The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 19.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

Thus as efficient cause God is present in a more perfect and complete way in the world of spirits than in that of bodies; He is more present to the angels than to men; to rational and living beings than to irrational ones, and those deprived of life; to the just than to sinners.
This is the clear teaching of Pope St. Gregory the Great: "God is everywhere, and whole and entire everywhere, for He is in contact with all things, even though He has for different things a different contact. With insensible creatures it is a contact which gives being without life; with animals His contact gives being, life and sensation, without intelligence; with human and angelic natures, His contact is such as to give at once being, life, sensation and intelligence; and thus, although He is always the self-same God, yet He is in contact divinely with creatures mutually unlike one another." (St. Gregory, in Ezech., lib. I., Hom, viii., n. 16.)
St. Fulgentius says: "God is not similarly present in all things; for although He is present everywhere by His power, He is by no means present everywhere by His grace." And St. Bernard: "God Who is everywhere, and equally so by His simple substance, is notwithstanding present with reasonable creatures differently than with others; He is also present in the good, differently than in the bad. So also He is present in unintelligent creatures in such a manner, that they do not attain to possess Him, as reasonable beings may by their knowledge; but only good ones may possess Him by love, in whom alone He is present by union of will." (St Bernard, Hom, iii., super Evang., Missus est.)

How can we arrive at an idea of these different grades of God's presence? If the Divine substance were extended and divisible, we might understand how it could be present in this and that object, in proportions varying as do the things themselves, to a greater degree in larger beings, and to a lesser in smaller ones. St. Thomas furnishes us with a solution of this problem, when he says: "There is one common and ordinary mode of presence, according to which God is present in all things by His essence, His power and His presence, namely, as the cause is present in the effects which participate in His goodness." (St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I., q. xliii., a. 3.)

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 18.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

What are we to conclude from all this, save that God is present in all beings and in all places, not as the liquid in the vessel that contains it, since God cannot be contained by creatures, but rather that it is He Who contains them by preserving them; nor as a constituent element of these creatures as the soul is present to the body, for this would be Pantheism; but as the cause and as the active principle is present to the object upon which it exerts an immediate influence. He is present everywhere, not directly and immediately by His substance, although there is no space from which the latter is absent, but rather by His operation and the contact of His power; for the Divine substance being absolute needs no relation with beings existing in time, and being simple and without parts, it, in order to be present any and everywhere, does not have to extend itself through space. Yet since operation, operative power, and substance are not really distinct one from another in God, we must affirm that wherever there is an immediate effect due to the Divine causality, there God is really and substantially present. And as there is not a single creature on which God does not exert His activity to preserve and to move it, it follows that God is present everywhere, not only by His action or power, but also by His essence.

When, therefore, Scripture speaks of God as filling heaven and earth: "Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord?" Jeremiah xxiii. 24.  these words are not to be taken in their literal meaning any more than the other anthropomorphism's found so plentifully in Holy Writ. God's immensity, as we have often insisted, must not be understood in the sense of extension, and we cannot liken it to a boundless ocean containing in its depths all existing things, interpenetrating each portion of the created world and overflowing on all sides. It is to commentators and to theologians that we must appeal for the true meaning hidden under the expressions the Holy Spirit has employed in order that He might be understood by all. Such was the attitude of St. Thomas toward the above text.

And since being and the other perfections are communicated to creatures in degrees that vary amazingly —from the grain of sand up to that highest of heavenly spirits—the presence of God as efficient cause has also innumerable degrees, according to the measure in which each creature shares in the Divine perfection. 

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 17.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

Although, therefore, God is everywhere and wholly present in every place, He is not equally present everywhere. There are certain places where He dwells in such a particular manner that one might call these places the home or dwelling house of God. It is in these privileged spots, according to St. John Damascene, that the Divine operation is most manifest. Such was the spot, in days of yore, where Jehovah was pleased to reveal himself to Jacob in wondrous visions, and called by him "the house of God and the gate of heaven." Again, at the sight of the miracles performed in his favour, and of the mystical ladder between earth and heaven which he beheld in a dream, as well as in the marvellous promises made to him by the God of his fathers, the holy patriarch recognised a special presence of the Divinity even in the heart of the desert. Under the old law, God dwelt in a special way in the tabernacle built by Moses, and later in the temple of Jerusalem, where His presence was made manifest under the form of a mysterious cloud.

