What Is Adeodatus 'Idea Of Nothing'?

St. Augustine is a man with a rational mind. As a philosopher, scholar, and teacher of rhetoric, he is trained in and practices the art of logical thought and coherent reasoning. The pursuits of his life guide him to seek concrete answers to specific questions. Religion, the practice of which relies primarily on faith—occasionally blind faith—presents itself as unable to be penetrated by any sort of scientific study or inquiry. Yet, like a true scientist and philosopher, one of the first questions St. Augustine poses in his Confessions is: “What, then, is the God I worship” (23)? For a long time, Augustine searches for knowledge about God as a physical body, a particular entity—almost as if the Lord

In the beginning, God created the world. He created the earth, air, stars, trees and mortal animals, heaven above, the angels, every spiritual being. God looked at these things and said that they were good. However, if all that God created was good, from where does un-good come? How did evil creep into the universal picture? In Book VII of his Confessions, St. Augustine reflects on the existence of evil and the theological problem it poses. For evil to exist, the Creator God must have granted it existence. This fundamentally contradicts the Christian confession that God is Good. Logically, this leads one to conclude evil does not exist in a created sense. Augustine arrives at the conclusion that evil itself is not a formal thing, but the

St. Augustine couldn’t rap his head around the idea of something that was not made of matter (taking up space) existing. So he tried to see God in a physical sense. He had no conception of spiritual substance. Trying to picture God as “a secret breath of life” when he shouldn’t of been trying to “picture” Him at all. In Chapter 17 of book VII, St Augustine described how he had this “vision” of God. He did not physically see the God, but he saw the “invisible things, understood by the things which are made” He experienced this world of being that Plato talks about without seeing with the physical eye. It was an encounter with God. This encounter took place in the existence that Plato calls the “World of Being.” St. Augustine spoke about the two different worlds and how one was pure

“Where then is evil, and what is its source, and how has it crept into the creation? What is its root, what is its seed?”1 These are the first of the many inquiries that Augustine makes in his work entitled the Confessions. In fact, the question of 'what is evil' is the main concern of Augustine, eventually leading the theologian from Manicheanism, a heresy that Augustine spent nine years of his life practicing, back into the arms of the Church. The Manichees are not willing to say that God created evil, and so therefore evil must have existed from the very beginning, possessing its own being. At this time, Augustine has a very Platonist view of things and begins to question this view of the Manichees. As a Platonist, Augustine asserts that all being is fundamentally good because all being comes from a supreme Good, which is God. As it says in

The final chapter recapitulates the main points of every book and discusses the impossibility and possibility of seeking God from the creation. In this chapter Augustine argues that the image trinity is inadequate but a means of access to communion with God. It is also in this very last chapter that he points out the eternal procession of the Son and the Holy Spirit form the Father.

In order to make sense of St. Augustine’s definition of evil as the absence of good, it is helpful to know how he came up with it. It is true that

A crucial concept required for this discussion is the concept of “emptiness”. Emptiness is the notion that nothing has an underlying essence or inherent existence. Therefore, even though things may appear to

This paper examines St. Augustine’s view on evil. St. Augustine believed that God made a perfect world, but that God's creatures turned away from God of their own free will and that is how evil originated in the world. Augustine assumes that evil cannot be properly said to exist at all, he argues that the evil, together with that suffering which is created as punishment for sin, originates in the free nature of the will of all creatures. According to Augustine, God has allowed evil to exist in the world because it does not conflict with his righteousness. He did not create evil but is also not a victim of it. He simply allows it to exist.

Augustine did not really care about the material world because either way they will need to live in the physical world and they themselves will discover the real world and will be able to understand it. From all that Augustine had said about the world we have concluded that he believes that the world is the development of god. In his confessions he said that where ever they look they are going to recognize that they did not make it ourselves, but god that lives forever made us. He also argues that everything that takes space is the creation of god’s substance that is manufactured. He also says that god is unable to performed an evil act or create evil. Augustine thinks that each human has different needs that will help with the act of love and also have spiritual needs that cause the love of

This illustrates to the audience that evil is not any kind of physical manifestation like the Manicheans teach their followers, but rather that evil is only a label and something that does not exist on the material plane. Using this line of reasoning, Augustine strengthens his argument that Christianity’s views are more valid and sensible by showing the audience that there is no evil to God and as such, his creations are not initially tainted by sins that lead them to be classified as “evil”. This connects to Christianity’s definition of evil which states that “evil was nothing but a privation of good” (Book 3:7) which means that evil is simply the absence of good and therefore, considered as a label of how a person strays away from God.

In The City of God, Augustine writes about the nature of evil and where he believes it to come from and what the purpose of evil is to the world and humans. He states, “Good thing prevail over bad, however: so much so that, although evil things are permitted to exist in order to demonstrate how the justice and perfect foresight of the Creator can make good use even of them, good things can nonetheless exist without evil…” By this, Augustine is simply saying that without evil in the world, good will not technically exist because it is just the way things are. Evil shows the light on good and gives us proof that the creator is good and can beat evil. In the Chronicles of Narnia book The Magicians Nephew, we get a peek of this very similar ideology

Based on God’s qualities and those of His creations, Augustine classifies two states of existence. The first is the state that God exists in, which Augustine calls ‘Being,’ and the second, for all things that He creates, is being. Just as God transcends his creations, so does his state of Being

In the passages selected, Parmenides describes the exact nature of what he designates as the “what-is.” The first characteristic of the “what-is” is its continuous persistence. That is to say, it does not have a beginning or an end. It is simply eternal. Parmenides argues that the “what-is” could not have come into being, for this would suggest that the “what-is” used to be in a state of “what-is-not.” I.e., it is impossible for something to spring out of nothing. Similarly, the “what-is” could not ever cease to exist, because this would imply that it will at one point become the “what-is-not.” To make better sense of why the “what-is” and the “what-is-not” cannot freely convert between one another, one must understand the reasoning behind

     He observed that everything God made is good and when you take away from goodness from something God made, we call that condition evil. Another way of putting it is that evil is the lack of good. In this solution, good has substance whereas evil does not; it is merely good that is missing. If it does not have any substance, then it does not require a creator. To say that something is evil is a shorthand way of saying it lacks goodness. Augustine goes on to explain how such a thing can be, and gets into a discussion about free will.

Augustine and Descartes seek to explain and recognize the existence of God by understanding and acknowledging themselves as finite beings. They would both agree that in order to understand God, one must first understand what it means exist. This can only be achieved by examining the self. Descartes reasons that humans are certainly not infinite and perfect, so where else could the idea of infinite and perfect come from other than some thing that possesses those qualities; God. The aspect that Augustine and Descartes are most coherent is their ability to understand the existence of God by understanding