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 move is at once a theology and a metaphysics. As a theology it dissolves the gap between worshipper and worshipped; as a metaphysics it is a species of monism, the claim that reality is at bottom one, and a strong form of divine immanence, the claim that the sacred dwells wholly within the world rather than above it. What distinguishes pantheism from a merely immanentist theism is the word identical: not that God is everywhere present in the world, but that God is the world, with nothing left over on either side.

A young word for an old position

The word is young, though the idea is old. The English freethinker John Toland put pantheist into print in 1705, in the title of a pamphlet, Socinianism Truly Stated, by a Pantheist, and the abstract noun pantheism followed within a few years; by 1709 a critic was using it against him, and both words quickly entered common circulation. The coinage was not quite from nothing. The Cambridge mathematician Joseph Raphson had already used the Latin pantheismus in his De Spatio Reali of 1697, applying it to the doctrine he attributed to Spinoza and others, and Toland — who had read Raphson — gave the term its English career. Before that the position had no settled name and was usually described by its opponents as a kind of atheism: a God so thoroughly identified with nature, the charge ran, was no God at all but a polite cover for denying one. That polemical equation — pantheist as crypto-atheist — shadowed the word for its first century, and the long argument over pantheism has in part been an argument over whether the accusation holds.

Spinoza and the long charge of Spinozism

The figure the term has clung to ever since is Benedictus de Spinoza, the Amsterdam lens-grinder excommunicated from his Sephardic congregation in 1656, whose Ethics — composed in the geometric manner of definitions and demonstrations and published only after his death in 1677 — identified God with the single infinite substance of which all things are modes. There is, Spinoza argued, exactly one substance: absolutely infinite, self-caused, expressed through infinitely many attributes of which the human mind grasps two, thought and extension. Particular things — bodies, minds, this stone, that thought — are not independent beings but modes, modifications of the one substance, conceived through it and inseparable from it. He drew the distinction between natura naturans, nature actively “naturing,” God as the productive essence, and natura naturata, nature “natured,” the totality of modes that follow from it. From this followed the denial of miracles, of final causes, of a providential deity with purposes and passions.

The formula his readers fastened on, Deus sive Natura — “God, or Nature” — became his signature, though it served his critics better than it served him: read as a flat equation it flattens a system in which the two faces of the one substance are precisely not interchangeable at every level. What Spinoza actually built has a summit that the slogan misses entirely. The highest of his three kinds of knowledge, the intuitive grasp that proceeds from the essence of God to the essence of singular things, issues in an amor Dei intellectualis, an intellectual love of God that he identifies, in the closing propositions of the Ethics, with the very love by which God loves itself — a finite mode’s participation in the infinite, named in the cold idiom of geometry. It is this that earned Spinoza the Romantic epithet of the God-intoxicated man, and that keeps the question of whether his pantheism is a religion or its negation permanently open.

For more than a century Spinozism was a charge before it was a school — a synonym for atheism and fatalism, hurled rather than professed. The turn came in Germany in the 1780s, when Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi revealed that the revered Lessing had confessed himself a Spinozist, avowing the old creed hen kai pan, “one and all.” The ensuing controversy — the Pantheismusstreit — had the unintended effect of making Spinozism intellectually respectable, drawing in Herder, Goethe, and the young idealists. Only then, with the German Romantics and the poets of the early nineteenth century, did pantheism become something a person might openly profess rather than something one was accused of. Whether Spinoza himself is best read as a pantheist (God as the totality of nature), a panentheist (the attributes beyond thought and extension exceeding anything we can know), or an acosmist (only the one substance fully real, finite things deposed before it) remains a live question in the scholarship, and the choice substantially changes how much of the popular “pantheist Spinoza” survives contact with the text.

Currents read as pantheist in retrospect

Once the Pantheismusstreit had made the position sayable, it found voice in the nineteenth century less in systems than in poetry — in the verse of the German Romantics and in an English line from Wordsworth’s sense of a presence rolling through all things to the cosmic naturalism later distilled in Einstein’s profession of belief in Spinoza’s God, the God revealed in the lawful order of what exists rather than in any concern with human fates. This is the register in which pantheism has most often been professed rather than merely charged: a sensibility before a doctrine, a way of standing toward the world that finds the whole sufficient. The retrospective readings that follow should be measured against it, but also against its difference from the earlier material.

Earlier currents are often read as pantheist in retrospect, and the reading has to be made carefully, for the category is a Western and largely modern one and sits awkwardly on traditions that never framed themselves by it.

Stoic physics held that a divine fire, or logos, pervades and orders the whole cosmos — an active principle named indifferently reason, God, nature, and fate, identical with the pneuma or divine breath that Chrysippus held to penetrate all matter. Cleanthes gave the doctrine its most devotional voice in the Hymn to Zeus, the one substantial early Stoic text to survive intact. This is closer to pantheism than anything in Plato, whose Forms and demiurge keep the divine and the sensible world firmly distinct; the Stoic God is corporeal, immanent, and exhaustive of the cosmos, and it is no accident that Stoicism is the school most often named as pantheism’s ancient ancestor.

