Pantheism

PANTHEISM. - A very ancient doctrine, but the introduction and use of the term are relatively recent. As R. Eucken (v.) noted, J. Toland (v.) was the first to use the word pantheist in 1705; Fay in 1709 introduced the term pantheism (A. Lalande, Vocab. techn. et crit. de la philos., II, 4th ed., Paris 1938, p. 554). Both pantheism and monism (v.) - which in certain respects must be distinguished from the former - arise from a common fundamental exigency: to reduce all beings to an absolute identity that is not only logical but also ontological. Or rather: to bring the multiplicity of entities back to an ontological unity, which is to say that the being of the world is identical with the being of God. The legitimate exigency of unifying the multiple into a single principle (v.), pushed beyond the limits of the observation of the order of things (by which multiplicity forms a "cosmos"), concludes to the substantial unity of things themselves and of their principle, confounding (or failing to distinguish) analogy and identity.

The pantheistic assertion - πᾶν, θεός, everything is God and God and the world are one - can be understood in two fundamental senses, to which the many and varied forms of pantheism can be traced: a) reduction of the world to God, the only reality, of which the world is a set of manifestations or emanations without permanent reality and lacking a substance of their own distinct from the divine one; b) reduction of God to the world, the only reality: God is the unity of what exists, the sum of the parts. The terms acosmism (Hegel) and pancosmism (Grote) can be used to indicate these two positions respectively. Of these, only the first characterizes pantheism properly so called; the second, by which is indicated so-called naturalistic pantheism (e.g., d'Holbach) or materialistic pantheism (e.g., Haeckel [v.]), is better considered a form (the fundamental one) of monism, which, though close to pantheism, must be distinguished from it. Here we shall speak of monism only insofar as is needed to demonstrate what it has in common with pantheism and how in effect, through internal contradiction, it is not even pantheism but atheism (v.); and of the true pantheists only to the extent necessary to characterize pantheism in its historical development.

Monism too obeys the exigency (a metaphysical dogma it shares with pantheism) of the unity and ontological identity of the real, but its tendency to reduce God to the world necessarily drives it toward naturalism (v.) or materialism (v.). In Greek antiquity, the philosophy of Heraclitus (v.) cannot properly be called monistic, although the "Obscure" of Ephesus seems to identify the Whole with the eternal and cyclical transformation of Fire, the one universal and divine. A development of Heraclitean metaphysics is that of Stoicism (v.), a typical systematization of naturalistic pantheism and therefore with strong tendencies toward monism: the cosmos consists of a matter, finite and full, penetrated by Reason (v.), of a fiery nature, an immanent force, God, who is at once the order that holds the parts together and the sum of the parts themselves. According to Zeno, in fact, "the universe has two principles: one passive, formless substance, matter; the other active, mind, God. The latter penetrates matter, produces the four elements and is the artificer of all things" (Diog. Laer., VII, 134; I frammenti degli stoici antichi, edited by N. Festa, I, Bari 1932, p. 80). Zeno does not identify "the spirit that moves" with nature, but with the rational soul, "which gives life to the sensible world and makes it beautiful," "animate and divine" (Calcidius, In Tim., c. 292; I frammenti, cit., p. 82); but the Soul is identified with the "World," of which he distinguishes three meanings. The World is: "1) the divine being itself, which has its peculiar property from the universal substance; 2) the product of divine activity in the composition and distribution of the elements, in the celestial bodies and in natural phenomena; 3) the complex of the divine being and of created things" (Diogenes Laertius, 135-37 ff.; I frammenti, cit., pp. 82-83). In the first and also in the third sense "the world is one, and is called God, mind, fate, Jupiter" (ibid.). Hence naturalistic pantheism: identification of God with the natural world and a material conception of what is called Soul or Reason or Fire.

