Pantheism

First published Mon Oct 1, 2012; substantive revision Thu Aug 17, 2023

The term ‘pantheism’ is a modern one, possibly firstappearing in the writing of the Irish freethinker John Toland (1705)and constructed from the Greek rootspan (all) andtheos (God). But if not the name, the ideas themselves arevery ancient, and any survey of the history of philosophy will uncovernumerous pantheist or pantheistically inclined thinkers; although itshould also be noted that in many cases all that history has preservedfor us are second-hand reportings of attributed doctrines, anyreconstruction of which is too conjectural to provide much by way ofphilosophical illumination (see Kahn 1960).

At its most general, pantheism may be understood either (a)positively, as the view that God is identical with the cosmos (i.e.,the view that there exists nothing which is outside of God), or (b)negatively, as the rejection of any view that considers God asdistinct from the universe.

However, given the complex and contested nature of the conceptsinvolved, there is insufficient consensus among philosophers to permitthe construction of any more detailed definition not open to seriousobjection from some quarter or other. Moreover, the label is acontroversial one, where strong desires either to appropriate or toreject it often serve only to obscure the actual issues, and it wouldbe a sad irony if pantheism revealed itself to be most like atraditional religion in its sectarian disputes over just what countsas ‘true pantheism.’ Therefore pantheism should not bethought of as a single codifiable position. Rather it should beunderstood as a diverse family of distinct doctrines; many of whomwould be surprised—and, indeed, disconcerted—to findthemselves regarded as members of a single household. Further, sincethe concept has porous and disputed boundaries there is no clearconsensus on just who qualifies, no definitive roll-call of pastpantheists. Given this situation the range of things that may beusefully said aboutall pantheisms is perhaps limited, butnonetheless a variety of concepts may be clarified, the nature ofcontentious issues explored, and the range of possible options moreprecisely mapped out (see Buckareff & Nagasawa 2016; Buckareff2022).

1. Pantheism in religion, literature, and philosophy

There are several different ways to think about pantheism. (1) Many ofthe world’s religious traditions and spiritual writings aremarked by pantheistic ideas and feelings. This is particularly so forexample, in Hinduism of the Advaita Vedanta school, in some varietiesof Kabbalistic Judaism, in Celtic spirituality, and in Sufi mysticism.(2) Another vital source of pantheistic ideas is to be found inliterature, for example, in such writers as Goethe, Coleridge,Wordsworth, Emerson, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, and RobinsonJeffers. Although it should be added that, far from being limited tohigh culture, pantheistic themes are familiar, too, in popular media,for example in such films asStar Wars, Avatar, andTheLion King. (3) Thirdly, as it is in this article, pantheism maybe consideredphilosophically; that is, a criticalexamination may be made of its central ideas with respect to theirmeaning, their coherence, and the case to be made for or against theiracceptance.

2. Arguments for / drives towards pantheism

A good way to understand any view is to appreciate the kind of drivesthat may push someone towards it. What arguments may be given forpantheism? Although there are a great many different individual linesof reasoning that might be offered, generally they may be placed undertwo heads; arguments ‘from below’, which start fromaposteriori religious experience, and arguments ‘fromabove’, which start froma priori philosophicalabstraction.

Following the first type of argument, pantheistic belief arises whenthe things of this world excite a particular sort of religiousreaction in us. We feel, perhaps, a deepreverence for andsense of identitywith the world in which we findourselves. Epistemically it seems to us that God is not distant butcan be encountered directly in what we experience around us. We seeGod in everything. The initial focus of attention here may be eitherour physical environment (the land on which we live, our naturalenvironment) or else our social environment (our community, our tribe,our nation or, generally, the people we meet with) but furtherreflection may lead to its more universal expansion.

In the second kind of argument, reasoning starts from a relativelyabstract concept whose application is taken as assured, but furtherreflection leads to the conclusion that its scope must be extended toinclude the whole of reality. Most typically, the concept in questionis that of ‘God’, or ‘perfect being’, in whichcase pantheism appears as the logical terminus or completion oftheism. The following paragraphs illustrate four examples of suchreasoning.

(1) Traditional theism asserts theomnipresence of God and,while it strongly wishes to maintain that this is not equivalent topantheism, the difference between saying that God ispresenteverywhere ineverything and saying that Godiseverything is far from easy to explain. If omnipresence means, notsimply that God is cognisant of or active in all places, but literallythat he exists everywhere, then it is hard to see how any finite beingcan be said to have existence external to God. Indeed, for IsaacNewton and Samuel Clarke divine omnipresence was one and the samething as space, which they understood as ‘the sensorium ofGod’ (Oakes 2006). One recent variant of this position isLogical Pantheism according to which God is identified withlogical space, with the totality of all possible worlds.(Aranyosi 2022)

(2) The traditional theistic position that God’s creation of theuniverse is continuous can easily be developed in pantheisticdirections. The view that the world could not exist—even for asecond—without God, makes it wholly dependent on God and, hence,not really an autonomous entity (Oakes 1983). Moreover, to furtherdevelop this argument, if God creates every temporal stage of everyobject in the universe, this undermines the causal power of individualthings and leads to occasionalism, which in turn encourages pantheism;for in so far as independent agency is a clear mark of independentbeing, the occasionalist doctrine that all genuine agency isdivine—that it all comes from a single place—tends toundermine the distinction of things from God. Both Malebranche andJonathan Edwards have found themselves charged with pantheism on thesegrounds, and it was for this reason that Leibniz, in attempting torefute the pantheistic monism of Spinoza, felt it most important toassert the autonomous agency of finite beings (Crisp 2019).

(3) Alternatively it might be argued that God’somniscience is indistinguishable from reality itself. For ifthere obtains a complete mapping between God’s knowledge and theworld that God knows, what basis can be found for distinguishingbetween them, there being not even the possibility of a mismatch?Moreover, were we to separate the two, since knowledge tracksreality—we know something because it is the case and notvice versa—then God would become problematicallydependent upon the world (Mander 2000).

