Augustine

English

And whence had it any being at all, unless it were from you, from whom are all things in whatever measure they are? Yet the further from you the more unlike — and not by places. And so you, Lord, who are not one thing at one time and another otherwise, but the selfsame and the selfsame and the selfsame, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God almighty (Isa 6:3): in the Beginning which is from you, in your Wisdom which was born of your substance, you made something, and made it out of nothing. For you made heaven and earth; not out of yourself, for then it would be equal to your Only-begotten and thereby to you, and it would in no way be just that what was not out of you should be equal to you. And there was nothing else besides you out of which you might make them, God, one Trinity and threefold Unity: and therefore you made heaven and earth out of nothing, a great something and a small something; since you are almighty and good, to make all things good, a great heaven and a small earth. You were, and there was nothing else out of which you made heaven and earth, two somethings: one near to you, the other near to nothing; one than which you alone were higher, the other than which nothing was lower.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Latin

PL 32, col. 828 · pd

Notes

The doctrine argued as a dilemma with two horns and no third. Whatever is, is from God; but heaven and earth are not made out of God, for what is out of God is the Only-begotten and equal to him; and there was nothing else besides God out of which to make them; therefore they were made out of nothing. Then the phrase that the rest of Book XII turns on: two somethings, one near to God and one near to nothing — the heaven of heaven and the formless matter — one than which God alone is higher, one than which nothing is lower. Augustine will not say that the matter is nothing, and he will not say that it is something in its own right; prope nihil is a position built to be unavailable to both objections at once. Bereshit Rabbah 1:5 stands at the same place and does not have the phrase, and so has to say the thing plainly and apologise for it.

Threads

• ← echoes · Augustine
  The same conclusion reached twice in one book by different routes — at XII.7 from the exhaustive dilemma (not out of God, and nothing else was there, therefore out of nothing), at XII.22 from the failure of the argument from Scripture's silence. The second is the defensive form of the first.
• → echoes · Augustine
  'De nihilo fecisti coelum et terram' restates in prayer what De Genesi contra Manichaeos argued nine years earlier, with the same two-stage structure — formed things out of the matter, the matter out of nothing — now expressed as 'unum prope te, alterum prope nihil'.
• ← parallel · Chalcidius
  The same doctrine reached from opposite directions. Augustine works down from God to a formless something 'near to nothing', and needs a page to say what it is not. Chalcidius works up from the Timaeus and has the definition ready: the receiver of all qualities has none of its own by nature, and is therefore called empty; being devoid of all things, it is called nothing. Augustine has the Bible and is short of the vocabulary; Chalcidius has the vocabulary and is using the Bible to confirm it.
• ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
  Augustine's near-nothing is Philo's substance with the one addition that makes it orthodox. Augustine: you made two things, one near to you and one near to nothing, and the formless matter is yours too, made by you out of nothing. Philo: the substance had nothing beautiful of itself but was able to become all things. The description matches almost word for word; what Augustine adds is the clause about where it came from, and that clause is exactly what Philo does not supply.