the Greater Nomadic Council

The Morality of Nothing

This will be somewhat related to my post on Boethius so you may want to read that first. Not necessary of course, but relevant background. Either way, I just finished reading Brian Rotman's Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero. Despite the title, it's an enjoyable and intriguing book that examines the related phenomena of zero's introduction into Western mathematics, the use of a vanishing point in art, and the creation of imaginary money in capitalist societies. Rotman argues that they're all analogous semiotic shifts in that each represents a moment in which a sign is introduced that is both part of the system and external to it as a meta-sign. That, though, is a detailed argument that I'm not going to reproduce here since it's not what I'm really interested in for the purposes of this post.

Perhaps the easiest to read chapter of the book is chapter three, "Nothing:Zero," which comes after Rotman has demonstrated how those three inventions are isomorphic to one another within their sign systems. In this chapter, he investigates the history of the concept of nothingness in Western thought, starting with the Greeks, then moving through Jewish and early Christian debates about the concept. In one section, he points out the difficulty nothing caused Christian theologists. I'm not going to retype several pages, but instead jump around a bit with relevant sections. Bear with me since I plan to quote several paragraphs:

Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe from St. Augustine's moral foundations to the scholastic legacy of St. Aquinas took its conception of God as a being knowable or unknowable to man, from Greek theology and metaphysics and its image of God as a maker, the Creator of the world, from Jewish monotheism. In so doing it saddled itself at the outset with a fundamental contradiction, a logical dilemma which it never resolved, about the ontological and eschatological status it was to assign to 'nothing.'

And:

The Greek refusal of the void was at once a philosophical proposition, a conclusion explicitly and safely debated within the domain of rational discourse. Ontologically it was impossible to attribute being to 'nothing' since 'nothing' is that which is not, and epistemologically 'nothing' was without meaning.

And:

St. Augustine, though he absorbed the God of Parmenides and Plato and their abhorrence of the void through the neo-Platonist writings of Plotinus and not from Aristotle, assigned an eschatological status to 'nothing'—it was the devil—which neatly Christianises the sort of horrific object Aristotle was at such pains to deny. For St. Augustine 'nothing' was a kind of ultimate privation, the final and limiting term of that which was absent, lacking, lost, which had been subtracted and taken away from the original presence and fullness of God. To be in a state of sin was to enclose within one's spiritual being an absence of God. (emphasis mine)

This is the argument Boethius makes about evil which I discussed in my previous post. It's apparently a pretty standard understanding of evil. But, as Rotman writes:

There is in this privative solution to 'nothing' a difficulty that borders on blasphemy, since it would seem that before the creation out of nothing there was something missing, lacking, something not yet part of God's being which was to be subsequently supplied by the creation. St. Augustine's answer, elaborated ingeniously in his theory of time, was that in creating the world God also created time itself, and so God, being outside of time, could never have lacked what he always had. This issue however—that is essentially what could and could not be ascribed to God, the nature and status of God's attributes—remained a dangerous one within Christian theology. Any attempt to refer too positively or too directly to God's relation to 'nothing' could be easily converted into heresy and unbelief.

And:

But this attempt to negate the problem of 'nothing', by a formulaic transfer of Aristotle's horror of the void onto God's transformative overcoming of it, was more an avoidance of the void than any real engagement with a sigh signifying no thing.

Rotman goes on to discuss the ways various people turned this into blasphemy. Then, later, writes:

Moreover, in precisely the same way that Socrates' Nothing, by being the agent of an absence in the previously full and indivisible knowing self, marked the place of an epistemological disruption, so 'nothing' allowed within Christian discourse—and this was its heretical danger—the means of a parallel theogenic disruption by introducing the possibility of an absence of God, a falling short from God's total unfractured omni-presence.

Sorry for the numerous quotes, but it seemed better to give Rotman's examination of the problem than attempt to summarize it myself, particularly since I don't entirely understand the finer points. I recognize the problem nothing or absence of God presents—how can an omnipresent God ever be absent?—but I'm not sure how it's resolved in Christian theology. Perhaps one of our readers better versed in such things will help explain it. For me it seems like a pretty direct contradiction and a telling example of the difficulty inherent in the problem of evil. How is it possible if one posits an omnipresent, omnipotent, and benevolent God? If one defines sin as God's absence then isn't God no longer omnipresent? Perhaps this lack is only possible for those possessing free will (although the question of whether sinners actually possess it is another interesting one) and since free will is something granted by God, the ability to fall away from Him is actually sign of His presence. That seems a little strained to me though, so surely there's another explanation that theologians have found acceptable. Rotman hints at another one when he discusses St. Augustine's theory of time. This is much like Boethius' attempt to resolve the conflict between perfect divine foreknowledge and human free will, which he does by positing two different systems and perceptions of time, one human and one divine. However, this problem seems even more mysterious and difficult to resolve. Obviously I don't have an answer; I just find apparent paradoxes and discussions of various moral systems fascinating. If you've read all this, I imagine you do too, so why not comment?