God and the Void: A Meditation

God is the creator of the universe, the Supreme Being and the ultimate authority. The nature of this deity was most succinctly described by the Catholic theologian Saint Anselm, who wrote that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” This means that God is the greatest thing imaginable, and to place limits on It would then make It not God. When we take this definition, there is no reason for God to have created angels, let alone Devils, since God needs no messengers if It is omnipresent and does not deed an army to fight for It if It is truly omnipotent. An omniscient being can watch over mankind better than any angel could, no matter how powerful the angel might be, and a God who can do anything has no need for a single angel and especially not for the multitude of heavenly hosts. Furthermore, no perfect being would create angels capable of falling unless It planned for them to fall from the beginning.

Perhaps God created the angels, not to work for It, but to adore It in Its full splendor. The human mind cannot comprehend an infinite being in its entirety. The idea of something that can be anywhere, do anything, know everything, and exist outside of time is too great for us to conceive. Our brains are limited by what we can imagine and what we have previously seen, but an angelic mind might be much greater than our own. In order to comprehend omnipotence as a whole, however, one must be omniscient, since to understand infinity requires a mind to have infinite understanding. If angels are omniscient, then they could never sin, since they would always know the right action to take and see the outcome of their future actions. Lucifer could never have made a mistake if he was omniscient, and would have known both the outcome of his actions and the potential error of his ways. While knowledge does not mean the same thing as righteousness, perfect knowledge implies a complete understanding of the situation.

If something knew every side to a situation, then that entity would always choose the action which was the most beneficial in the long run, because infinite knowledge implies infinite rationality. There is no way to believe in both fallen angels and omniscient angels unless the angels knew that falling from God’s grace was the right thing to do, which implies that God would be unjust and therefore not omniscient. If God is omnipotent but some angels still became devils, then those devils would not have fallen so much as changed their responsibilities while working for the same boss. Angels might have a greater capacity for understanding than humans, but they cannot be omniscient if any of them have fallen. We can conclude, as St. Thomas did, that angels may know the divine better than mortals but are never able to conceive It in Its entirety.

If God is truly infinite, then it might have aspects of Itself which are both good and evil. The Zoroastrians believed that there were two equal and independent gods, the good deity called Ahura Mazda and the evil deity Ahriman, which formed at the same time and are forever at war with each other for supremacy. The good God created angels to fight in his army and the evil God created the Devils to fight for him. Leaving alone the issue of two entities spontaneously appearing without being in any way contingent upon the other, to have two equal Gods makes the question of good and evil a relativistic one. The evil God would only be called malevolent because it is on the other side of the war, not because it is actually against the created order of the universe. Both Gods are limited in power, since they can not defeat the other, and neither is omniscient or omnipresent if they are separate from each other. If the two Gods existed in the same place, knew the same things, and had total control over the other, then they would both be omnipotent but would also be indistinguishable from the other. Two entities which exist in the same place and have the same mind are by definition indistinct, and thus are in essence the same thing. If we apply this reasoning to God and the Devil, we must conclude that an omnipresent and omnipotent God exists even in the mind of the Devil and must have total power over him. If God is just and God can control the Devil, then the Devil’s actions must either be approved of by God or God must not be omnipresent. Evil angels must either be completely independent from an infinitely benevolent God or that God must be at least partly evil.

Angels have been described as aspects of God, the ways in which we can come to know different parts of the singular divine being. As aspects of one being, angels would have no independent will, but be more like the separate fingers of one hand. If this is true, and some angels have fallen, this would imply that many aspects of God were evil or faulty to begin with. Perhaps Lucifer was the aspect of God’s pride, which was created only to be discarded so that God could purify Itself of Its own inequities. This would explain the creation of devils of lust and wrath and so on. However, for God to have had such aspects it must have either been imperfect to begin with or such aspects must have been part of its initial perfection. If God was imperfect and is working towards perfection, this not only changes the idea of God as a timeless being (since it would then be subject to change), but also means that something greater than God could exist which was perfect to begin with. On the other hand, if aspects such as Pride and Wrath were part of its original perfection, then God would either not have shed them off or is becoming less perfect. There is no known reason for God to want to become less perfect, not to mention that God would no longer be that than which nothing greater can be conceived if it started to become less than perfect. A God who became less than infinite and thus subject to change might no longer be God, in the same way that a stone that God could not move would limit Its omnipotence.

