I will call you by name and accept you, so those who come from the east and the west may know there is none besides Me. I am the Lord God, and there is no other. I am He who prepared light and made darkness, who makes peace and creates troublesome things (Isaiah 45:6-7).
In the above passage, the word used by Isaiah in Greek for “none” is actually ου or ou which does indeed mean none, but it is really a word meaning a total negation. It is tempting to assume that “none” here might mean “no one” as in “you shall have no other Gods besides me.” That would not be accurate. God is not saying that he is a jealous God, but rather that nothing exists other than He. This could be paraphrased as “There is nothing other than Me.” Here the word for “light” is φως or phos, which we have seen usually refers to the dual-natured Incarnation. Here, the light is “prepared” not created as natural light would be. The second person of the Trinity is of course uncreated, but his coming into the world only occurs after a long period of preparation, particularly of the Chosen People. “He who prepared light and made darkness” does not mean that God specifically created darkness, but rather that any lack of his light or anything outside of his light is darkness. In other words, there is either Him or nothing. As Jesus, the light of course also says that he came to divide,1 which Isaiah prefigures here by writing “which makes peace and creates troublesome things.”
Sin, as defined by the early Church Fathers, is a lack of being (existence).2 Specifically, it is a lack of existence of the good. This understanding was critical in the early intellectual formation of Christianity in order to counter heresies such as Manichaeism, which was a dualist religion where forces of good and forces of evil eternally competed for supremacy. By defining evil as the lack of existence of the good, it could be demonstrated that no independent force was necessary to explain evil. Everything was God, the pure principle of existence, and evil was simply a lack of God. There are no competing or multiple gods, just one Sovereign God who is responsible for everything that exists.
Evil causes corruption, which can be thought of as a lack of being (existence). When something is corrupted, it becomes less than what it originally was. Taken to an extreme, that thing can become so corrupt and degraded as to cease to be recognizable as itself.3
Equating being with the good is also a powerful argument against people who justify not believing in God because of the existence of evil. They argue that a God who would create a universe with evil in it is not a good God worthy of worship. But if God is good and doesn’t create evil, but only good, then this argument evaporates.
However, it still remains that he allows evil. If he is Love and seeks to be loved by his creatures, then he must allow for free will since love must be freely chosen. In order for the perfect good of love to exist, the potential risk of evil must be tolerated. Some creatures may choose evil and have beginning with Lucifer and the other dark angels.
When Lucifer (“Light-Bringer”) rejected God, he rejected the source of his light and his existence, and he became Satan. His beauty corrupted into ugliness, his self-love degenerated into self-hatred. Since he was cut off from Existence, he forever trapped himself into an orgy of self-annihilation that can never succeed.4
The eternal flames of hell are the eternal burning self-annihilation of the demons and souls who dwell there with them. This is confirmed by the vision of hell that the Holy Mother showed the children at Fatima,
Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair.5
Notice the flames in the description issue “from within themselves.” God isn’t burning them and neither are the demons. For the damned, it is their own futile eternal self-annihilation that consumes them and causes their despair. Since they have lost their existence, they are “without weight or equilibrium” and are just “transparent burning embers” that float for eternity in torment with no respite or reprieve. They are helpless when faced with the power of Existence that is Christ when he is opposed to their nothingness.
Most people can easily grasp that man and other beings cannot bring themselves into existence from nothing. Grasping the opposite is harder — that once brought into existence, we cannot remove ourselves from existence. Once we exist in the mind of God, we must forever retain at least a shadowy existence as despairing “transparent embers,” even if it is only as a memory in the divine Mind. We can get a sense of how this may work from our own minds and memories. Theoretically at least, somewhere in our minds our memories exist, though it is only when we call them back that they become real to us again. Otherwise they remain hidden, since we do not actively give them existence until we recall them back to our consciousness. These “cut off” memories still exist, but they are not in an active relationship to us like our present thoughts are. While the beings in hell are completely cut off from Grace, the only place that anything can exist is in Existence, the divine Mind. So while there is no active relationship of love with God in heaven for damned souls, God knows exactly what is going on in hell. That is exactly why the Holy Mother can show the Fatima children a vision of it. This notion is further supported by Jesus in the parable of “Lazarus and the Rich Man” (Luke 16), where there is a conversation between Abraham in heaven and the Rich Man in hell. It is one of hell’s great tortures to always know the happiness that you have forever lost by your own freely chosen actions.6
No one knows that God is Existence with more certainty than his arch-enemy Satan, yet no one could possibly be more damned and alone. It is how a person responds to that knowledge, hopefully with humility and trust, that either leads them through the narrow gate of Christ toward Love and Truth or to a searingly painful eternity of futile self-annihilation amid “shrieks and groans of pain and despair.”
