Janie B. Cheaney: A heart of emptiness

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 2nd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Finally today, commentary from WORLD’s Janie B Cheaney on the emptiness that leads to tragedy.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: The FBI has a new crime designation: Nihilistic Violent Extremism, or NVE. The term could serve as a default explanation for random killing sprees like the one that pierced our hearts last Wednesday in Minneapolis. What motivates anyone to deliberately set out to kill children? What disordered the mind of the Covenant school shooter, or the Sandy Hook mass murderer? Clues strewn along a shooter’s past may indicate certain leanings toward violence, but not the rock-solid determination to do it. These were not crimes of passion—passion we understand. But that vacant space in the heart of a cold-blooded killer mystifies us.

To call it “mental illness” seems inadequate. Nihilistic violence is more specific, though most of us might just call it evil. Yet to say such a heart was filled with evil is to say nothing. And “nothing”—the root meaning of nihilism—may be closer to the truth than we realize.

Augustine’s “privation theory” wrestles with a conundrum: how falsehood, hatred, and murder could have flourished so quickly in a world created by goodness and love. If God created all things and evil is a thing, then it must follow that God is the creator of evil—a conclusion that devastates our faith. Augustine did not deny the problem but believed it was misunderstood. What if evil is not actually a “thing”? What if it is instead the absence of a thing?

In The City of God, he summed it up this way: “Evil has no positive nature, but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil’.” He reasons that God is the source of all being, and being is good in itself, and no goodness exists outside of God. Rejecting God therefore creates a hole in the human soul, and whatever fills that emptiness is the residue of corrupted being.

The privation theory isn’t perfect—no intellectual heavy-lifting could encompass this great mystery—but it seems to come close. It doesn’t mean that all unbelievers are potential mass murderers, nor that evil has no real effect. It obviously does. But its essence is emptiness. In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis pictures condemned souls in hell as consumed by their vices. After the narrator witnesses a silly old woman reject potential glory in order to keep complaining, his mentor explains that she has ceased to be a grumbler and become a grumble: “The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing.”

The collapse of a human being into itself can happen on this side of the divide. For example, did jet-setting financier Jeffrey Epstein cease to be a predator and become a predation? Or was there enough of a person remaining in him to repent? Only God knows.

Psalm 115 verse 8 describes how the idols one embraces while turning away from God can’t see, hear, taste, or touch. And “those who make them will become like them.” The bad news is that we often don’t recognize these empty souls among us. The good news is that good will eventually overcome by its very nature. Something always defeats nothing.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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