"Pantheism" is a doctrine that usually occurs in a religious and philosophical context in which there are already tolerably clear conceptions of God and of the universe and the question has arisen how these two conceptions are related. It is, of course, easy to read pantheistic doctrines back into unsophisticated texts in which the concept of the divine remains unclarified, but it is wise to be skeptical about the value of such a reading. Some commentators have confidently ascribed pantheistic views to the Eleatics simply because they assert that what is, is one. But even if one considers Xenophanes, the most plausible candidate for such an ascription, it is clear that considerable care must be exercised. Thales and Anaximenes had some idea of objects in the world being infused with a divine power or substance that conferred life and movement. Xenophanes took over this idea and added to it a critique of Homeric and Hesiodic polytheism, attacking both their anthropomorphism and the immorality in which they involved the gods; his own consequent view of deity remains mysterious, however. Aristotle said that Xenophanes "with his eye on the whole world said that the One was god," but he also complained that Xenophanes "made nothing clear." It seems likely that Xenophanes, like other early Greek thinkers, did not distinguish clearly between asserting that an object was divine and asserting that a divine power informed the object's movement.

A failure by commentators themselves to observe this distinction makes it misleadingly easy to present both earlier pre-Socratic and later Stoic philosophers as recruits to the ranks of pantheism. But even Marcus Aurelius, the only notable thinker among them who can plausibly be represented as a pantheist, when he addressed the Universe itself as a deity did not clearly address it in the sense of all that is rather than in the sense of some principle of order that informs all that is.

As in Greek thought, the approach to pantheism in Indian thought is a systematic critique of polytheism. Although there are also conceptions of a god who reigns as the highest deityIndra at one time held this positionwhat emerged with the growth of theological reflection was the notion of Brahman. Brahman is the single, infinite reality, indefinable and unchanging, behind the illusory changing world of perceived material objects. The equation of plurality and change with imperfection is an assumption of the Vedanta teachings. From it there is drawn a proof of the illusory character of the material world, as well as of its imperfection. Were the material world real, it must, being neither self-existent nor eternal, have originated from Brahman. But if Brahman were such that from within it what is multifarious, changing, and therefore imperfect could arise, then Brahman would be imperfect. And what is imperfect cannot be Brahman.

We take the illusory for the real because our knowledge is itself tainted with imperfections. Our ordinary knowledge is such that knower and known, subject and object, are distinct. But to know Brahman would be for subject and object to become identical; it would be to attain a knowledge in which all distinctions were abolished and in which what is known would therefore be inexpressible. Two features of the pantheism of the Vedanta scholars deserve comment. The first is the affinity between their logical doctrines and those of F. H. Bradley, whose treatment of the realm of appearance is precisely parallel to the Vedanta treatment of the realm of illusion (my ); Bradley's Absolute resembles Brahman chiefly in that both must be characterized negatively. As with Bradley's doctrine, the natural objection to Vedanta pantheism is to ask how, if Brahman is perfect and unchangeable, even the illusions of finitude, multiplicity, and change can have arisen. The Vedanta doctrine's answer is circular: Ignorance (lack of enlightenment) creates illusion. But it is, of course, illusion that fosters the many forms of ignorance.

Yet if the explanation of illusion is unsatisfactory, at least the cure for it is clear; the Vedanta doctrine is above all practical in its intentions. It will be noteworthy in the discussion of other and later pantheisms how often pantheism is linked to doctrines of mystical and contemplative practice. The separateness of the divine and the human, upon which monotheists insist, raises sharply the problem of how man can ever attain true unity with the divine. Those contemplative and mystical experiences, common to many religions, for whose description the language of a union between human and divine seems peculiarly appropriateat least to those who have enjoyed these experiencesfor that very reason create problems for a monotheistic theology, problems that have often been partly resolved by an approach to pantheistic formulations. It is at least plausible to argue that the essence of the Vedanta doctrine lies in its elucidation of mystical experience rather than in any use of metaphysical argument for purely intellectual ends.

The pantheism of the Vedanta argues that because God is All and One, what is many is therefore illusory and unreal. The characteristic pantheism and near pantheism of the European Middle Ages proceeded, by contrast, from the view that because God alone truly is, all that is must in some sense be God, or at least a manifestation of God. Insofar as this view implies a notion of true being at the top of a scale of degrees of being, its ancestry is Platonic or Neoplatonic. It would be difficult to call Neoplatonism itself pantheistic because although it views the material world as an emanation from the divine, the fallen and radically imperfect and undivine character of that world is always emphasized.

However, the translation of Neoplatonic themes of emanation into Christian terms by John Scotus Erigena (c. 810c. 877) resulted in De Divisione Naturae, which was condemned as heretical precisely because of its break with monotheism. It might be argued that Erigena does not seem to be wholly pantheistic in that he did not treat every aspect of nature as part of the divine in the same way and to the same degree. This would be misleading, however, for on this criterion no thinker could ever be judged a pantheist.

