1. As soon as man awakens to a higher consciousness of God, he realizes
the vast distance between his own finite being limited by space and time,
and the Infinite Being which rules everywhere and unceasingly in lofty
grandeur and unlimited power. His very sense of being hedged in by the
bounds and imperfections of a finite existence makes him long for the
infinite God, unlimited in might, and brings to him the feeling of awe
before His greatness. But this conception of God as the omnipresent and
everlasting Spirit, as distinct from any created being, is likewise the
result of many stages of growing thought.
2. The primitive mind imagines God as dwelling in a lofty place, whence He
rules the earth beneath, descending at times to take part in the affairs
of men, to tarry among them, or to walk with them.(240) The people adhered
largely to this conception during the Biblical period, as they considered
as the original seat of the Deity, first Paradise, later on Sinai or Zion,
and finally the far-off heavens. It required prophetic vision to discern
that “the heavens and the heavens’ heavens do not encompass God’s
majesty,” expressed also in poetic imagery that “the heaven is My throne
and the earth My footstool.”(241) The classic form of this idea of the
divine omnipresence is found in the oft-quoted passage from Psalm
CXXXIX.(242)
3. The dwelling places of God are to give way the moment His omnipresence
is understood as penetrating the universe to such an extent that nothing
escapes His glance nor lies without His dominion.(243) They are then
transformed into places where He had manifested His Name, His Glory, or
His Presence (“Countenance,” in the Hebrew). In this way certain
emanations or powers of God were formed which could be located in a
certain space without impairing the divine omnipresence. These
intermediary powers will be the theme of chapter XXXII.
The following dialogue illustrates this stage of thought: A heretic once
said sarcastically to Gamaliel II, “Ye say that where ten persons assemble
for worship, there the divine majesty (_Shekinah_) descends upon them; how
many such majesties are there?” To which Gamaliel replied: “Does not the
one orb of day send forth a million rays upon the earth? And should not
the majesty of God, which is a million times brighter than the sun, be
reflected in every spot on earth?”(244)
4. Nevertheless a conception of pure spirit is very difficult to attain,
even in regard to God. The thought of His omnipresence is usually
interpreted by imagining some ethereal substance which expands infinitely,
as Ibn Ezra and Saadia before him were inclined to do,(245) or by
picturing Him as a sort of all-encompassing Space, in accordance with the
rabbis.(246) The New Testament writers and the Church fathers likewise
spoke of God as Spirit, but really had in mind, for the most part, an
ethereal substance resembling light pervading cosmic space. The
often-expressed belief that man may see God after death rests upon this
conception of God as a substance perceptible to the mind.(247)
A higher standpoint is taken by a thinker such as Ibn Gabirol, who finds
God’s omnipresence in His all-pervading will and intellect.(248) But this
type of divine omnipresence is rather divine immanence. The religious
consciousness has a quite different picture of God, a self-conscious
Personality, ever near to man, ever scanning his acts, his thoughts, and
his motives. Here philosophy and religion part company. The former must
abstain from the assumption of a divine personality; the latter cannot do
without it. The God of religion must partake of the knowledge and the
feelings of His worshiper, must know his every impulse and idea, and must
feel with him in his suffering and need. God’s omnipresence is in this
sense a postulate of religion.
5. The second earthly and human limitation is that of time. Confined by
space and time, man casts his eyes upward toward a Being who shall be
infinite and eternal. Whatever time begets, time swallows up again.
Transitoriness is the fate of all things. Everything which enters
existence must end at last. “Also heaven and earth perish and wax old like
a garment. Only God remains forever the same, and His years have no end.
He is from everlasting to everlasting, the first and the last.” So speak
prophet and psalmist, voicing a universal thought(249); and our liturgical
poet sings:
“The Lord of all did reign supreme
Ere yet this world was made and formed;
When all was finished by His will,
Then was His name as King proclaimed.
“And should these forms no more exist,
He still will rule in majesty;
He was, He is, He shall remain,
His glory never shall decrease.”(250)
6. But the idea of God’s eternity also presents certain difficulties to
the thinking mind. As Creator and Author of the universe, God is the First
Cause, without beginning or end, the Source of all existence; as Ruler and
Master of the world, He maintains all things through all eternity; though
heaven and earth “wax old like a garment,” He outlasts them all. Now, if
He is to manifest these powers from everlasting to everlasting, He must
ever remain the same. Consequently, we must add immutability as a
corollary of eternity, if the latter is to mean anything. It is not enough
to state that God is without beginning and without end; the essential part
of the doctrine is His transcendence above the changes and conditions of
time. We mortals cannot really entertain a conception of eternity; our
nearest approach to it is an endless succession of periods of time, a
ceaseless procession of ages and eons following each other. Endless time
is not at all the same as timelessness. Therefore eternity signifies
transcendence above all existence in time; its real meaning is
_supermundaneity_.(251)
7. This seems the best way to avoid the difficulty which seemed almost
insuperable to the medieval thinkers, how to reconcile a Creation at a
certain time and a Creator for whom time does not exist. In the effort to
solve the difficulty, they resorted to the Platonic and Aristotelian
definition of time as the result of the motions of the heavenly bodies;
thus they declared that time was created simultaneously with the world.
This is impossible for the modern thinker, who has learned from Kant to
regard time and space, not as external realities, but as human modes of
apperception of objects. So the contrast between the transient character
of the world and the eternity of God becomes all the greater with the
increasing realization of the vast gap between the material world and the
divine spirit.
At this point arises a still greater difficulty. The very idea of creation
at a certain time becomes untenable in view of our knowledge of the
natural process; the universe itself, it seems to us, extends over an
infinity of space and time. Indeed, the modern view of evolution in place
of creation has the grave danger of leading to pantheism, to a conception
of the cosmos which sees in God only an eternal energy (or substance)
devoid of free volition and self-conscious action.(252) We can evade the
difficulty only by assuming God’s transcendence, and this can be done in
such a way as not to exclude His immanence, or—what is the same thing—His
omnipresence.
8. Both God’s omnipresence and His eternity are intended only to raise Him
far above the world, out of the confines of space and time, to represent
His sublime loftiness as the “Rock of Ages,” as holding worlds without
number in “His eternal arms.” “Nothing can be hidden from Him who has
reared the entire universe and is familiar with every part of it, however
remote.”(253)