Finally, how can we fail to recognise a special presence of the Divinity (were it only as the efficient Cause), in the prophets to whose minds the Holy Ghost unveiled the future, and in the other inspired writers, as well as in the Apostles whom He assisted and enlightened; in the saints, who_receive more abundant graces; in the Church, which He safeguards from error, sanctifies and defends against her enemies: in a word, wheresoever His operation is more plainly felt, wheresoever His favours are distributed more lavishly, in the natural order as well as in the order of grace. And because it is in heaven that God's action displays itself with the greatest splendour, because it is there that His Divine bounty becomes, as it were, forgetful of all limitation— it is there, according to St. Bernard, that God is present in so special a manner, that by comparison in other places He is not present at all. This is why we pray in the Lord's prayer: "Our Father, Who art in heaven" 

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 16.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

Our own soul may furnish an analogy. While it is in its substance entirely present in the whole body and in each part, it is nevertheless more specially and fully and perfectly united to the head, the seat of all the senses, than to the rest of the organism. This is easily explained. In order to perform the functions of the many faculties with which it is endowed, the soul needs a variety of organs, all of which are not met with throughout all the body, but are found united only in the head. In all truth, we can say that, although "the soul is present entirely and substantially in the whole body, and in each part, it is, however, by its power, more chiefly and excellently present in the brain," as St. Bernard has said.

It can now be understood how, notwithstanding His perfectly indivisible simplicity, God can be here more than there; and how His presence as an efficient cause, though formally and specifically the same everywhere, can, when considered in its extension, vary, so to say, infinitely according to the very measure of the Divine activity. In this sense His presence is more complete, more excellent, and more perfect where the results of His activity are more multiplied and of a higher nature, while it decreases in the same measure as the effects of His Divine power are more remote from the perfection of the cause which produced them. This accounts for the saying, that some beings are near to God while others are far from Him. Here it is question not of a material or local relation, but of a likeness or unlikeness of nature or of grace. Thus, the angels—brightest mirrors of the Divinity, as St. Dionysius calls them—dwell, as it were, in the very vestibule of the adorable Trinity, because, being the most perfect of creatures, they are nearer to God. Material beings, on the contrary, are relegated to the lowest grade of creation, and thus are further away from God because of the unlikeness of their nature to His. Man, being made of both spirit and matter, holds the middle place between these two classes of beings. Although less united to God than the pure spirits, he having a soul, is incomparably nearer to Him than are irrational creatures who have not the power to lift themselves up to their Creator by knowledge and love. This is why it is said that man was created to the image and likeness of God, whereas only a vestige of the Divinity is to be found in animals, plants, and inorganic beings.

Still further below the material world is the place occupied by the sinner, because of his moral unlikeness to God. Of him alone does Holy Writ speak when it says that the Lord is far from the wicked. St. Augustine, speaking of his sinful life, says of his own previous state of sinfulness: "I was then far off in the region of unlikeness." Such words have become current in Christian speech. Talking about a person, who, for a long time has been neglectful of his religious duties, and who wallows in sin, we say: "He lives far from God." But let him begin to show better dispositions, and then we say: "He is drawing nearer to God." These expressions are most appropriate; for, according to St. Prosper: "It is not in passing over space that we come nearer to God or go farther from Him, but it is by similarity or dissimilarity to Him." 

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 15.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

God, then, is the universal Cause of all existence, for all the beings of the world are the effects of His power. "All, then, must possess something of God within themselves, not any portion of His substance, but a likeness of and participation in His goodness," after the manner of a foot-print or image. Moveover, since the effects of the Divine activity are different in different creatures, and the Divine benefits are far from being equally distributed—whether we consider the order of nature or of grace—it follows that those which have a greater share in the blessings of the Creator are by that very fact nearer and more united to God and richer in their possession of Him. In turn, "God as active principle, exists more perfectly in those creatures which are more indebted to His munificence, for as He is present directly and immediately by virtue of His activity, He is consequently more closely united to the beings in whom He has worked the greatest things."  If God's substance, so simple and single and indivisible, knowing neither separation nor division, cannot be anywhere unless it be there entirely, it is not the same with His operation and His all-embracing power, which, while free to realise itself externally in the measure it judges right, is brought by a multitude of ways into contact with different creatures.

