The Reality of Nothing: Evil and Theodicy through the Lens of a Horror Film
Photo by Oliver Hihn on Unsplash
Contemporary theology often begins with the topic of theodicy. Sometimes this is intentional and sometimes it is a framework that is begrudgingly accepted as the presumed necessary place to begin any work of modern theology. The methodology en vogue today is thoroughly contextual. There is good reason for this emphasis on context. For too long, theology was overly theoretical or speculative, allergic to the plight of the poor and oppressed, blind to the tragedies of everyday life experienced by so many. Good intentions aside, however, we must ask whether or not theology should begin with the human condition. My contention is that, no, we must instead begin with the classical starting point of the goodness of God. Only then will we be able to navigate successfully the difficulties of theodicy. To that end, I will examine the nature of evil.
For much of Christian history, evil was understood not as a thing but rather as a privation: privatio boni, or the privation of the good. As such, evil was understood to be a lack, and not a thing itself. This is not the same as claiming “evil is not real,” though. Evil is real, but its reality is that of shadow, over and against the very real goodness of God. In short, there is no quiddity, or “thing-ness,” to be ascribed to evil and sin, and yet they are all too real. This was the view that arguably held sway until the contemporary and especially postmodern quavering before the seemingly insurmountable problem of suffering and evil, or theodicy. In what follows I will defend the classical conception of evil articulated above in conversation with Alex Garland’s fantastic, complex, and terrifying film Annihilation (2018). My hope is not only to engage these classical concepts from a fresh vantage point, but to provide a persuasive and compelling image of the cosmic reality of nothingness as sin. Annihilation provides a way to think about the reality of sin and evil, without allowing it to have the first and last word. Moreover, the arguments of theodicy framed by this film might just allow us to step beyond the cul-de-sac of contemporary reasoning, and return to the rich, ancient view of evil that has both a beginning and a definite end.
A Biblical Account of Evil
Where one begins matters a great deal for where one hopes to end. Accordingly, the first two chapters of Genesis are some of the most important chapters in all of Scripture. These initial two chapters connect extremely well (and with clear intentionality) to the final two chapters in Scripture, Revelation 21 and 22. Of course all that is in between matters a great deal, but it might be suggested that the Psalms, in terms of eschatological vision and theological aesthetics, provide much of the glue that maintains the overarching theme of Scripture. What is this theme? Genesis tells of a gracious, loving, almighty, and self-sufficient God who created all things that exist, miraculously, without any pre-existing matter. For much of Christian history this has been helpfully described as creatio ex nihilo, or creation out of nothing. Literally, in Genesis 1:1 God exists and there is void, or nothing. God breathes breath or wind, speaks, and things come into existence – all things. Genesis 1 provides a thorough and purposeful, though clearly not exhaustive, account of the creation of all things. After each “day” God is said to look upon that which has been created—all of it—and declare that it is good. The creation account in Genesis 1 culminates with the creation of the first humans, said to be made in the image and likeness of God. They are blessed and given dominion or lordship over all that has been made as stewards, who will ultimately be accountable to their Creator for how they have cared for the rest of creation. God then rests on the 7th day, instituting the pattern of sabbath into the very fiber of creation as a whole.
Genesis 2 provides an anthropocentric account of creation. The first human, the Adam (non-gendered at this point) is created and given dominion as a steward over all things. The Adam is even asked to name the various animals that were created, which surely indicates the level of connection humans are to have with the created world. After all of this, God notices the need for the Adam to have a partner like unto itself, and so God puts the Adam to sleep, removes a rib, adds mud, breathes into this new being, and the humans awake. Now gendered pronouns are used as the male Adam greets the female Eve for the first time. The two are said to be intended for intimate partnership in all things to the point that they literally become, once more, the Adam, when united. So far so good!
In Genesis 3, though, we learn that God has given the first humans one rule. They have been instructed not to eat the fruit of one particular tree in the middle of the garden, for in doing so, their eyes will be open to both good and evil, and they will surely die. Interestingly, the first humans knew goodness in an intimately personal way unlike any other creature ever. They existed in God’s good and perfect garden after all! Pure unbridled goodness was all around! What they didn’t know, though, was evil—and death which inescapably comes with evil. In learning of evil, they would learn of another way, a perverted, corrupted way of living, one which led inescapably to death. This way would, unfortunately, so corrupt the minds and hearts of humans, that we would pursue it by necessity. In choosing other than God, we would separate ourselves from God. It was as if a wall of unknowing fell between God and God’s creation. Creation—humans in particular—would never be the same. The purposefulness and intentionality of creation was interrupted, re-arranged, and ultimately lost. Disorder was introduced into order. It spread like a virus, corrupting all it came in contact with – everything that was created became contaminated. No thing remained as it was supposed to be. Not wanting humans to live forever as broken and sinful creatures, God banished them from the garden and from the tree of life in particular, but vowed to restore humanity to its proper place in the fullness of time.
