Omnipresence is God's being wholly present everywhere at once, present to every place while occupying none. The two halves pull apart: "present at every point" quantifies over places, but "no spatial extension" denies there are any places for God to be at. A presence that cannot tell here from there is not a more intimate presence; it is the loss of the very contrast the word "present" depends on.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine omnipresence assembles three reinforcing claims. God is present everywhere by being everywhere intimately and substantially: *Deus est in omnibus rebus*, God is in all things, by power, by presence, and by essence (Aquinas, *ST* I.8.3). God is present *totus in toto et totus in qualibet parte*: wholly in the whole and wholly in every part (*ST* I.8.2; Augustine, *Confessions* I.3). On the most developed contemporary refinement, presence is an act in which God is operatively present at every point alike, with no point favored over any other (Wierenga, Edward R., 1989); (Hudson, Hud, 2009); (Inman, Ross D., 2017). The doctrine preserves the believer's intuition that God is here and not absent at any *there* by extending the *here* without limit. It does so, on the doctrine fully stated, in a being defined as having no *here* of its own. Pressed to its limit, the position holds that divine presence is unrestricted precisely because the being has nowhere of its own from which any restriction could be a restriction *from*.

*What cannot be answered.* Five questions expose what the doctrine of omnipresence, in the form structural reasoning takes up, cannot answer. The difficulty beneath the five is structural, the conjunction of two of the doctrine's strongest commitments: God is wholly present at every spatial point, and God has no spatial extension. *Wholly at every point* is a quantifier over points; *no spatial extension* is the negation of a manifold over which the quantifier could range. The doctrine wants the universal of presence and the negation of position at once. The five pressures run one at the level of the predicate, four at the level of the conditions presence-talk runs on.

**Q1.** *At what place is a placeless being present?* The classical doctrine treats omnipresence as the universal of position: God is at every point. Hudson -(Hudson, Hud, 2009) develops the contemporary defense by treating divine presence as *occupation* of every spatial region, with the divine being filling space without being divided by it. Inman -(Inman, Ross D., 2017) argues for a *grounding* construal: God is present at a region by grounding what occurs there. Wierenga -(Wierenga, Edward R., 1989) and Hoffmann and Rosenkrantz -(Hoffman, Joshua, and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, 2002) treat presence as a function of divine knowledge and power: God is wherever God knows and acts. The concern this section adds is that each construal trades positional content for something else: occupation without division, grounding without location, knowledge-and-power without where. The believer's *here* is positional. *Wholly at every point* is positional. Treating divine presence as non-positional preserves the universal at the cost of removing what the *at* in the universal was supposed to track. To say God is present-by-knowledge-and-power is to say something true about what knowledge and power require (as [§6.4.2](<6.4.2 Knowledge.md>) and [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>) develop); on the doctrine taken in its strong form it is to substitute one predicate for another and claim the substitution is a clarification.

One test disposes of the non-positional construals together, and it does not assume what the defenders deny. Grant each its own terms: occupation without division (Hudson, Hud, 2009), grounding of what occurs at a region (Inman, Ross D., 2017), presence-by-knowledge-and-power (Wierenga, Edward R., 1989). Each is still the claim that God is present *at this region rather than that one*: present at the burning bush in a way God is not present at the next shrub on Sinai, present at A in whatever way occupies or grounds or knows A and not identically at B. Strip that out and the construal no longer yields omnipresence but a single undifferentiated relation to everything at once, and the nearness and directedness the doctrine insists on (the fourth and third questions below) go with it. So the construal must individuate presence-at-A from presence-at-B. But to individuate A from B is to hold them apart as distinct positions standing in relational non-identity, and a manifold of positions held apart by relational non-identity is what S is ([§2.6.7](<2.6.7 Triconditional Cross-Entailment.md>)). The defender's *at every region* is a quantifier, what it ranges over is a field of mutually distinct locations, and a field of mutually distinct locations is not an alternative to spatial structure but an instance of it. Occupation, grounding, and knowledge-and-power do not remove S from presence; they presuppose S as the manifold across which their *at* is indexed.

