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Systems of Religious and Spiritual
Belief
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Both "pantheism"
and "panentheism"
are terms of recent origin, coined to describe certain views of the relationship
between God and the world that are different from that of traditional Theism
(see Theism
below). As reflected in the prefix "pan-" (Greek pas, "all"), both of the terms stress the all-embracing
inclusiveness of God, as compared with his separateness as emphasized in many
versions of Theism. On the other hand, pantheism and panentheism, since they
stress the theme of immanence--i.e.,
of the indwelling presence of God--are themselves versions of Theism
conceived in its broadest meaning. Pantheism stresses the identity between God
and the world; panentheism (Greek en, "in")
holds that the world is included in God but that God is more than the world.
(see also sacred and profane) |
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The adjective "pantheist" was
introduced by the Irish Deist, John Toland, in a book, Socinianism Truly Stated (1705). The noun "pantheism" was
first used in 1709 by one of Toland's opponents. The term
"panentheism" appeared much later, in 1828, when it was used to
characterize the view that the world is a finite creation within the infinite
being of God. |
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Although the terms are recent, they have
been applied retrospectively to alternative views of the divine being as found
in the entire philosophical traditions of both East and West. |
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Pantheism and panentheism can be
explored by means of a three-way comparison with traditional or Classical Theism
viewed from eight different standpoints--i.e.,
from those of immanence or transcendence; of monism, dualism, or pluralism;
of time or eternity; of the world as sentient or insentient; of God as absolute
or relative; of the world as real or illusory; of freedom or determinism; and of
sacramentalism or secularism. |
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The poetic sense of the divine within
and around mankind, which is widely expressed in religious life, is frequently
treated in literature. It is present in the Platonic Romanticism of Wordsworth
and Coleridge, as well as in Tennyson, Emerson, and Goethe. Expressions of the
divine as intimate rather than as alien, as indwelling and near dwelling rather
than remote, characterize pantheism and panentheism as contrasted with Classical
Theism. Such immanence encourages man's sense of individual participation in the
divine life without the necessity of mediation by any institution. On the other
hand, it may also encourage a formless "enthusiasm," without the
moderating influence of institutional forms. In addition, some theorists have
seen an unseemliness about a point of view that allows the divine to be easily
confronted and appropriated. Classical Theism has, in consequence, held to the
transcendence of God, his existence over and beyond the universe. Recognizing,
however, that if the separation between God and the world becomes too extreme,
man risks the loss of communication with the divine, panentheism--unlike
pantheism, which holds to the divine immanence--maintains that the divine can be
both transcendent and immanent at the same time. |
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Philosophies are monistic if they show a
strong sense of the unity of the world, dualistic if they stress its twoness,
and pluralistic if they stress
its manyness. Pantheism is typically monistic, finding in the world's unity a
sense of the divine, sometimes related to the mystical intuition of personal
union with God; Classical Theism is dualistic in conceiving God as separated
from the world and mind from body; and panentheism is typically monistic in
holding to the unity of God and the world, dualistic in urging the separateness
of God's essence from the world, and pluralistic in taking seriously the
multiplicity of the kinds of beings and events making up the world. One form of
pantheism, present in the early stages of Greek philosophy, held that the divine
is one of the elements in the world whose function is to animate the other
elements that constitute the world. This point of view, called Hylozoistic
(Greek hyle, "matter," and zoe,
"life") pantheism, is not monistic, as are most other forms of
pantheism, but pluralistic. (see also dualism) |
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Most, but not all, forms of pantheism
understand the eternal God to be in intimate juxtaposition with the world, thus
minimizing time or making it illusory. Classical Theism holds that eternity is
in God and time is in the world but believes that, since God's eternity includes
all of time, the temporal process now going on in the world has already been
completed in God. Panentheism, on the other hand, espouses a temporal-eternal
God who stands in juxtaposition with a temporal world; thus, in panentheism, the
temporality of the world is not cancelled out, and time retains its reality. |
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Every philosophy must take a stand
somewhere on a spectrum running from a concept of things as unfeeling matter to
one of things as psychic or sentient. Materialism holds to the former extreme,
and Panpsychism to the latter.
Panpsychism offers a vision of reality
in which to exist is to be in some measure sentient and to sustain social
relations with other entities. Dualism, holding that reality consists of two
fundamentally different kinds of entity, stands again between two extremes. A
few of the simpler forms of pantheism support Materialism. Panentheism and most
forms of pantheism, on the other hand, tend toward Panpsychism. But there are
differences of degree, and though Classical Theism tends toward dualism, even
there the insentient often has a tinge of Panpsychism. |
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God is absolute insofar as he is
eternal, cause, activity, creator; he is relative insofar as he is temporal,
effect, passive (having potentiality in his nature), and affected by the world.
