Abstract

This chapter explicates Scotus’s and Ockham’s attempts to make metaphysically rigorous Peter Lombard’s formula that God exists in all things by ‘presence, power, and essence’. Their efforts result in three distinct types of omnipresence: cognitive omnipresence or God’s knowledge of all things; causal omnipresence of God’s control over all things; and immensity or God’s real presence everywhere. To these types of presence Ockham adds a fourth, adjacent omnipresence, or presence at every place. The chapter focuses on immensity and concludes critically that Scotus’s and Ockham’s arguments for immensity rely on at least one premise incompatible with some of their deepest theological convictions. The premise is that “being nowhere is a property of nothing,” or, formally, there is no x such that x exists and is not somewhere. This premise is incompatible with the following commitments, shared by Scotus and Ockham: God need not have created a world, and if there had not been a world there would be no places for anything, God included, to be present in.