Certain strands of Advaita Vedānta teach that Brahman — the one reality — is all that truly is, and that the appearance of a separate, manifold world is a kind of overlay, real enough for practice but not ultimately real. Scholars more often call this non-dualism than pantheism, and the distinction is exact: pantheism affirms the full reality of the world it identifies with God, whereas classical Advaita, in the line running from Śaṅkara through later systematizers such as Vidyāraṇya, holds the world to be a lower grade of reality, neither simply real nor simply unreal, finally resolved into Brahman alone. To call Brahman “the cosmos” is therefore to mistake the doctrine: the cosmos, on this view, is precisely what dissolves. (The label must also not be confused with Neo-Advaita, a distinct modern Western current.) The Tao of the Daodejing is likewise spoken of as the source and pattern within all things — the way that things follow, immanent in them — rather than a god set apart from them; here too the fit with pantheism is suggestive but inexact, since the Tao is named as much for its hiddenness and its priority as for its identity with the manifest world. Giordano Bruno, the ex-Dominican burned in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori in 1600 after an eight-year Inquisition trial, taught an infinite, centerless universe of innumerable worlds animated throughout by a single world-soul, and is frequently named as pantheism’s martyr. What he actually held, and why exactly he died — the eight condemned propositions are lost — is genuinely contested; the cosmology was inseparable from a tangle of theological heresies, and the bald “burned for believing the universe divine” overstates a record the documents do not fully supply.

Telling pantheism from its neighbors

A standing difficulty is telling pantheism from its near neighbors, and the boundary-work is where most of the conceptual labor of the term has gone. Panentheism — the word coined by Karl Krause in 1828 to mark off Hegel and Schelling from the supposed Spinozism of their century — 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. This is the position toward which much of the contemplative tradition tends, and it is nearer to it than to strict identity that the Neoplatonic One stands — source of all by way of emanation, yet beyond all, exceeding even being, so that what flows from it never exhausts it. The same source-yet-beyond structure recurs in Nicholas of Cusa, whose infinite God is the coincidence of opposites in which finite comparison fails — a God in whom the universe is enfolded and from whom it is unfolded, present in everything yet identical with nothing finite, and whom a hostile contemporary nonetheless accused of pantheism for collapsing the distance too far. The difference between pantheism and panentheism is a hair’s breadth and a chasm at once: both deny the remote watchmaker God, but only pantheism denies that anything divine remains once the world is accounted for.

Critics across the monotheist traditions have pressed the same objection from the other side, and they have pressed it from within a worship that takes a personal counterpart for granted. A God wholly identical with the world, they argue, can be neither worshipped nor prayed to, has neither will nor purpose nor the capacity to answer, makes no demands and offers no covenant, and amounts to renaming nature rather than affirming a deity — the old charge of disguised atheism in a new key. A further version of the complaint runs through the problem of evil: a God simply equal to the world is equal to its cruelties as much as its splendors, and so cannot be the good toward which prayer is addressed. Defenders answer that the objection assumes the very separation pantheism denies: that it measures the pantheist’s God against a personal sovereign and finds it lacking only because it was never that kind of God, and that reverence for the whole, awe before the single reality in which one is a mode, is reverence enough — a stance for which Spinoza’s intellectual love of God, and the cosmic religiousness later associated with it, stand as the chief exhibit. To the charge that such a God answers no prayers, the reply is that prayer petitioning a separate will was never the point; the practice it leaves standing is contemplative rather than petitionary, an alignment of the mind with what is. The two sides do not meet, because they disagree about what worship is for. Reported as debate, the exchange has run, with variations, from Toland’s first century down to the present, neither party conceding the ground on which the other stands.

The shape of the word: texts and scholarship

The modern study of pantheism is in large part a study of how a polemical label became a position. The primary documents are themselves part of the history: Spinoza’s Ethica, printed in the Opera Posthuma of 1677, supplies the doctrine that every later definition orbits, and survives in public-domain form through the R. H. M. Elwes translation of The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (Bell, 1883–84). Toland’s Socinianism Truly Stated, by a Pantheist (1705) is the term’s birth certificate, and his Pantheisticon (1720) its first sustained — and deliberately provocative — elaboration into something like a creed. The Neoplatonic source-beyond-source that frames the panentheist contrast can be read directly in Plotinus, whose fifth Ennead sets out the One, Intellect, and Soul; the Daoist source-within is collected in James Legge’s Texts of Tâoism.

The standard reference treatment is W. J. Mander’s article “Pantheism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is also the leading recent synthesis after his monograph and which is careful to keep the comparative readings provisional. The most influential book-length philosophical defense is Michael P. Levine’s Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Deity (Routledge, 1994), which argues that pantheism is a distinct and serious option rather than a way station to atheism. On Spinoza, the metaphysics and its German afterlife are the province of Yitzhak Melamed’s Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford, 2013); on the Pantheismusstreit that made the doctrine respectable, the documents are gathered in Gérard Vallée’s The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi (1988). The etymological record — Raphson’s Latin pantheismus of 1697, Toland’s English coinage of 1705, Krause’s panentheism of 1828 — is laid out in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s companion entry, which traces how the two terms were drawn apart precisely to keep Spinoza on one side of a line and the idealists on the other.

What recurs across these otherwise unrelated systems is a single refusal: to locate the sacred anywhere but in the fabric of what already is. The disagreement that follows is not over the systems but over the word God — whether a deity emptied of will, purpose, and counterpart is a deity at all, or only nature given a grander name.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna), V.1, The Three Initial Hypostases · Legge — The Texts of Tâoism (SBE 39 & 40, 1891)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Emanation · Giordano Bruno · Taoism · Hinduism · The One · John Toland · Spinozism · Benedictus De Spinoza · Stoicism · Monism · Immanence · Atheism · Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Brahman · Nicholas Of Cusa