God, Satan, and the Silence of the Eloi.
By Paul Nyssen.
Not long ago I watched a panel discussion about a famous exorcism case. On the panel was a Jesuit priest—an academic 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 is ultimately speculative—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, sitting 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 judgment, who created the universe for reasons that 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 creates the classic problem of evil: if God is all-good and all-powerful, why do children suffer? Many theologians try to resolve this by arguing that evil is simply the absence of good, the way darkness is the absence of light. 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 called apophatic or negative theology, which simply means defining something by what it is not, rather than what it is. It is the most honest approach available to us when dealing with something that exceeds our understanding. 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? In Zen Buddhist tradition, the underlying state of existence is called the Void. Suzuki described it as the coincidence of straightforward affirmation and ceaseless negation—”is” and “is not” held together in a third state beyond ordinary human understanding. The Void is not empty space; it is a state of absolute superposition, containing the potential for all things before they are measured or manifested. Rather than saying God created the universe, it may be closer to the truth to say the universe is an expression of the Void, the way a wave is an expression of the ocean.
The Spectrum of Negation
If all things are expressions of the Void, then so are we. Within each of us lives the capacity to affirm—to build, to connect, to love—and the capacity to negate. But we often misunderstand how negation operates in the real world. We assume it requires an active, horns-and-tail villain, or an SS guard convincing himself that his brutality is a necessary duty.
That is active negation, and while dangerous, it is at least visible. It takes work to rationalise destruction. Far more dangerous is passive negation: the total collapse into indifference.
In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the Time Traveller watches a young Eloi woman drowning while her peers sit on the riverbank, quietly observing without making the slightest move to help. Wells saw this not as peace, but as ultimate human degeneration. When my mother watched newsreel footage of concentration camps in a cinema after WWII, and said you could hear a pin drop—a society in collective moral shock. Today, similar horrors play on our screens daily, and the response is frequently a shrug.
This is where the idea of a simple choice between “doing good” and “doing bad” fails. Many people exist in a third state of non-action. They feel no active impulse to harm, yet by doing nothing, they allow the destructive currents of the world to break around them. Indifference is not neutrality; it is negation operating under the guise of an easy life.
Spiritual Narcissism and the Courage to Doubt
The most insidious form of negation is when it dresses itself up as enlightenment. It is easy to sit facing a wall all day, feeling spiritually superior and convinced you have achieved inner peace because you are no longer bothered by the world. But if that peace requires stepping back while others suffer, it isn’t transcendent wisdom—it is just quietism. It is using the Void as an excuse to vacate human responsibility.
The Book of Revelation offers a harsh assessment of this state: “Because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” The active villain and the active saint are at least engaged with reality. The lukewarm person has simply dropped out of the struggle.
Contrast the quietist staring at a wall with Mother Teresa. When asked by a journalist if she ever doubted the existence of God, she reportedly answered, “Yes, every day.” That is a total failure of negation to paralyze a human being. She did not wait for absolute certainty or a state of pristine inner calm. She existed in the middle of doubt, friction, and dirt, and chose to affirm anyway.
The Only Question That Matters
We are expressions of an underlying reality that contains both the potential to build and the potential to erase. We did not choose to be born into that tension. But every day, we choose whether we participate in it or hide from it.
Negation wins the moment it convinces us that unless we are committing outright evil, we are innocent. The true test of being human is not achieving a passive, undisturbed mind, but having the courage to act from affirmation even when we are tired, even when we are uncertain, and even when we doubt.