Pantheism

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Pantheism is the doctrine that God and the cosmos are identical — that the divine is not a maker standing outside the world but the inner reality of the world itself, coextensive with the whole of what exists. Where conventional theism sets a creator over against a creation, pantheism collapses the distance: there is one thing, and “God” and “nature” are two names for it.

The word is young, though the idea is old. The English writer John Toland coined pantheist in 1705, and the abstract noun followed soon after; before that the position had no settled name and was usually described by its opponents as a kind of atheism. The figure the term has clung to ever since is Spinoza, whose Ethics identified God with the single infinite substance of which all things are modes — a formula his critics summarized, not quite fairly, as Deus sive Natura, “God, that is, Nature.” For more than a century Spinozism was a charge before it was a school; only with the German Romantics and the poets of the early nineteenth century did pantheism become something a person might openly profess.

Earlier currents are often read as pantheist in retrospect, and the reading has to be made carefully. Stoic physics held that a divine fire or logos pervades and orders the whole cosmos, which is closer to pantheism than anything in Plato. Certain strands of Advaita Vedānta teach that Brahman, the one reality, is all that truly is, and that the appearance of a separate world is a kind of overlay — a position scholars more often call non-dualism than pantheism, since the two part company over whether the visible world is fully real. The Tao of the Daodejing is spoken of as the source and pattern within all things rather than a god apart from them. Giordano Bruno, burned in Rome in 1600, taught an infinite universe animated throughout by a single world-soul, and is frequently named as pantheism’s martyr, though what he actually held is debated.

A standing difficulty is telling pantheism from its near neighbors. Panentheism holds that the world is in God but that God exceeds it — the divine is more than the sum of things, not simply equal to it; the Neoplatonic One, source of all yet beyond all, sits closer to this than to strict identity. Critics across the monotheist traditions have pressed the same objection from the other side: a God wholly identical with the world, they argue, can be neither worshipped nor prayed to, and amounts to renaming nature rather than affirming a deity. Defenders answer that the charge assumes the very separation pantheism denies, and that reverence for the whole is reverence enough.

What recurs across these otherwise unrelated systems is a single refusal — to locate the sacred anywhere but here, in the fabric of what already is. Whether that refusal is the highest form of religion or its quiet dissolution has been argued for three centuries, and the argument turns, every time, on what one takes the word God to mean.

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Emanation · Giordano Bruno · Taoism · Hinduism · The One