(4) Arguments of this general type may also proceed from startingpoints more philosophical than theological. For example, Spinoza, themost famous of all modern pantheists starts from the necessaryexistence of something he calls ‘substance.’ By this hemeans that which exists wholly in its own right, that whose existencedoes not depend upon anything else. The notion of ‘theAbsolute’, or wholly unconditioned reality, as it figures in thephilosophies of Schelling, Hegel, and the British Idealists may beconsidered a related development of the same philosophical startingpoint (see Thomas 2019). In both cases the reasoning runs that thisnecessary being must be all-inclusive and, hence, divine.

3. The logic of identity

The pantheist asserts an identity between God and nature, but it needsto be asked in just what sense we are to understand the term‘identity’? To begin with it is necessary to raise twoambiguities in the logic of identity.

(1)Dialectical identity. It is important to note that manypantheists will not accept the classical logic of identity in whichpairs are straightforwardly either identical or different. They mayadopt rather the logic of relative identity, oridentity-in-difference, by which it is possible to maintain that Godand the cosmos are simultaneously both identical and different, or toput the matter in more theological language, that God issimultaneously both transcendent and immanent. For example, Eriugenaholds that the universe may be subdivided into four categories: thingswhich create but are not created, things which create and are created,things which are created but do not create, and things which neithercreate nor are created. He argues that all four reduce to God, andhence “that God is in all things, i.e. that he subsists as theiressence. For He alone by Himself truly has being, and He alone iseverything which is truly said to be in things endowed withbeing” (Periphyseon, 97). But nonetheless, forEriugena, the uncreated retains its distinct status separate from thecreated, not least in that the former may be understood while thelater transcends all understanding. In consequence, he insists thatGod is not the genus of which creatures are the species. Similarly,the Sufi philosopher, ibn ‘Arabi identifies God and theuniverse, suggesting in a striking metaphor that the universe is thefood of God and God the food of the universe; as deity swallows up thecosmos so the cosmos swallows up deity (Bezels of Wisdom,237; Husaini 1970, 180). But Ibn ‘Arabi in no sense regards suchclaims as preventing him from insisting also on the fundamental gulfbetween the unknowable essence of God and his manifest being. We mustdistinguish between the nature of God and the nature of things,between that which exists by itself (God) and that which exist byanother (the universe), but since the nature of God just is Beingitself, no parallel distinction may be drawn between the being of Godand the being of things. Nothing real exists besides God who discloseshimself in and through the universe (Chittick 1989, ch.5). Again,Nicholas of Cusa’s celebrated doctrine of the ‘coincidenceof opposites’—which he memorably illustrated by pointingto way in which, upon infinite expansion, a circle must coincide witha straight line—allows him to sayboth that God and thecreation are the same thingand that there exists afundamental distinction between the realm of absolute being and therealm of limited or contracted being (Moran 1990). Even Spinoza goesto great lengths to show that the two attributes ofthoughtandextension by which we pick out the one substance as‘God’ or ‘nature’ are nonetheless at the sametime irreducibly different. They may be co-referring but they are notsynonymous; indeed, they are utterly incommensurable. Such adialectical conception of unity, in which there can be no identitywithout difference, is a strong element in Hegel’s thought, andalso one aspect of what Hartshorne meant bydipolar theism;the opposites of immanence and transcendence are included among thosewhich he thinks God brings together in his being.

(2)Partial Identity. Even accepting a classical conceptionof identity and difference, there remain issues to settle. If we thinkof pantheism negatively as a rejection of the view that God isdistinct from the cosmos, we would face four possible schemes by whichwe might represent their mereological relation: we might understandGod as proper part of nature, we might take nature as a proper part ofGod, we might regard the two domains as partially overlapping, or elsewe might hold that they are strictly identical.

Reflecting upon the ambiguities of the previous two paragraphs, itmight be argued that only where we find strict classical identity dowe have pantheism. For if the universe is not wholly divine we havemereimmanentism, while if God includes but is not exhaustedby the universe then we have ratherpanentheism. Now,certainly it may be allowed there are metaphysical schemes for whichthe range of overlap between divinity and the cosmos is so small thatthey fail to capture the spirit of pantheism. (For example, aworld-view in which God were understood as the vital spark whichanimates an otherwise dead and motionless cosmos, or a world-view inwhich the cosmos were merely one small fraction of the being of Godwould indeed seem far from the spirit of pantheism.) However, to limitthe term’s application to just those schemes advancing strictclassical identity would be far too restrictive.

Such ‘strict identity’ is virtually impossible to definedue to the extreme difficulty of stipulating what would count as anacceptable and what as an unacceptable sense, part, aspect, or elementof difference. For example, Aquinas distinguishes between the doctrinethat God is the form of all things (‘formal pantheism’)and the doctrine that God is the matter of all things (‘materialpantheism’) (Moran 1989, 86). Does either of these count aspantheism ‘proper’, or must both obtain at the same time?Again, while some pantheists conceive of deity in mereological termsas the collection of things which make up the universe, many othershave found this approach inadequate, maintaining that in someimportant sense ‘the whole is greater than the sum of itsparts.’ The finite things that we encounter around us and arehappy enough to describe as partsof nature we feel lesshappy to think of as partsof God. Such theorists may alsoreject the charge that their way of thinking ispanentheistic, maintaining that the proper lesson to draw isnot one of the transcendence of the holistic view but rather oneconcerning the degree of unreality or abstraction involved in anydistributed view. In short, doesany admission of differencebetween the world as common-sense experiences it and the divine cosmosas pantheism understands it amount to a concession either that thereare aspects of experience which fall outside deity or aspects of deitywhich fall outside experience? If so, then the class of ‘truepantheists’ threatens to become null. In the end, rather thanattempt to draw sharp but artificial and contentious lines it seemsmore fruitful to maintain that the boundaries of demarcation betweenimmanence, pantheism, and panentheism are vague and porous.