For pantheism and Classical Theism, God is absolute; and for many forms of
pantheism, the world, since it is identical with God, is likewise absolute. For
Classical Theism, since it envisages a separation between God and the world, God
is absolute and the world relative. For panentheism, however, God is absolute
and relative, cause and effect, actual and potential, active and passive. The
panentheist holds that, inasmuch as they refer to different levels of the divine
nature, both sets of claims can be attributed to God without inconsistency, that
just as a man can have an absolute, unchanging purpose, which gains now one
embodiment and now another, so God's absoluteness can be an abstract unchanging
feature of a changing totality. |
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Panentheism, Classical Theism, and many
forms of pantheism hold the world to be part of the ultimate reality. But for
Classical Theism the world has a lesser degree of reality than God; and for some
forms of pantheism, for which Hegel coined the term Acosmism, the world is
unreal, an illusion, and God alone is real. |
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In those forms of pantheism that
envisage the eternal God literally encompassing the world, man is an utterly
fated part of a world that is necessarily just as it is, and freedom is thus
illusion. To be sure, Classical Theism holds to the freedom of man but insists
that this freedom is compatible with a divine omniscience that includes his
knowledge of the total future. Thus the question arises whether or not such
freedom is illusory. Panentheism, by insisting that future reality is
indeterminate or open and that man and God, together, are in the process of
determining what the future shall be, probably supports the doctrine of man's
freedom more completely than does any alternative point of view. (see also free will) |
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Insofar as God is the indwelling
principle of the world and of man, as in pantheism, so far do these take on a
sacramental character; and insofar as God is separated from the world as in
18th-century Deism (see also Deism
below), so far does it become secular, neutral, or even fallen. In
contrast, Classical Theism, though basically sacramental, places this quality in
an enclave, the church. |
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On the basis of the preceding
characteristics, seven forms of pantheism can be distinguished in addition to
Classical Theism and panentheism: |
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The divine is immanent in, and is
typically regarded as the basic element of, the world, providing the motivating
force for movement and change. The world remains a plurality of separate
elements. |
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God is a part of the world and immanent
in it. Though only a part, however, his power extends throughout its totality. |
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God is absolute and identical with the
world. The world, although real, is therefore changeless. |
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The world is real and changing and is
within God (e.g., as the body of God).
But God remains nonetheless absolute and is not affected by the world. |
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The absolute God makes up the total
reality. The world is an appearance and ultimately unreal. |
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The opposites of ordinary discourse are
identified in the supreme instance. God and his relation to the world are
described in terms that are formally contradictory; thus reality is not subject
to rational description. Whether being is stressed or the void, whether
immanence is or transcendence, the result is the same: one must go beyond
rational description to an intuitive grasp of the ultimate. |
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God is absolute, eternal, first cause,
pure actuality, an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfect being. Though related to
the world as its cause, he is not affected by the world. He is essentially
transcendent over the world; and the world exists relative to him as a temporal
effect of his action--containing potentiality as well as actuality and
characterized by change and finitude. Since all of time is part of God's eternal
"Now," and since God's knowledge now includes the total future as
though laid out before him like a landscape, it is not clear that, in this
system, man can have freedom in any significant sense; for although
foreknowledge does not of itself determine anything, it vouches for the
existence of such determination. Nonetheless, human freedom is in fact asserted
by Classical Theists. |
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God is absolute in all respects, remote
from the world and transcendent over it. This view is like Classical Theism
except that, rather than saying that God is the cause of the world, it holds
that the world is an emanation of God, occurring by means of intermediaries.
