33. God's Presence in All Things and Omnipresence

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Lecture Notes

Main Topics #

God’s Presence in All Things #

• The Central Question: Can God be in all things if He is above all things? Does being “in” something mean being contained by it?
• The Agent-Effect Relationship: Every agent must be present to that which it immediately acts upon. Since God is being itself (ipsum esse), and created existence is His proper effect, God must be intimately present to all things.
• Continuous Causation: God causes being not only at creation but continuously conserves all things in existence, just as the sun continuously illuminates air.
• Being as Most Intimate: Being (esse) is what is most intimate and inward in all things—more intimate than any accident or quality. Therefore, the cause of being must be present in the most intimate way.

Clarification Through Multiple Senses of “In” #

• Bodily Sense: Things in a room are contained by the room’s walls (actual spatial containment).
• Part-in-Whole Sense: Parts are actually within wholes (e.g., teeth in a mouth).
• Genus-in-Species Sense: The genus is actually in the species (e.g., animal in man).
• Spiritual Containment: Spiritual things contain what they are in (e.g., the soul contains the body; God contains all things).
• Power Sense: To be “in my power” means under my control, not physically contained.

The Problem of Imagination #

• False imagination is the beginning of error. When we try to imagine what cannot be imagined, we necessarily fall into false imagination.
• We must negate what we imagine when discussing immaterial realities. For example, we say “God is not a body” and “God is not in the continuous [quantity],” even though we necessarily imagine something continuous when we speak this way.

Key Arguments #

Objection 1: God is Above All Things, Not In Them #

• Objection: Scripture says God is “raised up above all the nations.” Therefore, He cannot be in all things.
• Response: God is above all things through the excellence of His nature, yet He is in all things as the cause of their being. These describe different relationships and are not contradictory.

Objection 2: What Is In Something Is Contained By It #

• Objection: To be in something means to be contained by it. But God is not contained by things; rather, He contains them. Therefore, God is not in things; things are in Him.
• Response: Bodily things are contained by place, but spiritual things contain what they are in. The soul is in the body yet contains it. Similarly, God is in all things as their container and cause.
• Scripture Support: Augustine, in the 83 Questions, says “In him, rather, are all things, than he [is] somewhere.”

Objection 3: The More Powerful an Agent, the More Distance Its Action Proceeds #

• Objection: A powerful agent can act at a distance without being present. Therefore, God need not be in all things to act in all things.
• Response: This applies only to agents acting through intermediaries. It is the maximum power of God that He acts immediately in all things. Nothing is distant from Him except through unlikeness of nature or lack of grace. Things may be spatially distant from God, but not essentially distant.

Objection 4: God Is Not In Demons #

• Objection: “Light has no fellowship with darkness.” Therefore, God is not in demons.
• Response: In demons, we must distinguish between their nature (which is from God) and their deformity of will (which is not from God). God is present to their being and existence, not to their sinful deformity.

Scripture Support for God’s Presence in All Things #

• Isaiah 26:12: “All our doings God has done in us”—indicating God’s operative presence in all things.
• Jeremiah 23:24: “I fill heaven and earth”—directly affirming omnipresence.

Important Definitions #

Touch / Contact of Power (contactus potentiae) #

• When one thing acts upon another, it “touches” it through power, not necessarily through bodily contact.
• Examples: One is “touched” by another’s misery (emotionally acted upon without physical contact); magnetic fields cause action at a distance.
• God touches all things through His power, not through dimensional contact.

Indivisible Outside the Continuous (indivisibile praeter continuum) #

• God’s indivisibility is not like a point’s indivisibility (which has a determined position in continuous quantity).
• God is indivisible in the sense of being outside the entire genus of continuous quantity altogether.
• This distinction is crucial: a point is divisible in place; God is outside all place.

Intimate/Inward Presence (intimitas, inwardly) #

• God’s presence is more intimate to things than things are to themselves, because He is the cause of their very being.
• Berquist notes the connection to St. Teresa of Avila’s “Interior Castles”—moving inward spiritually to encounter God who is more within us than we are within ourselves.
• “Inward philosophy” (logica, sapientia) deals with immaterial things known through intellect alone, unlike “outward philosophy” (geometry, ethics) which deals with sensible things.

Examples & Illustrations #

The Magnet and Metal Filings #

• Einstein’s childhood wonder at magnets seemingly moving metal filings without contact.
• Modern physics reveals magnetic fields as intermediaries, but the principle stands: the mover and moved must be “together” even without dimensional contact.
• Shows that action at distance is not truly action at distance but action through intermediaries.

The Soul in the Body #

• Though the soul is said to be “in” the body, it is not contained by it as a body in a place would be.
• Rather, the soul contains the body and holds it together. Without the soul, the body falls apart.
• Similarly, God is in all things, containing and holding them in being.

Light Continuously Caused in Air #

• Just as light is caused in air by the sun and remains in the air as long as it is illuminated, so God continuously causes being in all things as long as they exist.
• When the sun is removed, the air loses light; when God ceases to cause being, things cease to exist (hypothetically).

The Child and the Tower #

• Berquist’s nephew pointing with awe at a tower taller than himself, sensing it could act upon him by falling.
• Illustrates how spatial prepositions (above, below) derive from our sense of agency and power: what is better we place “above,” and agents act “upon” patients.

The Sphere and Cube #

• A piece of clay molded from a sphere to a cube: what changes, the clay or its shape?
• People often falsely imagine the genus (shape) as the subject of change, rather than the substrate (clay).
• This shows how people fall back upon earlier, incorrect senses of “in” when confronted with equivocal language.

Anaxagoras and the Problem of Generation #

• Anaxagoras imagines that what can be drawn from matter must be actually in it, leading him to posit all things in all things.
• He wrongly supposes ability (potentia) must exist actually.
• This error arises from failing to distinguish the fourth sense of “in” (species in genus, in ability) from the first sense (actual being in place).

Questions Addressed #

Q: How can God be both transcendent and immanent? A: God is above all things through the excellence of His nature (transcendence), yet He is in all things as their cause of being (immanence). These describe different relations and are not contradictory.

Q: If God is in all things, is He in demons? A: God is present to demons’ nature and existence (which He causes) but not to their deformity of will. The deformity is not from God; only the being is.

Q: How can God be everywhere if He is not a body? A: God is not in place through dimensional extension like bodies. Rather, He is everywhere through His infinite power and as the cause of all being. His indivisibility is outside the entire genus of continuous quantity, not determined to any location.

Q: Is omnipresence unique to God? A: [Introduced but not fully resolved in this lecture] The fourth article will address whether being everywhere belongs exclusively to God (proprium Dei).