According to Erigena the whole, natura, is composed of four species of being: that which creates and is not created, that which is created and creates, that which is created and does not create, and that which is not created and does not create. The first is God as creator; the last, God as that into which all created beings have returned. The second and third are the created universe, which is in process of passing from God in his first form to God in his last form. Erigena wrote as if each class of beings belongs to a different period in a historical unfolding, but he also treated this as a misleading but necessary form of expression. Natura is eternal; the whole process is eternally present; and everything is a theophania, a manifestation of God.

Pope Honorius III condemned De Divisione Naturae in 1225 as "pullulating with worms of heretical perversity," and much earlier Erigena's other work had been described by the Council of Valence (855) as "Irish porridge" and "the devil's invention." Clearly, part of what perturbed them was Erigena's ability to interpret in a pantheistic sense both the biblical doctrine of creation and the biblical notion of a time when God shall be all in all.

A similar problem arose for the Islamic interpreter of Aristotle, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose discussions of the relation of human to divine intelligence aroused suspicion of pantheism and whose assertions of fidelity to the Quran did not save him from condemnation. A Christian Aristotelian such as Meister Eckhart, the Dominican mystic, was also condemned. Both Eckhart and Johannes Tauler spoke of God and man in terms of a mutual dependence that implies a fundamental unity including both. However, in every medieval case after Erigena the imputation of pantheism is at best inconclusive. Only since the sixteenth century has genuine pantheism become a recurrent European phenomena.

Giordano Bruno (15481600) was an explicitly anti-Christian pantheist. He conceived of God as the immanent cause or goal of nature, distinct from each finite particular only because he includes them all within his own being. The divine life that informs everything also informs the human mind and soul, and the soul is immortal because it is part of the divine. Since God is not distinct from the world, he can have no particular providential intentions. Since all events are equally ruled by divine law, miracles cannot occur. Whatever happens, happens in accordance with law, and our freedom consists in identifying ourselves with the course of things. The Bible, according to Bruno, insofar as it errs on these points, is simply false.

Jakob Boehme (15751624) was a shoemaker, a mystic, and a Lutheran whose wish to remain within the church was shown by the fact that to the end he received the sacraments. The pantheism of Erigena or Bruno was founded upon a view that the universe must necessarily be a single all-inclusive system if it is to be intelligible. Their pantheism derived from their ideal of explanation. Boehme, by contrast, claimed that he was merely recording what he has learned from an inward mystical illumination. He saw the foundation of all things in the divine Ungrund, in which the triad of Everything, Nothing, and the Divine Agony that results from their encounter produces out of itself a procession of less ultimate triads which constitute the natural and human world. Boehme made no distinction between nature and spirit, for he saw nature as entirely the manifestation of spirit. It is not at all clear in what sense the propositions that Boehme advanced can have been the record of vision; it is clear that both in claiming authority for his vision and in the content of his doctrine he was bound to encounter, as he did, the condemnation of the Lutheran clergy.

Benedict de Spinoza's pantheism had at least three sources: his ideal of human felicity, his concept of explanation, and his notion of the degrees of human knowledge. His explicit aim was to discover a good that would be independent of all the ordinary contingencies of chance and misfortune. Only that which is capable of completely filling and occupying the mind can be the supreme good in Spinoza's sense. The only knowledge that could satisfy these requirements would be the knowledge that the mind is part of the total system of nature and is at one with it when recognizing that everything is as it must be. Felicity is the knowledge of necessity, for if the mind can accept the necessity of its own place in the whole ordering of things, there will be room neither for rebellion nor for complaint. Thus, from the outset Spinoza's characterization of the supreme good required that his philosophy exhibit the whole universe as a single connected system.

So it is with his concept of explanation. To explain anything is to demonstrate that it cannot be other than it is. To demonstrate this entails laying bare the place of what is to be explained within a total system. Spinoza made no distinction between contingent causal connections and necessary logical connections. A deductive system in which every proposition follows from a set of initial axioms, postulates, and definitions mirrors the structure of the universe, in which every finite mode of existence exemplifies the pattern of order that derives from the single substance, Deus, sive natura (God, or nature). There can be only one substance, not a multiplicity of substances, for Spinoza so defined the notion of substance that the relation of a property to the substance of which it is a property is necessary, and therefore intelligible and explicable; however, the relation of one substance to another must be external and contingent, and therefore unintelligible and inexplicable. But for Spinoza it is unintelligible that what is unintelligible should be thought to exist. Hence, there can be only one substance; "God" and "Nature" could not be the names of two distinct and independent substances.