God's absoluteness is thus preserved while a bridge to the world is provided as
well. In Plotinus (3rd century
AD), the foremost Neoplatonist, the Nous
(Greek, "mind"), a realm of ideas or Platonic forms, serves as the
intermediary between God and the world, and the theme of immanence
is sustained by positing the existence of a World-Soul
that both contains and animates the world. (see also emanationism,
causality) |
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In this alternative, both sets of
categories, those of absoluteness and of relativity, of transcendence and of
immanence, are held to apply equally to God, who is thus dipolar. He is the
cause of the world and its effect; his essence is eternal, but he is involved in
time. God's knowledge includes all that there is to know; since the future is
genuinely open, however, and is not in any sense real as yet, he knows it only
as a set of possibilities or probabilities. In this alternative man is held to
have significant freedom, participating as a co-creator with God in the
continuing creation of the world. |
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With only slight attention being
accorded to Classical Theism (which is covered in another article), the
incidence of the preceding eight forms of pantheism and panentheism in cultural
history remains to be explored. |
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The gods of the Vedas,
the ancient scriptures of India (c. 1200
BC), represented for the most part natural forces. Exceptions were the gods Prajapati
(Lord of Creatures) and Purusa
(Supreme Being or Soul of the Universe), whose competition for influence
provided, in its outcome, a possible explanation of how the Indian tradition
came to be one of pantheism rather than of Classical Theism. By the 10th book of
the Rigveda, Prajapati
had become a lordly, monotheistic figure, a creator deity transcending the
world; and in the later period of the sacred writings of the Brahmanas(c. 7th century BC), prose
commentaries on the Vedas, he was moving into a central position. The rising
influence of this Theism was later eclipsed by Purusa, who was also
represented in Rigveda X. In a creation myth Purusa was sacrificed
by the gods in order to supply (from his body) the pieces from which all the
things of the world arise. From this standpoint the ground of all things lies in
a Cosmic Self, and all of life
participates in that of Purusa. The Vedic hymn to Purusa may be
regarded as the starting point of Indian pantheism. (see also Hinduism) |
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In the Upanisads(c. 1000-500 BC), the most
important of the ancient scriptures of India, the later writings contain
philosophic speculations concerning the relation between the individual and the
divine. In the earlier Upanisads, the absolute, impersonal, eternal properties of the
divine had been stressed; in the later Upanisads,
on the other hand, and in the Bhagavadgita, the personal,
loving, immanentistic properties became dominant. In both cases the divine was
held to be identical with the inner self of each man. At times these opposites
were implicitly held to be in fact identical--the view earlier called identity
of opposites pantheism. At other times the two sets of qualities were related,
one to the unmanifest absolute Brahman,
or supreme reality (sustaining the universe), and the other to the manifest
Brahman bearing qualities (and containing the universe). Thus Brahman can be
regarded as exclusive of the world and inclusive, unchanging and yet the origin
of all change. Sometimes the manifest Brahman was regarded as an emanation from
the unmanifest Brahman; and then emanationistic pantheism--the Neoplatonic
pantheism of the foregoing typology--was the result. |
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Shankara,
an outstanding nondualistic Vedantist and advocate of a spiritual view of
life, began with the Neoplatonic alternative but added a qualification that
turned his view into what was later called acosmic pantheism. Distinguishing
first between Brahman as being the eternal Absolute and Brahman as a lower
principle and declaring the lower Brahman to be a manifestation of the higher,
he then made the judgment that all save the higher unqualitied Brahman is the
product of ignorance or nescience and exists (apparently only in men's minds) as
the phantoms of a dream. Since for Shankara, the world and
individuality thus disappear upon enlightenment into the unmanifest Brahman, and
in reality only the Absolute without distinctions exists, Shankara
has provided an instance of acosmism. |
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On the other hand, Ramanuja,
a prominent southern Brahmin who held to a qualified monism, argued strenuously
against Shankara's dismissal of the world and of individual selves
as being mere products of nescience. In place of this acosmism he substituted
the notion of world cycles. In the unmanifest state Brahman has as his body only
the very subtle matter of darkness, and he decrees "May I again possess a
world-body"; in the manifest state all of the things of the world,
including individual selves, are part of his body. The doctrine of Ramanuja
approaches panentheism; he has certainly advanced beyond emanationistic
pantheism. There are two aspects to the single Brahman, one absolutistic and the
other relativistic. As in panentheism, the beings of the world have freedom. The
only qualification is that, although it is Brahman's will to support the choices
of finite beings, he has the power to prohibit any choice that displeases him.
This power to prohibit indicates a preference for the absolute in Ramanuja's
thought, which is reflected in many ways: although God is the cause of the
world, for example, and includes the world within his being, he is never
affected by that world, and his motive in world creation is simply play. In sum,
since the absolutistic categories were given the greater emphasis in his
thought, Ramanuja is representative of a relativistic monistic
pantheism. |
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The presence in the Hindu tradition of
both absolutistic and relativistic descriptions of the divine suggests that
genuine panentheism might well emerge from the tradition; and, in fact, in the
former president of India, S.
Radhakrishnan, also a religious philosopher, that development did occur.
