Paper proposal
One of the crucial moments in Augustine's intellectual life - and indeed one of the factors in his conversion from Manicheanism to Christianity - was his insight into the doctrine of divine immensity. On Augustine's version of the doctrine, which he seems to have drawn from Plotinus, divine immensity is not a matter of divine extension or even omnipresence by effective power alone. Rather, immensity describes the reality of divine presence as the essence that surrounds and undergirds the essences of all actual and possible beings. As Augustine puts it, creatures “owe their being to you and … all of them are by you defined, but in a particular sense: not as though contained in a place but because you hold all things in your Truth as though in your hand …”[1] Notably, this notion of divine immensity implies a robust account of divine ideas as the locus of creatures actual and possible. And just such a version of the doctrine of immensity can be traced from Augustine through the authors of the Medieval period and into the thought of Reformed and Catholic theologians in early modernity. Divine immensity is a metaphysical, rather than in any sense a physical or spatial, reality. As the authors of the Synopsis Theologia Purioris, put it, “Immensity is the attribute of the essence of the infinite God, whereby He surpasses all boundaries of essence.”[2] That is, God’s Being contains the essence of other essences or is ‘the place’ that contains the essences of possible and actual creatures. On a classical view of immensity, God is present wholly to each creature, rather than ever presencing Himself as partem extra partem. While this view of immensity is commonplace in the pre-modern tradition, there is very little theological reflection on it in recent theological scholarship.[3] This paper attempts a recovery of the classical view of divine immensity from these sources, providing a fresh articulation of the doctrine for today.
In the second movement of the paper, I argue that divine immensity achieves several philosophical and theological desiderata. For instance, this articulation of the doctrine guards against, on the one hand, a deistic impulse according to which God is present only by His power. On such a view, there is no essential link between divine infinitude and a robust conception of divine presence. On a classical view of divine immensity, by contrast, the divine presence is manifest in the being of all creatures, insofar as God’s Being is the ‘place’ of each creature’s being. As Turretin suggests, “[God’s] essence penetrates all things and is wholly by itself intimately present with each and every thing.”[4] God is present to each creature (by His perfect knowledge of their essence and His willing of their being) in a way that creatures are not even present to themselves. Divine immensity guards, on the other hand, against pantheism and panentheism according to which God is in some sense extended or physically or spatially 'present' like creatures - albeit in a greater way than creatures. On such a view, God must be in some way extended, thus undermining classical notions of God’s immateriality and simplicity.
The third and final movement of the paper addresses philosophical objections to divine immensity or repletive presence. Specifically, the paper addresses the objections to repletive presence in the great Cambridge Platonist Henry More, namely, that it is incoherent to attribute to a substance or entity presence in multiple extended places without also attributing actual extension to that being. Second, the paper draws on recent work in metaphysics to defend the notion of repletive presence or presence as "whole in the whole" of some extended place.
[1] Confessions VII, 21, trans. Maria Boulding; see also Confessions, VII, 2.
[2] Synopsis Theologia Purioris, ed. Dolf te Velde, trans. Riemer Faber, Question 6, p. 169.
[3] Notable exceptions are John Webster, ‘The Immensity and Ubiquity of God’ in T&T Clark Reader in John Webster, ed. Michael Allen (2020); and R.D. Inman, ‘Retrieving Divine Immensity and Omnipresence’, T&T Clark Handbook on Analytic Theology (2021).
[4] Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Topic 3, Q. IX, IV.
In this paper, I recover platonic and Christian sources on divine immensity and argue that immensity is crucial to any resolutely theistic participatory metaphysics. The paper involves three movements. First, I outline a version of immensity drawn from key sources of classical theism, including Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Frances Turretin. On this view, immensity describes, not merely the limitless presence of effective divine power, but properly the reality of divine presence as the essence that surrounds and undergirds the essences of all actual and possible creatures. Second, I argue that such a view of immensity guards against the deistic impulse, on the one hand, and the pantheistic/panentheistic impulse on the other hand - and yet allows for a sufficiently robust account of divine presence for a participatory metaphysics. Finally, I conclude by addressing philosophical objections to divine presence as outlined in the doctrine of immensity.