Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/696

 GOD

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GOD

us, and is sometimes spoken of, under the name of omnipresence, or ubiquity, as if it were a distinct attri- bute. Divine immensity means on the one hand that God is necessarily present everywhere in space as the immanent cause and sustainer of creatures, and on the other hand that He transcends the limitations of actual and possible space, and cannot be circumscribed or measured or divided by any spatial relations. To say that God is immense is only another way of saying that He is both immanent and transcendent in the sense already explained. As some one has metaphor- ically and paradoxically expressed it, "God's centre is everywhere. His circumference nowhere".

That God is not subject to spatial limitations fol- lows from His infinite simplicity; and that He is truly present in every place or thing — that He is omnipres- ent or ubiquitous — follows from the fact that He is the cause and ground of all reality. According to our finite manner of thinking we conceive this presence of God in things spatial as being primarily a presence of power and operation — immediate Divine efficiency Iseing required to sustain created beings in existence and to enable them to act; but, as every kind of Divine action ad extra is really identical with the Divine na- ture or essence, it follows that God is really present everywhere in creation not merely per virtutem. et operationem, but per esscntiam. In other words God Himself, or the Divine nature, is in immediate contact with, or immanent in, every creature — con.serving it in being and enabling it to act. But while insisting on this truth we must, if we would avoid contradiction, reject every form of the pantheistic hypothesis. While emphasizing Divine immanence we must not overlook Divine transcendence.

There is no lack of Scriptural or ecclesiastical testi- monies asserting God's immensity and ubiquity. It is enough to refer for example to Heb., i, 3; iv, 12, 13; Acts, xvii, 24, 27, 28; Eph., i, 23; Col., i, 16, 17; Ps. cxxxviii, 7-12; Job, xii, 10, etc.

(c) Immutabihty. — In God " there is no change, nor shadow of alteration" (James, i, 17); "They [i. e. "the works of thy hands"] shall perish, but thou shalt continue; and they shall all grow old asagarment. And as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the selfsame, and thy years shall not fail" (Heb., i, 10-12; Ps. ci, 26-28. Cf. Mai., iii, 6; Heb., xiii, S). These are some of the Scriptural texts which clearly teacli Divine immutability or luichange- ableness, and this attribute is likewise emphasized in church teaching, as by the Council of Nica>a against the Arians, who attributed mutability to the Logos (Denzinger, 54 — old No. 18), and by the Vatican Council in the definition quoted above.

That the Divine nature is essentially immutable, or incapable of any internal change, is an obvious corol- lary from Divine infinity. Changeableness implies the capacity for increase or diminution of perfection, that is, it implies finiteness and imperfection. But God is infinitely perfect and is necessarily what He is. It is true that some attributes by which certain as- pects of Divine perfection are described are hypothet- ical or relative, in the sense that they presuppose the contingent fact of creation: omnipresence, for exam- ple, presupposes the actual existence of spatial beings. But it is obvious that the mutability implied in this belongs to creatures, and not to the Creator; and it is a strange confusion of thought that has led some mod- em Theists — even professing C'hristians — to maintain that such attributes can be laid aside by God, and that the Logos in becoming incarnate actually did lay them aside, or at least ceased from their active exer- cise. But as creation itself did not affect the immu- tability of God, so neither did the incarnation of a Divine Person; whatever change was involved in either case took place solely in the created nature.

(d) The so-called active Divine attributes are best treated in connexion with the Divine Intellect and

Will — the principles of Divine operation ad extra — to which they are all ultimately reducible.

(i) Divine Knowledge. — (a) That God is omniscient, or possesses the most perfect knowledge of all things, follows from His infinite perfection. In the first place He knows and comprehends Himself fully and ade- quately, and in the next place He knows all created objects and comprehends their finite and contingent mode of being. Hence He knows them individually or singularly in their finite multiplicity; knows every- thing possible as well as actual; knows what is bad as well as what is good. Everything, in a word, which to our finite minds signifies perfection and complete- ness of knowledge may be predicated of Divine omnis- cience, and it is further to be observed that it is on Himself alone that God depends for His knowledge. To make Him in any way dependent on creatures for knowledgeofcreatedobjects would destroy His infinite perfection and supremacy. Hence it is in His eternal, unchangeable, compreliensive knowledge of Him- self or of His own infinite being that God knows crea- tures and their acts, whether there is question of what is actual or merely possible. Indeed Divine knowl- edge itself is really identical with Divine essence, as are all the attriliutes and acts of C!od; but according to our finite modes of thought we feel the need of con- ceiving them distinctly and of representing the Divine essence as the medium or mirror in which the Divine intellect sees all truth. Moreover, although the act of Divine knowledge is infinitely simple in itself, we feel the need of further distinctions — not as regards the knowledge in itself, but as regards the multiplicity of finite objects which it embraces. Hence the univer- sally recognized distinction between the knowledge of vision (scientia visionis) and that of simple intelligence (simplicis inteUigentiw), and the famous controversy regarding the scientia media. We shall briefly explain this distinction and the chief difficulties involved in this controversy.

(p) Distinctions in the Divine Knowledge. — In classi- fying the objects of Divine omniscience the most obvi- ous and fundamental distinction is between things that actually exist at any time, and those that are merely possible. And it is in reference to these two classes of objects that the distinction is made between knowledge "of vision " and " of simple intelligence " — the former referring to things .netuMl, and the latter to the merely possible. This distinction might appear at first .sight to be absolutely eomiirehensive and ade- quate to the purpose for which we introduce dis- tinctions at all; but some difficulty is felt once the question is raised of God's knowledge of the acts of creatures endowed with free will. That God knows in- fallibly and from eternity what, for example, a certain man, in the exercise of freewill, will do or actuallydoes in any given circumstances, and what he might or would actually have done in different circum.stances, is beyond doubt — being a corollary from the eternal actuality of Divine knowledge. So to speak, God has not to wait on the contingent and temporal event of the man's free choice to know what the latter's action will be: He knows it from eternity. But the difficulty is: how, from our finite point of view, to interpret and explain the mysterious manner of God's knowledge of such events without at the same time sacrificing the free will of the creature.

The Dominican school has defended the view that the distinction between knowledge of "vision" and of "simple intelligence" is the only one we need or ought to employ in our effort to conceive and describe Divine omniscience, even in relation to the free acts of intelligent creatures. The.se acts, if they ever take place, are known or foreknown by God as if they were eternally actual — and this is admitted by all; other- wise they remain in the category of the merely possi- ble — and this is what the Jesuit school denies, pointing for example to statements such as that of Christ re-