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 14.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

What we have said of being should be applied to all the other perfections as well. All that God is, He is by Himself, by His essence, and consequently without measure. Hence He is not merely intelligent, wise, good, loving, powerful; He is intelligence and wisdom itself, infinite goodness and love and power, the source of all understanding and goodness. On the contrary, the creature can well be intelligent, wise, good and powerful, but is not intelligence itself, nor wisdom, nor love. Its perfections do not constitute its essence, but are simply either its powers, or properties, or operations, distinct from its essence, and limited as is the latter. In a word, these are participated perfections.

III

After the foregoing explanation it will not be difficult to understand the Angelic Doctor, when he says that God is in all things, as the cause is in the effects which participate in the causal goodness. This is but another way of saying that God is present to creatures as efficient cause, first, by His operation, for it is requisite that every principle or cause of action shall enjoy immediate contact with the object of its action;, and then by reason of His benefits, which constitute the purpose of His operation; namely, by the created, finite contingent, communicated perfection which He communicates to creatures of this world as so many remote imitations, imperfect copies or analogical participation's in the Divine Essence. Indeed, it is the peculiar quality of an efficient cause to communicate more or less of the perfection of its own self with its effects, and to be not only in forceful contact with them at the first moment and during the continuance of its operation, but even to transmit to them its own similitude. It is even natural to an efficient cause to produce something which resembles itself, and the perfection of the effect is none other than a reproduction of and participation in and resemblance to the perfection of the cause. "That which is in God perfectly, is found in other things by a certain deficient participation." (St Thomas, Contra Gent, 1, I., ch. xxlx.)

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 13.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

II

How can we arrive at an idea of these different grades of God's presence? If the Divine substance were extended and divisible, we might understand how it could be present in this and that object, in proportions varying as do the things themselves, to a greater degree in larger beings, and to a lesser in smaller ones. St. Thomas furnishes us with a solution of this problem, when he says: "There is one common and ordinary mode of presence, according to which God is present in all things by His essence, His power and His presence, namely, as the cause is present in the effects which participate in His goodness," 1 To understand the meaning and the force of these words, we must recall a beautiful doctrine borrowed by the Angel of the Schools from the Greek Fathers, particularly from St. Dionysius, who had himself taken it from the writings of Plato.

According to Plato's teachings, and they coincide on this point with the teachings of Faith, every created being is a participation in the Divine being, and every created perfection is in some manner a participation in infinite perfection. Thus our nature is a participation in the Divine perfection; 2 the light of our intelligence is a participation in the uncreated intelligence; our life, a participation in the life of God. Briefly, every particle of goodness, of perfection, of being in any creature whatsoever, is a participation in the being and goodness of God. 3

We must not conceive this communication of God to His creatures as a division of the Divine essence, just as one divides and distributes the parts of a fruit; rather, the Divine essence preserves its unity and fullness. Nor should we regard it as an emanation properly so-called, or a flowing out, an effusion of the Divine substance as rivulets flow from a single source, or as a warm body sheds its rays and heat upon everything that is near. The Divine goodness externizes itself by producing beings like unto itself, yet without any diminution of the Divine substance; 4 for only its likeness is imparted to creatures. The process is akin to the impression of the seal on the wax, without any communication of the former's substance to the latter.