Although Radhakrishnan had been influenced by Western philosophy, including that
of A.N. Whitehead, later discussed as a modern panentheist, the sources of his
thought lie in Hindu philosophy. He distinguishes between God as the being who
contains the world and the Absolute, who is God in only one aspect. He finds
that the beings of the world are integral with God, who draws an increase of his
being from the constituents of his nature. |
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Some 600 years after Buddha, a new and
more speculative school of Buddhism arose to challenge the 18 or 20 schools of
Buddhism then in existence. One of the early representatives of this new school,
which came to be known as Mahayana (Sanskrit "Greater Vehicle")
Buddhism, was Ashvaghosa. Like
Shankara (whom he antedated by 700 years), Ashvaghosa
not only distinguished between the pure Absolute (the Soul as
"Suchness"; i.e., in its
essence) and the all-producing, all-conserving Mind, which is the manifestation
of the Absolute (the Soul as "Birth and Death"; i.e., as happenings), but he also held that the judgment concerning
the manifest world of beings is a judgment of nonenlightenment; it is, he said,
like the waves stirred by the wind--when the quiet of enlightenment comes the
waves cease, and an illusion confronts a man as he begins to understand the
world. |
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Whereas Ashvaghosa treated
the world as illusory and essentially void, Nagarjuna,
the great propagator of Mahayana Buddhism who studied under one of
Ashvaghosa's disciples, transferred Shunya
("the Void") into the place of the Absolute. If Suchness, or
ultimate reality, and the Void are identical, then the ultimate must lie beyond
any possible description. Nagarjuna approached the matter through dialectical
negation: according to the school that he founded, the Ultimate Void is the
Middle Path of an eightfold negation; all individual characteristics are negated
and sublated, and the individual approaches the Void through a combination of
dialectical negation and direct intuition. Beginning with the Middle Doctrine
School, the doctrine of the Void spread to all schools of Mahayana
Buddhism as well as to the Satyasiddhi
(Sanskrit: "perfect attainment of truth") group in Hinayana
Buddhism. Since the Void is also called the highest synthesis of all
oppositions, the doctrine of the Void may be viewed as an instance of identity
of opposites pantheism. (see also shunyata) |
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In the T'ien-t'ai
school of Chinese Buddhism founded by Chih-i, as in earlier forms of Mahayana
Buddhism, the elements of ordinary existence are regarded as having their basis
in illusion and imagination. What really exists is the one Pure Mind, called
True Thusness, which exists changelessly and without differentiation.
Enlightenment consists of realizing one's unity with the Pure Mind. Thus, an
additional Buddhist school, T'ien-t'ai, can be identified with acosmic
pantheism. |
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Indeed, although a mingling of types is
discernible in the Hindu and Buddhist strands of Oriental culture, acosmic
pantheism would seem to be the alternative most deeply rooted and widespread in
these traditions. |
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Just as the early gods of the Vedas
represented natural forces, so the Canaanite deities known as Baal
and the Hebrew God Yahweh both
began as storm gods. Baal developed into a Lord of nature, presiding with his
consort, Astarte, over the major fertility religion of the Middle East. The
immanentism of this nature religion might have sustained the development of
pantheistic systems; but, whereas the pantheistic Purusa triumphed in
India, the Theistic Yahweh triumphed in the Middle East. And Yahweh evolved not
into a Lord of nature but into a Lord of history presiding first over his chosen
people and then over world history. The requirement that he be a judge of
history implied that his natural "place" was outside and above the
world; and he thus became a transcendent deity. Through much of the history of
Israel, however, the people accepted elements from both of these traditions,
producing their own highly syncretistic
religion. It was this syncretism that provided the occasion that challenged
certain men of prophetic consciousness to embark upon their purifying missions,
beginning with Elijah and continuing throughout the Old Testament period. In
this development, the absoluteness and remoteness of Yahweh came to be
supplemented by qualities of love and concern, as in the prophets Hosea and
Amos. In short, the categories of immanence came to supplement the categories of
transcendence and, in the New Testament period, became overwhelmingly important.
The transcendent Yahweh, on the other hand, had fitted more naturally into the
categories of absoluteness. And, in the Christian West, it was the transcendent
God who appeared in the doctrines of Classical Theism, while pantheism stood as
a heterodox departure from the Christian scheme. (see also Syrian
and Palestinian religion, Judaism,
history, philosophy of, Christianity) |
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Early Greek
religion contained among its many deities some whose natures might have
supported pantheism; and certainly the mystery religions of later times stressed
types of mystical union that are typical of pantheistic systems. But in fact the
pantheism of ancient Greece was related almost exclusively to philosophical
speculation. For this reason it is more rationalistic, possessing a style quite
different from the Pantheisms thus far examined. |
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The first philosophers of Greece, all of
whom were 6th-century-BC Ionians, were hylozoistic, finding matter and life
inseparable. The basic substances that they identified as the elements of
reality--the water proposed by Thales,
the boundless infinite suggested by Anaximander,
and the air of Anaximenes--were
presumed to have the motive force of living things and thus to be a kind of
life, a position here called hylozoistic pantheism. |
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Impressed by the absolute unity of all
things, the adherents of another philosophic position, that of Eleaticism
(see PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS AND
DOCTRINES: e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Eleaticism ),