This approach has the further advantage of keeping togetherhistorically cognate thinkers. If the essence of pantheism lies instrict classical identity, the issue of who is or is not a pantheistcomes down to the somewhat arcane dispute whether there could be anyconceivable aspect or side of reality which was not natural, and/orwhether there could be any conceivable aspect or side of reality whichwas not divine, but these are abstruse points that can only take usaway from the fundamental pantheistic intuition of the overlap of Godand nature, the intuition that that in grasping the reality before uswe grasp God himself, not something separate or intermediary.

4. Nature of the identity relation itself

To say that God isidentical with the world as a whole is notself-explanatory and, although often the matter is leftdisconcertingly vague, examination of the literature reveals a varietyof different understandings of the identity relation being assertedhere.

(1)Substance identity. For Spinoza the claim that God is thesame as the cosmos is spelled out as the thesis that there exists oneand only one particular substance which he refers to as ‘God ornature’; the individual thing referred to as ‘God’is one and the same object as the complex unit referred to as‘nature’ or ‘the cosmos.’ On such a scheme thefinite things of the world are thought of as something likeparts of the one great substance, although the terminology ofparts is somewhat problematic. Parts are relatively autonomous fromthe whole and from each other, and Spinoza’s preferredterminology ofmodes, which are to be understood as more likeproperties, is chosen to rectify this. A further problem with theterminology of parts is that many pantheists have wanted to claim thatGod or nature is not just the whole or totality of things, but issomehow the inner essence or heart ofeach individual thing.This may be expressed in the idea that somehow the whole is present ineach of its parts, a suggestion whose meaning has often been leftmetaphorical or obscure. Giordano Bruno, for example employs the twoillustrations of a voice heard in its entirety from all sides of theroom, and that of a large mirror which reflects one image of one thingbut which, if it is broken into a thousand pieces, each of the piecesstill reflects the whole image (Bruno 1584, 50, 129). A thesis of thecomplete interpenetration or interrelation of everything, the claimbeing made here is related to that defended by Leibniz (who was not apantheist) that each monad is a mirror to the entire universe.

In Western philosophy Spinoza’s formulation of the pantheisticposition has become so influential as to almost completely define theposition, but while practically all pantheists are monists (of somesort), not all aresubstance monists, and there do existalternative ways of expressing identity besides a head-count of thenumber of particular entities.

(2)Being itself. There is a long theological tradition inwhich God is regarded asbeing itself, rather than as onebeing among others, and insofar as it treats God as something to befound inseparable from and at the very root of all that is, such aconception may be used to express pantheism. While a conceptualdistinction may be drawn between ‘the totality of beings’and ‘being itself,’ it is clear that neither of thesecould have any reality except in and through the other. Theidentification of God with being itself is a common Christian view,from Augustine to Tillich, but it is not exclusive to Christianthought. For example, Ibn ‘Arabi, in developing the Koranicnotion oftawhīd (God’s unity), asserts that therecan be no real being other than God; that God permeates through allbeings andis essentially all things. Especially among hisfollowers this was developed into a monistic ontology ofwahdatal-wujūd (the unity of being).

(3)Identity of origin. A third way to express the identityof God and nature is by reference to the thought that all things comefrom God, rendering them both identical with each other and with theone source from which they came. It is important in this connection todiscuss the difference between such notions as emanation, expression,or instantiation and the more specifically theistic conception ofcreationex nihilo, for given the plausibility of supposingthat what ‘flows forth’ or ‘radiates out’ froma source is only latent within that stem, traditional theists haveoften insisted on creationex nihilo precisely to drive awedge between creator and created and thereby rule out pantheism. Butalthough it would be tempting to contrast creationex nihioas theistic and emanation as pantheistic, such thoughts are probablytoo simple. Plotinus’ universe comprises in a hierarchy ofemanations from what he terms, the ‘One’; but as neitheranything in the cosmos nor the sum of all things in the cosmos, as anideal construction from which all expressions fall short,Plotinus’ God is really too transcendent for his doctrine tocount as pantheism proper (see Steinhart 2019). Eriugena, by contrast,has an emanation-theory that is more genuinely pantheist but, givenhis apophatic conception of God as marked by both being and non-being,he regards this position as wholly compatible with the doctrine ofcreationex nihilo. To Eriugena, God is precisely the nothingfrom which all things were made. Spinoza approaches the question oforigin from a rather different angle. Arguing that God is the immanentcause of all things, he draws an important distinction betweennatura naturans andnatura naturata; between theuniverse considered in active mode as cause and the very same universeconsidered in passive mode as effect (Ethics 1p29s). This isan important doctrine not least for the way in which it links withnecessity. Modelled more on the way in which the theorems of geometryderive from its axioms than on the sense in which a work of artresults from the free or spontaneous activity of its artist,pantheistic creation of this second type courts a determinism thatthreatens to rule out free will. And that has been a very commonobjection to pantheism.

(4)Teleological Identity. Religious world views in which itis the ultimate destiny or purpose of the cosmos to achieve onenesswith or to fully express deity provide a fourth model forunderstanding pantheistic claims of identity. The true identity of theuniverse is that which is revealed at the end of all things. Forexample, on the Absolute Idealist scheme, history culminates in thecomplete realization of God or Absolute spirit in the world and so, asSchelling put it, in the last days “God will indeed beallin all, and pantheism will be true” (Schelling 1810, 484).A rather different example of this type of thinking is that of SamuelAlexander who thinks that the universe evolves in a steadilyprogressive manner and will finally ‘attain deity’, wheredeity is thought of as an unknown but superior quality that will‘emerge’ from the complex whole in rather the same way as,at a lower level, consciousness ‘emerges’ from complexorganisations of organic matter. By way of objection to suchteleological conception of identity it might be challenged thatsomething can only become merged with God, or become God, if it isnow different from God. But against this it could be repliedthat, if the notion of teleology be taken seriously, a thing moretruly is what it isdestined to become than what itcurrently seems to be, for everything about it is to beexplained in terms of itstelos or goal. It may also beresponded that anything which can beconverted into Godcannot be finallydifferent from God. Hence Alexander, forexample, is clear that since all potentiality must be grounded in someactuality there is also a sense in which the universe is alreadyimplicitly God: “God as actually possessing deity does not existbut is an ideal, is always becoming; but God as the whole universetending towards deity does exist” (Alexander 1921, 428).

