29

Omnipresence
EDWARD R. WIERENGA

Omnipresence is naturally understood as being everywhere present. Thus, to say that

God is omnipresent is to say that he is present everywhere. But what does it mean to
say that God is present at a place, or at every place?
St Anselm, writing in the eleventh century, struggled with this issue. In chapter 20
of his Monologion he offered an argument for the conclusion that the supreme essence
exists everywhere and always. In the following chapter, however, he argued that for
God it is quite impossible for it to exist everywhere and always. Anselm then attempted
to reconcile this contradictory language but ineluctable logic by distinguishing two
senses of being wholly in a place, namely, being contained in a place and being present
at a place. In the first sense, a thing X has a place if that place contains the extent of
X by circumscribing it and circumscribes it by containing it. Ordinary physical objects
are thus contained in regions of space. In this sense, however, God is not in any place,
for Supreme Truth does not admit of the big and the small, the long and the short,
which belong to spatial and temporal distention. On the other hand, God is in every
place in the sense that he is present at every place. In this sense, Anselm held that it is
necessary that [God] be present as a whole simultaneously to all places and times. But
this second sense of being present, the sense in which God is present in every place,
is just the concept that was in question, and Anselm said very little explicitly to make
it clearer.
St Thomas Aquinas added some details here. He agreed that God is present in space
in a different sense from that in which ordinary objects are. But Aquinas further speci-
fied this sense, claiming that Gods presence is to be understood in terms of Gods power,
knowledge, and essence (see Chapter 27, Omnipotence; Chapter 28, Omniscience; and
Chapter 37, Creation and Conservation). More precisely, Aquinas held that God is in
all things by His power, inasmuch as all things are subject to his power; He is in all
things by His presence in all things, inasmuch as all things are bare and open to His
eyes; He is in all things by His essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of
their being (Summa Theologiae I.8.3). Aquinass illustration of this point is suggestive,
if not entirely satisfactory. He held that

how [God] is in other things created by Him may be considered from human affairs. A
king, for example, is said to be in the whole kingdom by his power, although he is not

258 A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition Edited by C. Taliaferro, P. Draper and P. L. Quinn
2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-16357-6
 omnipresence
everywhere present. Again, a thing is said to be by its presence in other things which are
subject to its inspection; as things in a house are said to be present to anyone, who never-
theless may not be in substance in every part of the house. Lastly, a thing is said to be
substantially or essentially in that place where its substance is.

This account of omnipresence in terms of power, knowledge, and essence follows an

influential twelfth-century formulation set forth by Peter Lombard in his Sentences, 1,
xxxvii, 1.
Perhaps a king may be said to be present wherever his power extends. At any rate,
it is clear that Aquinas took this to be a kind of presence. In his Summa contra Gentiles,
for example, Aquinas contrasted the contact of dimensive quantity that a physical
object has to the place it is in with the contact of power that an incorporeal object
has in a place, and he added that an incorporeal thing is related to its presence in
something by its power, in the same way that a corporeal thing is related to its presence
in something by dimensive quantity (see Chapter 34, Incorporeality). And he con-
cluded that if there were any body possessed of infinite dimensive quantity, it would
have to be everywhere. So, if there be an incorporeal being possessed of infinite power,
it must be everywhere (Summa contra Gentiles, III.68.3).
The third condition Aquinas gave, that of presence by essence or substance, can
perhaps be assimilated to the condition of power. If God is present in things by his
essence inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of their being, then it is in virtue
of an exercise of his power, namely, creating and sustaining things, that he is present.
However, Aquinas explanation of his second condition, namely, presence through
knowledge, is puzzling. The things in a house that are present in virtue of being subject
to inspection seem a poor analogy for God, who, if anything, is more like the inspector
than that which may be inspected. So perhaps Aquinas should be taken as holding that
God is present everywhere in the sense that everything is open to his inspection (bare
and open to his eyes), rather than that he is open in this way to others. Another way
of putting this idea, then, is to say that God is present everywhere in virtue of his knowl-
edge of everything in any place.
This way of conceiving of Gods presence by reference to his knowledge and power
assumes that the predicate is present as applied to God is analogical with its applica-
tion to ordinary physical objects. The term is neither univocal (used with the same
meaning as it is in ordinary contexts), nor equivocal (used with a completely unrelated
meaning). Rather, the meaning of is present or, better, is present at place p when
applied to God, can be explained by reference to its ordinary sense, as follows: God is
present at a place (in a special sense) just in case there is a physical object that is present
at that place (in the ordinary sense) and God is able to control that object, God knows
what is going on in that object, and God is the cause of the existence of that object.
Conceiving of Gods presence in this way, however, would seem to limit him to those
places that are actually occupied by some object or other. Perhaps this is in fact what
such philosophers as Anselm and Aquinas intended; Anselm, after all, said that eve-
rywhere in the sense of in everything that exists, is, as regards the truth, the more
appropriate thing to say of the supreme nature (Monologion 23). On the other hand,
if God is present at places not otherwise occupied, the classical account can accom-
modate this simply by not insisting that is present as applied to God derives from the

