Pantheism

Pantheism is the belief that everything is divine, that God is not separate from but totally identified with the world, and that God does not possess personality or transcendence.

Pantheism generally can be traced to two sources. The first is the Vedic tradition (Hinduism), which begins with the belief that the divine principle from which everything arises is a unity and that the perception of multiplicity is illusory and unreal. In the Vedanta, Brahman is the infinite reality behind the illusory and imperfect world of perception. Our knowledge is imperfect because we experience subject and object as distinct. When subject and object are equated, however, all distinctions are eliminated and we know Brahman.

In the Western tradition the cosmology of the Stoics and, more importantly, the emanationist hierarchy of Neoplatonism tend toward pantheism. In Judeo - Christian thought the emphasis on the transcendence of God inhibits pantheism. Nevertheless, a form of pantheism is found in the thought of the medieval scholastic John Scotus Erigena, who viewed the universe as a single, all - inclusive system with various simultaneous stages. The most important modern version of pantheism is that of Baruch Spinoza. For him nature is infinite, but because the only being capable of genuine infinity is God, God must be identical, in essence, with nature. In the 18th and 19th centuries the various forms of Idealism sometimes tended toward pantheism, often in the form of a theory of cosmic evolution.

Donald Gotterbarn

Bibliography
A H Armstrong, ed., The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (1967); E M Curley, Spinoza's Metaphysics (1969); A O Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936); N Smart, Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy (1964).

Pantheism

The word, coming from the Greek pan and theos, means "everything is God." It was coined by John Toland in 1705 to refer to philosophical systems that tend to identify God with the world. Such doctrines have been viewed as a mediating position between atheism and classical theism by some, while others have concluded that pantheism is really a polite form of atheism because God is identified with everything.

Pantheism may be contrasted with biblical theism from a number of perspectives. Pantheism either mutes or rejects the biblical teaching of the transcendence of God in favor of his radical immanence. It is typically monistic about reality, whereas biblical theism distinguishes between God and the world. Because of pantheism's tendency to identify God with nature, there is a minimizing of time, often making it illusory. The biblical understanding of God and the world is that God is eternal and the world finite, although God acts in time and knows what takes place in it. In forms of pantheism where God literally encompasses the world, man is an utterly fated part of the universe which is necessarily as it is. In such a world freedom is an illusion. Biblical theism, on the other hand, holds to the freedom of man, insisting that this freedom is compatible with God's omniscience.

It would be erroneous to conclude, however, that pantheism is a monolithic position. The more important forms are as follows:

Hylozoistic pantheism