so-named from its centre in Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy, found it
impossible to believe in multiplicity and change. The first step in this
direction was taken by Xenophanes,
a religious thinker and rhapsodist, who, on rational grounds, moved from the
gods and goddesses of Homer and Hesiod to a unitary principle of the divine. He
believed that God is the supreme power of the universe, ruling all things by the
power of his mind. Unmoved, unmoving, and unitary, God perceives, governs, and
apparently contains, or at least he "embraces," all things. So
interpreted, Xenophanes provides an instance of monistic pantheism, inasmuch as,
in this view, the Absolute God is united with a changing world, while the
reality of neither is attenuated. This paradox may have encouraged Parmenides,
possibly one of Xenophanes' disciples (according to Aristotle), to accept the
changeless Absolute, eliminating change and motion from the world. Reality thus
became for him a unitary, indivisible, everlasting, motionless whole. This
position is basically that of absolutistic monistic pantheism in that it views
the world as real but changeless. Insofar as the change and variety of the world
are only apparent, Parmenides also approaches acosmic pantheism. |
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A third fundamental position is that of
the Ephesian critic Heracleitus,
among whose cryptic sayings were many that stressed the role of change as the
basic reality. Heracleitus continued the hylozoistic tendencies of the Ionian
philosophers. Fire, his basic
element, is also the universal logosor reason, controlling all things; and since fire not only has a life of its
own but exercises control to the boundaries of the universe as well, the system
is more complex than hylozoistic pantheism. In view of the circumstance that
everything is either on the way from, or to, fire, this basic element is
actually or incipiently everywhere. Since the divine works here from within the
universe, indeed from within a single, but basic, aspect of it, the system is an
instance of immanentistic pantheism. |
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The philosopher Anaxagoras,
one of the great dignitaries at Athens in the golden age of Pericles, approached
the problem somewhat in the manner of Heracleitus. Nous
(or Mind) he held to be the principle of order for all things as well as the
principle of their movement. It is the finest and purest of things and is
diffused throughout the universe. This, like the preceding system, is an
instance of immanentistic pantheism. |
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From the standpoint of the typology here
employed, Plato may be
regarded as the first Western philosopher to treat the problem of the
absoluteness and the relativity in God with any degree of adequacy. In the Timaeusan absolute and eternal God was recognized, existing in changeless
perfection in relation to the world of forms, along with a World-Soul,
which contained and animated the world and was as divine as a changing thing
could be. Although the material can be variously interpreted, panentheists hold
that Plato has adopted a dual principle of the divine, uniting both being and
becoming, absoluteness and relativity, permanence and change in a single
context. To be sure, he envisioned the categories of absoluteness as situated in
one deity, and those of relativity in another; but the separation seems not to
have pleased him, and in the tenth book of the Lawsby invoking the analogy of a circular motion, which combines change with the
retention of a fixed centre, he explained how deity could exemplify both
absoluteness and change. Plato thus may be viewed as a quasi-panentheist. |
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Aristotle,
on the other hand, with his exclusivistic, transcendent God, exemplifying only
the categories of absoluteness, anticipated the absolute God of Classical
Theism, existing above and beyond the world. |
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Stoicism,
one of the foremost of the post-Aristotelian schools of thought, represents an
immanentistic pantheism of the Heracleitean variety. First of all, the Stoics
accepted the decision of Heracleitus that an indwelling fire is the principal
element entering into all transformations and is also the principle of reason,
the logos, ordering as well as
animating all things, but that, second, there is a World-Soul, which is diffused
throughout the world and penetrates it in every part. Rather than approximating
Plato's spiritual World-Soul, the Stoic World-Soul is more like the Nousof Anaxagoras. The Stoics were Materialists, and their diffuse World-Soul
is, thus, an extended form of subtle matter. That everything is determined by
the universal reason is an unvarying theme in Stoicism; and this fact suggests
that Stoic pantheism, despite its immanentism, stresses the categories of
absoluteness rather than those of relativity in the relations holding between
God and the world. |
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The life of reason brings man into
harmony with God and with nature and helps him to understand his fate,
which is his place in the universal system. Although the view is an amalgam of
several types of pantheism, this particular mixture has retained its identity.
It is therefore useful to call this position, or any similar combination of
themes, by the name Stoic pantheism. |
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Plotinus,
the creator of one of the most thoroughgoing philosophical systems of ancient
times, may be taken to represent Neoplatonism,
an influential modification of Plato's attempt to deal with absoluteness and
relativity in the divine. Plotinus' system consists of the One--the absolute God
who is the supreme power of the system--the intermediate Nous,
and the World-Soul (with the world as its internal content). His World-Soul
follows the Platonic model. The system really blends pantheism with Classical
Theism, since the categories of absoluteness apply to the One, and the
relativistic categories apply to the World-Soul. The doctrine of emanation,
whereby the power of the One comes into the world, is a clear attempt to bridge
the gap between absoluteness and relativity. For Plotinus, as for Classical
Theism, there is immanent in man an image of the divine, which serves as well to
relate man to God as does the divine spark in Stoic pantheism. Even Classical
