Is God in All Things and Everywhere? (Summa I, q.8, a.1–2)

Orientation #

He says nothing explicit about the previous class beyond the standing thread (God’s infinity, the order of the attributes). He looks ahead: article 4 will ask whether being everywhere belongs to God alone, and article 3 will distinguish essence, power and presence “and Thomas will make that distinction.” The neighbouring classes treat the infinite and God’s presence in things (previous) and articles 3–4 of q. 8 plus the start of immutability (next).

The class, in order #

1. Opening aside: the incarnation and “ubique” (“He’s still God, though, so He still is ubique”) #

Point: a coincidence that morning’s reading sets the theme. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, after refuting heresies on the incarnation from Scripture, Thomas gives objections from reason; one is that Christ’s human nature is not everywhere, so God who takes it on would not be ubique. Thomas’s reply: he is still God, so still everywhere, though his human nature is not. Latin note: ubi = where, ubique = everywhere.

2. The prooemium: infinity, place, and the order of the attributes (“it seems to belong to the infinite that it be everywhere”) #

Point: why “everywhere” follows “infinite,” and why he pauses over Thomas’s ordering.

• Even an infinite body would be everywhere; the early Greeks who posited one would have it everywhere in length, width and depth, hence no motion (nowhere to go).
• The Greeks already saw a link between infinite and unchangeable: infinite in extension, no place to go; infinite in perfection, nothing to lack, nothing to move to get.
• Infinity sits between perfection and immutability; God’s infinity is tied to his universal perfection (perfections of every kind, in a superior and simple way). “I just throw that out as a hint”: is infinity more closely related to perfection and immutability than those two are to each other? Thomas on the circle: perfect because beginning is end.
• Simplicity and unity are very close (in the Compendium of Theology unity is treated among the chapters on simplicity); the five attributes begin with simplicity and end with unity: “he ends where he began.” He will not presume to say why the order is exactly so, but it makes him remember and look for reasons.
• Four things sought: (1) whether God is in all things; (2) whether everywhere; (3) whether by essence, power, presence — his provisional gloss: essence = giving things existence; power = moving them to do what they do; presence = he sees, hears, knows all (“all things are open to him,” as Scripture says); (4) whether being everywhere is proprium to God.
• On proprium: “proper” is opposed to improper; but proprium often means private as opposed to common (bonum commune vs bonum proprium, the private good; “proper good” would make the common good “improper”). In logic, property belongs to one species, every member, always. So a. 4 asks something further: “God is wise” vs “God alone is wise” — “alone” adds something. Appropriately last, since “God is everywhere” is presupposed to “only God is everywhere.”

3. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“what is above all things is not in all things”) #

Point: four objections, one Scriptural sed contra.

1. What is above all things is not in them; God is above all (Psalm 112, raised above the nations). “That’s a good objection” — the very one Protestants use against the real presence: how can Jesus be up there and here?
2. What is in something is contained by it (the first sense of in: we are contained by these four walls). God is not contained; rather things are in him — Augustine, Eighty-three Questions: all things are in him rather than he somewhere. Aside: “to be in” has many senses; Aristotle in Natural Hearing IV [ed.: Physics] distinguishes eight, “which Thomas in his commentary orders on” — and those are the central senses, not all of them.
3. The more powerful the agent, the farther its action reaches; God is the most powerful (Latin virtus usually rendered “power”); so his action reaches distant things and he need not be in them.
4. Demons are things; God is not in demons — no fellowship of light with darkness (2 Corinthians).

• Sed contra: where something operates, there it is; God operates in all things — Isaiah 26:12, “all our doings you have done in us.” He stresses this is a very important text Thomas is always quoting: we do nothing without God in some way doing it in us; raises difficulties about free will. Even Aristotle (he thinks the Eudemian Ethics, on the beginning of deliberation and willing coming from outside, from God) sees God as the beginning of our doings.

4. Article 1, respondeo: agent, contact of power, being as most inward (“every agent be joined to that in which it immediately acts”) #

Point: God is in all things not as part of their essence nor as an accident, but as an agent present to that on which it acts.

