PANTHEISM. – An extremely ancient doctrine, but the introduction and use of the term are relatively recent. As R. Eucken (q.v.) has noted, J. Toland (q.v.) first used the word *pantheist* in 1705; Fay introduced the term *pantheism* in 1709 (A. Lalande, *Vocab. techn. et crit. de la philos.*, II, 4th ed., Paris 1938, p. 554). Both p. and monism (q.v.)—which, in certain respects, must be distinguished from the former—arise from a common fundamental exigency: to reduce all beings to absolute identity, not only logical but also ontological. Or, in other words, to bring the multiplicity of entities back to ontological unity, which is tantamount to saying that the being of the world is identical to the being of God. The legitimate exigency of unifying the manifold into a single principle (q.v.), pushed beyond the limits of the observation of the order of things (whereby multiplicity forms a “cosmos”), leads to the substantial unity of things themselves and of their principle, blurring (or failing to distinguish) analogy from identity.
The pantheistic assertion—πᾶν θεός, “all is God,” and God and the world are one—can be understood in two fundamental senses, to which the manifold and varied forms of p. can be traced: a) the 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 distinct from the divine; b) the reduction of God to the world, the only reality: God is the unity of what exists, the sum of its parts. The terms *acosmism* (Hegel) and *pancosmism* (Grote) may be used to indicate the two positions respectively. Of these, only the first characterizes p. in the strict sense; the second, which indicates the so-called *naturalistic p.* (e.g., d’Holbach) or *materialistic p.* (e.g., Haeckel [q.v.]), is better considered a form (the fundamental one) of monism, which, though close to p., must be distinguished from II. Here, monism will be discussed only insofar as is necessary to demonstrate what it has in common with p. and how, by internal contradiction, it is not even p., but atheism (q.v.); and the true pantheists will be treated only insofar as is necessary to characterize p. in its historical development.
Monism also obeys the same metaphysical dogma (shared with p.) of the unity and ontological identity of the real, but its tendency to reduce God to the world necessarily drives it toward naturalism (q.v.) or materialism (q.v.). In ancient Greek philosophy, the philosophy of Heraclitus (q.v.) cannot properly be called monistic, although the “Obscure” of Ephesus seems to identify the All with the eternal and cyclical transformation of Fire, the sole universal and divine principle. A development of Heraclitean metaphysics is that of Stoicism (q.v.), a typical systematization of naturalistic p. and thus with strong monistic tendencies: the cosmos consists of a finite and full matter, penetrated by Reason (q.v.), of 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, the formless substance, matter; the other active, the mind, God. The latter penetrates matter, produces the four elements, and is the artificer of all things” (Diog. Laer., VII, 134; *I frammenti degli storici antichi*, ed. 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,” “animated and divine” (Calcidius, *In Tim.*, c. 292; *I frammenti*, cit., p. 82); yet 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 natural phenomena; 3) the complex of the divine being and created things” (Diogenes Laertius, 135-37; *I frammenti*, cit., pp. 82-83). In the first and even in the third sense, “the world is one, and is called God, mind, fate, Jupiter” (ibid.). Thus, naturalistic p.: identification of God with the natural world and material conception of what is called Soul or Reason or Fire.
In modern times, the theory of evolution has given new impetus to the naturalistic monism of certain forms of positivism (Du Bois-Reymond, Spencer [q.v.], Ardigò [q.v.]) and to materialistic and biological monism (Moleschott, Huxley, Büchner, etc.). Fundamentally, here one is outside p., since no longer is there talk of an immanent God, but only of world or nature or universe: the term “God” means nothing. God does not exist; only the world exists, arising from an original matter endowed with vital energy, which evolves by itself and according to its own laws. The original being, ontologically one—some sort of embryonic world or mother-matter, called “homogeneous” (Spencer), or “indistinct” (Ardigò), or “primitive substance” (Haeckel)—evolves progressively into different forms. Such assertions have no scientific or philosophical foundation and do not explain how spirit (q.v.) arises from primitive material being and enters the world, nor how thought (q.v.) emerges, nor how intelligent substances—fundamentally irreducible—arise through evolution, whereby the pluralism of entities is not merely phenomenal but substantial. In the end, materialistic monism (e.g., that of Haeckel) is a superficial contamination of evolutionary materialism and Spinozism. But when evolutionism (left-wing Hegelianism: Feuerbach, Marx, etc., and other later currents) meets Hegelian dialecticism, the concepts of monism or materialistic p. undergo a profound transformation to the point that one can no longer speak of either monism or p. Indeed, dialectical materialism denies that there is any essence of man or of anything else, any immutable order, any matter in the traditional materialist sense. Every law and every entity is the result of historical situations, responding to a stage of dialectical becoming; and everything in the future may be different, not only in accidents but in substance. Now, as has been said, the exigency of p. is the unification of the manifold, 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 materialistic evolutionism, having lost the concept of entity, cannot be called either monistic or pantheistic. Monism and p., pushed 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 thus its ultimate outcome is the destruction of its premises.