In modern times the theory of evolution gave a new impulse to the naturalist monism of certain forms of positivism (De Bois Reymond, Spencer [v.], Ardigò [v.]) and to materialist and biological monism (Moleschott, Huxley, Büchner, etc.). Ultimately here we are outside pantheism, inasmuch as there is no longer any talk of an immanent God, but only of world or nature or universe: the term "God" no longer means anything. God is not there, there is only the world, arising from a primordial matter, endowed with vital energy, which evolves from itself and by its own laws. The original being, ontologically one, a kind of embryo of the world or mother-matter, called "homogeneous" (Spencer), or "undifferentiated" (Ardigò) or "primitive substance" (Haeckel), evolves progressively into different forms. Such assertions have no scientific or philosophical foundation and do not explain how spirit (v.) is born from primitive material being and how thought (v.) enters the world, how intelligent substances emerge through evolution, fundamentally irreducible, whereby the pluralism of entities is not merely phenomenal but substantial. Ultimately materialist monism (e.g., that of Haeckel) is a superficial contamination of evolutionist materialism and Spinozism. But when evolutionism meets (the Hegelian left: Feuerbach, Marx, etc., and other later currents) with Hegelian dialecticism, the concepts of monism or materialist pantheism undergo a profound transformation to the point that one can no longer speak of either monism or pantheism. In fact, dialectical materialism denies that there is in any case an essence of man or of anything else, an immutable order, a matter in the sense of traditional materialism. Every law and every entity are the result of historical situations, correspond to a stage of dialectical becoming; and everything in the future could be different, not only in its accidents but in its substance. Now, it is an exigency of pantheism, as has been said, to unify the multiple, and its starting point is the order of things and, in common with monism, their substantial unity. Therefore, once the reality of an order and substantiality is denied, dialectical and materialist evolutionism, having lost the concept of entity, can be called neither monist nor pantheist. Monism and pantheism, driven to this point, destroy themselves: dialectical materialism is the self-criticism of their starting point, the negation of the exigency that should justify them, and therefore its ultimate outcome is the destruction of the premises.

The term "everything is God" no longer has any meaning when one admits the existence only of physical beings or of a being (embryonic or not, undifferentiated or originally homogeneous, which whether it be) purely material. Pantheism, precisely because of the essential meaning of the term, does indeed imply the unity of being or being one, but it conceives this being as spirit or reason, even if devoid of consciousness and impersonal — so true is this that it then makes thought and consciousness (v.) the revelation of being to itself. It must be added that the Absolute of pantheism arouses a religious sentiment, admiration and love, even if only "intellectual"; indeed the pantheist feels enthusiasm for the Being to which he feels united, in whose essence he participates: pantheism is intoxication with the immanent divine (Spinoza). All this is lacking in naturalistic and materialistic monism, which cannot in any way call God a purely material being (however matter may be conceived), even if it is active and a principle of life, nor nurture for it a religious sentiment or intellectual love. Therefore materialistic pantheism is a verbal and senseless expression: the "all is God" proper to pantheism cannot be reduced, without losing its substantial meaning, to the expression "all is matter." Today, after the great clamor of the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, and the wide diffusion it enjoyed through the atheistic and pseudoscientific popular press, materialist monism no longer seems to have any claim to seriousness even among scientists and philosophers without religious interests. Nevertheless, today more than before, it is very widespread among the masses, through Marxist and communist doctrines, not because it has regained even a minimal speculative force or scientific consistency, but insofar as it hooks onto practical problems of an economic-political-social order. Certainly far more serious and less crudely uncritical is pantheism properly so called, whose most significant historical forms are indicated here.

There is a very ancient form of pantheism, ever recurring and present in all epochs and among all peoples; that pre-philosophical, primitive pantheism, proper to peoples only at the beginnings of speculation or to poetic and mystical natures who abandon themselves to the fascination of the immediate and to the suggestion of the vital and active forces of nature without rational mediation, conceptual reflection or critical elaboration. Pre-philosophical Greece is in this sense pantheistic: the forces of nature are divinized, made objects of worship. In the already evolved polytheism of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, etc., the distinction between the various divinities, identified with the forces of nature, grows faint; multiplicity is hierarchized and unified in a supreme god (Zeus "head of the world"). Orphism, with its cults, its beliefs about the afterlife and metempsychosis, is likewise a form of primitive pantheism and tends to cancel, reducing it to appearance, the substantial individuality of human persons. The one possessed by the divinity, through inspiration and rite, feels so possessed by the god as to become one with him. The ontological unity of the whole, lived immediately and as spontaneous feeling, is still in the phase of poetic intuition or mystical abandonment. The deep sense of nature and of man's identification with its forces is intoxication with the divine, a vital feeling of communion of man with the divinity and of the divinity with man. This form of pantheism, which is not reflected thought but lived experience, finds its most spontaneous and exuberant expressions either in the primitivism of peoples not yet intellectually evolved or in that of strong mystical and poetic temperaments, who have an exuberant sense of nature and cult of life; the non-Catholic German mystics, on the one hand, Goethe and almost all the poetry of German romanticism (v.) on the other, certain contemporary writers, especially North American, etc., vibrate with powerful pantheistic accents. It is what may be called aesthetic or mystical pantheism: cult of the "great mother nature," who is "beautiful" even when she is "horrid," who is the living God in all the power of his active forces, now terrifyingly disturbing (the storm, the earthquake, etc.), now majestically calming in an infinite and almost motionless peace (the starry sky, the immense and limpid horizon from an Alpine peak, etc.).

