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.)
