Sacred Mysteries: How God acts from the inside of everything
....the Gospel of John by St Thomas Aquinas, ....he says early on about the Word of God before he “was made flesh, and dwelt among us”.
John says: “He was in the world.” Thomas says he was in the world as an efficient cause (in the language of Aristotle) but with a striking difference. “Other agents act as existing externally...” he says, “But God acts in all things from within, because he acts by creating.”
To create, he says, is to give being to the thing created. The Latin word for “being” that he uses is esse, the infinitive. This in his vocabulary is the act of being that makes anything exist as what it is. Esse is sometimes translated into English as “existence”, but it is more than the fact of existing; it is the power each thing has to act as itself. In our case, esse is the difference between being alive and dead.
“Since existence [esse] is innermost in each thing,” Thomas says, “God, who by acting gives existence, acts in things from within. Hence God [the Word] was in the world as one giving existence to the world.”
when the old Catechism answer said that “God is everywhere”, it meant, among other things, that God is interior to the vital being of anything.
All this applies to the Word of God, God the Son, before ever he took upon himself human flesh and was born in Bethlehem.
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