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.