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.
