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.
