The Catholic idea of God is the very opposite of the pantheistic.
For, whereas they make God a possibility, something that is becoming, to be made; the Catholic Church exhibits him as reality, actuality, being itself. It is careful to eliminate from him the least idea of potentiality or possibility, of becoming something, or of being subject to development or perfection; because it insists that God is all reality, perfectly and absolutely actual. Any idea of further perfection is not only to be excluded from him, but cannot even be conceived; for the simple reason that he is all perfection, absolute, eternal perfection.
That this is the only reasonable idea of God is evident to every mind which is capable of understanding the terms. For happily it does not require a long and difficult demonstration to prove the falsehood and absurdity of the pantheistic, and the truth of the Catholic, idea of God. The understanding of the terms is quite sufficient.
Whoever says possibility, excludes, by the very force of the term, existence and reality. A self-existent possibility is a contradiction in terms; for possibility excludes existence, and self-existence implies it necessarily.
An eternal possibility is also a contradiction in terms; for eternity excludes all succession or mutation, and possibility implies it. An infinite possibility is yet more absurd; because infinite means absolute reality and actuality; possibility, on the contrary, implies only power of being.
But, on the contrary, how logical, how consistent, how grand, and how conformable to all ontological principles is the idea of God held by the Catholic Church! God is absolute, pure, unmixed actuality and reality. Therefore he is self-existing being itself; therefore he is eternal, because pure actuality is at the same time pure duration; therefore he is immutable, since pure actuality excludes all change and development; therefore he is infinite, because he is being itself, the essential being, the being; therefore he is simplicity itself, because a distinction would imply a composition, and all composition is rejected by actuality most pure, so to speak, unalloyed, unmixed.
The God of the pantheist is a nullity, a negation; the God of the Catholic Church is really the Infinite. He is in himself whatever is real and actual in spirit, whatever is real and positive in matter, whatever is real and positive in the essence of all creatures. But he has all the reality of spirit without its limitation; all the reality of matter without its limitation; all the reality of all creatures without their limitation. All this reality in him is not such and such reality; but he is all reality, pure, unmixed reality, without limit and without distinction.
What leads the pantheists into the admission of their principle is a false, wrong idea of the infinite. They suppose, and suppose rightly, that the infinite must contain all reality; and seeing around them such a multitude of different beings or creatures, each one with its particular difference and individualization, they ask themselves the question, How can all these differences be concentrated in one being?—the infinite—and in endeavoring to resolve it they admit a first something undefined, indeterminate, which assumes gradually all these different forms.
What is this but a very material and vulgar idea of the infinite? That it was the idea of the first who began to philosophize is intelligible. But that modern philosophers should have no higher comprehension of the infinite, that they should not conceive how the infinite can be all reality, in its being without distinction, composition, change, or succession, is quite inconceivable; and is much less than we should expect from men boasting so loudly of their enlightenment.