Presence of God in space or his presenceness

Is God out of the world? He must be!

The spiritual order

The question

After dealing on a preceding essay with the presence of God in the world, or his presenceness, (Presence of God in space or his presenceness) we may now wonder if God is also out of the world. The question, “where was God before the world was created?” is a wrong question; it presupposes that there was a “before” creation; this is a spatial and temporal question, and God is spaceless and timeless. Creation didn’t affect the presence of God. God is the same, speaking temporarily, before creation and after creation.

God is nowhere and everywhere

God is nowhere, because he doesn’t occupy any space of the universe; and he is everywhere, because everything that exists is in God. When the universe was created, it was created in God. The world does not contain God, but the universe is in God. That is the main point.

Aquinas, talking about the Divine Government, says: “God is outside the entire order of the universe… since the beginning of all things is something outside the universe, namely, God“ (Summa Theologica, Qu 103 art 2). This “outside” is not physical, and means only that the universe does not contain God.

Aquinas though suggests a kind of “place” (which is not spatial) for spiritual beings; he says: “Incorporeal things are not in place after a manner known and familiar to us, in which way we say that bodies are properly in place; but they are in place after a manner befitting spiritual substances, a manner that cannot be fully manifest to us.” (Summa Theologica, Supplement, Qu 69, art 1, reply 1).

It is impossible for us to understand spirit only beings

God, and other spirits as angels, belongs to the spiritual order. We cannot have an image of spiritual beings, because they are not corporal. Our intellect knows by images (or phantasms, as Thomas says), through our senses. If the object is not sensible, our mind may have only an analogical idea. This is what happens with God: there are not images of God. Thomas said that:

The human intellect in its present state can understand only by turning to the phantasms… we cannot imagine what we have never perceived by senses, either wholly or partly; as a man born blind cannot imagine colors (Summa Theologica, Qu 11 art 2, 3 at 1).

Incorporeal beings, of which there are no phantasms, are known to us by comparison with sensible bodies of which there is phantasm. It is through these natures of visible things that it raises to certain knowledge of things invisible… Immaterial substances which do not fall under sense and imagination, cannot be known by us first and essentially, according to the mode of knowledge of which we have experience (Summa Theologica, Qu 84, art 7; and Qu 88 art 1).