Chapter 19 PRIVATION

Evil is not a thing created but an absence—darkness is what exists before light.

19.1 Augustine’s Insight

Before he became a saint, Augustine was a Manichaean.

The Manichaeans taught that the universe was a battlefield between two eternal principles: Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. Both were equally real, equally powerful, locked in cosmic war. Humans contained sparks of light trapped in material darkness. Salvation meant liberating the light.

This solved the problem of evil elegantly. Evil exists because Evil is a fundamental force—a god, really, opposing the good God. The good God isn’t responsible for evil; he’s fighting against it.

But Augustine came to reject this. The Manichaean solution created new problems. If evil is a god, then there are two ultimates, and the good God isn’t truly supreme. If matter is evil, then creation is evil, and the body is a prison—a view that degrades human existence.

Augustine found a different answer in Neoplatonism, which he then baptized into Christian theology.

Evil, he argued, is not a thing at all. Evil is an absence—the absence of good.

19.2 The Analogy

Consider darkness.

We speak of darkness as if it were a thing: “the darkness descended,” “darkness filled the room,” “he walked into darkness.” Our language treats darkness as a substance.

But darkness is not a substance. Darkness is the absence of light. You cannot bottle darkness, weigh it, measure its density. When light enters a room, darkness doesn’t flee to another location—it simply ceases to exist in that space. Darkness has no positive existence of its own.

The same is true of cold. Cold feels like a thing—biting, numbing, deadly. But cold is the absence of heat. There is no “cold particle,” no positive entity called coldness. Cold is what remains when heat is removed. Absolute zero is the complete absence of thermal energy—not the presence of maximum coldness.

Or consider silence. Silence seems to be something—we speak of “the silence of the night,” “a profound silence.” But silence is the absence of sound. Silence is not a thing that exists; it is the non-existence of sound waves.

Augustine argued that evil works the same way.

Evil is not a thing God created. Evil is the absence of good. God created good; evil is what exists where good is lacking. Sin is not a positive act but a falling-away, a failure to be what one should be. Suffering is not a created entity but a lack of fulfillment, a deficiency of being.

This is the privation theory of evil.

19.3 Genesis Reread

Look at the opening verses of Genesis with this lens.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.”

Notice the sequence. Before God creates, there is already… something. Not nothing—something. But this something is described negatively: formless, void, dark.

The Hebrew words are tohu va-vohu—“formless and void,” sometimes translated “chaos.” And darkness—choshekh—covers the deep.

Then God acts:

“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.”

God creates light. God does not create darkness. The darkness is already there—primordial, pre-existing, the background against which creation occurs.

God’s creative act is bringing form to formlessness, being to void, light to darkness. Creation is not making something from absolute nothing; it’s ordering the chaos, illuminating the dark, filling the void.

On this reading, darkness is not a divine creation. It’s the default—what exists before and apart from God’s creative Word. Light is the positive; darkness is the negative. Good is the creation; evil is the shadow.

This doesn’t mean darkness is evil in a moral sense. The Genesis text is describing cosmology, not ethics. But it suggests a pattern: God creates positive realities (light, life, order); negative states (darkness, death, chaos) are what exist in the absence of divine creativity.

19.4 Suffering Reconceived

Apply this to suffering.

What is suffering? On the privation theory, suffering is not a thing God made. Suffering is the experience of lack—the felt absence of fulfillment, health, connection, peace.

The child with cancer: her suffering is not a positive entity that God created and inserted into her body. Her suffering is the experience of her body failing to function as it should—cells that should divide properly dividing chaotically, systems that should maintain health breaking down. The cancer is a failure of order, and the suffering is the felt experience of that failure.

The grief of loss: when someone we love dies, the agony is not a thing added to us. It is the felt absence of the beloved. The hole where they used to be. The privation of relationship.

Loneliness: not a substance but an absence—the lack of connection. Hunger: the lack of food. Cold: the lack of warmth. Fear: the lack of safety. Depression: the lack of vitality, meaning, hope.

In each case, suffering is privative. It’s what we experience when something that should be present is absent, when being fails to fulfill itself, when existence falls short of flourishing.

This doesn’t make suffering less real. Privations are real. The darkness is real even if it’s not a substance. The cold can kill you even if it’s only the absence of heat. Suffering hurts even if it’s “only” the absence of good.

But it changes what suffering is. God didn’t create suffering the way God created light. Suffering is the shadow—what exists where light hasn’t reached, what remains where being hasn’t fully flowered.

19.5 The Limit of Creatures

Here’s the deeper point.

To be a creature is to be finite. To be finite is to be limited. To be limited is to lack.

God, on the classical view, is infinite—unlimited being, fullness without deficiency. God lacks nothing because God is everything that being can be.

But creatures aren’t God. Creatures are finite by definition. A creature is this and not that, here and not there, now and not then. Every creature has boundaries, edges, limits.

And limits are privations. To be limited is to lack what lies beyond the limit. The limit is where being stops and non-being begins.

This means that finitude inherently involves privation. It’s not that God created perfect creatures and then added suffering as an afterthought. It’s that creatures, by being finite, necessarily lack. And lack, when experienced from within, is suffering.

To demand a world without suffering is to demand a world without finitude—a world of infinite beings. But infinite beings wouldn’t be creatures; they’d be gods. A world of only gods isn’t a created world at all.

If God creates—if there are to be creatures distinct from God—then there will be finitude. Where there is finitude, there is lack. Where there is lack, there is the possibility of suffering.

Suffering is not something God added to creation. Suffering is the shadow side of creatureliness itself.

19.6 Light into Darkness

But the story doesn’t end with darkness.

Genesis continues: God creates light. God separates light from darkness. God fills the formless void with sun and moon, sea and land, plants and animals and humans. Creation is the progressive overcoming of darkness, chaos, void.

And the Jewish and Christian traditions continue: God acts in history to bring more light. Liberation from slavery. Prophets calling for justice. Promises of a future when tears will be wiped away, when death will be no more, when light will be all in all.

On this view, God’s project is not complete. Creation is ongoing. The darkness is real, but it’s being pushed back. Suffering exists, but it’s not the final word.

This is different from saying suffering doesn’t matter, or that we should passively accept it. Precisely because suffering is the absence of good, we should work to bring good. Medicine, justice, compassion—all are ways of extending the light, filling the void, reducing the privation.

Humans, made in God’s image, participate in the creative work. We can bring light where there is darkness, food where there is hunger, connection where there is loneliness, healing where there is disease. Every act of kindness is a small creation—being brought into void.

The privation theory doesn’t counsel despair. It counsels action. Darkness is the default; light is the creation. We are invited to create.

Coda: What God Did and Did Not Create

Let’s be precise.

What God created (on this view):

Light
Order
Form
Life
Good

What God did not create:

Darkness (the absence of light)
Chaos (the absence of order)
Void (the absence of form)
Death (the absence of life)
Evil (the absence of good)

The second list is real. Darkness is real; I stub my toe in it. Death is real; it takes everyone I love. Evil is real; it destroys lives and cultures.

But the second list is real the way a hole is real. A hole exists—you can fall into it—but a hole is not a thing added to the ground. A hole is ground that’s missing.

Suffering is a hole in being. God didn’t dig the hole; God is filling it. Slowly, patiently, through creation and redemption and the long arc of history, light is entering darkness.

The darkness is still there. Much of it. But it’s not the final reality. It’s the background against which the light shines.

And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.