• First the negations: not as part of the essence (God is not the soul of the world); not as an accident (as my quantity, knowledge, shape, health are in me). Not as soul, body or accident.
• Argument:
  1. Every agent must be joined to that in which it immediately acts (unless through an intermediary), and by its power touches it. — Aristotle proves in Natural Hearing VII that mover and moved are together.
  2. “Touch” is extended from bodies touching to acting upon: “I was touched by his situation” — your heart was acted on by their misery. So there is a contact of power without contact of surfaces; God has no surfaces.
  3. God is being itself (esse), so created being is his proper effect, as being ignited is the proper effect of fire.
  4. He causes this not only when things begin but as long as they are conserved — as light in the air from the sun lasts only as long as the sun illumines.
  5. Being is what is most intimate to each thing and most profound, because it is formal with respect to everything in the thing, the actuality of them all. Conclusion: God is in all things, and most intimately (in English, “most inwardly”).
• Examples on contact: Einstein’s boyhood wonder at a magnet moving filings without touching them; fields — there is no action without contact, but it appears so; a remote control moving a cup: no contact needed because working through an intermediary. “That immediate idea has got to be kept.”
• Aside on intimus: Boethius, De Trinitate, draws his teaching ex intimis disciplinis philosophiae, “from the inward disciplines of philosophy”; Thomas says these are logic and wisdom — natural philosophy, geometry, ethics, politics deal with the sensible, imaginable or experienced (outward); logic (inside the mind) and wisdom (immaterial things) are inward. Teresa of Avila’s interior castle: going inside to what is most inward, where you might find God — though “there might be a lot of monsters on the way in” (dragons, defects, sins).

5. Article 1, replies (“above all things through the excellence of His nature”) #

• Ad 1: God is above all by excellence of nature, in all as causing their being — not the same way. Aside on prepositions borrowed from space: we put the better “above” (this student above that); the agent acting upon the patient is above, the patient under; so form is imagined above matter. Story of his small nephew: knocked down and laughed at towers, but stood in wonder at one taller than himself — because it might come down upon him; he could act on the small one, the tall one could act on him.
• Student question: why Thomas uses the infinitive esse rather than ens? Answer: more precise; ens sometimes means what is. English “being” is equivocal — what is, or the existence of what is; “wisdom is about being as being” means about what is, as it is.
• Ad 2: bodily things are in something as in a container, but spiritual things contain what they are in — the soul contains the body: at death the body falls apart, so the soul holds it together; it is in the body as form, not as in a place. So God is in things as containing them; by a likeness of bodily things, things are also said to be in God as contained by him.
• Digression: the eight senses of in (Natural Hearing IV), “a lot of mileage” — people deceived by the equivocation fall back on an earlier sense.
  • Senses 1–3: what is in is actually there — you in this room (place); teeth in the mouth (part in whole); genus in species.
  • Sense 4: species in genus — is man in animal? Only in ability: if actually, “the dog is an animal” would say the dog is a man.
  • Sense 5: form in matter. Boundary case: clay molded from sphere to cube — people say “the shape changed,” but the clay is the subject; shape is the genus of spherical and cube, so they falsely make the genus the subject (falling from fifth sense to fourth).
  • Anaxagoras: “you can’t get blood out of a turnip” because it isn’t in there — he imagines what comes out of a thing must be actually in it, where often it is only in ability; all the problems Aristotle points out follow.
  • Sense 7: in the power of the agent — “I’ve got you in my power,” opposite “out of my hands.” Things are in God in this sense, in his hands; God in things as containing them, holding them in existence.
• Ad 3: no agent, however powerful, acts at a distance except through what is between; it belongs to God’s maximum power to act immediately in all, so nothing is distant from him as lacking him; things are “distant” by unlikeness of nature or lack of grace, as he is “above” by excellence of nature. Example: God closer to me than I am to myself, yet as a sinner there is more distance between me and God than between a saint and God.
• Ad 4: in demons there is the nature, from God, and the deformity of guilt, not from him; so not conceded absolutely that God is in demons, but “insofar as they are certain things”; of what names a nature without deformity, one says absolutely that God is in it. “Demon” may already include the deformity of will in its meaning.

6. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“whatever is must be somewhere”) #

Point: three objections from place, indivisibility and wholeness.

1. To be everywhere is to be in every place; bodyless things are not in place (Boethius, De Hebdomadibus). Aside: Aristotle on place in Natural Hearing IV cites the early philosophers’ common opinion that whatever is must be somewhere, and what is nowhere is not — but being somewhere is a property of natural body, so this assumes everything is a body or in a body. Cosmonauts reporting “there is no God up here”: a kick, as if God were up there like asteroids or comets.
2. As time to successive things, so place to permanent things; one indivisible of motion cannot be in diverse times (the “now”), so one indivisible permanent thing cannot be in all places; God’s being is permanent, not successive. Aside: people confuse the indivisible with position in the continuous (the point, here or there — geometry’s business) with the indivisible without position; God is entirely outside the genus of the continuous. Same problem with the soul, whole in every part of the body: indivisible in the genus of substance, not of quantity. “There you see the necessity of transcending the imagination”: you imagine a line and its endpoints, but God is not indivisible that way.
3. What is somewhere as a whole has nothing outside that place; God has no parts, so if in a place, the whole of him is there and nothing outside; so not everywhere. Aside on false imagination as the beginning of error: imagining a thing other than it is (C. S. Lewis’s story — a part of England not as he had imagined; the uncle asks what right he had to imagine it so; meeting a famous person); and imagining what cannot be imagined — we never think without imagining, so we must negate the image: “God is not a body,” “not in the continuous.” Same in logic: Socrates in the Parmenides imagines the universal as a big sail covering things, so each man would have only a part of “man.” Logic disposes for wisdom because to do it you must transcend imagination. Modern logicians substitute class for universal — a crowd you can imagine, the set of all men — instead of one thing common to all; but “man” does not resolve into something imaginable.

• Sed contra: Jeremiah 23:24 (Thomas has a commentary), “I fill heaven and earth” — “can’t escape from this guy.”

7. Article 2, respondeo: in every place in both ways (“God fills every place, but not as a body does”) #

Point: since place is a certain thing, “in place” is taken two ways, and God is in every place in both.

• (a) In the way other things are in place (as accidents of place are): God is in place as in all things, giving it existence and its power to locate things.
• (b) In the way private to place, as things placed (locata) are in it, i.e., as filling it: God fills every place — but a body fills a place by not suffering another body there; God’s being in a place does not exclude other things, because he fills all places by giving existence to all placed things which fill all places.

8. Article 2, replies (“through the contact of power”) #

• Ad 1: bodyless things are not in place by contact of dimensive quantity (Thomas’s synonym for continuous quantity: line one dimension, surface two, body three; the outer surface of the water touching the inner surface of the cup, part to part), but by contact of power. “Keep in touch” — touch used for power.
• Ad 2: indivisible is twofold. (i) The limit of the continuous — the point in permanent things, the momentum in successive; having a determined site, it cannot be in many places, and the indivisible of motion, having a determined order, not in many times. (ii) The indivisible outside the whole genus of the continuous — bodyless substances: God, the angel, the soul; not applied to the continuous as something of it, but touching it by power; so according as its power extends to one or many, small or large, it is in one or many places, a large or a small one. Angels are “in place” where they act, here not there, since they cannot act everywhere at once; God’s power being infinite, he acts everywhere at once.
• Ad 3: whole is said with respect to parts, and part is twofold. (i) Parts of the essence or nature: form and matter of the composite, and genus and difference of the species — two senses Aristotle distinguishes in book V of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics], put together as parts of the nature. Example: I am composed of body and soul (form, matter — parts in the thing, which will someday part), and I am a rational animal (genus, difference — parts in reason’s understanding); animal taken more from the bodily side, rational more from the soul, yet one cannot say animal is the body and rational is the soul — something proportional. (ii) Parts of quantity, into which a quantity is divided (the first sense in Metaphysics V). What is in a place by the whole of its quantity cannot be outside it, since the quantity of the placed is measured with the quantity of the place (water surface equals cup surface). But the totality of nature is not measured with place — as in accidental forms with quantity by accident: whiteness is whole in each part of the surface by wholeness of nature (this paper fully white here, and here), the perfect definition of the species in each part; by totality of quantity it is spread over the whole surface. Bodyless substances have no totality per se or per accidens except of nature; so as the soul is whole in each part of the body (recalling the earlier article on the soul), God is whole in all things and in each.
• Aside: English translations always render scilicet “to wit.”