It follows that God cannot be said to be the creator of nature, except in a sense quite other than that of Christian or Jewish orthodoxy. Spinoza did distinguish between nature as active (natura naturans ) and nature as passive product (natura naturata ), and insofar as he identified God with nature as creative and self-sustaining rather than with nature as passive, he could speak of God as the immanent cause of the world. But this is quite different from the orthodox conception of divine efficient causality. Also, in Spinoza's view, there can be no divine providential intentions for particular agents and there can be no miracles. What, then, of the Bible?

Spinoza regarded the Bible as an expression of truth in the only mode in which the ordinary, unreflective, irrational man is able to believe it or be guided by it. Such men need images, for their knowledge is of the confused kind that does not rise to the rational and scientific explanation of phenomena, let alone to that scientia intuitiva (intuitive knowledge) by which the mind grasps the whole necessity of things and becomes identical with the infinita idea Dei (infinite idea of God). Freed from all those passions that dominated his actions so long as he did not grasp them intellectually, man is moved only by a fully conscious awareness of his place in the whole system. It is this awareness that Spinoza also identified as the intellectual love of God.

In using theological language to characterize both nature and the good of human life, Spinoza was not concealing an ultimately materialistic and atheistic standpoint. He believed that all the key predicates by which divinity is ascribed apply to the entire system of things, for it is infinite, at once the uncaused causa sui and causa omnium (cause of itself and cause of everything) and eternal. Even if Spinoza's attitude to the Bible was that it veils the truth, he believed that it is the truth that it veils. He considered his doctrine basically identical with both that of the ancient Hebrew writers and that of St. Paul. This did not save him from condemnation by the synagogue in his lifetime, let alone from condemnation by the church afterward.

Erigena, Bruno, Boehme, Spinozaeach of these, no matter how much he may have made use of material drawn from earlier philosophical or religious writing, was a thinker who was independent of his specifically pantheist predecessors and who revived pantheism by his own critical reflections upon monotheism. It was only in the eighteenth century that something like a specifically pantheist tradition emerged. The word pantheist was first used in 1705 by John Toland in his Socinianism truly stated. Toland's hostile critic, J. Fay, used the word pantheism in 1709 and it speedily became common. With the increased questioning of Christianity, accompanied by an unwillingness to adopt atheistic positions, pantheism became an important doctrine, first for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, both of whom were influenced by Spinoza, then for Friedrich Schleiermacher, and finally for Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Goethe's aim was to discover a mode of theological thinking, rather than a theology, with which he could embrace both what he took to be the pagan attitude to nature and the redemptive values of Christianity. Suspicious as he was of Christian asceticism, he also recognized a distinctive Christian understanding of human possibility, and his various utterances about Christianity cannot be rendered consistent even by the greatest scholarly ingenuity. In the formulas of pantheism, which he was able to interpret in the sense that he wished precisely because he failed to understand Spinoza correctly, Goethe found a theology that enabled him both to identify the divine with the natural and to separate them. The infinite creativity Goethe ascribed to nature is what he took to be divine; but while the seeds of a consistent doctrine can be discerned in this aspect of Goethe's writings, it would be wrong to deny that part of pantheism's attraction for him was that it seemed to license his will to be inconsistent.

Lessing, by contrast, was consistent. He found the kernel of truth in all religions in a neutral version of Spinozism, which allowed him to see Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as distorted versions of the same truth, distorted because they confuse the historical trappings with the metaphysical essence.

Schleiermacher's quite different preoccupation was to make religion acceptable to the cultured unbelievers of his own time. The core of religion, on his view, is the sense of absolute dependence; to that on which we are absolutely dependent he gave a variety of names and titles, speaking of God in both monotheistic and pantheistic terms. However, he committed himself to pantheism by asserting that it is the Totality that is divine.

It is clear from Goethe, Lessing, and Schleiermacher that Spinoza's writing had become a major text for philosophical theology, but for these writers he was an inspiration rather than a precise source. With the advent of German idealism, the attempt to criticize the deductive form of Spinoza's reasoning while preserving the pantheistic content became a major theme of German philosophy. Nowhere is this more evident than in Fichte's writing, in which God and the universe are identified because the world is nothing but the material through which the Ego realizes its infinite moral vocation, and the divine is nothing but the moral order that includes both world and Ego. The divine cannot be personal and cannot have been the external creator of the world. Fichte poured scorn on the unintelligibility of the orthodox doctrine of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing). He distinguished sharply between the genuinely metaphysical and the merely historical elements in Christianity. It is the theology of the Johannine Gospel that he treated as the expression of the metaphysical, and to this he gave a pantheistic sense.

Schelling's pantheism was cruder than Fichte'saccording to him, all distinctions disappear in the ultimate nature of things. The divine is identified with this ultimate distinctionless merging of nature and spirit, a unity more fundamental than any of the differences of the merely empirical world.