The only way that an angel could have actually fallen from God’s grace is if it was given independence from God and sinned in a place where God had no power. The Kabalistic mystic Isaac Luria conceived of an idea called Tsimtsum, or “contraction”, which means that the universe was created when God limited himself. According to Luria, the infinite aspect of God known as Ain Sof withdrew into itself in order to make room for the universe, creating a Void where God’s infinity did not expand to. In this Void, God sent out the Sephirot, or “vessels”, containing Its numerous aspects. Unfortunately, Luria claims that these vessels broke during the creation of the world, leaving us with our imperfect universe. The different aspects of God are now unbalanced, both within our souls and in the world as a whole. Evil occurs in the universe when one Sephirah is preferred over another, such as having too much mercy or too much intellectualism. If we replace the word “Sephirot” with that of “angels”, we can finally see a conceivable explanation for an omnipotent God would have created angels in the first place.

Let us assume that, in the beginning, God withdrew into Itself to make room for the creation, which was intended to be independent of Itself. God created lesser aspects of Itself called angels who could operate in the Void without filling it up again. These angels were sent out into the Void to act as the hands and eyes of God during the creation of the cosmos and were given a sort of independence from God comparable of free will. This free will and independence implies that they were not directly connected to the divine and thus were not as flawless as their creator. They became corrupted by the Void, with some becoming distressed as they began to feel cut off from God and others desiring total independence from the divine. The initial balance that God gave the angels was lost as the angels found themselves at war with each other for control over Creation in a realm where God had relinquished Its total control over. Many of the angels “cracked”, or became less perfect than how God created them. These angels could be said to have “fallen” from the initial grace in which they were created. Perhaps one of the aspects of God’s anger grew stronger than was intended when given room to expand and became the fallen angel of wrath, or maybe one of the angels of love became unbalanced and turned into a Devil of lust. These angels were created by an omnipotent God, but given room to grow in a Void where God was not, and were therefore able to grow away from God. It is possible that an omniscient God foresaw the corruption of these angels, but had to allow it in order to create a universe where creatures would have free will. Angels would then not be the messengers of an omnipresent God but instead the confused agents of a God that has fled from the universe and exists outside of creation.

St. Augustine defined evil as that in which God is not. The fall of the angels, he claimed, was a lessening in power and virtue as they became more unlike God. However, if God is fully omnipresent, then there is no place, even in the heart of the Devil, where God is not. However, it is possible that God decided to lessen Its own omniscience and omnipresence so that its creations could have free will. If God created a Void where It was not, as the Kabalistic idea of Tsimtsum states, then it is possible that the angels in the Void could have lessened in virtue and become less Godlike.

Perhaps some angels have fallen, or have become unbalanced, but this does not mean that God planned for them to be evil. Instead, the “evil” nature of some devils was a necessary consequence of the creation of a world where entities would not be wholly subject to God’s power and supervision. This does not mean that our universe is irreparable, but it does mean that it needs to be fixed. The Yezidi religion of Iraqi Kurds maintains that Satan, known to them as Melek Taus, became the king of the earth after God detached Itself from the universe. Though he had rebelled against God, Melek Taus has since repented and is considered to be once again the most powerful and just of the angels. Lucifer, fallen because of his imperfection, might likewise not be damned forever.

The early Christian theologian Tetrullian prayed for the repentance of the Devil, a view which has since been classified as heretical. According to Catholic dogma, fallen angels are unable repent because they knew the commands of God and sinned willfully, unlike humans who have to operate under faith and cannot seen the face of the divine directly. If, as we have theorized, the angels fell not in the presence of God but because of their distance from God, then maybe even Lucifer can be restored to his former glory. The way to restore the original order of the universe, as Luria teaches us, is to seek balance among the different Sephirot. Let us work towards balance between all the different angels that influence us. The spirit of Asmodeous, who represents our anger and our destructive impulses, should be kept in check by the spirit of Raphael, our loving and healing side. Likewise, the egoistic spirit of Lucifer, who was the angel of light, reason, masculinity, and pride, can only be restored to his former self when be tempered by the feminine and intuitive angel of the unconscious, Gabriel.

There is a Void between us and God, an abyss of what we can and what we cannot know. Perhaps we can never cross this Void and perceive an infinite God, but we can see hints of It in the different aspects of the divine which make up this world. The small wonders that we see every day could be hints, no matter how vague, of an infinite being. If there ever was some infinite and omnipresent entity, then every bit of love, every bit of strength, and every bit of knowledge that we have ever had would have all once been parts of its glorious whole.