Omnipresence is naturally understood as being everywhere present. Thus, to say that God is omnipresent is to say that he is present everywhere. But what does it mean to say that God is present at a place, or at every place?
St Anselm, writing in the eleventh century, struggled with this issue. In chapter 20 of his Monologion he offered an argument for the conclusion that " the supreme essence " exists " everywhere and always. " In the following chapter, however, he argued that for God " it is quite impossible for it to exist everywhere and always. " Anselm then attempted to reconcile this " contradictory language -but ineluctable logic " by distinguishing two senses of " being wholly in a place, " namely, being contained in a place and being present at a place. In the fi rst sense, a thing " X has a place if that place contains the extent of X by circumscribing it and circumscribes it by containing it. " Ordinary physical objects are thus contained in regions of space. In this sense, however, God is not in any place, for " Supreme Truth does not admit of the big and the small, the long and the short, which belong to spatial and temporal distention. " On the other hand, God is in every place in the sense that he is present at every place. In this sense, Anselm held that " it is necessary that [God] be present as a whole simultaneously to all places and times. " But this second sense of " being present, " the sense in which God is present in every place, is just the concept that was in question, and Anselm said very little explicitly to make it clearer.
St Thomas Aquinas added some details here. He agreed that God is present in space in a different sense from that in which ordinary objects are. But Aquinas further specifi ed this sense, claiming that God ' s presence is to be understood in terms of God ' s power, knowledge, and essence (see Chapter 27 , Omnipotence; Chapter 28 , Omniscience; and Chapter 37 , Creation and Conservation). More precisely, Aquinas held that " God is in all things by His power, inasmuch as all things are subject to his power; He is in all things by His presence in all things, inasmuch as all things are bare and open to His eyes; He is in all things by His essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of their being " ( Summa Theologiae I.8.3). Aquinas ' s illustration of this point is suggestive, if not entirely satisfactory. He held that how [God] is in other things created by Him may be considered from human affairs. A king, for example, is said to be in the whole kingdom by his power, although he is not A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition Edited by C. Taliaferro, P. Draper and P. L. Quinn