This eloquent new book of philosophical theology challenges and aims to remedy the underlying assumption of both believers and atheists that their arguments depend on proof that God either exists or doesn’t exist. It is a controversy conducted in misleading terms – as if atheists believed in all the things that exist in the universe, and theists also believed in all those beings but also believed in one additional being which they call ‘God’.

A much more useful enquiry about ‘God’, suggests Gilbert Márkus, is ‘Why does anything exist, rather than nothing?’ If God created everything that exists, according to a very ancient tradition, God cannot be one of the things that exist. God is no thing. Or Nothing.

In God as Nothing, Márkus traces the history of this idea through the long development of the Jewish and Christian philosophical and literary tradition. He identifies it in the Bible, in the thought of Augustine, Aquinas and Eckhart, and in the poetry of R.S. Thomas and Paul Celan. He explores its significance in relation to Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx. In the second part of the book, he shines the ‘single white light’ of the idea through various prisms, to help all of us divine further enlightenment in the refractions that emerge.