La Metafisica del Nulla nelle Confessiones di S. Agostino.

The theme of all existence as created out of 'absolute nothingness' is the guiding thread of Augustine's biographical-introspective masterpiece The Confessions. In it anthropological insight and metaphysical speculation are coherently consistently joined together. In fact the ontological and metaphysical analisis of the last three books of The Confessions is the key to fully understand in a unifying view the phenomenological and existencial inquiry brought about by Augustine in the first part of his work, following his own autobiographical memories. The original 'nothingness' of creation does not belong solely to the event the foundations which laid of all existence but persists as 'meontological' underlying dimension for all created beings. In Augustine's view man not only came into existence ex nihilo, but in him 'nothingness' perpetuates its sinister depriving power, leaving its mark on all his existential activities. Being intrinsecally nullifying they reveal the scarring sign of man's origin: his birth de nihilo, as if 'nothingness' itself is the 'matter' out of which the human being is moulded, 'Nothingness' - in its quality of «deficient caused» - in fundamentally inherent in the human being, because of his condition as 'creature'. Only the intervention of the Divine Grace has the power of contrasting its sinister force of depletion, of reabsorbing its power of entropy and giving ontological stability to the disquiet of the human heart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]