Hence this participation of creatures in the Divine goodness is not any community of being and perfection. Such a doctrine is pantheistic. Creatures have their own being, and their own goodness, which is at once the intrinsic and the formal cause, making them what they are. They are related to God inasmuch as God is their extrinsic cause, and this in a threefold sense, namely, the ideal according to which they have been created; the efficient cause; and the final and ultimate cause of their creation. 5

Not without reason then did the Fathers, and, under their influence, St. Thomas, speak of creatures as beings by participation, entia per participationem, and of their perfections as participated perfections. In so speaking they had a twofold purpose; first, clearly to establish the profound difference between the Creator and*creature, or rather the abyss which separates them; second, to impress upon men the fact, that every created being essentially depends on God as upon its exemplar and its efficient cause of existence. Indeed, the very words, participated being, signify a being that is finite, limited, restricted; for participation in anything, a family heritage, for example, means to take a part and not have entire possession. The same words further imply a borrowed being, a contingent being, a being proceeding from another being, and essentially depending upon some extrinsic cause. From the very fact that a thing is not being itself in all its plenitude—the ocean of being—but a mere rivulet or stream, it follows that what it possesses of being is not its own in virtue even of its essence, but comes to it from without, just as every tiny stream supposes a generating spring or fountain.

In speaking of creatures, then, as entities participating of the deity, we wish to assert two tryths: first, creatures do not possess being in all its fullness, but have merely a part of it, varying among themselves in quantity if you will, but essentially limited and restricted; secondly, this limited and restricted being does not accrue to them in any essential manner, even in virtue of their nature, but has been communicated to them by an extrinsic cause—God. In much the same way to the glowing steel has been imparted warmth and brilliancy by the operation of an outside agency, not because its nature demands it, but because it is igneous only by participation.

The Divine being, on the contrary, is not a borrowed being, a being proceeding from another. God holds His being from no one, for He has it by virtue of His nature. "He is, then, self-existent being Ens per se, being by essence, in opposition to being that is contingent and dependent on another—  He is also preeminent being, self-subsistent,and consequently He is infinite being, the very plenitude of being,. And if He is being in all its fullness, nothing can exist beyond Him, which is not traceable to Him as to its source, and which is not present in Him in a super-eminent manner. Thus whatever being is outside of Him cannot be called simply being, rather they are beings —that is to say, participation's in and imitations of being."

1 St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I., q. xliii., a. 3.

2 Ibid., Summa Theologica, I., q. xiv., a. 6.

3 Ibid., Summa Theologica, I., q. xii., a. 11, ad. 3; and I., q. vi., a. 4.

4 St. Thomas, Comment in lib. de divinis Nom., c. ii., lect. 6.

5 Ibid., Summa Theologica, I., q. vi., a. 4.

6 St. Thomas, Contra Gent., l, n., c. xv.

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 12.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

This mode of the presence of God, common to every being and the same everywhere substantially, has, nevertheless, many degrees, according to the number and the excellence of the effects produced, or, rather, according to the varying measure in which each creature shares in the Divine perfection. Thus as efficient cause God is present in a more perfect and complete way in the world of spirits than in that of bodies; He is more present to the angels than to men; to rational and living beings than to irrational ones, and those deprived of life; to the just than to sinners.

This is the clear teaching of Pope St. Gregory the Great: "God is everywhere, and whole and entire everywhere, for He is in contact with all things, even though He has for different things a different contact. With insensible creatures it is a contact which gives being without life; with animals His contact gives being, life and sensation, without intelligence; with human and angelic natures, His contact is such as to give at once being, life, sensation and intelligence; and thus, although He is always the self-same God, yet He is in contact divinely with creatures mutually unlike one another." (St. Gregory, in Ezech., lib. I., Hom, viii., n. 16.)

St. Fulgentius says: "God is not similarly present in all things; for although He is present everywhere by His power, He is by no means present everywhere by His grace." (Ad Trasim., I., II., c. viii.) And St. Bernard: "God Who is everywhere, and equally so by His simple substance, is notwithstanding present with reasonable creatures differently than with others; He is also present in the good, differently than in the bad. So also He is present in unintelligent creatures in such a manner, that they do not attain to possess Him, as reasonable beings may by their knowledge; but only good ones may possess Him by love, in whom alone He is present by union of will." (St Bernard, Hom, iii., super Evang., Missus est.)

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 11.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

PART FIRST. 