One construal does not trade position away, and so does not fall to the disposing test as stated: *ubiquitous entension* (Hudson, Hud, 2005); (Hudson, Hud, 2009). The entension theorist concedes location rather than substituting for it: God is *wholly* located at every region and at every subregion alike, an extended occupant present in its entirety at each part of what it occupies and divided by none. This is the contemporary cash-out of *totus in qualibet parte*, and it meets the disposing test head-on: it does not preserve the universal of presence by removing the *at*; it affirms the *at* at full strength and denies only that being wholly-located-at-each entails being partitioned. The test above assumes the defender purchases omnipresence by trading position for occupation-without-division, grounding, or knowledge; the entension theorist refuses the trade, so the construal must be met on its own ground. Grant entension everything it claims: an undivided whole wholly located at every region and subregion. It remains that the regions it is wholly located *at* are many, and many *as positions*: the occupant is wholly at A and wholly at B only if A is a position distinct from B and held apart from it, so that being-wholly-at-A is not already being-wholly-at-B. Entension does not dispense with the manifold of mutually distinct positions; it is *defined over* it: *wholly at each* is a quantifier whose field is a plurality of locations held apart by relational non-identity, and that plurality is what S is ([§2.6.7](<2.6.7 Triconditional Cross-Entailment.md>)). The occupant is not thereby identified with the manifold (that would help itself to the section's thesis rather than earn it) but the entended occupant cannot so much as state its *wholly at each* without presupposing the manifold as the field across which the *each* is indexed. Entension locates the predicate *present* in S all the more firmly for affirming location instead of trading it away: it needs the differentiated field of positions in order to have anything for its undivided whole to be wholly at.

This is why the aspatial defender's most ambitious move (that God is present to creation in a manner needing no spatial structure at all) does not relocate presence to a higher register but dissolves it: a relation that cannot tell *here* from *there* is not a more intimate presence than the believer's, but the negation of the contrast the word *present* names. The differentiation of positions is not an imperfection in creaturely presence that divine presence improves on; it is the condition under which there is any *there* for God to be present *to*.

**Q2.** *How is a being with no extension wholly present at every point?* *Totus in toto et totus in qualibet parte* is the formula at its sharpest. To be wholly in the whole is one claim; to be wholly in every part of the whole is another; to be both at once, when the whole has parts and the parts are spatially distinct, is to be reduplicated at every part without thereby being divided. The classical reply is that divine non-extension makes the reduplication unproblematic: only an extended being could be divided by being placed in extended regions. The concern here is that *wholly at* presupposes spatial location for whatever is wholly at the place, since *wholly* contrasts with *partly* and the contrast is positional. A non-extended being is not wholly at any point in the contrastive sense the formula trades on. *Totus in qualibet parte* keeps the language of part-by-part presence and removes the structure that makes part-by-part presence different from no-part presence. The formula performs the doctrine's deepest work by deploying terms whose ordinary content has been suspended.

**Q3.** *In what direction does a being act, if it is no nearer one point than another?* For an action to be directed at a target (for a divine intervention to land on this object rather than that one, on this body rather than the body next to it) there must be a structural relation between the agent and the target along which the action runs. [§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>) presses the question for agency; the present concern is closer in. If God is at every point identically, with no point preferred to any other, the divine standing-at-A-and-not-at-B that would distinguish acting on A from acting on B is unavailable. The reply that divine action is mediated by divine intention rather than by spatial direction is the same one [§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>) examines: it preserves directedness by relocating it from a structural relation to a primitive of will. The concern this section adds is that omnipresence in its strong form removes the spatial asymmetry directionality requires, and the doctrine's preservation of directedness through divine willing imports a structure the doctrine had been preserving God from importing. The two commitments of the doctrine are in structural tension at the point of contact between presence and act.

