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Are We Living on a Sponge? - Kaitlyn Terry

    In book VII, Augustine starts by trying to wrap his mind around the fact that God has no substance, yet still exists. He takes this concept head-on, something that we still struggle with today. We as a collective don't really understand it, so we largely just try to keep from thinking about it. Augustine kind of does the opposite. He takes it head-on and tries to come to terms with it right then and there. From there he, naturally, dives into several more internal debates and questions. 

    I find one of these particularly notable. He begins to try to understand the existence of evil if all was created by a good God. He compares God to a vast infinite ocean and the earth to a large but finite sponge. This allows the goodness of God to flow completely through the sponge. As he debates the existence of God and evil, he realizes the flaws in his imagery. He seems to focus largely through this book on how he imagines God and how he must not even begin to try to imagine God because he simply cannot be imagined. Augustine seems to take some very revolutionary steps in his debate of what God is and the existence of evil.



I commented on Addison and Abbie's posts.

Comments

  1. Ian BlairFebruary 2, 2021 at 7:30 AM

    I think Augustine realizing that the existence of evil may not even being linked to God in the first place, but him simply allowing it to exist for a time shows that he has grown since his earlier years documented in the earlier books. It's really cool, I think, to see how his thinking mindset evolves from chasing pleasure to chasing answers and truth.

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  2. Jackson RiddleFebruary 2, 2021 at 9:30 AM

    I commented on this idea that we will never understand God existing without taking up substance in my own blog post, and is something that we likely will never understand. Having grown up Christian it becomes a concept that I no longer question but just accept as fact, because I am unable to contemplate such things; they are simply true to me. Therefore I applaud Augustine for his head-on approach to understanding such concepts; he has tackled concepts I have never attempted to understand.

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