CHAPTER II

How This Common and Ordinary Presence is Intimate, Profound and Universal. Its Different Degrees

It is difficult for us to conceive and far more difficult to express, how intimate, profound and universal is the common and ordinary presence of God in all things. We know directly and immediately only created causes; and however efficacious their action, it is always limited. The created cause modifies and transforms the object upon which it exercises its activity, operator transmutando; it never creates. Hence there is something which it leaves untouched in the depths of the being it works upon, which it does not bring forth and consequently to which it has not been present. A sculptor, for example, may be able to carve from a rough block of wood or marble a masterpiece, which will be an object for the admiration not only of his contemporaries, but also of remotest posterity; yet however powerful and creative his genius, before he can give outward expression to the ideal conceived in the secret of his mind, he will require a material substance upon which to exercise his chisel, a substance whose existence he takes for granted, but does not produce. The soul itself supposes the existence of the body, which is the matter it informs, and which is extraneous to it, notwithstanding the fact that the soul is so very intimately united with the body in the capacity of its substantial form. It communicates to the body its life, sensation and action, and forms with it one single substance, yet the body by no means comes from it by creation.

Such barriers are unknown to the Divine causality; it is universal and reaches out to every place and thing: substances, faculties, habits, operations, everything that is real and positive comes from it, is its work—all except evil and sin. Without the Divine causality nothing can come into existence; without it, nothing can continue to exist, without God, of Whom it is said that He upholdeth "all things by the word of His power." (Hebrews i. 3.) Again, without His actual and immediate influence, no created agent can act: "Lord, Thou hast wrought all our works for us;" (Isaias xxvi. 12.) even our free will cannot escape His almighty action: "For it is God Who worketh in you both to will and to accomplish, according to His good will." (Philippians ii. 13.) God then is present everywhere as the First Cause—in the centre, in the radius, and in the circumference of every being.

Whatever be the nature of the effect produced; whatever be the order to which this effect belongs; be it an inanimate or animate being, a soul to be created, to be preserved, to be justified, a natural or supernatural gift to be conferred, a faculty to be set in action; in a word, as soon as we have anywhere an effect of the Divine causality, there we are sure to find God in His very self in the capacity of active principle. ( St. Thomas, Contra Gent, 1, IV., c. xxl.)

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 10.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

PART FIRST. 

III

THE ORDINARY PRESENCE OF GOD IN ALL CREATURES ¹¹

If, therefore, God fills the heavens and the earth, it is by the presence and exercise of His power and not by the necessity of His nature, for God's greatness is one of power and not of bulk. St. Thomas seems manifestly to have taken his inspiration from these different passages. 

St. Fulgentius, a disciple of St. Augustine, speaks in much the same terms as his master. Likewise, St. Gregory of Nyssa.

That the basis for the presence of God by very substance in all created things is the divine activity, can be clearly seen from all these passages, and from many others we could easily adduce. An earthly body is present in the place it occupies neither by its action nor even directly by its substance, but by its dimensions, by the contact of its parts with the parts of the body surrounding and containing it; since, therefore, it is quantity that gives parts and dimensions to a body and enables it to come into contact with another body and to occupy a determined part of space, such or such a body is, properly speaking, present in space by its quantity: per quantitatem dimensivam.

Far different is the way in which a spirit is present in space. As it is a simple, that is to say, an indivisible substance and without parts, it cannot of itself occupy any space, either great or small, and does not need space to display itself. If, however, a spirit wishes to enter into relation with a place or with the things present in that place, it can do so by the exercise of its activities and its energies. Hence the proposition, looked upon as an axiom by all Scholastics: spirits are present in space by contact of power— per contactum virtutis. 

What, therefore, quantity is to bodies—i. e., a property distinct from their substance and extending it through space—active power is to spirits, which it places in contact with space and the things situated in space.

This is why St. Thomas, when asking the question whether ubiquity is a property becoming God from all eternity, utrum esse ubique conveniat Deo ab æterno, instead of answering, like some theologians, that God is not, of course, present from all eternity to things which did not as yet exist, but that His substance is, nevertheless, really and eternally present in the spaces which the different created beings are to occupy in time, answers "that the Divinity is present only temporarily in created things according as by His creative act He is present by His power during their temporary existence."

