DE Weekly: Augustine, Sartre, & Ex Nihilo
Below is an archived email originally sent on June 22, 2026.
Augustine, Sartre, & Ex Nihilo
Creatio ex nihilo is a Latin phrase which means “creation out of nothing.” In a religious context, it infers that God created the universe and everything in it out of absolutely nothing: no pre-existing materials. It differentiates the act of creation in the human sense (say, me creating this newsletter) from God’s creation.
St. Augustine of Hippo, one of my favorite writers, once said that in light of this creatio ex nihilo, every creature on the earth carries with it the heritage of nonbeing. In other words, there is a palpable sense of true nothingness that haunts us and every other finite thing in this world.
In a real sense, it is precisely because we are created ex nihilo that we can understand nonbeing and nothingness.
Jean-Paul Sartre might not be the likeliest suspect to build on an inherently Christian idea of creation, but in his existential treatise Being and Nothingness (in a way), he does exactly that.
Sartre and the other prominent existential philosophers sought to address how human beings can confront nothingness after we are thrust into being without consultation.
How are we to go about creating meaning where there is none? How are we to confront the fundamental nothingness (ex nihilo) we come from and find in it the ingredients for making life subjectively meaningful?
To understand those questions better, it helps to consult our friend St. Augustine once again.
In Augustine’s Confessions, he argued that the power that God possessed at the beginning was so absolute that His own wisdom was enough for the act of creation, no pre-existing materials or building blocks required.
In fact, before the creation, there was even no time, as we understand it––there was nothing. And so, all of creation, Augustine deduces, really did come ex nihilo: out of nothing.
Let us now jump forward to our own time, indeed to our own existence. Sartre posited in Being and Nothingness his notion that existence precedes essence, that humans are first born and then must define their own meaning.
He is embracing the concept of ex nihilo to illustrate what he views as the true nature of human existence: we are nothing other than what we choose, nothing other than what we effect in our own lives.
We are born (into existence), and we later choose how to create meaning in our lives to constitute our being (our essence).
Each of our lives, then, is a miniscule exercise of the creation: there is no blueprint for purpose or meaning––for essence––we are responsible for the meaning that we create for ourselves.
It can be difficult to grasp the concept of nonbeing and nothingness while we are living, and I find that trying to understand what happens to us after we die is just as difficult, as none of us truly know until we die. (Sartre would disagree here; he believed death returns us to the same nothingness we were born out of.)
It is much more helpful at this instant to try and remember what we experienced before we were born. Can you? I cannot––and that is exactly what Sartre is driving at. That experience (or lack thereof) is nonbeing and nothingness.
This concept within Existentialism is important because it provides some level of understanding toward what Sartre argued is the primary task of our lives: to take the starting point of nothingness and to paint the blank canvas with purpose and meaning through the choices we are radically free and responsible to make.
Both Augustine and Sartre agreed that human beings are born ex nihilo. Because of this, we understand to some degree the experience of nonbeing. Further, as finite beings, we often feel the dread and the pressure of finding meaning while we can.
So, how do we embrace our finite being and find meaning before we return to nonbeing?
According to Sartre, we first accept the conditions of our unconditioned freedom and engage in a process of ground-up self creation. We can negate our situation by freely choosing to do so.
What’s more, we must not try and escape the enormous personal responsibility we might feel about this, as to do so would be to live in Bad Faith.
It is bad faith to pretend that we are simply objects trapped by our various limitations rather than subjects who can actively mold our lives into creations of our choosing.
It is bad faith to give up during our brief period of being simply because we are afraid of the potential of nonbeing and nothingness.
The whole point of Existentialism is to understand why we are as much as it is to understand what we are. And why we are is to live a meaningful life.
“This is a rather philosophical way of stating what all of us know in our bones: No matter how good, beautiful, true, or exciting a thing or state of affairs is here below, it is destined to pass into nonbeing. Think of a gorgeous firework that bursts open like a giant flower and then, in the twinkling of an eye, is gone forever. Everything is haunted by nonbeing; everything, finally, is that firework.” –– Bishop Robert Barron
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Sometimes, two diametrically opposed philosophies and people can meet in the middle to help us understand at a greater scale. Who had St. Augustine and Jean-Paul Sartre doing that?
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