God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are the objects of Augustine's devotion. God speaks to Augustine indirectly, through the words that Augustine quotes in the Christian Scriptures, and Augustine speaks directly to God, addressing him as "you". Augustine laments that it took him so long to understand God and the Christian Trinity. The Trinity is the three faces of the one God, which are: God the father, Jesus Christ, his son, who was born on earth, and the Holy Spirit, which proceeds from the Father and the Son. There are many doctrines about the nature of God. According to Augustine, the Manicheans believe that there exists evil independent of God, since nothing about God can be evil. The Christian belief in God is that God is immutable and omnipotent and omniscient. Evil is not independent of God, it is only a corruption from the work of God or an absence of the good. God is the creator of the universe and everything in it. Christ is begotten of God the Father and is born in the flesh, to live among men, to die on the cross and to be resurrected. The Christian notion of God is a being that knows all of man's thoughts and actions.
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