9. Closing exchange: the two senses, and the place of place (“you have to have a place to place place”) #

• Student asks for the two senses in which God is everywhere; first answer: giving existence to everything in place. He corrects: also giving existence to the place itself — reading back the respondeo: in all things giving existence, power, operation, so in every place giving it being and its power to locate; and filling all places by giving existence to all placed things.
• Aside: Aristotle, beginning on place, cites the early Greeks (whatever is must be somewhere) and Hesiod — you first need a place for things, so place seems first of all: place can be without things placed, not the reverse. Then the difficulty: if whatever is must be somewhere, where is place? You need a place to place place, and the same question recurs; but if place need not be anywhere and yet is, then something is without having to be in place. Left there as the class ends.

His words #

• ubi / ubique: where / everywhere.
• proprium: “private” as opposed to common, rather than “proper” (opposed to improper); bonum commune vs bonum proprium.
• Natural Hearing: his name for the Physics (“as the multitude call it”) [ed.: Physics].
• touch / contact of power: acting upon something, extended from bodily contact; opposed to contact of surfaces.
• esse vs ens: to be / existence vs what is; English “being” equivocal.
• most intimately / most inwardly: intimus, being as most inward in each thing; Boethius’s intimis disciplinis, inward disciplines = logic and wisdom.
• ability: for potency (“only in ability”) [ed.: potency].
• in power of the agent: seventh sense of in; “in my hands” / “out of my hands.”
• dimensive quantity (quantitas dimensiva): Thomas’s synonym for continuous quantity.
• locata: things placed.
• momentum: the indivisible limit of successive things, as the point of permanent things.
• book V of Wisdom: Metaphysics V [ed.: Metaphysics].
• scilicet: “to wit.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 8, prooemium and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies), read and translated.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 8, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies), read and translated.
• Handout “The First Definition of Reason,” p. 95 (verified source, ~10 min; not named in the transcript).

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles, on the incarnation (objection from ubiquity).
• Thomas, Compendium of Theology (unity among chapters on simplicity).
• Psalm 112; 2 Corinthians (light and darkness); Isaiah 26:12; Jeremiah 23:24 (and Thomas’s commentary on Jeremiah).
• Augustine, Eighty-three Questions.
• Aristotle, Physics IV (eight senses of in; place; early Greeks and Hesiod); Physics VII (mover and moved together); Eudemian Ethics (he hesitates: “maybe De Motu”) on deliberation from God; Metaphysics V (senses of part/whole).
• Boethius, De Trinitate (prologue) and De Hebdomadibus.
• Plato, Parmenides (universal as sail).
• Teresa of Avila, interior castle; Einstein on the magnet; C. S. Lewis story; Anaxagoras.
• Printed volume DHB Vol III, p. 860 (verified source, not named in transcript).

His questions #

• Is infinity more closely related to perfection and immutability than they are to each other? Thrown out as a hint; left open.
• Is being everywhere something God alone has, beyond his being everywhere? A separate question, adding “alone”; reserved for article 4.
• How is God in things if not as soul of the world or as an accident? As an agent present to that in which it immediately acts, giving being, by contact of power.
• Is man actually in animal? No — only in ability; otherwise “the dog is an animal” would say the dog is a man.
• Clay molded from sphere to cube: what has changed, the clay or its shape? Students: shape; he: the clay is the subject; shape is the genus, falsely taken as subject.
• Why can’t you get blood out of a turnip? Because there is no blood in there — not even in ability; Anaxagoras puts everything actually in.
• Is God indivisible the way a point is? No; entirely outside the genus of the continuous, as the soul is indivisible in substance, not quantity.
• What are the two senses in which God is everywhere in this article? Giving existence to everything in place, and giving existence to place itself (and filling places without excluding bodies).
• Where is place, if whatever is must be somewhere? Left open as the difficulty the class ends on.