Theism may thus contain a touch of immanentistic pantheism. This view, or any
similar combination of themes, is an instance of emanationistic or Neoplatonic
pantheism. |
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Though Scholasticism,
with its doctrine of a separate and absolute God, was the crowning achievement
of medieval thought, the period was, nonetheless, not without its pantheistic
witness. Largely through Jewish and Christian mysticism, an essentially
Neoplatonic Pantheism ran throughout the age. (see also Christianity) |
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The only important Latin philosopher for
six centuries after St. Augustine was John
Scotus Erigena. Inasmuch as, in his system, Christ's redemptive sacrific
helps to effect a Neoplatonic return of all beings to God, Erigena can be said
to have turned Neoplatonism into a Christian drama of fall into sin and
redemption from its power. When Erigena said that, even in the stage of
separation from God, God in his superessentiality is identical with all things,
he advanced beyond a strictly Neoplatonic pantheism to some stronger form of
immanentistic or monistic pantheism. |
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In the two principal writings of the
esoteric Jewish movement called the Kabbala,
known for its theosophical interpretations of the Scriptures, a mystically
oriented system of 10 emanations is presented. A Spaniard, Avicebrón,
a Jewish poet and philosopher, similarly presented a Neoplatonic scheme of
emanations. And in Spain, Averroës,
the most prominent Arabic philosopher of the period, represented an Aristotelian
tradition that is heavily overladen with Neoplatonism. For Averroës, the
active intellect in man is really an impersonal divine reason, which alone lives
on when man dies. (see also Judaism) |
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The German Meister
Eckehart, probably the most significant of philosophical mystics,
developed a markedly original theology. From his Stoic pantheism there arose his
most controversial thesis--that there resides in every man a divine, uncreated
spark of the Godhead, making possible both a union with God and a genuine
knowledge of his nature. But Eckehart also distinguished between the unmanifest
and barren Godhead and the three Persons who constitute a manifest and personal
God. Thus, the system has similarities to both Stoic and Neoplatonic pantheism. |
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Cardinal Nicholas
of Cusa, whose broad scholarship and scientific approach anticipated the
coming Renaissance, continued the tradition into the 15th century. The
"learned ignorance," in which a man separates himself from every
affirmation, can have positive results, in Nicholas' view, because man is a microcosm
within the macrocosm (or universe), and the God of the macrocosm is thus
mirrored in all of his creatures. He also held that, in reference to God,
contradictions are compatible--his "coincidence of opposites"
doctrine, in which God is at once all extremes. Clearly, Nicholas wished to
ascribe to God both the categories of transcendence and those of immanence
without distinction. But in fact he displayed some preference for the categories
of the absolute, insisting, for example, that the creatures of the world can add
nothing to God since they are merely his partial appearances. Despite this bias
toward absolutism, and even to acosmism, Nicholas can be appropriately viewed as
espousing an identity of opposites pantheism. |
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The humanism
of the Renaissance included an
enlarged interest in Platonism and in its historical carrier, Neoplatonism, as
well as influences from Aristotle and from Kabbalistic sources. The view of man
as a microcosm of the universe was widespread. Marsilio
Ficino, one of the first leaders of the Florentine Academy, found the
image and reflection of God in all men and anticipated the divinization of man
and the entire cosmos. The humanist and syncretistic philosopher Pico
della Mirandola, also a leading figure in the Academy, substituted for
creation a Neoplatonic emanation from the divine. |
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The most famous scholar of the Italian
Renaissance was Giordano Bruno.
Combining Copernican astronomy with Neoplatonism, Bruno thought of the universe
as an infinite organism with monads
as its ultimate constituents and world-systems as its parts. The universe, he
held, is in a continual process of development and is infused with the divine
life. Accepting Nicholas of Cusa's doctrine of the identity of opposites, he
taught that contradictory ascriptions apply equally to God in particular and
that claims concerning his immanence and transcendence are equally valid. More
open to the categories of relativity than Nicholas, Bruno, however, exemplified
a neatly balanced instance of identity of opposites pantheism. |
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The next great innovator of mystical
religious thought was Jakob Böhme,
who, in developing the concept of the divine life, took a decisive step beyond
mere absoluteness. God goes through stages of self-development, he taught, and
the world is merely the reflection of this process. Böhme anticipated Hegel
in claiming that the divine self-development occurs by means of a continuing dialectic,
or tension of opposites, and that it is the negative qualities of the dialectic
that men experience as the evil of the world. Even though Böhme, for the
most part, stressed absoluteness and relativity equally, his view that the world
is a mere reflection of the divine--apparently denying self-development on the
part of creatures--tends toward acosmic pantheism. |
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In the 17th century the foremost
pantheist was a Jewish rationalist, Benedict
Spinoza, whose training in the history of philosophy included both
medieval Jewish philosophy and the Kabbala. He championed a rational rather than
a mystical pantheism, so much so that all that remained of mysticism, in fact,
was his concept of the intellectual love of God. The rationality
of the system is suggested by Spinoza's argument that, since God is the infinite
being, he must be identical with the world; for otherwise, God-and-world would
be a greater totality than God alone. Also, since God is a necessary being and
is identical with the world, the world must also be necessary in all its parts.