5. The unity of the cosmos

At least as usually understood the two terms ‘nature’ and‘God’ have different and contrasting meanings. If they areidentified, it follows that one or both words are being used in adifferent way than usual; that nature is more like God than commonlythought and/or that God is more like nature than commonly thought.With respect to the cosmos this may be seen in the stress pantheiststypically put on the unity of the cosmos.

A distinction may be drawn betweendistributive pantheism,the view that each thing in the cosmos is divine, andcollectivepantheism, the view that the cosmos as a whole is divine (Oppy1997). And if polytheism in general is coherent there is no reason inprinciple why we should exclude the possibility of a distributivepantheism. But as in pursuit of explanatory unity and coherence beliefin many Gods tends historically to give way to belief in single deity,while it would be technically possible to identify the universe with acollection of deities, in practice monism tends to win out, and it hasbeen characteristic of pantheists to stress heavily the unity ofnature. Thus pantheism typically asserts atwo-fold identity:as well as the unity of God and nature, it urges the unity of allthings with each other.

It may be asked whether a statement of the world’s unity is aprecondition for asserting its identity with God, or aconsequence of asserting it? Is the intuition that the cosmosconstitutes a single integrated whole a contributory factor inthinking it divine, or (reflecting the traditional idea that God isunique and simple or without parts) is the intuition that it is divinethe reason for regarding it as such a unity?

The kind of unity which the pantheist thinks to find in nature canvary from a very strong metaphysical oneness, like that of Parmenides,which excludes all diversity or difference, to a much loosersystematic complex of distinct but inter-related elements, but thefour species of unity most commonly defended are: (1) the unity of allthat falls within the spatio-temporal continuum under a common set ofphysical laws, (2) the reductive unity of a single material out ofwhich all objects are made and within which no non-arbitrary divisionscan be made, (3) the unity of a living organism, or (4) the morepsychological unity of a spirit, mind or person (see Cohoe 2020).

6. The nature of the cosmos

Besides commitment to the view that the cosmos as a whole is divine,pantheists as a general class hold no specific theory about thenature of that cosmos. There are three main traditions.

(1)Physicalism. Many pantheists argue that physicalconceptions are adequate to explain the entire cosmos. This is anancient form of pantheism, found for example in the Stoics, for whomonly bodies can be said to exist. Soul they understood as nothing morethan a specific form ofpneuma, or breath, the active powerto be found throughout nature. This is also a form of pantheismpopular today—often termed, scientific or naturalisticpantheism. Such worldviews make no ontological commitments beyondthose sanctioned by empirical science (Buckareff 2016,Lancaster-Thomas 2020).

(2)Idealism. During the nineteenth century, when pantheismwas at its most popular, the dominant form was idealist. According toAbsolute Idealism, as defended by such figures as Fichte, Schelling,Hegel, and many of the British Idealists, all that exists is a singlespiritual entity, of which the physical world must be understood as apartial manifestation. The search for that which may be assertedwithout condition or qualification leads to the conclusion that allvariety is the expression of an underlying unity, and that nothing canbe real in the absence of mind or spirit. On some versions of thissort of doctrine the physical world starts to look more like anappearance of the ultimate spiritual (or possibly unknown)reality beneath. Hegel himself rejects this sort of doctrine—which he termsacosmism—and while it certainlyamounts to a view that there exists nothing besides God, in view ofits basic denial of the reality of the world we all experience ithardly seems like a kind of pantheism.

(3)Dual-aspect theory. The pantheism of Spinoza is ofneither these types. For Spinoza, there is one thing which expressesitself, or which may be understood, in two different ways, either asthinking substance or as extended substance. The principle difficultyof any such position is to further specify that ambiguousrelationship, whilst simultaneously avoiding the twin but opposedpitfalls of reductionism and dualism.

Pantheists holds that whatever exists falls within God. This placesthem in disagreement with any theory of thesupernatural. Butsuch opposition must not be misunderstood, for to say that there is nosupernatural realm is not in itself to delineate the range of what isnatural. This is important, for while many contemporary pantheistshave been epistemologically conservative, there is no reasoninprinciple why the pantheist should oppose the idea of that whichis epistemically transcendent to us, no reason (that is) why he shouldseek to limit the compass of the universe to theknownuniverse. For example, Spinoza held, not only that the realms ofthought and extension must stretch indefinitely beyond our finitegrasp, but that, as well as in the two known realms of thought andextension, the one substance must exist also in an infinity of otherdimensions completely beyond our power to conceive.

7. The divinity of the cosmos

One of the strongest and most commonly raised objections to pantheismis that it is simply inappropriate to call the universe‘God’. Thus Schopenhauer complains that “Pantheismis only a euphemism for atheism,” for “to call the worldGod is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with asuperfluous synonym for the word world” (Schopenhauer 1851,I:114, II:99). It has been described as nothing more than‘materialism grown sentimental’ (Illingworth 1898, 69),while more recently Richard Dawkins inThe God Delusioncomplains that “Pantheism is sexed-up Atheism” (Dawkins2007, 40). It is clear that the more naturalistically the cosmos isconceived the stronger that objection must seem, but to estimate morecarefully its validity the following six sections take in turn anumber of characteristics which the cosmos possesses or might possessand which could be thought to make it divine. We may proceed from theleast to the most contested, noting that not all pantheists will agreeon all marks.

