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3. Presence and Omnipresence
- University of Notre Dame Press
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59 Three Presence and Omnipresence Eleonore Stump Thomas Aquinas, who has a rich, sophisticated account of love, thinks that love consists in two desires: the desire for the good of the beloved and the desire for union with the beloved.1 In the contemporary literature on love, there is considerable discussion of the connection between love and the first of these desires, for the good of the beloved. In this paper, I want to reflect on the second of the desires of love, the desire for union with the beloved, and I want to consider what the nature of such union is. Union, of course, comes in different sorts, depending on the sort of love at issue. For ease of exposition, in this paper I am going to examine union in the love between friends, and I am going to restrict the kind of friendship at issue to that between normally functioning adult human beings who are not lovers or members of the same immediate family. What is it for someone to desire union with a person he loves in this way? It is not equivalent to a desire to be in the beloved’s company. Others have pointed out that one can love a person WeithProof.indb 59 WeithProof.indb 59 6/30/08 11:53:14 AM 6/30/08 11:53:14 AM 60 Eleonore Stump but not want to be in that person’s company.2 And it is clear that being in a person’s company is not equivalent to being united to that person. It is possible to be in the company of a person from whom one is entirely alienated, and it is also possible to be united with someone without being in the company of that person. But if being united to a person isn’t a matter of being in that person’s company, then what is it? In my view, union between friends requires mutual closeness and personal presence. In what follows, I will argue that, to understand the nature of the union desired in love, we need to understand what it is for one person to be present to another and what the relation is between such personal presence, on the one hand, and closeness between persons, on the other. As I hope to show, this way of thinking about union between friends sheds light on the general nature of the union desired in love, and it also highlights a neglected side of the standard divine attribute of omnipresence. Closeness and Presence I want to begin by considering the connection between one person’s being present to or with another person and her being close to that person . Can one person be present to or with another without being close to that person? Is being close to a person just one way of being present to or with that person? That is, is being present a genus within which being close is a species? Or is it the other way around? Is it the case that when there is a deep enough degree of mutual closeness between two people, it is then possible for each of them to be truly present to the other? Is being close a genus within which being present is a species? The right answer to all these questions is “yes,” in my view. The notion of one person’s being present to or with another is ambiguous. Sometimes it is a genus within which closeness is a species, and sometimes it is a species that is within the genus of closeness. This ambiguity in the notion of being present holds also when the presence of God is at issue. So Augustine, for example, talks in one place about God’s being present to everyone everywhere always;3 in another place, however , he describes the overwhelming but sadly ephemeral presence of God that he perceived in a powerful religious experience.4 When being present is a genus such that personal closeness is one of its species, I will call the relation “minimal personal presence” or “minimal being present .” When being present is a species within the genus of personal closeWeithProof .indb 60 WeithProof.indb 60 6/30/08 11:53:14 AM 6/30/08 11:53:14 AM [3.239.149.56] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:08 GMT) Presence and Omnipresence 61 ness, for want of a better term I will call presence in this stronger sense “significant personal presence...