Toward the absence of being

Taking this approach further still we might perhaps consider evil, when portrayed in terms of watery chaos or sea beasts, as a tendency in creation to move away from being and form towards nothingness. Here I am picking up on Augustine’s teaching that evil is not a thing, a substance, but a lack in a thing, a privation. Evil is when good things fall away from their nature.— The Biblical Cosmos, pages 202–3