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.)