Anselm Moynihan, The Presence of God (New Hope, KY: New Hope Press, 2012), 27-29 (First edition in 1948 by Dominican Publications (Dublin, Ireland)).

We have seen something of God’s interest in the things that he has made. He beholds them always and governs them always by his loving providence. Does he do this from a distance, from his throne in Heaven, as a king—wise and powerful—might rule a vast realm from afar? To think of God’s presence in the world as no more than this, great as it is, would give a very inadequate notion of it. No, God is pres- ent to all things not only by his knowledge and his power, but by his very essence. Let us see precisely the intimacy which that implies.

Almighty God does not govern the world just by a sort of external shepherding of men and things. He acts in them from within, and moves them from within to the fulfilment of his purposes. The activity of any created thing depends on the impulse of God’s activity within it. Not only that, but the very continuance in existence of any created thing depends moment by moment on the activity within it of God’s sus- taining power. Now such is God’s nature that, wherever he exercises his power, wherever he acts, there he himself is really and substantially present, in the fullness of his being. Therefore, wherever anything exists, there must God himself be, giving it its existence. The very fact that a thing is means that God himself is there at the roots of its being. All things are rooted in God. “He is not far from any one of us; it is in him that we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Had I eyes to pierce the ultimate hidden depths of anything that is, a grain of sand or a blade of grass or my own soul, I would see where its own being ended, and know that beyond that is the all-holy God, utterly distinct yet infinitely closer in his contact than the soil is to the root it nourishes. “All things find in him their origin, their impulse, the center of their being; to him be glory throughout all ages. Amen” (Rom. 11:36).

Our imagination can lead us very much astray in our efforts to conceive this omnipresence of God’s being. We are inclined to think of it as diffused throughout space, much as the ether is said to be. This was an error through which even the great mind of St. Augustine passed before his conversion to the Faith. “Although I conceived you not in the form of a human body, yet I was forced to think you to be some corporeal substance, taking up mighty space of place, either infused into the world, or else diffused through infinite spaces without the world” (Confessions, Bk. VII, ch. 1). To avoid this we must keep in mind that God is a pure spirit, without quantity or extension. Of itself, therefore, his nature has nothing to do with space or place. But since things that are in space, material things or bod- ies, have the hidden roots of their being in immediate con- tact with him as the source of their existence, he is really present where they are. Though not in space himself, he is immediately present behind, or if we prefer to put it, beneath everything that is in space. And this presence, let it be insisted, is not something diffused, but a concentration of God’s whole infinite being in each thing one by one; the fullness of the Divine Nature is immediately behind every particle of reality that exists throughout the universe.

God is present, then, at the roots of my being wherever I go, present in me in the fullness of his reality. He is present in the same way in the lost souls in hell, as truly present in them, under this aspect, as he is in the saints in heaven. However, we can and do think of God as being more present in some beings than in others, that is, in those which resemble him more by nobler gifts they have received from him, and which by this greater resemblance make his presence within them more manifest. Much in the same way we think of the human soul, equally present though it is in every part of the body, as being especially present in those organs, such as the brain, through which its presence is more nobly manifested.

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