“God creates everything out of nothing; but everything which is nothing pours forth and spreads before the eyes of God.”Søren Kierkegaard · Jurnale · 1850 · 1850
Even your nothingness is visible before God — emptiness is no hiding place.
Kierkegaard turns the comfortable theological aphorism about creation on its head. If God sees everything, he also sees the void, the failure, the meaninglessness — nothingness cannot be hidden from him. For a human being, this means there is no place to hide from the divine gaze, not even in inner emptiness. Crisis of faith, despair, the feeling of being nothing: all of these are themselves presences before God.
Kierkegaard goes a step further: inner emptiness is not an absence before God, but a kind of presence. When you feel like nothing, you have not left the divine gaze; you have appeared within it differently. This changes what despair means. It is not proof that you lost contact with God, but a way of being seen. Think of someone who, after a hard failure, can no longer pray: their silence is not an empty wilderness without witness, but a prayer left unspoken. Their nothingness still stands before those same eyes. If even emptiness is visible, the question becomes: what does God do with what he sees and receives no answer from?
Why it matters The idea speaks to those who feel empty or worthless: even your emptiness is seen, and therefore you are not wholly lost.