Satan isn’t stupid. He knows that there is a fundamental difference between his nature and that of an eternal uncreated God, but he refuses to acknowledge it. That is why Jesus says that Satan is the Father of Lies and was “a liar from the beginning” (John 8:44). In the book of Psalms, there is a remarkable verse,
Say to God, “How fearful are Your works; In the greatness of Your power Your enemies will lie7 to You” (Psalm 65:3).
What is the Psalmist saying here? Since there is no truth (and therefore reality) outside of the person of God, those who do not recognize his greatness and his power are both enemies and liars. A lie is a denial of the reality of truth and instead sets up a false reality – the lie. In his refusal to acknowledge his true nature and limitations, Satan is left with no alternative but to exalt himself which makes him a liar and therefore a false being lacking reality. He does so even at the cost of self-annihilation, since any rejection of God, who is the source of all existence, inevitably leads to a lack of existence and self-destruction. To quote Edith Stein8 regarding Satan’s existence, “It is a being which constantly consumes and devours itself and is in this sense an empty and futile being.”9
If God is “I Am Who Am,” then Satan is “I Am Who Isn’t.” Contrast the pathetic arrogance of Satan with the noble humility of a St. Catherine of Siena.10 She reports God as saying to her,
“Do you know daughter, who you are and who I am? If you know these two things you have beatitude in your grasp. You are she who is not, I AM HE WHO IS.”11
Catherine’s response to this insight is a desire for a radical union with God. As a result, she received her most fervent wish — a mystical marriage12 to God and thereby becomes infinitely greater than she could have ever been on her own.
Satan is the ultimate parasite. He surfs God’s Existence and Creation. He rejects God, but knows that because of God’s immutable nature as Existence, he will always exist in some fashion because God knows he existed and will therefore always exist. He takes advantage of the goodness of God’s nature, the goodness which God himself cannot change, because God in his sovereign power can change everything except his own nature.
“Do you suppose that I came to give peace on earth? I tell you, not at all, but rather division. “For from now on five in one house will be divided: three against two, and two against three. “Father will be divided against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Luke 12: 51-53).
“Absence of good,” Wikipedia, accessed April 27, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absence_of_good.
“You are dust and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19).
Once God conceives a creative thought, that thing comes into existence. Because he exists in that perfect, uncreated, everlasting moment, no thought God has ever had can truly go out of existence. At least a shadow of his thought always remains. Therefore, the “idea” of every created person, whether angelic, or human can never truly disappear. There is no possible escape from “existing” once that gift is bestowed upon us.
William Thomas Walsh, Our Lady of Fatima (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 81.
This is why suicide is such a great lie and perhaps the most Satanic of all sins. Traditionally, suicidals could not even be buried in consecrated ground (1917 Code can. 1240) as their rejection of the good is so profound.
“It would have been good for that man had he not been born” (Matthew 26:24).
The Masoretic Hebrew and every Protestant English bible mistranslates this as “cower” or “submit before you,” rather than “lie” to you. In the Septuagint, the word used here is ψευδομαι or pseudomai that explicitly means to lie, to tell a falsehood. Yet again, the motivation for such an obvious mistranslation is unclear. On the other hand, their bibles also delete the word “resurrection” from verse 1 of that psalm and instead call it a psalm of “joy.” The word they translate as joy is αναστασις or anastasis which explicitly means resurrection. Perhaps the problem is dependence upon unreliable original sources since Protestants surely do not take issue with the Resurrection?
"Edith Stein,” Wikipedia, accessed April 29, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein.
Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being (the Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9) trans. Kurt Reinhardt (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002), 402.
"Catherine of Siena,” Wikipedia, accessed April 29, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_of_Siena.
“St. Catherine of Siena,” Dominicans, accessed December 16, 2020, https://dominicans.ie/st-catherine-of-siena/.
“Mystical marriage of Saint Catherine,” Wikipedia, accessed April 27, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_marriage_of_Saint_Catherine.