What follows does not make sense according to the logic of Genesis 1 and 2. Things spin violently out of control. Chaos overtakes creation, humanity in particular. Violence reigns supreme. People do not know God or acknowledge God as their Creator. In sin humans create idols, imaginary beings said to have power over particular aspects of life and even creation itself. Fueled by the worship of so many, these idols come to possess a sort of existence and their hold over humanity increases. God allows all of this to happen but works to fix things. A grand plan is set into motion: the Covenant. Eventually, God sends the Son to live and even die as one of us, to set us free from evil, sin, and death, to teach us again how to be properly human, to restore in us the very image of God in which we were originally created. This process of renewal anticipates an ending where the wall of disorder, confusion, and chaos is lifted and destroyed and God once again dwells intimately with creation, and with humans in particular. Things are restored to how they were originally intended. Evil, sin, and death are destroyed. The garden becomes an urban garden, in a beautiful city full of God’s presence, which comes and remains on this earth and all is again as it should be: good.
Such is the biblical vision of creation, rebellion, evil, and redemption. Nowhere in this account was evil created, nor was it given an origin story as separate from or prior to God. (St. Thomas speaks to this well in question 49 of the Prima Pars.) Whatever we are to say about evil, sin, and death, therefore, must be subject to the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 in which evil does not exist. “God is not the author of evil,” as Jacob Arminius often pointed out. And yet, evil is nonetheless felt and experienced. It is real, though it was not created. Death, likewise, is all too prevalent, and yet it was not an original aspect of God’s creation, nor is it said to be an ultimate part of God’s plan. In short, evil and death were not created, and they will not endure, but they are at present quite real. We must confess that this doesn’t really make a lot of sense, and yet it is so.
Annihilation (2018)
The film Annihilation tells the story of Eva, played by Natalie Portman, a military veteran turned ivy league biologist trying to uncover the truth of what happened to her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), on a covert operation that leaves him unexplainably impaired. As a result of her knowledge of the state of her husband, Eva is taken to a covert military base in Florida that has been established to research a seemingly extraterrestrial event. The event in question featured an unidentified object crashing into a remote lighthouse. Upon impact, a shimmering forcefield-like wall surrounded the lighthouse on all sides and slowly began moving outward. Within the area inside “the shimmer,” as it came to be known, everything began to change. People who went into the shimmer did not return. Radio signals were not able to cross the boundaries of the shimmer. The army was afraid that the shimmer would slowly expand and engulf everything.
Soon after arriving, Eva learned that a group of female scientists was going inside the shimmer. Driven both by guilt over having an affair with another man, as well as scientific curiosity, Eva joins the team heading into the shimmer. Nothing could prepare her for what she would encounter. Providing a pithy summary of what follows in the film is beyond my abilities. It truly is something that must be seen or experienced in order to make an attempt at comprehension.
Once inside, the team learns that time does not seem to function in the traditional linear fashion. Most importantly, though, the team observes the rearrangement, disintegration, and mutation of traditional cellular structures. Plants and animals exhibit mutations, and these mutations even appear to cross over between plants and animals. Disparate flowers grow on one single plant. Animals demonstrate unthinkable mutations and are seen to be sprouting flowers, grass, and moss. Plants demonstrate thought and malice. The humans are not exempt from this disorder and rearrangement of cellular structure, either. In one gruesome scene, the team watches a video of a previous military team cutting a man’s stomach open to reveal that his intestines are alive and snakelike inside his torso. Their minds begin warping. In one telling scene, the team leader, a biologist named Dr. Ventriss, states that she feels the need to hurry on to the lighthouse or else “the person who started this mission won’t be the person who ends it.” Conventional wisdom would interpret this to mean she is worried she won’t live to fulfill the mission. Within the prism of the shimmer, though, it’s clear that she means that she—her very personhood—is changing and will not survive much longer. She will literally become a different, or more aptly, another person before long.
Simple explanations do not suffice for this film. One doesn’t understand this film so much as experience it. For this reason, I will leave the ending unexplained. Perhaps the same should be said of evil. What if we do not need to, and in fact cannot, understand evil? What if evil simply must be experienced, endured, and resisted until restorative order and peace overcomes it and sets all things back to their ontological purpose, their proper teleological goal?
