According to Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans and Archbishop of Tours, these verses describe God.  Hildebert was the first poet of his time; no small merit, since he was contemporary with the “Chanson de Roland” and the first crusade; he was also a strong man, since he was able, as Bishop of Le Mans, to gain great credit by maintaining himself against William the Norman and Fulk of Anjou; and finally he was a prelate of high authority.  He lived between 1055 and 1133.  Supposing his verses to have been written in middle life, toward the year 1100, they may be taken to represent the accepted doctrine of the Church at the time of the first crusade.  They were little more than a versified form of the Latin of Saint Gregory the Great who wrote five-hundred years before:  “Ipse manet intra omnia, ipse extra omnia, ipse supra omnia, ipse infra omnia; et superior est per potentiam et inferior per sustentationem; exterior per magnitudinem et interior per subtilitatem; sursum regens, deorsum continens, extra circumdans, interius penetrans; nec alia parte superior, alia inferior, aut alia ex parte exterior atque ex alia manet interior, sed unus idemque totus ubique.”  According to Saint Gregory, in the sixth century, God was “one and the same and wholly everywhere”; “immanent within everything, without everything, above everything, below everything, sursum regens, dear sum continens”; while according to Archbishop Hildebert in the eleventh century:  “God is overall things, under all things; outside all, inside all; within but not enclosed; without but not excluded; above but not raised up; below but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly beneath, sustaining; wholly without, embracing; wholly within, filling.”  Finally, according to Benedict Spinoza, another five hundred years later still:  “God is a being, absolutely infinite; that is to say, a substance made up of an infinity of attributes, each one of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence.”

Spinoza was the great pantheist, whose name is still a terror to the orthodox, and whose philosophy is—­very properly—­a horror to the Church—­and yet Spinoza never wrote a line that, to the unguided student, sounds more Spinozist than the words of Saint Gregory and Archbishop Hildebert.  If God is everywhere; wholly; presiding, sustaining, embracing and filling, “sursum regens, deorsum continens,” He is the only possible energy, and leaves no place for human will to act.  A force which is “one and the same and wholly everywhere” is more Spinozist than Spinoza, and is likely to be mistaken for frank pantheism by the large majority of religious minds who must try to understand it without a theological course in a Jesuit college.  In the year 1100 Jesuit colleges did not exist, and even the great Dominican and Franciscan schools were far from sight in the future; but the School of Notre Dame at Paris existed, and taught the existence of God much as Archbishop Hildebert described it.  The most successful lecturer