For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts… — Mark 7:21

Suppose, for a moment, that the Adversary vanished before the next sunrise. Would mankind therefore cease to envy, betray, exploit, lie, and kill? Scripture gives little reason to think so. Israel did not require another serpent before it fashioned a golden calf at Sinai. The idol did not come from outside the camp but from within it. The deepest enemy is not merely the tempter who whispers, but the will that listens.


Contents


I. The Question Everyone Eventually Asks

José Saramago put it in one sentence: why did God, instead of giving up his son, not simply put an end to the devil, and so end evil in the world? Others ask it in a hundred unsigned versions, and it is always the same question wearing a different coat. If the hand on the strings is powerful enough to remove any figure from the stage, why remove the Son and not the Adversary? Why the elaborate, bleeding path, when the simple path — subtraction — was apparently available the whole time?

The question is not foolish. It is asked, most often, by people who have watched a child die or watched cruelty go unanswered, and who cannot understand why a hand with that kind of power would choose spectacle over deletion. It deserves a better answer than the word mystery, said quickly, to make the asking stop.

But before the question can be answered, its shape has to be examined. Every question carries a picture of God inside it, whether the asker notices or not. And the picture inside this one is more revealing than the question itself.


II. Gepetto’s Workshop

Picture a workshop. A carver sits at a bench. In front of him, on strings he controls from above, a wooden figure moves — walks, gestures, gets into trouble. When the trouble becomes intolerable, the carver has two kinds of power available to him. He can reach down and adjust the figure on the strings — correct its posture, still its hand before it does damage. Or, if some rival figure has gotten onto the stage and is pulling against him, he can simply lift that rival off the boards and set it aside. Either way, the carver stands outside the scene, above the strings, and the scene is his to arrange.

This is the picture almost every version of Saramago’s question assumes: God as a carver standing outside events, holding strings that run down into the world, with two levers in reach — end the Son, or end the Adversary — and inexplicably pulling the crueler one.

It is a coherent picture. It is also not the God that classical theism, or the framework this essay belongs to, has ever actually proposed. And once the picture is named, the question changes shape underneath it.


III. What “Kill” Cannot Mean Twice

Start with the smallest problem, which is also the least forgivable to overlook. Death, for a creature made of matter, is the separation of a life from a body — the string, so to speak, actually being cut. A son can be killed because a son has a body that can stop breathing. The Adversary, in the theological tradition Saramago is arguing against, is spirit: an intellect and a will without the kind of embodiment that death, as we know it, acts upon. There is no string there to cut, in the sense the question requires.

This is not a technicality offered to dodge the force of the question. It is the same discipline this framework has applied everywhere else: do not measure one order of being with the instrument built for another. A telescope cannot find justice; a scalpel cannot excise a spirit. To ask why God did not kill the devil the way a son can be killed is to ask why a lever wired to one part of the workshop was not used on a fixture that has no such wiring.

Grant, for the sake of the argument, that “kill” is loosened to mean something looser — neutralize, silence, remove from the field permanently. Even on that reading, the deeper problem has not moved.


IV. The Lever That Isn’t There

Suppose God had done it. Suppose the Adversary were subtracted from the stage entirely, this morning, before you finished reading this sentence. What changes?

Adam did not fall because a serpent was stronger than he was. The serpent supplied an occasion; the turning — the reach of the hand toward the fruit — was Adam’s own. Cain did not need a devil standing behind him to raise a stone against his brother; the text does not put one there. David did not require demonic assistance to place Uriah at the point of greatest danger. The tempter, wherever it appears in these stories, is never the cause of the fall. It is, at most, the occasion. The cause is the will — bent inward, as Augustine saw fifteen centuries ago, curved upon itself — and the will’s curvature does not straighten because the one who once whispered near it has been removed from the room.

Remove every tempter from every stage and the wound remains exactly where it was: in the wood, not around it. This is the same structural error the closed system makes everywhere else in this series. A debt collector believes the problem is a transaction that has not yet been executed; execute it, and the account is settled. But evil, in this framework, is not merely a transaction waiting on an external enforcer. It is a disorder of the will, and a disorder of the will is not repaired by removing a rival will from the vicinity. It is repaired — if it is repaired at all — at the crossing point, by something the removal of an enemy cannot supply.

And there is a reason removal could not supply it. The Adversary is not simply an external criminal loose on the boards; he is a creature, a will like ours, and the destruction of one creature does not straighten the curvature in another. Adam’s freedom was Adam’s; no subtraction performed on a second figure reaches into the interior of the first. The workshop remains, but God is not another craftsman inside it, tidying the set by lifting one carving away so that the others might stand straighter of their own accord. A bent will is not bent by proximity to another bent will, and it is not unbent by that other’s absence.

There is a further problem, and it is not a small one. Killing the Adversary, on Saramago’s own terms, would have been the bigger hammer — domination answered with superior domination, force met with greater force. That is not a different logic than the one that produced the evil being complained about. It is the same logic, executed by the stronger party. A universe in which God’s answer to evil is always the bigger hammer is a universe whose ultimate principle is still force. Nothing about that universe would be safe from the next stronger hammer, because force answering force never establishes anything except which hammer currently wins. None of this denies that evil is finally defeated; Scripture is explicit that it is. But the final defeat of evil belongs to God’s consummation of history, not to a preemptive act of force that would settle the matter by domination before human freedom has been redeemed at all.


V. Not the Hand Above the Stage, But the Floor Beneath It

The deepest error in the Gepetto picture is not about which lever God chose. It is about where God is standing.