And if you question the Fathers as to where God was before the creation of the world, instead of answering that He was in these incommensurable spaces occupied by the present universe, spaces which thousands of other worlds far greater than ours could not fill, they will answer you differently, saying through the mouth of St. Bernard: "We need not trouble to ask where He was, for besides Him nothing existed, and He was then in Himself alone." 

Hence, to summarise, in the mind of St. Thomas and the Fathers of the Church, the basic reason, the true ground, the definitive "why" of the presence of God in creatures is the divine operation, formally immanent, since it neither issues forth from, nor is even distinct from, the principle whence it emanates, yet producing outward created effects and, therefore, called "virtually transitive," virtualiter transiens.

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 9.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

PART FIRST. 

III

THE ORDINARY PRESENCE OF GOD IN ALL CREATURES ¹⁰

Theologians, as we have seen, often explain God's omnipresence by saying that He is present everywhere because of His immensity. St. Thomas uses a different term. According to him, God is present everywhere in the capacity of efficient cause, per modum causæ. (Summa Theologica. Ia., q. viii., a. 3.)

Such an expression is profound and full of meaning, for it banishes from the mind any idea of a diffusion or expansion of the Divine substance, at the same time marking out the Divine operation as the basis of the relations existing between God and His creatures. Yet the expression was not a new one, and St. Thomas is not giving a purely personal opinion; here as ever he shows himself to be the faithful echo of tradition.

And, as we have already noticed, St. Augustine declared that God was in the world as the efficient cause of the world, "as the presence of the One by Whom the world was created; as the artisan is present to the work he handles." (St. Augustine, in Evang. Joan., tract 2, n. 10.) 

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 8.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

PART FIRST. 

THE ORDINARY PRESENCE OF GOD IN ALL CREATURES ⁹

The Divine substance occupies no determined space, either great or small; it does not need space to display itself, and enters into no relation of proximity or remoteness with beings that exist in space. If we speak of a relation of the Divine substance with these beings, we mean only a relation of power and operation; i. e., God is intimately present to all things because He produces and preserves the being of all things: "God is not determined to space great or small by the necessity of His essence, as if He need be present in any place, since He is from all eternity before all place; but by the immensity of His power He reaches into all things which are in place, because He is the universal cause of being. Thus He is wholly wheresoever He is, because by His simple power He reaches into all things." 1 If then God is present in all places and in all creatures, it is because no actual space and no created being can escape His direct and immediate influence, for His power, and consequently His substance, reaches out to them all. 2


1 St. Thomas, L., iii., Contra Gent, lxviii.

2 Summa Theologica. Ia., q. cxii., a. 1. 

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 7.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

PART FIRST. 

The Saint Augustine Taken to School by Saint Monica. by Niccolò di Pietro 1413-15

THE ORDINARY PRESENCE OF GOD IN ALL CREATURES ⁶

After his conversion and accession to the episcopal see of Hippo, Augustine's language is entirely different: "When we say that God is everywhere we must withdraw from our mind every grossness of thought, and disengage ourselves from sensible images, lest we should imagine God as diffused everywhere, like some greatness spreading itself in space, as does the earth, the sea, the air or light; for all such things are less in one of their parts than in the whole; but we rather should conceive God's greatness as we think of great wisdom in a man who happens to be of small stature."

The notion of the diffusion and expansion of God's being, was entirely disapproved by St. Augustine, and dealt with by him as a carnal conception to be rejected. The advocates of such a theory do not, it is true, fall into Augustine's error whilst he was a Manichean, of supposing that a greater part of the earth can contain a greater part of the divine substance; for they know and teach that a pure spirit being indivisible and without parts does not occupy space like earthly bodies, but can be wholly in the whole being and wholly in each and every part of that being. They do, however, seem to share the ideas of Augustine's pre-conversion days, but which he reformed later, in the general trend of their argument and in the manner in which the^ conceive of the divine ubiquity.

Far more spiritual, and therefore much more in accordance with the divine nature, is the notion of God's immensity given by St. Thomas. Instead of admitting, with the advocates of the theory we are now refuting, a kind of diffusion of the divine substance, so that God would still be in His most real substance present to created things scattered through space, even though by an impossibility His action exercised no influence upon them, the Angelic Doctor teaches that the formal reason of God's presence in all created things is none other than His infinite activity and operation, just as the reason of His immensity is His omnipotence.

