The Location of God: A Medieval Question on Pantheism and Its Responses in Early Modernity

Abstract

Peter Lombard discussed in his Sentences (lib. 1, d. 37) the meaning of the statement: Deus est in omni- bus. It was an aside, as he noted, for it diverted the per- spective from theology proper to the relation of things to the Creator. He differentiated divine presence as potency and essence and also as grace. Thomas Aquinas com- mented on the problem, both in his commentary on the Sentences and in his Summa theologiae, noticing the dan- ger of pantheism (ante litteram, of course) when focusing on created things. During the Renaissance and early mod- ern scholasticism the question: Where is God? and its le- gitimacy became a litmus test of Christian philosophy. Francisco Suárez and Théophile Raynaud reconstructed the history of the notion of divine omnipresence and its biblical hermeneutics and pointed to heretics past and present. Rodrigo de Arriaga responded by relating omni- presence to action at a distance in physics. Honoré Tour- nely, then, responding to Spinoza’s pantheism, empha- sized the otherness of God against rationalizing and natu- ralizing the divine. The formula, ‘God is in everything,’ discloses the conundrum that God’ s omnipresence is equally real, substantial, effective, particular, and universal.