Pantheism

Pantheism is the view that the Universe (or Nature) and God (or divinity) are identical.^[1] Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek (pan) meaning "all" and the Greek (theos) meaning "God". As such, pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of relating to the Universe.^[2] The central ideas found in almost all pantheistic beliefs are the view of the Cosmos as an all-encompassing unity and the sacredness of Nature.

There is no official universal symbol for all types of pantheism, but one symbol used by the World Pantheist Movement (WPM)is the spiral as seen in the curves of the nautilus shell, or in the spiral arms of a galaxy, showing the link between the cosmic physical and the biological. The spiral represents a variety of things: it means evolution, eternity, spirituality, growth.^[3] Sometimes the Nautilus spiral alone is used; it embodies the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio. Another symbol used by the Universal Pantheist Society is a golden sun on an azure background, with a pi symbol in the center.^[4]

In pantheism, God is identical with the universe, but in Panentheism God lies within and also beyond or outside of the universe.^[5]

History

The first known use of the term pantheism was by English mathematician Joseph Raphson in his work De spatio reali, published in 1697 and written in Latin. He defined "pantheismus" as the belief that God is all-containing and all-penetrating. The term was first used in English by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work "Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist". He clarified the idea in a 1710 letter to Gottfried Leibniz when he referred to "the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe".^[6] However, many earlier writers, schools of philosophy, and religious movements expressed pantheistic ideas.

Although the term "Pantheism" did not exist before the 17th century, various pre-Christian religions and philosophies can be regarded as pantheistic. They include some of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus and Anaximander.^[6] The Stoics were Pantheists, beginning with Zeno of Citium and culminating in the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, Stoicism was one of the three dominant schools of philosophy, along with Epicureanism and Neoplatonism. The early Taoism of Lao Zi and Zhuangzi is also sometimes considered pantheistic.^[6]

In the West, pantheism went into retreat during the Christian years between the 4th and 15th centuries, when it was regarded as heresy. The first open revival was by Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake in 1600). Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, finished in 1675, was the major source from which pantheism spread (though Spinoza himself did not use the word, and there is some controversy over whether he may more accurately be termed a panentheist.^[7]John Toland was influenced by both Spinoza and Bruno. In 1720 he wrote the Pantheisticon: or The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society in Latin.^[8]

In 1785 a major controversy known in German as the Pantheismus-Streit (Pantheism controversy) between critic Friedrich Jacobi and defender Moses Mendelssohn helped to spread pantheism to many German thinkers in the late 18th and in the 19th century.^[9]

For a time during the 19th century pantheism was the theological viewpoint of many leading writers and philosophers, attracting figures such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge in Britain; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Germany; Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the USA. Seen as a growing threat by the Vatican, it came under attack in the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX.^[10]

However, in the 20th century pantheism was sidelined by political ideologies such as Communism and Fascism, by the traumatic upheavals of two world wars, and later by relativistic philosophies such as existentialism and postmodernism. It persisted in eminent pantheists such as the novelist D. H. Lawrence, scientist Albert Einstein, poet Robinson Jeffers, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and historian Arnold Toynbee.^[6]

Recent developments

In the late 20th century, pantheism began to see a resurgence.^[6] Pantheism chimed with the growing ecological awareness in society and the media. It was described as "Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now",^[11] and often declared to be the underlying “theology” of Neopaganism.^[12] 1975 saw the foundation of the Universal Pantheist Society, which was the first organization to treat pantheism as a religion in itself. The creation of the World Pantheist Movement in 1999, with its multiple mailing lists and social networks, spread further awareness of pantheism.

Prominent atheist Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion gave Naturalistic Pantheism increased credibility among atheists by describing it sympathetically as “sexed-up atheism.” ^[13] The Vatican gave Pantheism further prominence in a Papal encyclical of 2009^[14] and a New Year's Day statement on January 1, 2010,^[15] criticizing Naturalistic Pantheism for denying the superiority of humans over nature and "seeing the source of man's salvation in nature".^[14]

In 2008, Albert Einstein's 1954 German letter in which he dismissed belief in a personal God was auctioned off for more than $330,000 US. Einstein wrote, "We followers of Spinoza see our God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its soul ("Beseeltheit") as it reveals itself in man and animal." in a letter to Eduard Büsching (25 October 1929) after Büsching sent Einstein a copy of his book Es gibt keinen Gott. Einstein responded that the book only dealt with the concept of a personal God and not the impersonal God of pantheism. Einstein usually identified himself as agnostic, but admitted a belief in "Spinoza's God".^[16] "I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly,” he wrote in another letter in 1954.^[17]

Varieties

All varieties of Pantheism involve reverence for the Universe/Cosmos as a totality, all stress some kind of unity and interdependence of all things including humans. All have a strong emphasis on the natural world as a focus for reverence and for ethics. There are four major categories of pantheism, which differ as to whether they regard reality as made up of only one type of substance, or two, and what that type of substance is.^[6]

Monist Physicalist Pantheism

Monist physicalist pantheism or Naturalistic Pantheism holds that there is only one type of substance, and that substance is physical, i.e. able at its most basic level to be described by physics, though more complex phenomena such as life, consciousness and societies can appear through emergence. Physicalism is a strong form of metaphysical naturalism. This position was held by John Toland, Ernst Haeckel, D.H. Lawrence and Paul Harrison. This version is represented today by the World Pantheist Movement. In this version, the term god — if used at all — is basically a synonym for Nature or Universe, seen from the point of view of reverence.

