Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I

13Imagination at once deceives us with its illusions, suddenly setting before us in place of divine rays a certain stretch of lines in length, breadth, and depth, and thereby compelling us to regard as some dimension or void what is divine light. It deceives us again when we consider that God fills absolutely all things; for then it persuades us that he is somehow situated within things. But in truth he is everywhere in such a way that what is called ‘everywhere’ is in him—indeed, that he himself is ‘everywhere’ itself, which contains itself and all else. And those things besides it that are said to be everywhere are properly those which it extends through itself within itself. Reason declares that what is named ‘everywhere’ is nothing other than the entire nature of things, and that this nature is God. Thus, when we say God is everywhere, we must understand him to be in himself, and conversely. Reason also declares God to be nowhere absent, if that which is called ‘everywhere’ is nowhere absent. But when imagination supposes the nature of things to be only this bodily fabric, it cries out that what is named ‘everywhere’ is nothing other than the total extension of corporeal things. Since it imagines this extension to be exceedingly vast, it doubts that God can fill it all. Reason protests in reply that the corporeal fabric is a certain slight and paltry shadow, divisible without number into small parts and particles of parts, and so possessing boundless littleness but bounded magnitude. Reason asserts that what is truly great is that in which nothing is small, in which whatever exists is whole and equally great. And just as the whole is enfolded through everything within, so the whole is unfolded through everything without.