It follows from this that human freedom is an impossible idea; and the sense
that man has of such freedom is based on his ignorance of the causes that have determined
him. Spinoza distinguished between God and the world in three ways: first, by
stressing God's activity in the active sense of natura
naturans ("the nature that [creates] nature"; i.e.,
God) compared to the passive sense of natura
naturata ("the nature that [is created as] nature"; i.e.,
the world); second, he related God to eternity and the world to time; and
third, he distinguished God as self-existing substance, the whole, from the
world, which he conceived as the attributes and modes of that substance. In
terms of the present classification, Spinoza represents a monistic pantheism
tending toward absolutism. |
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Goethe,
the incomparable German litterateur, claimed that he was a follower of Spinoza.
In fact, however, his beliefs were rather different inasmuch as Goethe
championed man's individuality; opposed mechanical necessity; and held a
hylozoistic, or vitalistic, position in which nature was organic, a living
unity. His personalistic pantheism mixes hylozoistic and Stoic types with a
touch of relativism added to the mixture. |
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During the 19th century, pantheism and
panentheism were sustained by various kinds of Idealism
that developed during the period. In these systems the categories of relativity
gained in prominence; God was conceived as entering history and as being more
intimately related to processes of change and development. |
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Although the philosophy of the German
patriot J.G. Fichte, an
immediate follower of Kant, began in the inner subjective experience of the
individual, with the "I" positing the "not-I"--i.e.,
feeling compelled to construct a perceived world over against itself--it
turns out eventually that, at a more fundamental level, God, as the universal
"I," posits the world at large. The world, or nature, is described in
organic terms; God is considered not alone as the Universal Ego but also as the
Moral World Order, or Ground of ethical principles; and since every man has a
destiny as a part of this order, man is in this sense somehow one with God. In
the moral world order, then, man has a partial identity with God; and in the
physical order he has membership in the organic whole of nature. It is not
clear, however, whether in Fichte's view God as Universal Ego includes all human
egos, and the organic whole of nature. Should he do so, then Fichte would be a
representative of dipolar Panentheism, since in his final doctrine the Universal
Ego imitates an Absolute deity who is simply the divine end of all activity,
serving equally as model and as goal. In this interpretation God is conceived
both as absolute mobility and absolute fixity. It is not entirely clear whether
the doctrine is to be understood as referring to two aspects of a single God,
the panentheistic alternative, or to two separate gods, the alternative imbedded
in Plato's quasipanentheism. In either case, Fichte has enunciated most of the
themes of panentheism and deserves consideration either as a representative or
precursor of that school. |
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A second early follower of Kant was F.W.J.
von Schelling, who, in contrast to Fichte, stressed the self-existence of
the objective world. Schelling's thought developed through several stages. Of
particular interest to the problem of God are the final three stages in which
his philosophy passed through monistic and Neoplatonic pantheism followed by a
final stage that was panentheistic. |
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In the first of these stages, he posits
the Absolute as an absolute identity, which nonetheless includes, as in Spinoza,
both nature and mind, reality and ideality. The natural series culminates in the
living organism; and the spiritual series culminates in the work of art. The
universe is, thus, both the most perfect organism and the most perfect work of
art. |
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In his second, Neoplatonic, stage he
conceived the Absolute as separated from the world, with a realm of Platonic
ideas interposed between them. In this arrangement, the world was clearly an
emanation or effect of the divine. |
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In the final stage of his thought,
Schelling presented a theophany,
or manifestation of deity, involving the separation of the world from God, and
its return. In appearance this was quite like the views of Erigena or like the
unmanifest and manifest Brahman of Indian thought. But, since the power of God
continues to infuse the world and there can be no real separation, the entire
theophany is clearly the development of the divine life. The Absolute is
retained as the pure Godhead, a unity presiding over the world; and the
world--having in measure its own spontaneity--is both his antithesis and part of
his being, the contradiction accounting for progress. The positing within God of
eternity and temporality, of being-in-itself and of self-giving, of yes and no,
of participation in joy and in suffering, is the very duality of Panentheism. |
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It was a disciple of Schelling, Karl
Christian Krause, who coined the term panentheism to refer to the
particular kind of relation between God and the world that is organic in
character. |
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The third, and most illustrious, early
post-Kantian Idealist was G.W.F.