Paul told the Athenians that in God we live and move and have our being — not that God moves us from outside the way a carver moves a figure on strings, but that God is the ground in which moving itself occurs. Gepetto stands apart from his workshop; he could, in principle, walk out of it and it would still be a workshop, empty and waiting. Take God away from the stage this framework describes, and there is no stage. No wood. No strings. No workshop. No moment in which a figure could move, tempted or untempted, toward good or toward harm.

This is why the question “why didn’t God just remove the villain” assumes an architecture that was never on offer. It imagines God as one carver among possible carvers, choosing between two figures on the same set of strings. But if God is the floor the workshop stands on rather than a hand above it, then “removing” anything from the stage by force is not a small adjustment within the system — it is the kind of act that belongs to a different kind of God than the one under discussion. God’s ordinary relation to creation is not that of a puppeteer reaching up to pluck autonomous pieces off the board. The ground holds the board in being, including the freedom of what moves on it, which is the very thing that makes the moving matter at all.


VI. What the Cross Actually Refuses

Once the Gepetto picture is set aside, the cross stops looking like the losing option on a two-item menu and starts looking like a refusal of the menu itself.

Saramago’s question offers exactly two moves, and both are moves of force: subtract the enemy, or sacrifice the child. The cross is neither. It is not God tightening a string to end the Adversary, and it is not God cruelly loosening a string to let the Son fall. In the framework this series has been building, it is God entering the closed system of evil answered by evil — the very system that would have been reinforced, not broken, by a forcible removal of the Adversary — and refusing to operate by its terms. The Cross addresses precisely the wound in the human will that force cannot heal.

Mercy, this series has argued elsewhere, is not the suspension of justice. It is the introduction, at the crossing point, of something the closed system of return cannot generate from within itself. A dead Adversary would have left the system of force fully intact, with God as its most powerful practitioner. The cross leaves that system broken open from the inside, by a will that would not answer violence with greater violence.

Nor is the cross what the more careless critics of atonement imagine: a father handing over an unwilling stranger’s child to settle a private grievance. That picture, too, quietly borrows the Gepetto architecture — two separate wills, one holding the strings and one dangling from them. Classical trinitarian theology denies exactly that premise. The Son’s will is not external to the Father’s, pulled from above by a hand not his own; it is the same self-giving will, acting from the inside of what it is. Whatever else the cross is, it is not one puppet spent to spare the workshop.


VII. The Wish Underneath the Question

There is a reason the carver-and-puppet image has such a long hold on the human imagination, and it is worth naming plainly. Every version of the story ends the same way: the wooden figure wants to become real. Not better managed. Not more skillfully carved. Real — possessed of its own interior, its own will, no longer dependent on the hand above it for every movement.

That wish is not naive. It is close to the actual human condition this whole series has been describing — the creature who begins in total dependency, cannot add a single hour to its own life by any act of will, and still wants, somehow, to be more than a thing moved by something else. Saramago’s question, underneath its anger, is a version of that wish: make the workshop safe by removing the threat, and let the figures move freely at last.

But a workshop made safe by force is still a workshop, and its figures are still figures on strings, however few threats remain in the room. What this framework proposes instead is not a safer stage but a different relationship to the ground beneath it — not a puppet whose strings have been cut by a stronger hand, but a will addressed, at the crossing point, by a presence that does not compete with it for space on the same set of strings. That is a harder thing to picture than a carver removing a rival. It is also, on this account, the only thing that actually answers the wish underneath the question: not a puppet with fewer enemies, but a will no longer merely moved — a son, not a marionette.

This is also the point at which a second objection meets its answer. It has been said that no father in his right mind would hand his son over to execution, and that Paul, in preaching such a cross, sold a construction that collapses under the slightest ethical analysis. But that charge assumes the very architecture this essay has been dismantling: two separate wills, one above the strings and one dangling from them, the greater inflicting suffering on the lesser. Classical Christianity rejects that premise at the root. The Father does not coerce an unwilling Son, nor does the Son fall victim to a divine caprice staged before he was born. The cross belongs to the single, self-giving life of the Trinity — one undivided act of self-giving, not one divine person expending another. Once that is forgotten, Paul’s theology does indeed look monstrous, a father arranging a death. Once it is remembered, the accusation no longer strikes the doctrine it meant to refute: what looked like a father destroying his child turns out to be God, undivided, refusing to answer evil in evil’s own coin, and bearing from the inside what force could only have postponed.


Coda

Saramago asked why God did not kill the devil instead of giving up the Son. The honest answer is not that God had the lever and declined to pull it out of some inscrutable preference for suffering. The honest answer is that the question’s own architecture — a carver, two strings, a choice between them — was never the architecture in play. God was not standing above the stage deciding which figure to remove. God was, and is, the floor beneath it, holding open at the crossing point of every Now the one thing force can never produce: a will that turns because it was addressed, not because a rival was subtracted from the room.

In him we live and move and have our being. — Acts 17:28



References

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Augustine of Hippo. On Grace and Free Will (De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio). Various editions.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. I–II, Questions 109–114.

The Holy Bible. Genesis 3–4; Exodus 32; 2 Samuel 11–12; Mark 7:21–23; Acts 17:28.

Gaitan, Oscar. The Debt Collector at the Center: Karma, Grace, and the Crossing Point. 2026.

Gaitan, Oscar. Where Is God? Suffering, the Present Moment, and the Ground That Does Not Intervene. 2026.

Gaitan, Oscar. The Corridor: On the Ground That Does Not Withdraw. 2026.


Further Reading

Book

  • The Lemniscate of Time: A Geometric Meditation on Eternity and Temporal Succession
    ISBN: 9798248842360
    Zenodo: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18684516


Selected Essays