presence
So where are we? Aquinas has given the name "God" to
the essentially unknowable cause of the mystery of existence,
and attempted to deduce some things about it. To wit, he deduced
that God exists apart and different from everything we know
to be associated with space, time, and matter and that God is
something like what we know to be essential form. He deduced
that
God is both fully actualized and the pattern, source and goal
of the evolution of the universe.
What else does Aquinas think about God?
For Aquinas, God is everywhere and in everything. Whatever mystery
creates and sustains things in being exists intimately in everything
and is wholly and entirely in every place. Divinity is everywhere,
and for Aquinas, God is more intimately present to us than any
of us can ever be to each other: it is the invisible, pervasive,
permeating stuff and structure of the universe.
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“Divinity is better represented by the whole universe
than by any single thing. ... Not only are individual creatures
images of God but so too is the whole cosmos.”
(1a. 47. 1)
“... because the being of the world participates in the
divine being which pervades it to its innermost core, the world
is not only a good world; it is in a very precise sense holy."
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Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas, pg. 142-3, quoting Gilson |