The first mature philosophical and doctrinal elaboration of this pantheism, at once aesthetic, mystical and profoundly religious, is Neoplatonic emanationism, one of the forms of pantheism properly so called and precisely of that which traces nature back to God. It does not start from the world or from its primitive material elements, but from the One or Absolute or Substance or the like, which it identifies with God, from which it makes the world spring either by emanation (Plotinus) or by necessary deduction (Spinoza) and positing (Fichte), or by dialectical movement (Hegel), etc. In all these doctrines the world is dissolved in God; really only God exists, of whom the world is a necessary manifestation. These various forms of pantheism have two general theses in common: a) reduction of the multiplicity of beings to the ontological unity of a single and identical being, whereby the being of the world, emanating or proceeding from God, is the same being as God's; b) God is therefore "chained" to the world, to this world, the only possible one, which emanates from him eternally and necessarily and returns into him to be identified with him, like the drops of water that, left temporarily on the shore by the flow of the wave, are reabsorbed by the next one. Very well known and expressive is the image of the tree: roots, trunk, branches, leaves — all draw life from the same seed and the same sap, which is perpetually renewed in its manifestations and is always identical to itself in the unity of the substance from the seed to the fruits. This image is frequent in the Enneads (it had great fortune in Romantic poetry: Schlegel, Schiller, Novalis, Hölderlin, etc.): "let one imagine the life of a very great tree; it runs (ἐλθῶσαν) through it, yet its principle remains motionless without dispersing throughout the whole tree, since it resides in the roots" (Enn., III, 8, 10). For every thing there is a unity to which one must ascend: "every being is traced back to the unity that is prior to it, until one arrives at the absolute One (τὸ ἀπλῶς ἕν) which does not refer back to anything else" (ibid.). Evidently the pantheistic affirmations, according to the degree of God-World identification, have different nuances and greater or lesser rigidity. But the parabola of pantheism is almost fatal, required by the internal coherence of its presuppositions: whether one speaks of the emanation of the world from God or of its hypostatic union with God himself (the world subsists in the divine personality) or of an immanent act, the world is ultimately reduced to a semblance or an illusion.

For Plotinus (v.) everything proceeds through superabundance from the One (which is "simple" and of which nothing can be predicated: neither being, nor thought, nor will, etc.) in an emanative generation (Intellect, Soul, things, matter or non-being) that is necessary and eternal: "the One is all things and none of them; for the principle of all things is not all things, but all things derive from it and to it will return" (Enn., V, 21). Therefore "all things are like a single life that extends in a straight line, whole and continuous: each of its successive points is different, but the inner line is continuous; each point is different from the others, but the preceding one is not lost in the point that follows" (ibid., V, 2, 2). As is well known, Neoplatonism (v.) strongly influenced the Western Middle Ages, first through St. Augustine (v.) and then still more through Pseudo-Dionysius and his commentator Maximus the Confessor (v.), and finally through Muslim and Jewish thinkers (above all Avicebron; v.). Christian antiquity (and especially Augustine) by no means ignored the fundamental differences between Christianity (creation, fall, redemption, end of the world) and Neoplatonism (emanation, our world is the best of worlds, return of things to the Absolute), nor did the later Christian Neoplatonists of orthodox intention but heterodox doctrine ignore them, such as Scotus Eriugena (v.), who reproduces, through Pseudo-Dionysius, the thought of Proclus (v.) in the terms of Christian doctrine. In God, the "natura quae creat et non creatur," the supreme reason of every finite being that does not have within itself its own reason for being, every creature exists, and therefore, Scotus affirms, Creator and creature are one: "Quid si creaturam Creatori adiunxeris, ita ut nil aliud in ea intelligas, nisi ipsum qui solus vere est, nil enim extra vere essentia dicitur, quia omnia quae absunt nil aliud sunt in quantum sunt, nisi participatio ipsius, qui a seipso solus per seipsum subsistit: num negabis Creatorem et creaturam unum esse?": De div. naturae, II, II, f. 528 A-B). Therefore everything is in God and all reality has its reason in God: "in ipso enim immutabiliter et essentialiter sunt omnia, et ipse est divisio et collectio universalis creaturae, et genus, et species, et totum, et pars, sed haec omnia ex ipso et in ipso et ad ipsum sunt" (ibid., III, 1, p. 621 C-D). From the affirmation Deus omnia facere (ibid., I, 72, f. 518 A-B) Scotus does not hesitate to pass to the other: "Deus itaque omnia est, et omnia Deus" (ibid., III, 10, f. 650, C-D), that is, to affirm that God is the essence of everything he creates. It is true that Scotus strives (ibid., III, 7, f. 675 C) to distinguish, within God himself, as two realities of God, the one that transcends every essence and the other that coincides with the essence of all things, but neither this nor other distinctions save him from pantheism, despite the fact that authoritative Catholic scholars hold a different opinion (M. Cappuyns, E. Gilson). At most one may agree with the judgment of De Wulf (Storia della filos. mediev., Italian trans., I, Florence 1944, p. 135 ff.): in the De divisione there are (very numerous) texts that "have a pronounced monist flavor" and others that "establish no less clearly a distinction between God and the created."