**Q4.** *How is a being near to one place, if it is no farther from any other?* Scripture and devotional theology repeatedly emphasize divine nearness in particular places and moments: the burning bush (Exodus 3 NRSVUE), the tabernacle (Exodus 40), the holy of holies (1 Kings 8), the incarnation as the *tabernacling* of the Word (John 1:14), the indwelling of the Spirit in the believer (Romans 8). Each presupposes a contrast between *here in this place* and *not-here in some other*. The classical reply distinguishes ordinary presence (everywhere alike) from special presence (here-and-now in a way that elsewhere is not), with special presence understood as a heightened mode of divine action rather than as a positional difference. The reply preserves the devotional vocabulary by treating *nearness* analogically (Aquinas, *ST* I.8.3 ad 1; (Pruss, Alexander R., 2013)). The concern here is that the analogical reading preserves the term by removing the contrast the term tracks. Nearness is a positional contrast; the divine special presence at the burning bush is *not at* every other shrub on Sinai in the sense that mattered for Moses to remove his sandals at this one. Omnipresence-in-its-strong-form leaves no resource for reading the contrast structurally, and the analogical reading registers the cost.

**Q5.** *Can panentheism, panpsychism, or pantheism make God present without giving God a place?* The contemporary literature has pressed alternatives that retain the spatial intuition while modifying the doctrine. Panentheism (Clayton, Philip, and Arthur Peacocke, eds., 2004); (Cooper, John W., 2006); (Pfeifer, Karl, 2016) holds that the world is in God without being identical with God, preserving immanence by giving God a quasi-spatial relation to creation. Panpsychism in its theistic forms (Philip Goff, 2017); (Mathews, Freya, 2003) treats consciousness as ubiquitous in nature, with divine consciousness as the unifying fact about the manifold. Pantheism (Spinoza, *Ethics* I; (Levine, Michael P., 1994); (Buckareff, Andrei A., and Yujin Nagasawa, eds., 2016)) identifies God with the world. Each move concedes some classical commitment to preserve another. The present analysis agrees that the doctrine of strict transcendence-with-omnipresence is unstable, and treats the contemporary alternatives as registering the instability rather than resolving it. What each alternative reaches for, in different directions, is a way of relocating the *here* of divine presence into the structure that makes *here* a coherent predicate at all. The relocation, taken to its limit, is the analysis the present chapter offers: presence is what S is; Nature is the being the doctrine has been reaching for.

*What is required.* The five pressures together mark out what *present* actually depends on. The *at* of presence has positional content, and substituting occupation, grounding, or knowledge-and-power for location clarifies what the doctrine commits to while trading what the *at* was holding for something else. The contrast between *wholly at* and *partly at* is positional in the only sense that lets *totus in qualibet parte* mean part-by-part presence rather than no-part presence, which requires an extended spatial manifold for the contrast to obtain across. Directed action presupposes spatial asymmetry: a being identically at every point lacks the standing-at-A-and-not-at-B that distinguishes acting on A from acting on B, and the move that relocates directedness to a primitive of will already imports the structure the doctrine had been preserving God from importing. Nearness is a contrast as well: special presence at the burning bush is *not at* every other shrub on Sinai in the sense that mattered for Moses to remove his sandals, and the analogical reading registers what removing the contrast costs. The believer's *here* is positional, and presence-everywhere is the universal of position rather than its negation. The contemporary pan- alternatives have been registering the destination from different directions: each reaches for the same structural relocation of the predicate into the manifold that makes *here* a coherent term at all. S is what each of these conditions requires; the predicate the tradition has been performing on God is the modal status of S itself.

*What is inverted.* Presence is the structural status of S itself. The English *present* renders the Latin *prae-esse*: to be *before* in the sense of *in front of*, to be at a place where one can be addressed and met. The etymology only illustrates a point the five pressures established without it: the content of *present* does not survive having position removed. What *omnipresent* names, when the predicate is read against the structure that supports it, is the universal of S: the spatial manifold that is at every point of itself, by being the condition of any *at* whatsoever. Nature is *totus in qualibet parte* in the only sense the formula can be made to bear: every part of S is a part of the same S, with the same medium present at each as the condition of the part's being a part. Space is what is everywhere by being at every point of itself: the universal of position the tradition has been performing onto a being defined as having no *here* of its own. This is an inversion of the predicate, not a pantheist identification: the claim is that *omnipresent*, read for what it requires, names S, not that God is the spatial world; [§6.2.2](<6.2.2 Unity.md>) takes up the *deus sive natura* identification on its own terms.


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← [6.8 Reach and Contact](<6.8 Reach and Contact.md>) | [6.8.2 Relatability](<6.8.2 Relatability.md>) →