Monist Idealist Pantheism

Monist idealist pantheism holds that there is only one type of substance, and that substance is mental or spiritual. Physical reality is regarded as an illusion or projection of the individual mind which is seen as a part of the cosmic mind. This version is common in Hindu philosophies and Consciousness-Only schools of Buddhism, as well as in Religious Science and New Age writers such as Deepak Chopra.

Neutral Monist Pantheism

This philosophy is the metaphysical view that the mental and the physical are not separate substances but rather two aspects of a third, underlying reality. This type of pantheism was held by Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), a Jewish philosopher who identified God and Nature. For Spinoza, God was the underlying reality and had infinite attributes of which humans could perceive only two: extension (space and matter) and thought.^[6]

Dualist Pantheism

Dualist Pantheism holds that there are two major types of substance, physical and mental/spiritual, which interact or are unified in some way. This type of pantheism can be found in the Dvaita Vedanta tradition of Hinduism, which teaches that the Atman (Soul) is eternal but dependent on the Paramatman(Supreme God).

Pantheism in World Religions

Taoism

Taoism in the tradition of its leading thinkers Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi, is comparable with Pantheism, as The Tao is always spoken of with profound religious reverence and respect, similar to the way that Pantheism discusses the "divinity" of the Universe. The Tao te Ching never speaks of a transcendent God, but of a mysterious and numinous ground of being underlying all things. Moreover Taoism stresses the importance of living in harmony with Nature. </ref>^[6] Zhuangzi emphasized the pantheistic content of Taoism even more clearly: "Heaven and I were created together, and all things and I are one." When Tung Kuo Tzu asked Zhuangzi where the Tao was, he replied that it was in the ant, the grass, the clay tile, even in excrement: "There is nowhere where it is not… There is not a single thing without Tao."^[18]

Hinduism

It is generally asserted that Hindu religious texts are the oldest known literature that contains pantheistic ideas.^[19] In Hindu theology, Brahman is the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all things in this Universe, and is also the sum total of all that ever is, was, or ever shall be. This idea of pantheism is traceable from some of the more ancient Vedas and Upanishads to vishishtadvaita philosophy. All Mahāvākyas (Great Sayings) of the Upanishads, in one way or another, seem to indicate the unity of the world with the Brahman. It further says, “This whole universe is Brahman, from Brahman to a clod of earth." Pantheism is a key component of Advaita philosophy. Other subdivisions of Vedanta do not strictly hold this tenet.

Wicca

Wiccans venerate both a god and a goddess who are variously understood through the frameworks of pantheism, as being dual aspects of a single godhead. Dianic Wiccans see the Great Goddess as pantheistic, while the Church and School of Wicca regard the pantheistic Godhead as genderless. Other gods and goddesses from different cultures may be viewed as aspects of one pantheistic deity. According to the Witches Janet and Stewart Farrar, who held a pantheistic, duotheistic and animistic view of theology, Wiccans "regard the whole cosmos as alive, both as a whole and in all of its parts", but that "such an organic view of the cosmos cannot be fully expressed, and lived, without the concept of the God and Goddess. There is no manifestation without polarization; so at the highest creative level, that of Divinity, the polarization must be the clearest and most powerful of all, reflecting and spreading itself through all the microcosmic levels as well".

Other religions

There are many elements of pantheism in some forms of Buddhism, Sufism, Sikhism, Neopaganism, and Theosophy as well as in several tendencies in the major theistic religions. See also the Neopagan section of Gaia and the Church of All Worlds.

Many Unitarian Universalists consider themselves pantheists. The Islamic religious tradition, in particular Sufism and Alevism has a strong belief in the unitary nature of the universe and the concept that everything in it is an aspect of God itself, although this perspective leans closer to panentheism and may also be termed Theopanism. Many traditional and folk religions including African traditional religions and Native American religions can be seen as pantheistic, or a mixture of pantheism and other doctrines such as polytheism and animism.

Distinction from related concepts

Some other theological models have attempted to incorporate the perceived benefits of pantheism with the perceived benefits of classical monotheism.

The term panentheism (from Greek πᾶν (pân) "all"; ἐν (en) "in"; and θεός (theós) "God"; "all-in-God") was formally coined in Germany in the 19th century in an attempt to offer a philosophical synthesis between traditional theism and pantheism, that God is substantially omnipresent in the physical universe but also in a sense exists "apart from" or "beyond" the universe as its Creator and Sustainer.^[20] Thus panentheism is not compatible with pantheism, in which God and the universe are synonymous—with no part of God considered as being distinct from the universe.^[21][22]

For the same reasons, pandeism is not a form of pantheism. Though pandeism is characterized as a combination of reconcilable elements of pantheism and deism.^[23][24] It is simply a form of deism which assumes a Creator-deity which is at some point distinct from the universe and then merges with the universe it created.

See also

• List of Pantheists
• Monism
• Naturalistic pantheism
• Nature worship (disambiguation)
• Universal Pantheist Society
• World Pantheist Movement

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Pantheism

Look up pantheism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Beliefs, History and Practice of Pantheism (pantheism.net)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (plato.stanford.edu)
• Pantheism at the Open Directory Project
• The Pantheist Index, pantheist-index.net
• An Introduction to Pantheism (wku.edu)
•  "Pantheism". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. 
• World Pantheist Movement (pantheism.net)
• Pantheism and Judaism (chabad.org)