Annotation CLXXIV

”And without him was made nothing.” — John 1:3

Whether sin is nothing.

Augustine, in the first tractate on John, weighing that word “NOTHING,” asserts that by “NOTHING” can be understood malice and sin, likewise also the sinful man, and the idol, and the devil — which indeed were not made by God. And he explains this interpretation with these words: “See, do not so think, as though ‘nothing’ were something. For many, ill understanding ‘Without him was made nothing,’ are wont to think that ‘nothing’ is something. Sin, indeed, was not made through him, because sin is nothing, and men become nothing when they sin. And the idol was not made through the Word. It has, indeed, a certain human form: but the man himself was made through the Word (for the form of man in the idol was not made through the Word);¹ and it is written, ‘We know that an idol is nothing.’ Therefore these [things] were not made through the Word.”

Jerome, in chapter 2 on Micah, explaining that [text], “On account of the uncleanness of the corrupt, you have fled from the corruption, no one pursuing,” etc. — seems in a certain way to explode this exposition as forced, saying: “I know that I have read, in the commentaries of a certain [author] expounding the beginning of John the Evangelist — ‘All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing’ — [that] this [word] which is said, ‘nothing,’ he referred to malice; and again, that he interpreted malice itself [to be] the devil, and by this step, as it were, understood that itself, which was made without Christ — ‘Nothing’ — [to be] the devil. If, then, malice, or the devil, is nothing; and those who are corrupted with corruption have fled: no one — that is, ‘Nothing’ — pursuing, the devil pursued them into nothing.” But if to anyone this seems too forced, and set forth against the simplicity of Scripture rather by an artifice of eloquence than by a true interpretation, let him follow another exposition. These [things] Jerome [says].

There are [some] who think that Augustine too recognized this, and therefore expounded this passage otherwise, in the book On the Nature of the Good, against the Manichaeans, chapter 25 — where, the tropological understanding (which he followed here) being omitted, and embracing the genuine literal sense, he interprets “that ‘Without him was made nothing’ is worth just as much as if you say, ‘Whatever was made, was not made without him’; or, ‘Whatever subsists among created things, was made by him.’”