I am well pleased to share the following guest post from my friend Gilbert Márkus. Gilbert is a research associate and affiliate in Celtic & Gaelic at the University of Glasgow. He publishes books, academic articles, and lectures on a wide variety of topics, largely focusing on the island of Iona. His newest book is about one of my favourite subjects – Apophatic Theology.

Most of the people I love are actually atheists. That’s how they see themselves. Family, friends, colleagues, comrades in politics – they will often say, with firm conviction, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ And then I might ask them, ‘What God is it that you don’t believe in?’ And they will go on to give an account of some being – a powerful and invisible individual who dwells ‘up there’ or ‘somewhere’, one who makes demands, who rewards and punishes, who sometimes intervenes in the world, and they will say, ‘That’s what I don’t believe in.’

And I will typically respond by saying, ‘Well I don’t believe in any such being either.’

Of course I might use images, language, pictures, that suggest that kind of thing if you take them literally. But I don’t actually believe in such a being. Because at the root of our monotheistic tradition is this question about the world: ‘Why does anything exist, rather than nothing?’ The answer to that question cannot be any kind of ‘something’, obviously, because that would itself be just one of the ‘somethings’, part of the ‘everything’, that we are trying to explain.

Once we have understood this ancient Jewish and Christian idea, that God is not any kind of being, that God is (as Thomas Aquinas said) ‘utterly beyond the order of beings’, then we can be free of the pictures. We still use such pictures, of course, whenever we speak, but we know that they are not ‘what God is like’. There is, and can be, no such things as ‘a description of what God is like’, because (as Thomas Aquinas said once again), ‘To know God is to know that we don’t know what he is.’

In many ways, then, the atheist is the believer’s ally. The atheist says that there is no such individual entity as what he imagines we mean by ‘God’. And our answer is not that there is such an entity; our answer is, ‘We are not describing any kind of being. Thank you for reminding us that no individual being can be God.’

Atheism is a kind of ally to belief, then, rescuing us from taking our pictures too literally. But there is in fact a real and bitter opponent of faith. It is not atheism, but is idolatry. The opposite of belief in the God who is the lover and creator of all that exists (and is therefore not one of the things which exist) – the opposite of that is the worship of some existing thing.

Some object that exists. Some being who we are supposed to find more important than our neighbour, and to whom we give absolute obedience, even at the expense of other people. It is that ‘being’ which is the opposite of faith.

If God and a person are not ‘two beings’ or ‘two individuals’, we can never choose between loving one and loving the other. They cannot be two alternative objects of love. God is not one of anything.

But hear what Augustine has to say about this. He is wondering what it can possibly mean to love God, and he turns to the First Letter of John:

“If someone loves their neighbour, it follows that they must above all love love itself. But ‘God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God.’ … Let no one say, ‘I don’t know what to love.’ Let him love his brother and let him also love that love itself. … Let us observe how much the apostle John commends brotherly love: ‘Whoever loves his brother,’ he says, ‘remains in the light, and there is no scandal in him.’ … He seems to be silent about the love of God, but he would never do this unless he wanted God to be understood in terms of brotherly love. And he says it most clearly a little later in the same letter: ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and every one who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.’ This passage clearly and sufficiently declares how this brotherly love is proclaimed on the highest authority not only to be from God, but actually to be God” (De Trinitate VIII, 10, 12).

For Augustine God is not an object of our love among other objects. God is the love itself. It is the love, as Dante says, ‘which moves the sun and other stars’. We don’t love some object when we love God. We love the love with which we love one another.

So all you people I have loved, and whom I will love in the future, who call yourselves atheists – people who have loved me back, people who love one another, who love the poor, the excluded and the powerless, who love your neighbours and even your enemies – that is enough for me.

As ‘atheists’ you deny that any individual being is God. So do I. You will give divine honour to nothing. Me too. But by the very fact of your love, you show that you love love. And love is the name of God. It is partly for you that I wrote this book, God as Nothing. Because I, a believer, believe in the Nothing which is another name for God.

This blog was created to encourage discussion and engagement with the recently published God as Nothing, by Gilbert Márkus. You can order a discounted copy from Writing Scotland here.

If you would like to participate in a free social media network I have been curating quietly in the background, click HERE to open the Theology and Philosophy group where you will find a video conversation Gilbert and I shared a little while back.

https://newedenministry.com/2025/07/13/atheist-apophatic/