Pantheism

The term pantheism or pantheïsm (from the ancient Greek πᾶν pān "all" and θεός theós "God") refers to religious philosophical teachings in which "God" and the world (often understood as the cosmos) or God and nature are equated. The divine is seen in the makeup and structure of the universe, existing in all things and animating all things of the world or being identical with the world. "As an all-unity doctrine, pantheism asserts the immanence of God and the indistinguishability of divine and natural law activity in opposition to dualistic modes of thought and especially Judeo-Christian creation theology." Thus, there is no personal or personified God here. Therefore, a primordial cause defined by spiritual attributes is often assumed to be the only fundamental principle (monism). The objection frequently raised on the part of theology that pantheism (German also "Allgottlehre") is identical with atheism is only justified in the sense that indeed no God distinct from the world is assumed; by no means, however, that no God or divine principle is assumed at all.

As a collective name for a multiplicity of manifestations "pantheism" is in historical as well as systematic respect a fuzzy term: Depending on its manifestation pantheism touches with atheism and materialism (priority of the worldly), with acosmism (doctrine of God as the only reality) and mysticism (spiritual union with God), with panentheism (all-in-God doctrine), with panpsychism (doctrine of all-beings) or with monism (doctrine of unity).

Particularly difficult to distinguish from pantheism is cosmotheism: while for the pantheist the divine expresses itself uniquely and singularly in the diversity of the world, for the cosmotheist the world is only one manifestation of the divine being, beside which there could be others. Pantheism also differs from panentheism, which holds that the world is contained in God, but that God himself is greater than the world.

About the term

The term originated during the Enlightenment and can be traced back to the British philosopher John Toland, who created it in 1709 as an expression of his religious convictions. He postulated that "there is no divine being distinct from matter and this world-building, and that nature itself, that is, the totality of things, is the only and supreme God." In 1720 he wrote his work Pantheisticon, in which he combined ideas from Orphism with those of Hylozoism.

In the second half of the 18th century, "Spinozism" and "pantheism" were often used synonymously, because Baruch de Spinoza had advocated an equation of God and nature ("Deus sive Natura", "God or (also) nature"). The Pantheism Controversy, which started in 1785 with Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's thesis that pantheism and atheism coincided, involved famous Enlightenment thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottfried Herder and Immanuel Kant as his opponents.

Monotheistic thinkers who believed in a personal God polemically applied the attribution pantheist against authors who did not sufficiently emphasize the difference they advocated between God and the world or nature. They pejoratively labeled as "pantheists" all writers and scholars who were influenced by Spinoza, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and numerous representatives of the Romantic and Biedermeier periods. In fact, however, the works of named persons provide clear indications of their real pantheistic worldview, independent of the connection to pantheism presented in pejorative terms.

Jean Guitton (1901-1999) wrote that all atheism is a form of pantheism, since the concept of God is somehow placed in the world. According to Geo Widengren, polytheism develops from pantheism.

Pantheistic ways of thinking

Already in antiquity, the pre-Socratics developed a natural philosophy that also included the soul and the divine. Plato's cosmology of the world soul can also be partly interpreted pantheistically. The Neoplatonist Plotinus emphasized the All-One and was thus a direct predecessor of the pantheists. The Stoics regarded the Logos as the universal principle of reason, the divine, which was also in every human being. In the Middle Ages, following Plotinus, there were isolated pantheistic tendencies, e.g. in Nicolaus Cusanus. In the early modern period, Giordano Bruno considered the divine as part of the eternal cosmos, whereby divinity reveals itself in all things.

Pantheistic concepts are also known from the ethnic religions of non-European cultures, such as the Great Power of the Algonkin Indians, known as Kitchi Manitu, which permeates the entire cosmos, or Wakan Tanka, a very similar concept of the Sioux Indians of North America. The Persian mystic Bāyazīd Bistāmī, who lived in the 9th century, is considered the creator of a Sufi pantheism.