Other manifestations of pantheism, besides in the Muslim and Jewish world, are found throughout the Western Middle Ages from David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena to Eckhart (v.), of whom John XXII condemned, in 1329, 17 propositions as heretical and another 11 as suspect. It seems, on the other hand, despite certain rash affirmations, that Nicholas of Cusa (v.) cannot be accused of pantheism, since he maintains the duality between God and creatures, rejects the emanative principle and accepts that of creation in the Christian sense. Pantheism had a flowering in the thought of the Renaissance: traces of it are found in Pico della Mirandola (v.), in Cesalpino (v.), in Patrizi, etc., and an unequivocal expression in G. Bruno (v.), for whom the Monad of monads, in which contraries coincide, manifests its active essence in the infinite and eternal universe. Bruno borrows from Neoplatonism the image of the tree (Della causa, principio et uno, II) and even though he distinguishes between the "Mens super omnia" and the "Mens insita omnibus," his conception of Nature as the explicatio of divine unity, the necessary relationship between the world (natura naturae) and God (natura naturans), and expressions such as this: "all things are a single being," leave no doubt about his Neoplatonizing pantheism. Significant is the following passage from the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (Dial. morali, ed. G. Gentile, Bari 1927, III, 179): "That God as absolute has nothing to do with us; but insofar as he communicates himself to the effects of nature, he is more intimate to them than nature itself; so that, if he is not nature itself, he is certainly the nature of nature; and he is the soul of the soul of the world, if he is not the soul itself."

Pantheism, which in Bruno is more lyrical effusion than speculative elaboration, finds its philosophically highest expression, rich with intense religiosity, in the philosophy of Spinoza (v.), whose pantheistic system is typical and, as such, has a universal significance in the history of human thought. In it converge Jewish influences (Avicebron, the Cabala, Chasdai Crescas), those of Renaissance philosophy (Cusanus, Bruno), of German Protestant mysticism, etc., besides that of ancient Neoplatonism and of Descartes. But to understand Spinozistic pantheism one must also take into account what may be called the "mathematicism" of modern thought. It is not only a question of method (as is well known, the Ethica bears the subtitle geometrico more demonstrato) but of substance: for Spinoza, in fact, the relationship between God and the world is one of logical inherence, analogous to that between the triangle and its properties; and, in analogy with mathematics, where the quantitative criterion entails no judgment of cause and end, Spinoza excludes every efficient and final cause in the explanation of the world. By substance he means "id quod in se est, et per se concipitur"; by attribute "id quod intellectus de substantia percipit tanquam eiusdem constituens"; by mode "substantiae affectiones, sive id, quod in alio est, per quod etiam concipitur"; by God "ens absolute infinitum, hoc est substantiam constantem infinitis attributis, quorum unumquodque aeternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit" (Eth., part 1, De Deo, ed. G. Gentile, Bari 1915, p. 3). Spinoza identifies God and Substance, which consists of infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and infinite essence and hence each is infinite. But just as Substance does not exist except in its attributes, so the attributes (thought and extension are the two that we know) do not exist except in their infinite modes; therefore God exists only in things as their universal essence, and things are in him as modes of his essence. God is "natura naturans" insofar as he is the universal essence of the world, he is "natura naturata" insofar as he is the totality of things, in which his essence is realized. God, then, is not different from his effects and exists only in his effects. Here is pantheism in its most typical and perfect form: not a creation of the world, but a necessary derivation of it from the essence of God. The dependence of the world on God is not that of an effect on an efficient cause, but of a sequence or consequence, in the same way that from the definition of the triangle it follows that the sum of the angles is equal to two right angles. In short, the causal relationship is conceived by Spinoza as a logico-mathematical relationship of principle and consequence. Nothing can be other than what it is: there is no place either for chance or for freedom. To know this universal necessity is the supreme beatitude of the soul (amor Dei intellectualis).

