Augustine of Hippo
North African bishop whose De Trinitate shaped every later Western account of the Trinity. On the question here he supplies a flat axiom and no argument for it: nothing whatever generates its own existence.
Augustine's *De Trinitate* occupied him for around twenty years and set the terms for all later Western thinking about the doctrine, including the psychological analogies — memory, understanding, will — that Eastern theology has generally declined.
His contribution to this particular question is one sentence and no argument: *nulla omnino res est quae se ipsam gignat ut sit*, there is nothing whatever that generates its own existence. He treats it as self-evident and moves on; Aquinas later cites it in exactly that axiomatic role.
Bare as it is, it is the right *kind* of premise. It says something about what one relation is, and it rules out the case where a structure's places collapse onto a single occupant.
Where this comes up
Sources
- Augustine, De Trinitate I.1