259
edward r. wierenga
literal presence of ordinary objects; it is instead to be defined in terms of Gods knowl-
edge of and power over what happens at every place.
Twentieth-century commentators on divine omnipresence have also held that Gods
presence is analogical. As Charles Hartshorne (1941) put it, The relation of God to the
world must necessarily be conceived, if at all, by analogy with relations given in human
experience. But rather than taking divine presence to be analogical to the location in
space of ordinary objects, philosophers like Hartshorne have assumed that Gods rela-
tion to the world is analogous instead to a human minds relation to its body.
Hartshorne held that among the things that human beings know, some are known
immediately by vivid and direct intuition while other things are known only by
inference. The former knowledge is infallible: it includes knowledge of ones own
thoughts and feelings, as well as knowledge of changes going on in ones body. Since
such immediate knowledge is the highest form of knowledge, it is the kind of knowledge
God has. In Gods case, moreover, he has immediate knowledge of the entire cosmos.
Hartshorne made similar claims about power. Some of what people have power over,
they control directly. Other things can be controlled only indirectly or through inter-
mediaries. Human beings have direct or immediate power only over their own volitions
and movements of their own bodies. Again, however, since immediate power is the
highest form of power, it is the kind of power appropriate to God. Accordingly, God has
immediate power over every part of the universe. Hartshorne may thus be seen as
elaborating the medieval view of divine omnipresence: God is present everywhere in
virtue of having immediate knowledge and power throughout the entire universe.
However, Hartshorne endorsed a surprising addition. He held that, by definition, what-
ever part of the world a mind knows and controls immediately is its body. He thus drew
the conclusion that the world is Gods body.
Richard Swinburne (1977) also approached the question of what it is to be an omni-
present spirit by asking what it is for a person to have a body. Swinburnes view differs
from Hartshornes in certain respects, but Swinburne, too, was willing to accept what
he called a limited embodiment of God. Swinburne appealed first to the notion of a
basic action an action one does but not by doing something else. For example, raising
ones arm is typically a basic action, whereas making the same arm rise by lifting it
with ones other arm is not a basic action. According to Swinburne, God can move any
part of the universe directly, as a basic action. Moreover, God knows without inference
about any state of the world. Thus, Swinburne concluded that the doctrine of divine
omnipresence is the claim that God controls all things directly and knows about all
things without the information coming to him through some causal chain. This
summary of Swinburnes position may be slightly inaccurate, because presumably
Swinburne did not really mean to say that God controls directly the free acts of other
agents. Perhaps, then, his thesis is that God can control directly what happens at any
place (see Chapter 36, Divine Action).
It is, however, controversial to claim, on the basis of the knowledge and power
Hartshorne and Swinburne each attribute to God, that the world is his body, even in
only a limited respect. Charles Taliaferro (1994, p. 277), for example, notes that actions
human beings perform directly (basic actions) can involve highly complex physical
factors [including] many neural events and muscular movements, whereas with God
there is no such physical complexity. Taliaferro then adds that this immediacy in the