8. Evoking religious emotion

Most straightforwardly it has been maintained that the One is holybecause we feel a particular set of religious emotions towards it(Levine 1994, ch.2.2). For Rudolf Otto (1917), whatever is holy or‘numinous’ is so characterised on the basis of ournon-rational, non-sensory experience of it rather than its ownobjective features and, taking its departure from Otto’s work,one approach has been to argue that the feelings of awe which peoplefeel towards God can be, and often are, applied to the universeitself (Byerly 2019). Whether it is really possible, or appropriate,to entertain such feelings towards the cosmos as a whole will bediscussed below, but the chief point to make here concerns the extremesubjectivism of this response; it’s coming to rest upon feelingswhich, while sincere enough, indicate nothing whatsoever about theuniverse itself. On this view, all that distinguishes a pantheist froman atheist isfeeling; a certain emotional reaction orconnection that we feel to the universe. It would become akin, say, tothe difference between one who loves art and another who is relativelyindifferent to it.Prima facie, however, this approach putsthe cart before the horse; rather than say that the One is divinebecause we feel a set of religious emotions towards it, it seems moreappropriate to suppose that we feel those emotions towards it becausewe think it is divine.

9. A place in the universe at large

Religion gives meaning to human lives by assigning them a certaindefinite place within a grander scheme or narrative. It gives itsadherents a sense of their part in a coherent universe. It tells usthat the universe is not a random conjunction of brute facts, but awhole in which we have our proper location. The pantheist may regardthe cosmos as divine for very similar reasons. To think of oneself aspart of a vast interconnected scheme may give one a sense of being‘at home in the universe.’ Here ecological thinking maycome to the fore; like the individual creatures in a complexecosystem, small but vital contributors to a larger whole, we too maybe thought to have our place in the connected whole that isNature.

10. The infinity / eternity / necessity of the universe

Historically the majority of pantheists have regarded the universe asInfinite, metaphysically perfect, necessarily existent, and eternal(or some subset thereof) and—taking these attributes as thecharacteristic marks of divinity—that has formed one veryimportant reason for thinking that the universe itself is in factGod.

In more recent times, however, there have arisen naturalistic orscientific forms of pantheism which reject or are neutral about thesecharacteristics and, while they remove one important set of reasonsfor thinking the cosmos divine, so long as others remain, theamputation in itself seems insufficient reason to refuse the label‘pantheist’ to such views. Any methodology which limitsitself to empirical science will presumably find it hard to attributeanything like infinitude or necessary existence to the cosmos, whileapproaches which do find a role for such features will need to becareful that they understand them in an appropriate fashion. (Forexample, it is doubtful that mere infinite extent, or infinitedivisibility, in space and time would be sufficient to merit that theuniverse be called divine.) But with these caveats aside the pantheistis not without arguments for believing that the universe as a wholedisplays marks of metaphysical perfection.

The earliest arguments for such a view are to be found in thepre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander who held that the universeemerges from what he termed ‘to apeiron,’ acomplex notion which may be rendered as the infinite, the boundless orthe indefinite. Anaximander’s thought seems to have been thatthe ground by which all qualitative characteristics are explained mustitself lack any determination. Insofar as we can construct hisreasons, he argued that some such boundless potentiality was need toensure the continual coming to be and passing away in the world thatcharacterises the passing of time. As something thus immortal andindestructible, Anaximander concluded that the infinite was alsodivine (Aristotle,Physics, 203b).

It is notable that much of the same reasoning that theists employ inthe Kalaam cosmological argument for the existence of God may be usedfor the universe itself. If we inquire into the origin of theuniverse, it may be suggested (1) that it simply began without reason,(2) that it was somehow self-creating, or (3) that its origin requiresa prior cause which in turn calls for an infinite causal chain. Eachof these answers has sufficient problems such that one might wellprefer to argue instead, (4) that the universe in fact existsnecessarily.

But perhaps the most commonly used argument among pantheists has beenthe ontological argument. As employed by classical theism this line ofargument has been much criticised, but the forms in which it has beenput forward by pantheists (such as Spinoza and Hegel) areinterestingly different. On their way of thinking, the more perfect anidea becomes the less room there remains for any gap between it andits instantiation, but no idea becomes perfect simply by definingitself to be so. This can be shown only by a full development of itscontent amounting to nothing less than a complete philosophical system(Harrelson 2009).

11. Ineffable

A fourth feature commonly taken to mark the divinity of God is hisineffability. If he is so much greater than anything else, anything wesay of him would limit or falsify him, so we can speak at best innegatives, or simply conclude that he is an ineffable mystery. Itwould be hard to think of a line of reasoning less congenial to therationalist spirit that has characterised many pantheists, for examplescientific pantheism.

At the same time it must be allowed that there is a strong apophaticstreak in much pantheism. In contrast to his teacher, Thales, whothought it possible to specify the ground of all things as water, forAnaximander the one source from which cosmos comes forth (toapeiron) is construed precisely in terms of its resistance to anydeterminate characterisation, while both Eriugena and Ibn ‘Arabistress that although the God of which we can speak is identical withthe cosmos, there remains another sense in which we cannot speak ofGod at all. The essence of God considered in himself, the universalground of being cannot itself be captured by any of the limitedcategories which flow out from it. Even Spinoza suggests that thehighest stages of knowledge consist in a form of intuitive insight,which transcends mere reasoning or conceptual knowledge in that itenables us to grasp the essence of individual things. Part of what hecalls ‘the intellectual love of God’, suchscientiaintuitiva is itself assigned a salvific role in Spinoza’sthought; it is the path to human blessedness.