Comparison
A key theme in Annihilation is that “cells never die; they just change.” The film seems to display the equivalent of a cancer encountering all cellular life and introducing chaos, disorder, and mutation of every kind at the cellular level. All things, in effect, change. What’s more, this change is baffling and defies comprehension. This is remarkably close to how Christianity has understood and articulated sin and evil for some time: as a devastating and completely contagious disease. Evil is the disease, sin is the process by which it spreads (the shimmer?), and death is what seems like the ultimate triumph of this disease over God’s created order. Evil has no real volition or goal other than chaos, disintegration, and mutation over and against the fundamental order, wholeness, and peace (shalom) of God’s good creation. As evil spreads through sin it makes something new, though this new thing lacks intentionality or even substance. In fact, it isn’t anything new at all—it isn’t even a thing—but instead it is a mutated disintegration and re-ordering of created things.
Annihilation provides a powerfully creative illustration of evil and sin. It provides a way to conceive of the cosmological scope of evil and sin. To apply the film to the “real world,” we must ask, What if we’ve been living in the shimmer ever since Genesis 3? What if all that we write off as “nature” is really unnaturally natural – a mutated perversion of God’s intentions for creation? What if evil is so pervasive and complex that it defies all understanding? In The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (2005), David Bentley Hart suggests that Christians are to always see two realities at once in the world: the way things are and the way things are meant to be. The latter reveals a deep longing within all created things for Christ’s redemption and for the Holy Spirit to weave healing and order back through the mutation and disorder of God’s creation. The mutation of evil and sin is cosmic in its reach, but so too is the reach of the redemptive and restorative work of Christ. Through Christ, the Holy Spirit brings order to chaos, health to sickness, and life to death. The cosmic scope of the work of the infinitely loving Triune God is to restore unto creation the fundamental ontology of peace that only God can create, and thus only God can re-create. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are the means by which to accomplish this, the antidote to the infectious cancer of evil and sin. For now, though, we live in a world where the old age of sin and death continues to hold sway, though it is overlapped by the inbreaking of God’s Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven. We see glimpses of this, but ultimately what we still see and perceive is confusion, disorder, and chaos. This makes for significant confusion. Admitting to this confusion is a difficult thing in the rational scientific world we live in, but I believe it is actually key to navigating life successfully in such a confusing world.
To claim to understand evil and sin is to grant it a status that has long been denied by the Church and by Scripture: namely the quiddity, or “thing-ness,” that accompanies intelligibility and explanation.
But the New Testament also teaches us that in another and ultimate sense, suffering and death—considered in themselves—have no true meaning or purpose at all; and this is in a very real sense the most liberating and joyous wisdom that the gospel imparts (see Hart, 35).
Instead of claiming to understand evil and sin, we must “rage against explanation” (Hart, 44), accepting instead the deeper mystery and power of God’s creation and even deeper mystery and power of God’s redemption of all things. Amidst this present chaos of sin and death, we are reminded of C. S. Lewis’s insistence that there is “deeper magic still.” This deeper magic, that of the Gospel, will ultimately restore order, justice, and righteousness on the earth, eradicating the disease of evil and sin, restoring unto creation both original and ultimate peace.
Theodicy insists that we begin theological inquiry and exposition with that which is wrong, inconceivable, and ultimately nothing. I believe, though, that such reasoning, well-intentioned as it might be, is a dead end. This inescapable cul-de-sac of modern thought must be avoided if we are to attempt to conceive of God’s original created order, as well as God’s plans for restoration and ultimate peace. In this way, evil, though thoroughly felt and experienced as real, is not a proper thing. Rather, evil and sin are the lack of something, namely God’s goodness. Evil and sin are shadows creeping over creation, bringing coldness, darkness, confusion, and disorder. But as such, evil and sin do not make, indeed they cannot make; instead they take away. They steal and destroy. Ultimately, evil is nothing—a privation—and as such it is to be endured and resisted, but never is it to be understood. Evil is the very opposite of reason; it is confusion, disorder, mutation, and annihilation. Evil will end, but God’s goodness will endure forevermore. “The last enemy to be defeated is death” (1 Cor. 15:26). The One who is actually creative, then, will make all things new, perfect, and gloriously so.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.
Rustin E. Brian is a Senior Lecturer at Africa Nazarene University in Nairobi, Kenya. He also teaches as a regular adjunct at Northwest Nazarene University, and he pastored in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area prior to moving to Kenya.