260
 omnipresence
case of Gods action is precisely a reason to say that the world does not function as
Gods body the way material bodies function as our own. Another objection to sad-
dling this account of omnimpresence with the conclusion that the world is Gods body
is that, on the views of Hartshorne and Swinburne, God bears the same relation to
unoccupied regions of space that he does to occupied regions. That is, for any place,
God knows immediately what is happening at that place and he is able to control
directly what happens there. It is surely unmotivated, then, to say of such a region that
if there is some physical thing there then it is a part of Gods body, when God would
have the same epistemic access to that region and control over it if the physical object
were not there. The presence of the object makes no contribution to Gods abilities. (For
a more sympathetic treatment of the suggestion that the world is Gods body, without
an explicit application to divine omnipresence, see Wainwright, 1987).
Hartshornes view has a further implausibility, not shared with Swinburnes.
Hartshorne attempted to attribute to God maximal immediacy with respect to knowl-
edge and power. However, what he took to be immediate, at least in the case of knowl-
edge, included both a more immediate and a less immediate component. Attributing
only the more immediate component would better accord with Hartshornes aim of
ascribing maximal immediacy to Gods knowledge. Doing so, however, undercuts
Hartshornes definition of ones body as whatever part of the world ones mind knows
and controls immediately. This point needs explanation. Hartshorne had described
immediate knowledge as infallible, indicating that it includes knowledge of ones own
thoughts and feelings, as well as knowledge of changes in ones body. On the sort of
mind-body dualism Hartshorne seems to presuppose, however, only the knowledge of
ones own mental states would count as infallible. Knowledge of changes in ones body,
dependent as they are on various causal processes, are neither infallible nor as immedi-
ate as knowledge of ones mental states. What one has the most immediate knowledge
of, then, is not ones body.
A similar, although perhaps less convincing, point can be made with respect to
power. According to Hartshorne, ones most immediate power is with respect to ones
volitions and with respect to movements of ones body. In this case, too, control over
volitions would seem to be more immediate than control over ones body, especially if
voluntary bodily movements are causal effects of volitions. So what one has most direct
control over need not be ones body.
Swinburnes view avoids this objection by defining immediate knowledge as infor-
mation which does not come to the subject through a causal chain. Accordingly, it
should follow that anything of which one has immediate knowledge is not ones body,
since knowledge of our own bodies always arises through a causal chain.
If Swinburnes view of divine omnipresence is thus stripped of its admission of Gods
limited embodiment, it seems to be the medieval view strengthened with the require-
ment that the knowledge and power that constitute Gods presence be immediate or
direct. In fact, however, the medievals also held that Gods knowledge and power are
immediate or direct, even if they did not emphasize this in their discussions of omnipres-
ence. Thus, despite the fact that Aquinas spoke of things being open to Gods eyes,
suggesting that God sees or perceives what happens in order to have knowledge of it,
in fact Aquinas did not believe that God acquires his knowledge in this way. God does
not acquire knowledge by being acted upon causally by the world. Rather, he sees

261
edward r. wierenga
other things, not in themselves, but in himself, inasmuch as his essence contains the
likeness of things other than himself (Summa Theologiae I.14.5). Moreover, Gods
omnipotence is an active power of the highest degree (Summa I.25.2), and this is
naturally understood as direct or immediate power. Thus, Swinburnes explication of
omnipresence as immediate knowledge and power extending everywhere may be seen as
making explicit the standard medieval understanding of that divine attribute.

Works cited

Anselm. Monologion and Proslogion, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. B. Davies and
G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Aquinas, T. Basic Writings of St Thomas Aquinas, ed. A. C. Pegis, 2 vols. (New York: Random
House, 1944).
Hartshorne, C. Mans Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941).
Lombard, P. Sententiae in IV libris distinctae (Four Books of Sentences), ed. I. C. Brady, O. F. M., 2
vols. (Gottaferrate: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventureae Ad Claras Aqua, 197181).
Swinburne, R. The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Taliaferro, C. Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Wainwright, W. Gods World, Gods Body, in The Concept of God, ed. T. V. Morris (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
Wierenga, E. Anselm on Omnipresence, New Scholasticism 62 (1988): 3041.

Additional recommendations by editors

Brom, R. Divine Presence in the World (Kampen, the Netherlands: Kok Pharos Publishing House,
1993).
Hudson, H. Omnipresence, in Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. M. Rea and T. Flint
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 119216.
Leftow, B. Anselm on Omnipresence, New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 32657.
Oakes, R. Divine Omnipresence and Maximal Immanence, American Philosophical Quarterly 43
(2006): 1719.

262