12. Personal

Einstein was a pantheist but rejected any notion of a personal God(Einstein 2010, 325). And like Einstein, for many pantheists rejectionof a personal deity is the definitive mark or most important elementof their position (Levine 1994; Harrison 2013). However, the mattercalls for more considered attention.

It is important to distinguish between the specific question ofwhether God is literally a ‘person’ and the more generalquestion whether God is ‘person-like’; the issue ofwhether notions such as intellect, thought, consciousness, intent,etc. have any application to the divine, even if analogical ormetaphorical. It should also be recognised both that the notion ofpersonhood is itself deeply problematic, and that a not inconsiderablenumber of traditionaltheists would only with considerablequalification be prepared to allow that God is personal.

These points made, while it is true that traditional theism hasregularly opposed pantheism on the grounds that it tends to beimpersonal, and true also that many pantheists would deny that God ispersonal, it is nonetheless the case that many other pantheists havethought mind-like attribution of some form or other to the cosmosabsolutely central to their position (Bishop & Perszyk 2017; Hewitt2019; Mander 2022, 2017).

It is clear that pantheistic systems which start from the theistic Godwhich they then find to be all-inclusive, or Absolute Idealist systemswhich derive all reality from a spiritual principle, will find iteasier to attribute something like personhood to the cosmos than willthose which are more naturalistically motivated. But it is importantto realise that not even the latter are wholly resistant topersonhood.

For example, it has been argued (Baltzly 2003) that the Stoicsbelieved in a personal deity. Just as they construed human beings asphysical creatures animated by a physical soul, so too they regardedGod as the mind of the world—with the cosmos as his body. Like avast biological individual, to them God was a conscious rationalbeing, exercising providence over life and to whom we might approachin prayer.

Spinoza’s God is an “infinite intellect”,(Ethics 2p11c) all knowing, (2p3) and capable of loving bothhimself—and us, insofar as we are part of his perfection(5p35c). And if the mark of a personal being is that it is one towardswhich we can entertain personal attitudes, then we should note toothat Spinoza recommendsamor intellectualist dei (theintellectual love of God) as the supreme good for man (5p33). However,the matter is complex. Spinoza’s God does not have free will(1p32c1), he does not have purposes or intentions (1appendix), andSpinoza insists that “neither intellect nor will pertain to thenature of God” (1p17s1). Moreover, while we may love God, weneed to remember that God is really not the kind of being who couldever love us back. “He who loves God cannot strive that Godshould love him in return,” says Spinoza (5p19).

Another notable pantheist to insist that the supreme being is personalwas Gustav Fechner, who develops a form of panpsychism according towhich all organised matter must be thought of as possessing its owninner life or soul. The more complex and developed its structure, themore sophisticated its spiritual life; from the lowest soul-life ofplants, through our own mental life, which is just the inner side ofour bodies, through the soul-life of the planets and stars up to themost developed spirit of all, God, the consciousness which correspondsto the most complex organism there is, the cosmos itself. Morerecently, a very similar view has been put forward by Timothy Spriggewho maintains that that the only conceivable form of reality consistsin streams of experience, such as we know ourselves to be, all ofwhich must be thought of as included together within a singleall-embracing experience; which we may call God or the Absolute.Sprigge, however, is more cautious than Fechner insofar as he declinesto identify any physical systems other than those of animals(including human beings) that can confidently be said to possess theirown inner conscious life (Sprigge 2006, ch.9). Against the idea thatGod is some type of all-embracing spirit or person it is oftencomplained that this would undermine the autonomous personhood offinite individuals; for can one person bepart of another?Fechner suggests as a model for understanding this the way in whichour different sense modalities (sight, smell, touch, etc), eachinaccessible to each other, combine together into one unifiedconsciousness (Fechner 1946, 144). While to extend such a model beyondthe merely receptive to the active aspects of personhood, we mightthink of the way in which the agency of an organisation is exercisedthrough the agency of its individual members. Here several pantheistshave been influenced by Christian ideas of the indwelling spirit ofGod at work within the body of the Church.

13. Value

Sixthly (and perhaps most importantly of all) it is widely thoughtthat the most important thing about God—thing that most makes uscall him ‘God’—is his perfection or goodness. God isa being ‘worthy of worship.’ Can the pantheist say this ofthe cosmos as a whole? A variety of positions are possible. (1) Anypantheistic world-view arrived at by extending the reach of thetraditional theistic God will find it relatively easy to assert thesame value to the cosmos that it attributed to God, but there areother possibilities as well. (2) Insofar as the pantheist assertion ofunity may be understood as an assertion of complete and coherentintegration, and disvalue held to lie in conflict, disharmony orincompleteness, then it may be possible to argue that the culminationof metaphysical unity constitutes also the culmination of value. Forexample, the Absolute Idealist Bernard Bosanquet states, “Wecannot describe perfection; that is, we cannot enumerate itscomponents and state their form and connection in detail. But we candefine its character as the harmony of all being. And good isperfection in its character of satisfactoriness; that which isconsidered as the end of conations and the fruition of desires”(Bosanquet 1913,194). (3) More naturalistically, it might be suggestedthan pantheism tells us that nature is our proper home and, as such,our proper good. Everything has its place in a wider system which bothsupports it and to which it contributes. As natural creatures our mostfulfilling life is found in and at one with nature. (4) Lastly, itshould be noted that many scientific pantheists argue that nature hasnointrinsic value whatsoever. It is merely something thatwe happen to love and venerate in the highest degree.

14. Pantheism and the Problem of Evil

Historically one of the strongest and most persistent objections topantheism is that, because of its all-encompassing nature, it seemsinhospitable to the differentiations of value that characterise life.In what might be thought of as a pantheistic version of the problem ofevil, it is challenged that if God includes everything and God isperfect or good, then everything which exists ought to be perfect orgood; a conclusion which seems wholly counter to our common experiencethat much in the world is very far from being so. Or to put theargument slightly differently, if whatever we do or however thingsturn out must be deemed the action of God, how can our pantheisticbelief demand of us any specific duty? The only alternativeconclusion, if we wish to hold on to the difference between what isgood and what is bad, would seem to be equally unattractive claim thata universecontaining both values,in itselfpossessesneither; the pantheistic deity in its own beinglies beyond good and evil.

