Chapter 3 4 min read
Omnipresence, Hiddenness, and Modes of Presence
From the minimally refined research manuscript
Miracle should not be described as God arriving at a location from which God was previously absent. Omnipresence requires a more refined vocabulary of presence, operation, manifestation, and relation.
A refined doctrine of divine presence is indispensable to the miracle architecture. Once omnipresence is taken seriously, the question changes from “When does God show up?” to the more exact question:
God is already present. What kind of divine presence, operation, manifestation, signification, or self-communication is occurring here?
That distinction prevents omnipresence, grace, Christ’s promised ecclesial presence, sacramental presence, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, apparitions, and miracles from being treated as merely greater and lesser quantities of the same thing. Aquinas distinguishes God’s universal presence as cause from his special presence by grace and the unique presence involved in union; Catholic liturgical teaching likewise distinguishes multiple real presences of Christ while reserving a unique substantial mode for the Eucharist.
The full Catholic theology of miracle therefore intersects with at least the following doctrinal domains:
Divine omnipresence, transcendence, and the modes of presence. Aquinas says God is in everything not as a constituent part but as the cause continuously giving it being; God is therefore “innermostly” present to creatures. He nevertheless distinguishes this common presence from God's special presence in rational creatures through grace, and even mentions another unique mode through union, ultimately Christ's hypostatic union. Catholic liturgy adds another set of distinctions: Christ is present in the minister, Scripture proclaimed, the praying assembly, the sacraments, and especially the Eucharist. The Catechism then insists that the Eucharistic presence is unique, because Christ is “truly, really, and substantially” present.
This means a miracle ordinarily should not be described simply as “God becoming present.” God was already present. Something new occurs at the level of operation, relation, manifestation, or signification. At Lourdes, for example, God does not suddenly occupy a geographical region from which he was previously absent. If God heals there, a new providential act occurs and that place may acquire a new sacred or historical relation to God's action. That is quite different from Eucharistic substantial presence.
These modes should not be arranged on a single scale of more and less divine presence. Presence by creative causality, indwelling by grace, the missions of the Son and Holy Spirit, Christ’s ecclesial and liturgical presence, sacramental presence, the hypostatic union, and Eucharistic substantial presence name different relations, operations, or modes of union. A miracle ordinarily belongs to extraordinary action and manifestation, not to a new ontological mode of divine ubiquity.
Grace also prevents the doctrine of presence from terminating in mere proximity. The supernatural end is communion with the triune God: grace is participation in divine life, and the missions of the Son and Spirit make that communion personal and ecclesial. Extraordinary signs, when ordered to salvation, serve this deeper economy rather than replacing it.
A very useful rule would therefore be:
presence ≠ manifestation ≠ special action ≠ sacramental presence ≠ substantial presence.
Divine hiddenness and apophatic theology. Presence does not entail perceptibility. Catholicism simultaneously maintains that God is more inward to creatures than they are to themselves and that God infinitely transcends created comprehension. The Catechism places transcendence and intimate presence side by side. Aquinas likewise says created effects genuinely disclose God but cannot reveal the divine essence proportionately; in this life one does not see God as God is.
This gives miracle a beautiful phenomenological location: the hidden God becomes manifest through an effect without ceasing to transcend the effect.
A miraculous healing does not contain God the way an object contains another object. Nor does seeing the miracle amount to seeing the divine essence. It is an effect through which divine agency may become intelligible.
Hence even miracles preserve a kind of divine hiddenness.
Faith versus sight. This follows directly. Catholicism says we presently “walk by faith, not by sight”; even supernatural faith can be experienced in darkness. A miracle therefore does not ordinarily turn faith into the beatific vision or force assent by exposing God directly.
This refines the epistemology of miracle. A vindicatory miracle may make belief rationally warranted without making unbelief psychologically impossible.
That matters for the old question, “Why doesn't God simply perform an undeniable miracle for everyone every morning?” Catholic theology does not understand revelation as God's project of overwhelming finite intellects with irresistible spectacle. Revelation is personal self-communication ordered toward freely given faith, hope, charity, communion, and ultimately vision.
Aquinas, ST I, q. 8, aa. 1–3; Augustine, Confessions III.6.11; CCC §§300, 206–209; Sacrosanctum Concilium §7; CCC §§1373–1381; CCC §§258–260, 1997; Aquinas, ST I, q. 43.
A closer look
Questions raised here.
What distinguishes a miracle from an ordinary act of divine providence?
Every natural event already depends upon divine providence, so divine causation by itself cannot define miracle. Ordinarily, God governs through the created powers and causal relations he has given things. In a miracle, God produces an effect outside the proportionate operation of the created causal order by which that sort of effect would ordinarily be realized. The distinction is therefore not God versus nature, but ordinary and extraordinary relations of divine action to secondary causality.
Is everything supernatural a miracle, and is everything extraordinary supernatural?
No. The manuscript emphasizes Lambertini’s important distinction here. The Incarnation, sanctifying grace, sacramental efficacy, and glorification are supernatural realities, yet they are not therefore members of the particular class of miracles examined in canonical discernment. Conversely, something extraordinary may remain entirely within created powers. Thus extraordinary ≠ supernatural ≠ miraculous. The categories overlap in particular cases, but they cannot be identified.