Hegel, who held that the Absolute Spirit fulfills itself, or realizes
itself, in the history of the world. And in Hegel's deduction of the categories
it is clear that man realizes himself through the attainment of unity with the
Absolute in philosophy, art, and religion. It would appear, then, that God is in
the world, or the world is in God, and that, since man is a part of history and
thus a part of the divine realization in the world, he shares in the divine
life; it would seem, too, that God is to be characterized by contingency as well
as necessity, by potentiality as well as actuality, by change as well as
permanence. In short, it would seem at first that the panentheistic dipolarity
of terms would apply to the Hegelian Absolute. But this is not quite so; for
Hegel's emphasis was on the deduction of the categories of logic, nature, and
spirit, a deduction that provided the lineaments of Spirit-in-Itself (the
categories of the intrinsic logic that the world, as Spirit, follows in its
development), Spirit-for-Itself (nature as existing oblivious of its own
context), and Spirit-in-and-for-Itself (conscious spiritual life, natural, and
yet aware of its role in the developing world). This deduction, moving from the
most abstract categories to the most concrete, is partly logical and partly
temporal; it cannot be read either as a sheerly logical sequence or as a sheerly
temporal sequence. As a logical sequence, it has the appearance of a Neoplatonic
scheme turned on its head, since the Absolute Spirit that emerges from the
deduction includes all of the steps of the preceding rich and multifarious
deduction. As a temporal sequence, the system would seem to be a species of
Stoic (i.e., Heracleitean) pantheism,
qualified by a clear Parmenidean motif (see above Greco-Roman
doctrines ), which appears in
its stress on an absoluteness that, from the eternal standpoint, cancels out
time. This Parmenidean quality is to be found not only in Hegel but in most of
the Idealists who were influenced by him. Time is real, on this view, and yet
not quite real, having already eternally happened. And when Hegel spoke of the
Absolute Spirit, this phrase held the internal tension of a near contradiction,
for spirit, however absolute, must surely be relative to what is around it,
sensitive to and dependent on other spirits. The fact that Hegel wished to give
something like equal emphasis, however, both to absoluteness and to relativity
in the divine being or process suggests that his goal is identical with that of
the panentheists, even though he is perhaps more fairly regarded as a Pantheist
of an ambiguous type. |
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It is impossible for one to leave the
19th century without mention of the pioneering experimental psychologist Gustav
Fechner (1801-87), founder of psychophysics, who developed an interest in
philosophy. Fechner pursued the themes of panentheism beyond the positions of
his predecessors. A panpsychist with an organic view of the world, he held that
every entity is to some extent sentient and acts as a component in the life of
some more inclusive entity in a hierarchy that reaches to the divine Being,
whose constituents include all of reality. God is the soul of the world, which
is, in turn, his body. Fechner contends that every man's volitions provide
impulses within the divine experience, and that God gains and suffers from the
experiences of men. Precisely because God is the supreme being, he is in process
of development. He can never be surpassed by any other, but he surpasses himself
continually through time. He, thus, argues that God can be viewed in two ways:
either as the Absolute ruling over the world, or as the totality of the world;
but both are aspects of the same Being. Fechner's affirmations comprise a
complete statement of panentheism, including the dipolar deity with respect to
whom the categories of absoluteness and relativity can be affirmed without
contradiction. |
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The 20th century marks a decisive break
with absolutism. In the first half of the century, panentheism gained in
authority. The position of the Russian ex-Marxist Nikolay
Berdyayev, a religious metaphysician, with his emphasis on divine and
human freedom, is a manifesto of panentheism. Even more impressive was the work
of the eminent British-American philosopher, Alfred
North Whitehead. As in the case of Fechner, Whitehead came to philosophy
from science and held an organismic view of the structure of the world. In
Whitehead's view God has two natures: his primordial nature is abstract; his
consequent nature is concrete and includes within itself the total history of
the world. Whitehead was also a panpsychist and believed that feeling is present
in some degree at every level of the world process. Whether or not he was, then,
also a panentheist is in dispute. He held that the possible future and the total
past are in God--in his primordial and consequent natures; but for Whitehead the
present moment is relative, and contemporaries exclude each other. In the
present moment of any entity, since it is the present of that entity, it is appropriate to say that God is in that entity,
part of the data on which it acts; thus the Stoic spark of divinity has here a
modern application. From the standpoint of God, on the other hand, all entities
are part of God; they come from him and return to him in the passage of time,
but they are not in God in the sense that their independence in the present
moment is prejudiced. |
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It was left to Charles
Hartshorne, one of Whitehead's followers, to provide the definitive
analysis of panentheism. It is Hartshorne's suggestion that the organismic
analogy, present in Whitehead as well as in many earlier thinkers, be taken
seriously. For Hartshorne, God includes the world even as an organism includes
its cells, thus including the present moment of each event. The total organism
gains from its constituents, even though the cells function with an appropriate
degree of autonomy within the larger organism. |
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Panentheism is then a middle way between
the denial of individual freedom and creativity characterizing many of the
varieties of pantheism and the remoteness of the divine characterizing Classical
Theism. Its support for the ideal of human freedom provides grounds for a
positive appreciation of temporal process, while removing some of the ethical
paradoxes confronting deterministic views. It supports the sacramental value of
reverence for life. At the same time the theme of participation with the divine
leads naturally to self-fulfillment as the goal of life. |
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Many pantheistic and Theistic
alternatives claim the same advantages, but their natural tendency toward
absoluteness may make justification of these claims in some cases difficult and,
in others, some argue, quite impossible. It is for this reason that a
significant number of contemporary philosophers of religion have turned to
panentheism as a corrective to the partiality of the other competing views. |
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(W.L.Re.) |
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