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 6.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

PART FIRST. 

THE ORDINARY PRESENCE OF GOD IN ALL CREATURES ⁵

St. Augustine conceived a similar picture of the divine immensity in his early days before his conversion: "So also I thought of Thee, O God, O Life of my life," he says in his Confessions, "so also I thought of Thee, as stretched out through infinite spaces, interpenetrating the whole mass of the world, reaching out beyond in all directions to immensity without end, so that sea, sky, all things are full of Thee, limited in Thee, while Thou art not limited at all. As the body of the air above the earth does not bar the passage of the light of the sun, but the light penetrates the air, not bursting or dividing it, but filling it—in the same way, I thought, the body of heaven, and air, and sea, and even of earth was all pervious to Thee, penetrable in all its parts great or small, so that it can admit the hidden interjection of Thy presence, which from within or from without orders all things that Thou hast created. This was my fancy, for I could shape no other; yet it was false. For in that way a greater part of the earth would contain a greater part of Thee, a less part a less. All things would be full of Thee in such a sense that there would be more of thee in the elephant than in the sparrow, inasmuch as one is larger than the other, and fills a wider space. And thus Thou wouldst unite Thy limbs piecemeal with the limbs of the world, the great with the great, the small with the small. This is not Thy nature, but as yet Thou hadst not lightened my darkness." (a)

Further on, speaking on the same subject, he adds: "I marshalled before the sight of my spirit all creation, all that we see, earth, and sea, and air, and stars, and trees, and animals; all that we do not see, the firmament of the sky above, and all angels, and all spiritual things; for these also, as if they were bodies, did my imagination arrange in this place or in that. I pictured to myself Thy creation as one vast mass, composed of various kinds of bodies, some real bodies, some those which I imagined in place of spirits. I pictured this mass as vast, not indeed in its true dimensions, for these I could not know, but as large as I chose to think, only finite on every side. And Thee, O Lord, I conceived as lapping it round and interpenetrating it everywhere, but as being infinite in every direction; as if there were sea everywhere, and everywhere through measureless space nothing but illimitable sea, and within this a sponge, huge, but yet finite; the sponge would be pervaded through all its particles by the infinite sea. In this way, I pictured Thy finite creation, as filled with Thy infinity." (b)

(a) St Augustine, Confessions, I., vii., c. 1. Bigg's translation.

(b) St Augustine, Confessions, I., vii., c. 5. Bigg's translation.

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit In The Souls Of The Just. Part 5.

According To The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas

PART FIRST. 

THE ORDINARY PRESENCE OF GOD IN ALL CREATURES ⁴

In his commentary on Peter Lombard's first book of Sentences, St. Thomas explains this threefold presence in slightly different words. Not that it excludes the explanation we have just given, nor that it is in contradiction with it, but it brings out better the thought of the Angelic Doctor relative to the substantial presence of God in His capacity of efficient cause. Here are his words: "God is in created things by His presence, inasmuch as He is there in action, for the worker must in some manner be present with his work; and, furthermore, because the Divine operation cannot be separated from the active force from which it flows, it must be held that God is present in all things by His power; finally, since the force or the power of God is identical with His essence, it follows that God is in all things by His essence." (St. Thomas, Sententiae, dist. XXXVII., q. i., a. 2.) These words are highly significant.

There are some theologians who explain the divine omnipresence by saying that God is present everywhere by His essence, because the divine substance, being infinite, fills the heavens and the earth. To them, the immensity of God is a property by which the divine essence is, so to speak, distributed ad infinitum in all existing and possible spaces; that is to say, God's omnipresence is the actual diffusion of the divine being, penetrating all real things and places without blending with them. According to this opinion, the divine immensity might be compared to a sea without shores, capable of containing an infinite number of beings of every nature and dimension. Within this sea is a sponge which the waters interpenetrate and then flow over on all sides: a figure of this world, that God's immensity pervades and then flows over on all sides; with this difference, however, that God is wholly in the world and wholly in each of its parts, whereas each portion of the water of the sea occupies a distinct place.