Hegel was subtler and more philosophically interesting than either Fichte or Schelling. Like Boehme and Schleiermacher, he remained within orthodox Protestant Christianity, claiming to be engaged in the interpretation rather than the revision of its dogmatic formulas. The Hegelian Absolute Idea preexists its finite manifestations logically but not temporally, and it receives its full embodiment only at the end of history, when it is incorporated in a social and moral order fully conscious of its own nature and of its place in history. This phase of self-consciousness is already reached at the level of thought in Hegel's Logic. But the Absolute Idea has no existence apart from or over and above its actual and possible manifestations in nature and history. Hence, the divine is the Totality.

After Hegel pantheism was less in vogue. The critique of Christianity became more radical, atheism became a more acceptable alternative, and Spinoza dominated the intellectual scene far less. In England a poetic pantheism appeared in Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth, but in Shelley it coexisted with something much closer to atheism and in Wordsworth with a Christianity that displaced it. In any case, the intellectual resources of such a pantheism were so meager that it is not surprising that it did not survive in the nineteenth century.

Pantheism essentially involves two assertions: that everything that exists constitutes a unity and that this all-inclusive unity is divine. What could be meant by the assertion that everything that exists constitutes a unity? It is first and most clearly not a unity derived from membership of the same class, the view that seems to have been taken by Boehme. "There is no class of all that is," wrote Aristotle. Why not? Because existence is not a genus. To say that something exists is not to classify it at all. When Boehme asserted that the universe includes both existence and nonexistence, he both anticipated a long tradition that culminated in Martin Heidegger and remained unintelligible. The notion of a unity that includes all that existsor even all that exists and all that does not existis a notion devoid of content. What could be unitary in such an ostensible collection?

The unity might be of another kind, however. In Spinoza the unity of the universe is a logical unity, with every particular item deducible from the general nature of things. There is a single deductive web of explanationthere are not sciences; there is science. About such an alleged unity two points must be made. First, the contingent aspect of nature is entirely omitted. Even a total description of the universe in which every part of the description was logically related to some other part or parts (assuming for the moment such a description to be conceivable) would still leave us with the question whether the universe was as it was described; and if it was as it was described, this truth would be a contingent truth that could not be included in the description itself and that could stand in no internal conceptual relationship to the description. The fact of existence would remain irreducibly contingent. Second, the actual development of the sciences does not accord with Spinoza's ideal. The forms of explanation are not all the same; the logical structure of Darwinian evolutionary theory must be distinguished from the logical structure of quantum mechanics. Thus, the kind of unity ascribed by Spinoza to the universe seems to be lacking.

In Fichte and Hegel the unity ascribed to the universe is one of an overall purpose manifest in the pattern of events, as that pattern is discovered by the agent in his social and moral life. In order for this assertion to be meaningful it must be construed, at least in part, in empirical terms; in Fichte's case as a hypothesis about moral development, in Hegel's case as a hypothesis about historical development. Neither hypothesis appears to be vindicated by the facts.

Suppose, however, that a unity of some kind, inclusive of all that is, could be discovered. In virtue of what might the pantheist claim that it was divine? The infinity and the eternity of the universe have often been the predicates that seemed to entail its divinity, but the sense in which the universe is infinite and eternal is surely not that in which the traditional religions have ascribed these predicates to a god. What is clear is that pantheism as a theology has a source, independent of its metaphysics, in a widespread capacity for awe and wonder in the face both of natural phenomena and of the apparent totality of things. It is at least in part because pantheist metaphysics provides a vocabulary that appears more adequate than any other for the expression of these emotions that pantheism has shown such historical capacity for survival. But this does not, of course, give any warrant for believing pantheism to be true.

See also Aristotle; Averroes; Boehme, Jakob; Bradley, Francis Herbert; Brahman; Bruno, Giordano; Darwinism; Eckhart, Meister; Erigena, John Scotus; Eternity; Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; God, Concepts of; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Heidegger, Martin; Indian Philosophy; Infinity in Theology and Metaphysics; Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich; Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim; Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; Neoplatonism; Pantheismusstreit; Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von; Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst; Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) de; Tauler, Johannes; Toland, John; Xenophanes of Colophon.

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Fichte, J. G. Die Schrifte zu J. G. Fichte's Atheismusstreit. Edited by H. Lindau. Munich, 1912.

Fichte, J. G. The Science of Knowledge. Translated by A. E. Kroeger. Philadelphia, 1868.

Flint, Robert. Antitheistic Theories. London, 1878. Baird lectures.

Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Translated by E. B. Speirs and J. B. Sanderson, 3 vols. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1895.

Schelling, Friedrich. Werke. Edited by M. Schrter. 8 vols. Munich: Beck, 19271956.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Translated by J. W. Oman. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1893.

Spinoza, Benedict de. The Chief Works. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes, 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1951.

Alasdair MacIntyre (1967)

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