The same logico-mathematical intellectualism does not spare even Leibniz (v.), who insists so much on polemicizing against Spinoza and on distinguishing himself from him, from pantheistic tendencies. The accusation is anything but unfounded: the determinism of the best (God cannot not create the best of all possible worlds) and the exclusively logical character of the created world are significant. Even his idea of creation is very debatable: "Created substances depend on God, who conserves them and produces them continuously through a mode of emanation, as we produce our thoughts" (Discourse on Metaphysics, § 14). The Enlightenment thought of the 18th century is entirely steeped in pantheism, which is mingled with deism (Shaftesbury, Toland, Diderot, Herder, Rousseau; v.). For Lessing (v.) the world is the "consubstantial son" of God. Similarly, pre-Romantic and Romantic German literature is almost entirely pantheistic, as is transcendental idealism in the forms of Fichte and Schelling (v.); but only with Hegel (v.) does pantheism find a new original expression of great moment: the intellectualistic pantheism of Spinoza is transformed into dialectical pantheism.

Hegel, as is well known, reproaches Spinoza for making the world disappear and accuses him of "acosmism"; real is only the unity of God-world, in which God is the substance and the world the accident. Spinoza's fault is not that he is a pantheist, but that he did not grasp the "positive character of negation," that he dissolves the finite in the infinite, that he affirms unity at the expense of multiplicity. Dialecticism, on the other hand, allows one to recognize the positive character of the negative, that is, to consider the terms God-world in their dialectical relationship, whereby there is no world without God, but "without the world, God is not God" (Sämtliche Werke, ed. Lasson, XV, p. 184). Creation of the world and eternal expression of the Word express one and the same movement. "God is the truth, the substance of the universe and not simply an abstract 'other.' It is therefore the same content; it is the divine intellectual world, the divine life in itself that develops. Now, this circle — the activity of his life — is the same thing as the life of the world, yet this is apparent, that is eternal... The Son is the truth of the finite world" (ibid., XII, p. 168). God is the absolute Spirit, which is: a) the eternal idea that develops in the world (Father); b) the idea that has reached consciousness (Son: between the world and the Son or Word, identical with the Father, there is a distinction insofar as the world expresses the fall of the idea, the moment of what is negated; ibid., XIV, p. 86); c) the idea that in the world realizes itself as the general spirit of the community. This for Hegel is the absolute religion, a speculative transformation of the Christian one. Hegel too defended himself in vain against the accusation of pantheism, and even his authoritative interpreters (e.g., Th. Haering, A. Lasson, J. H. Stirling, etc.) have groundlessly maintained that his philosophy is not at all pantheistic. Such an interpretation can be justified only in this sense: given the dialecticism essential whereby dialectical antinomism, the essence of thought and of the real, replaces the concepts of being and of substance, one cannot speak of pantheism, insofar as the ontological identity of beings falls away, which is thinkable only as the dialectical term

(and in which it is negated) of multiplicity. In this case, Hegel's system can be called indifferently cosmism or acosmism; in either case what he calls "divine life" is identified with the history of men and God with the State, in which history finds its fulfillment.

There is no need to insist on other forms of pantheism (Schleiermacher, for whom God cannot exist without the world and pantheism is the highest form of religion, Schopenhauer, E. von Hartmann, etc.), for which reference is made to the corresponding entries, nor would one cite Krause (v.) if his mediocre thought had not had influence in Belgium and especially in Spain and if he had not coined the term panentheism, which then says nothing new: not God, of whom we have the infinite, is in the world, but the world in God: "all in God." Consequently philosophy is the science of God or of the Essence.

