01.07. Chapter 07

CHAPTER VII THE DIVINE OMNIPRESENCE THE divine omnipresence probably causes less mental confusion to-day than formerly when being had not been so closely identified with activity. We now see that the only way being can be at all is to act. Complete passivity is at bottom what we mean by nonbeing. So that a thing is fundamentally wherever it can act. Most of our difficulties about omnipresence have come out of conceptions limited to our own physical organisms. We identify our own personal life with one part of a physical body and then wonder how our organism could be everywhere at one and the same time. On the metaphysical side, I repeat, omnipresence is not so bewildering as it once was, and yet, the conception of a Force acting everywhere throughout the universe introduces many perplexities to us. We have seen reasons for believing that in many of their phases the activities of the universe do not have direct significance for men. My body is no doubt an item of the physical mass of the universe. That mass may be shifting its center more or less, all the time I am in the mass whirling through space at enormous speed. I am in one spot of the universe in January and in a far other spot in June. Infinitesimal though my own organism may be, it is of a system which is being readjusted constantly according to the demands of equations which the highest mathematics cannot grasp. I certainly cannot grasp the science which controls my body. I do not know how to give more than a rough description of the gravitation which incessantly plays upon my body in relation to other bodies, and which helps relate the parts of my body to each other. It does not help me much to interpret the divine omnipresence in terms of the operation of such forces. My body itself may be the seat of microscopic universes. If we are to believe the modern theories as to the construction of atoms, our bodies may be composed of throbbing systems which have a use in themselves altogether apart from their uses to us. No, it is not a large aid just to think of divine forces as playing around us, except as we believe in the friendly nature of the Source of the forces. It is not enough for us to believe that these forces will not do us harm. There are thinkers who conceive of the universe as so friendly to us that it will do us no vast harm. There is pain, to be sure, and death> but there is enough of joy in living to make life worth while. This, however, is not what the Christian intends by the nearness of God. The mere fact that the power is of God is not enough. We should not feel much at home in a universe where the forces might constantly impinge upon us indeed, but where they might be mostly indifferent to us. I think we take a step forward in adjusting ourselves when we think of the divine nearness not only in terms of doing and knowing but also in terms of f eeling. When I wish to speak of my nearness to my own body I do, indeed, think of my power to make a muscle move with practical instantaneousness, though the scientist’s psychological tests might show me the instantaneousness as only "practical." I get a livelier notion of my relation to my body when I think in terms of feeling. I am most certainly wherever I can act, but I am more keenly and vividly wherever I can feel. It seems to me that I am closest to the spots I can feel most keenly. This is true both for pleasure and for pain. Lack of sensitiveness means lack of presence of myself at the inert or dead spot. I say of a numb spot that it feels outside of me, or apart from me, or as if it belonged to someone else. As it is with physical sensitiveness so also is it with spiritual sensitiveness. Let us waive the question just now as to the physiological basis for feelings of every kind and consider those phases of sensitiveness which we do not ordinarily assign to a physical base sympathy for the joy or sorrow of others, appreciations of excellences in which the mind acts so quietly that we think not of an effort of thought or will but of these as set to registering instantaneously by the delicate shades of feeling. Admittedly, all these phases of mental activity are united in reality, but at any one instant knowing, or willing, or feeling seems to predominate. For the moment I am thinking of the quality of instantaneousness, or alertness, or power of immediate reaction. As a rather crude illustration we may imagine a group of telegraph operators relaying a message. The wires themselves may speed the message with a quickness which is for us instantaneous, but suppose one of the operators is slow. It may be possible to translate his inertness or deadness into the minutes which it would take the message itself to travel over the wires to a much greater distance, if it were not for the psychological sluggishness.

Now, immediacy of response seems to me of most aid as a clue to the divine omnipresence. In the chapter on immanence this problem will come up again from a slightly different base, for by immanence we ordinarily mean particularly the divine omnipresence. No discussion of this theme can be satisfactory, but it does seem to me that in facing the omnipresence of God the imagination gets a little more help if we make the most of the hints from sensitiveness.

Whatever our categories, however, the essential for us is the character of the omnipresent Mind. So far as our relation to God goes we desire to know if he is paying attention to us. The sacrificial rites of religions in all ages have, in the last analysis, aimed at least partly to attract the attention of the being conceived of as divine. Elijah’s taunting of the priests of Baal is significant here. Many features of the story of the contest of Elijah with the priests of Baal may not be historical in detail, but the taunts against the heathen priests precisely describe one characteristic of much, , perhaps most, heathenism, namely, the inattentiveness, or lack of sensitiveness of the gods toward men except as the interests of the gods are unusually aroused. Elijah called out that the god of the Baal-worshipers was asleep or off on a journey. The frantic shoutings of the priests were aimed at waking the god, or arousing him out of sluggishness, or of diverting his attention from something on which he might for the moment be engaged. Now we might, so far as the physical forces of the universe are concerned, think of them as propelled forward by the power of a Baal, but of what value would be the forces working around us if we could not attract the attention of the controller of the forces? No, it will not help us much to believe in a God whose attention wanders, or whose wits go wool-gathering. The pressure of his attention upon our fate and life is what we desire.