To point out that classical theism faces its own difficulties overevil and God’s providence, while it may level the playing field,does nothing in itself to help solve the puzzle, and pantheiststhemselves have suggested a variety of explanations or theodicies. (1)The most popular model for dealing with evil is found in thephilosophy of Spinoza who regards both error and evil as distortionsthat result from the fragmentary view of finite creatures; phenomenareal enough to the finite beings who experience them but which woulddisappear in the widest and final vision of God. In this he was, ofcourse, developing the Stoic sense that if we could see the world asGod does, as the perfectly harmonious embodiment of thelogos, we would recognise how its apparent defects in factcontribute to the goodness of the whole. (2) It may be responded alsothat the objection that pantheism councils moral indifference is basedon a modal confusion, comparable to that made by the proponent oflogical determinism. If pantheism amounts to a doctrine of providence,it is true that what actually happens will be for the best, but itcertainly does not follow from that that whatever elsemighthave happenedwould have been for the best, and itpossible that part at least of the perfection of the cosmos comesabout through our own individual moral choices.

15. Pantheism and the distribution of value

Although not all pantheists ascribe intrinsic value to the cosmos as awhole, insofar as they do, that might be thought give rise tosomething of a puzzle. For if God is valuable and God is identical tothe universe then we might seem committed to the somewhat implausiblethought that everything in the universe isequally valuable;a leveling off which gave rise to Coleridge’s complaint that‘everything God’ and ‘no God’ are in effectidentical positions (Coleridge 1839, 224). The pantheist need not becommitted to this view, however, for the fact that a certain featureor element is present in everything by no means entails that it isequally present in everything. Although the universe as awhole may be divine, there is no need to regard each bit of it asuniformly divine; no need (for example) to feel quite the same aboutthe loss of biological species as we do about the disappearance ofhuman cultures and languages. Historically, there have been two mainways in which pantheists have regarded the distribution of value inthe universe.

(1)Emphasis on nature. Most typically pantheism ischaracterized by deep love and reverence for the natural world insofaras it exists independently of human culture or civilization. Thepantheist finds God more in the waterfall or the rainforest than inthe car park or the gasworks. From the romantic period onwards this isa very strong drive in both literary and popular pantheism, with urbanand technological life regarded as at best a kind of self-interestedanthropocentric distortion of true value and at worst even a kind ofloss or separation from divinity.

If uncultivated nature is divine then the pantheist may legitimatelyconclude that it should be treated with respect, even as sacred. Suchis the import of Aldo Leopold’s ‘land ethic’ (1949)or the ‘deep ecology’ of Arne Næss (1973), and manymodern pantheists have developed close connections withenvironmentalism. But neither the import nor the justification of suchideas are straightforward. It might be suggested that as no one personought to put their own interests before another, neither ought anyspecies to put itself ahead of another, nor the sentient ahead of theinsentient, nor the living ahead of the non-living. But with eachfurther step this argument becomes harder to press, due to the extremedifficulty of identifying—and weighing—such potentiallyconflicting interests. For example, unless the pantheist is some sortof panpsychist, he will not regard natural objects such as rivers ormountains as possessing sentience, purpose or interests of its own;which means that treating them with respect cannot be modelled on whatit means to treat people or animals with respect (see Leidenhag2018).

(2)Emphasis on humanity. A second and very different modelfor understanding the relationship between divinity and valuemaintains that God is most revealed in human culture and history. Forthe Stoics, Reason orlogos—the essence of theworld—though it underlies all things, is more strongly manifestin some (such as human life) than in others, while the virtues ofstoic detachment and self-sufficiency preclude our true good beingheld hostage to the state of anything external to ourselves, such asnature. This pair of attitudes is summed up in Cicero’snotorious assertion that all things were made for either Gods or men(Holland 1997, Baltzly 2003). But probably the best illustration ofthis more anthropocentric way of thinking about value is the Hegeliansystem, in whichGeist —the spirit whose manifestationis the universe—articulates itself in a developmentalsequence of increasingly adequate expressions (which may or may notalso be temporal) up from the most basic abstractions of merelyphysical nature, through the organic realm, up to its apex in theconcrete details of social and cultural life. The beauties of natureare valued as an approximation to those of art, and the development ofethical life (Sittlichkeit) is literally “the march ofGod in the world” (Hegel 1821, 247).

16. Pantheism and ethics

If, as we have suggested, there is room for value in pantheism thenthere is room for ethics. But does pantheism prescribe any specificethics? There are two respects in which pantheism might be thought tohave significant ethical implications.

Firstly, for pantheism, there is no higher power, no externalauthority to tell us what to do. Insofar as it rejects any sense of atranscendent external lawgiver or—to put the matter morepositively—insofar as it regards deity as the distributedpossession of all, pantheism may be represented as endorsing theKantian doctrine of the autonomy of ethical judgement. But theimplications of this are open. It can lead to either democraticcommunitarian ethics or to individualism. Paradoxically, it mightequally well result in a species of conservative conformity towhatever is deemed to be the ‘natural state’ of the worldevery bit as stifling to the human spirit as conformity to whatever isdeemed to be ‘the will of God.’