For pantheism the world is identified with God, from whom it emanates or proceeds; therefore the being of the world is the same being as God. On the other hand, however, pantheism does not deny the material character of the world, that is, that the world is also matter or something that is not spirit, that is, further, that it is not of the same spiritual nature as God. Consequence: if one maintains the principle of the identity of the world with God, one must affirm the identity of opposites, which logically means affirming nothing.

This is the difficulty into which Spinoza's pantheism seems to fall: extension (matter) and thought (spirit) are two of the attributes of the single Substance or God or Nature. But is the duality also within the Substance? In that case there is not a single original reality (the Substance or God), but two realities irreducible to the unity of the Substance. If the Substance is one, then matter and spirit are identified in God and the identity of opposites is affirmed, that is, the reality of both is denied. In pantheism one does not know well where spirit begins and matter ends or vice versa. The distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata is of no avail, insofar as it presents the same difficulty exactly as it is. On the other hand, God cannot be conceived without the world, pantheism further maintains, insofar as without the world he would be unconscious: consciousness, in fact, implies otherness, that is, distinguishing oneself from something that exists and is opposed to it; therefore the world is necessary to God, who makes himself, becomes, reveals himself to himself through the world, becomes conscious of himself. This thesis, which is also typical of Greek and medieval pantheism and is typical of German transcendental idealism, makes pantheism become outright atheism. A God who makes himself (the Gott im Werden of Hegel), who is potency passing into act (v.), is not God, is not an infinite Spirit, which is pure Act. Evidently here God is denied and something else is called by his name. In fact, when the pantheist says that God without the world would be unconscious because consciousness, in order to grasp itself, needs the other than itself, he is not speaking of absolute Consciousness or of God, but of the finite consciousness of man, which is not pure spirit as God is, who, precisely because he is pure spirit, is always consciousness in act and therefore does not necessarily need the other in order to be such. Similarly he is perfect spirit without need of becoming such, of making himself: if he had to make himself, he would always be spirit in fieri and therefore never perfect. A God who becomes is never God at any moment of his becoming and thus never exists as God and never will be God. It is as if to say: God is not. Finally: one is not speaking of God but of something else when one argues that, if God is infinite, he cannot but be impersonal: whoever says person says limit and finitude, but God is infinite and without limits; therefore God is impersonal. One observes: a) the argument does not conclude that God is impersonal, but that God does not exist, insofar as an impersonal God is not God, but is an abstraction (either nature or humanity, etc.); b) that the premise is correct if one means the finite human person, but the concept of the human person is not the only possible concept of person: God is a person in a manner different from the way man is a person, but he is so in an analogous way (v. ANALOGIA). In other words, one cannot maintain in any case, because it is in contradiction with the concept of God, that the world "adds" something to God himself. But even if one were to assume for a moment the pantheist thesis that the world is necessary to God, it turns out to be contradictory in itself. If the world is necessary to God, it is absurd to say that God exists for an appearance; indeed it is absurd to say that he exists, inasmuch as, since the world is necessary to him in order to exist, given that the world is an appearance, God too, who needs the world in order to exist, turns out to be an appearance. Therefore the pantheist must grant the world a reality of its own. But not a reality different from that of God, otherwise the principle of the unity of being falls away, and with it the essence of pantheism. Therefore the reality of the world, which is his own reality, is necessary to God in order to exist: to God, therefore, is necessary... God himself in order to exist! Furthermore, in pantheistic systems human freedom is not justified, and it is impossible to distinguish between what God wills and what he permits: good and evil are divine, God needs evil! Lastly, pantheism suppresses the supernatural and religion (every religion is worth as much as another, and all are symbolic and inadequate expressions of an inaccessible truth) and justifies as necessary all revolutions, as it does all political tyrannies. The Church has rightly condemned it in all ages, in the Middle Ages as in the last century. The constitution De fide catholica of 24 April 1879 (chap. 1: De Deo rerum omnium creatore) sets forth the doctrine sanctioned by the Church (Denz-U, nos. 1782-83), and under the same heading are linked canons 3, 4 and 5 (ibid., nos. 1803-1805), which anathematize pantheism without the slightest concession. The encyclical Pascendi (1907) likewise points out that modernist doctrines on symbolism and immanence lead to pantheism.

Michele Federico Sciacca