It may be that I am wandering a little from the essential significance of the doctrine of the divine omnipresence. The modern putting of immanence lays stress on the divine nearness. Historically at least, the conception of divine omnipresence grew out of the realization of an enlarging world, and sought to find God out on the frontiers of that enlarging universe. No matter where the Hebrews first got a start in worshiping their God, they rendered vast, indispensable service in always taking their Deity with them, not, as some students would tell us, carrying him along in a box, but in realizing that their God had power wherever they might be. I have no desire to enter a field of controverted criticism, but let us assume that the God of Israel was originally the Deity of the Kenites, with special habitation at Sinai. A first stupendous lesson was that this Kenite Deity had power in Egypt, then in the wilderness, then in Palestine, then against P.hilistines, Assyrians, and Babylonians, and finally over all the earth and heavens. The Hebrews’ conviction of the presence of then- God kept pace with their growing knowledge of the world. They could not out-travel their God. They could not get ahead of him or beyond him. This same adjustment of the presence of God to the demands of our ever-enlarging world has been one of the continuous triumphs of the Christian church. If we wish to realize how complete the victory, let us consider one or two such adjustments. I mention first one which I do not remember ever hearing considered in this connection the matter-of-factness of the assumption of the great explorers from the time of Columbus on that the lands into which they pressed were the domain of the God of Christianity, and that their business was to convert the inhabitants of those lands to Christianity. The world of Columbus before he sailed was not large. Columbus believed in the sphericity of the earth, but if he had known how far he would actually have to travel on his first voyage, he would probably not have weighed anchor. He pushed so far that some of his sailors, indeed, thought God had deserted them, but their despair was a mood and not a conviction. The conviction was that God was the Lord of the new lands. Now, I know this will seem commonplace, but that is because the everywhereness of God is trite with us. The discoveries of Columbus were scarcely more than two thousand years later than the time when men believed in separate gods, in localized deities. The Christian nations at the close of the fifteenth century were not large, and heathenism pressed in closely upon their borders. Jn spite of all this the explorers and conquerors assumed the everywhereness of God as naturally as they assumed the sea and the land. The word of one explorer in a storm when it seemed that his ships must sink, that Heaven was as near from the waves of that strange sea as from England, is as significant as giving a glimpse of the mind of the age as of the spirit of a heroic individual. The commonplaceness of the conception to-day is itself a tribute to the spiritual energy of those who enforced the conception till it became commonplace. Two thousand years earlier the assumption that the gods of the peoples to whom the explorers came were real ,in their own domains would have been altogether natural and easy.

Time and again have thinkers emphasized the marvel of the adjustment of Christianity to the Copernican theory. I have in previous pages urged that the increase of knowledge of our material world is also an increase of ignorance, and that the wider the knowledge the heavier the strain on faith. I do not wish to retract anything thus urged, but I here note that the scientific teaching concerning some forces that rule everywhere is an aid to the doctrine that God works everywhere. The metaphysical doctrine is helped by scientific utterance, though the ethical doctrine is still a call for faith. It is a positive help to accept the discovery first forcefully set forth by Galileo, namely, that there is an essential uniformity in nature’s processes. No matter how far the starry spaces may extend, they are ruled by the same laws as rule our planet. Sir Charles Lyell made us even more at home in the world when he showed that the forces now shaping the earth rainfall, heat and cold are the same as have been shaping the earth from the beginning. After a fashion this stripped the old geologic days of their strangeness. Likewise the spectroscope indicates that stars are composed of materials to be found on earth, that the heavenly bodies some of them are now what the earth once was, that changes are taking place in them according to laws with which we are familiar. The mathematicians tell us of the significance of geometry and trigonometry and calculus for the movements of the heavenly spheres. The physicist speaks of a gravitation which works everywhere, and the followers of Einstein seek to combine space, time, and gravitation into one comprehensive formula valid throughout the universe. Now, whatever may be established by such conceptions some things are disestablished. All notion of a broken-up, decentralized universe is gone. The universe is one. The old materialism which conceived of matter as dead mass, or as inert lumps, called atoms, is gone. Forces are now at the center of the stage. Moreover, it is increasingly hard for matter conceived of as blind force to hold its sway. The energies work in ways that can be grasped only by the highest mathematics. If so much mind is required to read off the processes of the universe, it does not seem far-fetched to assume that the universe is the expression of mind. Even the considerations which are summoned to reduce mind to insignificance end by exalting mind. If mind is insignificant as compared with matter, mind has found itself out. If mind is just the outcome of the whirl of impersonal powers, mind has discovered that. If mind is to be ruled out of the universe, the decree must go forth in the name of mind and there we are, with mind back in the throne by the very decree that banishes mind. Nevertheless, the everywhereness of God, to which modern science lends some aid, is of scant comfort, after all, unless we can think of God in terms of Christ. I admit that there might be joys in a life lived out before indifferent gods, but a human race which is more and more taking mind as the clue to the universe, will ask more and more insistently as to the nature of that Mind. If the ethical aspects are the noblest features of mind as we see it, the only way we can keep our balance is to hold to the Mind of the universe as moving according to the highest principles we can conceive. The believer in the God of Christ finds in the progressive intensification of his understanding of the moral spirit of Christ a balance to the extension of our knowledge of the range of intellectual principles throughout the universe. It is a strange tendency that prevents some philosophers from balance in their view of the universe. At the same instant that they insist upon the everywhereness of laws which admittedly imply mind, they become more skeptical as to the cosmic significance of righteousness.

I suppose it is fair to meet my query by saying that the recognition of mind means only that laws explain more and more how events are brought about. We behold mathematics ruling throughout the quantitative universe. There is, indeed, an everywhereness of mathematics, but we cannot see what the mathematical movements are for. The skeptic avows that he does not deny mind by flying in face of the actual mathematical processes, but that he resents anyone’s telling him what the processes are for. They may be expressions of some lofty intelligence glorying in the manifestations on their own account, or they may be purposeful in some practical, manner, or they may have no purpose at all. Our knowledge, in other words, has to do just with how things hang together, or with steps by which events follow one another. How things happen we to a measure know. Why they happen we do not know. What the forces are we do not know, even if we admit that they are expressions of Mind. For knowledge of Mind is of no surpassing value till we know the purpose and spirit of the Mind. So the skeptic protests. Perhaps we can best consider what he says by discussing immanence.