1. God is intimate with all creation because He made it, for
creation implies that God remains within, supporting, upholding.
God is within everything, and therefore He is everywhere. But
while we thus believe that God is wholly everywhere, we also
believe something which seems the exact opposite, for we believe
that God is more in some places than in others, more in some
people than in others. How is it if God is wholly everywhere that
He can be more here than there? To understand this we must also
understand that every created thing shares somehow in God's being.
He communicates Himself to it in some fashion, for apart from Him
it could have no perfections. We have a way of saying that we
reflect God's greatness and that we are "broken lights" of Him.
But that is far short of the truth; we do more than reflect, we
actually have some participation in God, so that St. Thomas boldly
takes over a saying of Plato: "The individual nature of a thing
consists in the way it participates in the perfections of God"
(_Summa_ 1, 14.6). Not, of course, that there is any community of
being, but a direct participation.
2. Now since everything participates in God and since some things
are more excellent than others, it stands to reason that some
things express God better than others. The eyes of a dog often are
pitiful to see, because we can note its evident desire and yet its
impossibility to express its feelings. The whole of nature has to
seeing minds the same pitifulness. It is always endeavoring to
express God, the inexpressible. Yet the higher a thing is in the
scale of being the more of God it expresses, for it participates
more in God's being. The more life a thing has and the more
freedom it acquires, then the nearer does it approach to God and
the more divinity it holds. Man, by his intelligence, his deeper
and richer life, his finer freedom, stands at the head of visible
creation, and, in consequence, is more fully a shrine of God than
lower forms of life. He bears a closer resemblance to the Divine
intelligence and will and has a greater share in them. It is then
in that sense that we arrange in ascending order inanimate
creation, the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom, and man.
3. Consequently we can now see in what sense God is said to be
more in one thing than in another. He is more in it because He
exercises Himself more in one thing than in another; one thing
expresses more than another the perfections of God because it
shares more deeply than another that inner being of God. The more
nearly anything or anyone is united to God the more does His power
exercise itself in them, so that, since God's gifts are variously
distributed and are of various degrees, we are justified in saying
that though He is wholly everywhere, He may be more fully here
than there, just as, though my soul is in every part of my being,
it is more perfectly in the brain than elsewhere, because there it
exercises itself more fully and with more evidence of expression.
Thus we say God is more in a man's soul than anywhere else in
creation, since in a man's soul God is more perfectly expressed.
It is therefore with great reverence that I should regard all
creation, but with especial reverence that I should look to the
dignity of every human soul.