Secondly, it may be argued that pantheism is able to give aparticularly strong ground for an ethic of altruism or compassion. ToSchopenhauer (with whom this argument is particularly associated) onlygenuinely altruistic or compassionate actions have moral worth, butonly pleasure and pain are capable of motivating the will, from whichhe concludes that genuinely moral action is possible only if thepleasure and pain of others can stir us to action as directly andimmediately as can our own pleasure and pain. It is not enough that wesympathetically imagine ourselves in their shoes, he argues; we mustliterally feel the pleasure and pain of others as our own, an attitudethat will be rationally grounded only in a monistic metaphysics inwhich the distinction between ego and not ego becomes a trivial orillusory distinction between two manifestations of the same underlyingunity (Schopenhauer 1839). Schopenhauer includes nonhuman animals inthis argument. To the charge that what is defended here remains but aspecies of egoism—metaphysically enlarged, but still morallyworthless—it may be replied that self-concern is to bedeprecated only insofar as it is something that exists in contrastwith concern for others (a contrast which no longer finds any purchasein this scheme).

17. Pantheism and religion

Religion is a form of life, not a philosophical theory. Thus theism isnot itself a religion, although it lies at the core of many religions,and neither is pantheism itself a religion, although a core ofpantheistic belief has unquestionably grounded the religion of manypeople.

No doubt many pantheists self-consciously and deliberately rejecttheism, while many theists strongly reject pantheism. But to concludefrom this that pantheism should be understood asessentiallyopposed to theism would seem precipitous (like concluding mutualincompatibility from the fact that many Christians oppose socialismand many socialists oppose Christianity). Without being drawn intodoctrinal questions well outside the purview of this essay, two pointsmay be made. Many philosophers who have put forward pantheist beliefshave thought there was no need for anyone who accepted them to abandontraditional religion (for example, Spinoza, Hegel, or EdwardCaird—who argues that “the religious consciousness is notthe consciousness of another object than that which is present infinite experience and science, but simply a higher way of knowing thesame object,” (1892, 464) but whom nonetheless consideredhimself Christian.) From the other side, many committed theologianshave advanced positions with deeply pantheistic implications (e.g. the‘Christian Pantheism’ of Teilhard de Chardin or the‘Ethical Pantheism’ of Albert Schweitzer.)

It is sometimes objected that pantheism cannot really be religious onthe grounds that it can make no sense to directat the cosmosthe religious attitudes and emotions—worship, love,gratitude—which are more normally directedtowards aperson (Levine 1994, 315). (This is, of course, to assume thatthe pantheistic God isnot personal; a claim which, as wehave seen, many pantheists would reject.) Worship is commonly anexpression of dependence on a personal creator God, but, even if wedon’t approve of their doing so, people worship many otherthings, such as money, fashion, the State, or idols, withoutnecessarily assuming that these have residing within them someconscious spirit or other. Love is more usually felt towards people,but Wordsworth described himself as a ‘lover of nature’(Tintern Abbey; see Hoque 2014), while Byron thought itpossible to love his country but not his countrymen (Byron 1854, 25).We typically thank a person, but it is possible also to feel gratitudewhich transcends any feeling to particular individuals to aninstitution (such as a college, community, or even State) which hasnurtured you. In each case there remains room for doubt whether theseattitudes are really equivalent to the sort of emotions more typicallyassociated with religion, but equally it is hard to see on whatlegitimate grounds emotions might excluded from consideration as‘not properly religious.’

In most religions prayer is not simply the expression of worship,love, and gratitude, but an act in which we petition the deity forintercession. We can petition the theistic God, but can we petitionthe universe itself? Most pantheists have thought not, but where thecosmos is conceived as personal, or at least moral, room may exist todevelop such ideas. Construing the entire universe as a consciousbeing, Fechner argues that it makes perfect sense to petition it; theonly difference being that normal requests must be expressed since theobject to which they are directed lies outside of us, but in the caseof God this is unnecessary since we exist already within him (Fechner1946, 242–6). Even if not personal, so long as it could be saidthat the universe exhibits a moral narrative structure there is noreason to insist that that structure be independent of the moral needsor requests of creatures within it (Mander 2007).

A common mark of religion is its soteriological character, itsrecognition that the human condition is somehow unsatisfactory or‘fallen’ and its offer to overcome this state through aprocess of human transformation, be the result of that renovationenduring happiness or some more elevated state of blessedness ornirvana. Can pantheism respond to this? Can it offer thebeliever hope for a better life?

If all that is hoped for is the well-being that comes from a moreethical mode of existence, then pantheism is perfectly able to offerthis, supporting a value system which eschews selfishness in favour ofa wider concern. For example the American poet Robinson Jefferssuggests that “there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind ofsalvation, in turnings one’s affections outwards towards thisone God, rather than inwards on one’s self, or onhumanity” (Jeffers 2009, 365) But some other pantheists havesought to offer something further. Pantheist systems with ateleological structure (such as those discussed in Section Four above)readily lend themselves to soteriology on a grand scale; for example,while to Spinoza the highest state of human happiness consists in theintellectual love of God (a state not dissimilar to the BeatificVision), Hegel outlines a developmental scheme whose climax consistsin the full and explicit self-manifestation of God.

In many traditional religions salvation has been linked toimmortality. Against this, it has been common among pantheists toargue that what is distinctive about pantheism is precisely itsdisavowal of any hope for personal immortality. However, some haveargued that a measure of endurance may be found in so far as werecognize our real identity with, either the eternal universe (forexample, Schopenhauer 1851, 267–82) or, perhaps morespecifically with the ongoing life of our community (for example, JohnCaird 1880). A small number of pantheistic thinkers have attempted todevelop more genuinely personal senses of immortality. For example,Spinoza controversially claims that “The human mind cannot beabsolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains whichis eternal” (Ethics e5p23). Josiah Royce, in his earlyAbsolute Idealist phase, attempted to argue that if our finite will,which in this life is never quite satisfied, is itself but a part of agreater infinite will that is eternally satisfied, then that can onlymean that we must find our share of that satisfaction “in a lifethat is not this present mortal life” (Royce 1906, 147).

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Levine, Michael, “Pantheism”,The StanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta(ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/pantheism/>. [This was the previous entry on pantheism in theStanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy—see theversion history.]

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