is neither heads nor tails. It contains the possibility of both. The Void is something like that, but infinitely more so — containing not just two outcomes but an infinite number of them, including the universe we live in.
The Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki described it as the coincidence of “straightforward affirmation” and “ceaseless negation” — “is” and “is not” held together in a kind of third state that sits beyond ordinary human understanding.
Rather than saying God ‘created’ the universe, it may be closer to the truth to say the universe is ‘of’ the Void — an expression of it, the way a wave is an expression of the ocean. It doesn’t come from somewhere else. It emerges from what was always already there.
What This Means for Us
Here is where this stops being abstract and becomes, I think, urgently practical. If all things are expressions of the Void, and if the Void contains both affirmation (“it is”) and negation (“it is not”), then so do we. Within each of us lives the capacity to affirm — to do good, to create, to connect, to love — and the capacity to negate — to destroy, to harm, to subtract from the world. Call that second force Satan if the word is useful to you. Call it something else if it isn’t.
This reframes the question of why, if God is good, children starve in Africa, or anywhere else. The answer is not mysterious. It is because we allow it to happen. And we allow it because negation — the destructive impulse — rarely announces itself honestly. It almost always arrives dressed as something reasonable. Something necessary. Something even noble.
Think of the SS guard during the Second World War, writing home to tell his children that daddy cannot be with them at Christmas, but that he is doing a difficult and necessary job for reasons they will understand when they are older. He has convinced himself — and perhaps he is even sincere. That is how negation works at its most dangerous: it presents itself as a higher good. Economic realities. Geopolitical complexities. Regrettable but unavoidable. The devil, as they say, is in the details — and the details are always there when we need them.
The Only Question That Matters
My belief, then, is this. We are expressions of something that contains both the impulse to affirm and the impulse to negate. We did not choose to be born into that tension. But we are, every day, choosing which of the two we act from — often without realising we are making a choice at all.
That, to me, is what it means to be human. And it may be the only thing we are actually here to figure out.