Pantheists in History: a history of pantheism

Instilled by the power and mystery and beauty of the Universe and Nature, Pantheism is the perennial religion. Children are born with it, and it continually emerges from all human spiritual traditions.

Pantheism is the belief that the universe and nature are numinous - that they and they alone are worthy of the reverence that traditional religions devote to "God."

Pantheism is the perennial religion. Children are born with it, and it continually emerges from all human spiritual traditions. It is the feeling of awe and wonder that reality itself inspires, onto which theistic religions project their imagined deities.

Pantheism is as old as human speculative thought. It dates as far back as the Upanishads, the Tao te Ching and the first Greek philosophers such as Thales and . Heraclitus, the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu, and the Stoic philosopher Zeno of Cittium.

After Christianity was enforced as the state religion of the Roman empire, it became dangerous to express pantheistic beliefs. Pantheists such as Meister Eckhart were marginalized, while others were burned and their books suppressed. Giordano Bruno, the first post-Christian pantheist, was burned at the stake in 1600 CE.

When religious tolerance spread in Europe, after the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, Pantheism was able to express itself more openly, starting with Spinoza.

Pantheism began to spread more widely in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, in Germany with Goethe and Hegel, and in Britain with the romantic poets - Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, and the transcendentalists in the USA - above all Emerson and Thoreau.

During the 19th century Pantheism seemed set to become the dominant religious philosophy. But the wars and ideologies of the 20th century caused some regress. Political ideologies such as Communism and Fascism, along with the wars and upheavals they caused, commanded attention. Post-war existentialism and post-modernism spread the beliefs that there were no basic truths.

Yet pantheism persisted, often among the most eminent writers and scientists, including Einstein and Hawking, D. H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Related to pantheism is panentheism. Panentheists believe that a conscious, usually personal God is present in the sensible universe, but also extends beyond it. These include the neo-Platonist Plotinus and most Christian and Islamic panentheists. Some of these are included for comparison.

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Pantheists in History: a history of pantheism