If ever there was a play about nothing, it’s Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” I don’t mean, of course, that nothing happens in the play. A lot happens and in a spectacularly bloody manner. But the primary subject the play explores is precisely “nothing.” The word “nothing” appears 16 times in “Macbeth,” indicating it’s one of the play’s central themes.
To understand how nothingness can be the subject of the play, we turn to the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo. In his book “The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love,” Augustine tackles the question: What is evil? As a Christian, Augustine firmly believed in the goodness of God and that the universe created by God must, therefore, be fundamentally good. How then to explain the presence of evil in the world? He responded that what we call evil is actually the absence or privation of a good that should be present. It is a corruption of what was originally something good.
