Know also that wisdom is sweet to your soul; if you find it, there is a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off. Prov. 24:14.
Theology is reasoning or discussion about God.[1] Some study theology from a hilltop - a safe distance overlooking the battlefield. I have been studying God and his ways and words standing in the middle of a raging battle. This brings a certain degree of clarity unavailable in the comfortable high places.
But in the middle of a war it is often hard to tell who has integrity, who is lying, what is good and what is evil. In the journey of marital betrayal, we are called regularly to the praxis of humbly discerning what is evil. Somewhere along this journey I concluded that I may not have had a proper concept of "evil." I wondered if "evil" was not a "thing" to be chosen, but was more often a lack of something, the absence of something. I concluded that evil is the space where God is not.
I have since learned that Augustine concluded something similar long ago.
In a marriage with abuse or betrayal or pornography addiction, at some point the wife realizes that something is missing - there is a great and overwhelming absence of something that should be there. Some say it is empathy that is missing; some say it is intimacy that is missing. Some call it "projective identification" or the absence of dealing effectively with one's own emotions and forcing them onto your spouse in compensation. In Twelve Step programs, we are taught in the abstract that a sex addict is "not present" but we rarely grasp what this means or how to fix it. Emotional engagement with our husbands feels like plugging into a light socket with no juice behind the wall.
Friends also experienced my husband as not engaged, dismissive. One said he was almost overwhelmed by a sense of something missing when around my husband; it came over him like a wave but he didn't know what it was. He voiced, "I understand almost what you've been missing all these years." Another friend explained her view that the inability to bring forth empathy is a disease of something missing that effects everything else, much like a diabetic cannot produce insulin.
Emotional abuse does not necessarily involve tirades or tossing things; it is more often the "acceptable" sin of withdrawal and withholding and hiding. An abusive spouse is withholding himself from the one person to whom he has pledged to give of himself fully. An unfaithful spouse must distance from the one to whom he made vows in order to satisfy his desires with another. There is also the absence of kind words, the lack of optimism, the void in encouragements. These sound petty when described in isolation to anyone outside the family system. At one point, to be able to explain what my home felt like, I started counting the times my husband said a compliment or word of encouragement. I would go months without a single encouraging word. In one year, I waited from New Years until Easter to hear a compliment in my own home - and that came from a guest who liked my blackberry crisp. At another point, I asked my husband if he would go one week without subtly putting me down in someway; he was not sure he could, and he did not make it one day.
In exploring the question of where is evil, Augustine answered: "Evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name 'evil.'"[2] Augustine observed that evil always injures people and relationships, and such injury is a deprivation of good. If there were no deprivation, there would be no injury. Since all things were made by God with goodness, evil must be the privation of basic goodness: "All which is corrupted is deprived of good." [3]
Good has substantial being; evil does not. Some have written that evil is like a moral hole, a nothingness that results when goodness is removed. Augustine observed that evil could not be chosen because there is no evil thing to choose. We humans can only turn away from the good. "For when the will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil--not because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked." [4] Evil then is not something created, but spoiled goodness made possible by the free moral choice of rational creatures. Evil is not something present, but something missing. [5]
In other words, evil is the space where God is not, or more accurately, evil is the space where God's goodness is not, and God is all good all the time. The author of "Not The Way It's Supposed To Be" writes, "Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive. To be successful, evil needs what it hijacks from goodness." [6]
I have written that my ex-husband sat on the other end of the sofa and told me he has a girlfriend. When the words "I am seeing someone" cross the decades long covenant space that is those few feet on the sofa, I am amazed at the overwhelming pain. Why should I feel this way? I have not lost anything, and he no longer has legal obligations of fidelity. In the words that traveled the space, there was an absence of caring that should be present when delivering difficult words of betrayal to anyone, especially one to whom you once pledged marital faithfulness. Whether his lifestyle choice is evil is not for me to consider - that is now between him and God - but the space on the sofa between he and I where he decides to tell me for no apparent reason that he has a girlfriend is a space where God's goodness has been hijacked.
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[1] Augustine, City of God, Book VIII.i.
[2] Augustine, The City of God, XI, CHAP. 9.
[3] Augustine, Confessions, VII: [XII] 18.
[4] Augustine, City of God, XII, CHAP. 6.
[5] Greg Koukl, Stand To Reason, Dec. 20, 2012.
[6] Cornelius Plantinga, Not The Way Its Supposed To Be.
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