The assertion “all is God” loses all meaning when only physical beings or a single being (embryonic or not, indistinct or homogeneous original substance) are admitted to exist.
it is purely material. The p. [pantheism], precisely because of the essential meaning of the term, does imply the unity of being or being one, but conceives this being as spirit or reason, even if devoid of consciousness and impersonal, so much so that it then makes thought and consciousness (v.) the revelation of being to itself. It must be added that the Absolute of p. arouses a religious sentiment, admiration and love, albeit only “intellectual”; indeed, the pantheist experiences enthusiasm for the Being to which he feels united, of whose essence he partakes: p. is the inebriation of the immanent divine (Spinoza). All this is lacking in naturalistic and materialist monism, which cannot in any way call God a purely material being (however matter may be conceived), even if active and a principle of life, nor can it nourish for it a religious sentiment or intellectual love. Therefore materialistic p. is a verbal and meaningless expression; the “all is God,” proper to p., cannot be reduced, without losing its substantial meaning, to the expression “all is matter.” Today, after the great stir of the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th and the wide diffusion it had through 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 ever, it is widely diffused among the masses, through Marxist and communist doctrines, not because it has regained even the slightest speculative force or scientific consistency, but insofar as it attaches itself to practical problems of an economic-political-social order. Certainly much more serious and less crudely uncritical is true and proper p., of which the most significant historical forms are indicated here.
There is a very ancient form of p. that recurs constantly and is present in all epochs and among all peoples; that prephilosophical, primitive p. proper to peoples only at the beginning 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, and critical elaboration. Prephilosophical Greece is in this sense pantheistic: the forces of nature are deified, made objects of cult. In the already evolved polytheism of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, etc., the distinction among the various divinities, identified with natural forces, 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 also a form of primitive p. 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 himself so possessed by the god as to identify with him. The ontological unity of the whole, lived immediately and as a spontaneous sentiment, is still in the phase of poetic intuition or mystical abandonment. The profound sense of nature and of man’s identification with its forces is the inebriation of the divine, a vital sentiment of communion of man with divinity and of divinity with man. This form of p., 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 the cult of life; the non-Catholic German mystics, on the one hand, Goethe and almost all of German Romantic poetry (v.) on the other, some contemporary writers, especially North American ones, etc., vibrate with powerful pantheistic accents. This is what may be called aesthetic or mystical p.: the 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 serene 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 p., at once aesthetic, mystical, and profoundly religious, is Neoplatonic emanationism, one of the forms of true and proper p. and precisely that which reduces nature to God. It does not start from the world or its primitive material elements, but from the One or Absolute or Substance, etc., which it identifies with God, from which it makes the world emanate (Plotinus) or deduce necessarily (Spinoza) or posit (Fichte), or move dialectically (Hegel), etc. In all these doctrines the world is dissolved in God; only God really exists, of which the world is a necessary manifestation. These various forms of p. have in common two general theses: a) reduction of the multiplicity of beings to the ontological unity of a single and identical being, so that the being of the world, emanating or proceeding from God, is the same being as God’s; b) God is thus “chained” to the world, to this world, the only possible one, which eternally and necessarily emanates from him and returns to him to be identified with him, as the drops of water left temporarily on the shore by the wave’s flux are reabsorbed by the next wave. A very well-known and expressive image is that 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.): “It represents the life of a great tree; it passes (ἐλθούσαν) through it, while remaining its immobile principle without dispersing itself through the whole tree, since it resides in the roots” (Enn., III, 8, 10). For each thing there is a unity to which one must return: “every being is traced back to the unity that is before it, until one arrives at the absolute One (τὸ ἀπὸ λόγος ἐν) that refers to nothing else” (ibid.). Evidently the pantheistic affirmations, according to the degree of identification God-World, have different nuances and greater or lesser rigidity. But the destiny of p. is almost inevitable, demanded by the internal coherence of its presuppositions: whether one speaks of the world’s emanation from God or of its hypostatic union with God Himself (the world subsists in the divine personality) or of immanent act, the world is ultimately reduced to an appearance or an illusion.
For Plotinus (v.), all proceeds by overflowing abundance 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 derive from it and return to it” (Enn., V, 2, 1). Hence “all things are like a life that stretches out in a straight, whole, and continuous line: each of its successive points is different, yet the inner line is continuous; each point is distinct from the others, yet the attention does not stray from the point that follows” (ibid., V, 2, 2). As is well known, Neoplatonism (v.) strongly influenced Western medieval thought, first through St Augustine (v.) and later through Pseudo-Dionysius and his commentator Maximus the Confessor (v.), and finally through Muslim and Jewish thinkers (especially Avicebron; v.).
Christian antiquity (and Augustine in particular) was by no means unaware of the fundamental differences between Christianity (creation, fall, redemption, end of the world) and Neoplatonism (emanation, this is the best of all possible worlds, return of things to the Absolute), nor of the ignorance or heterodox doctrine of later Christian Neoplatonists such as Eriugena (v.), who, through Pseudo-Dionysius, reproduces Proclus’s (v.) thought in Christian terms. In God, the nature quae creat et non creatur, the supreme reason of every finite being that does not contain within itself its own reason for being, every creature exists; and therefore, Eriugena 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 essentiae 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, 11, f. 528 A-B). Hence all is in God and all reality has in God its reason: “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., II, 11, 1, p. 621 C-D). From the affirmation that God makes all things (ibid., I, 72, f. 518 A-B), Eriugena 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 all that He creates. It is true that Eriugena strives (ibid., III, 7, f. 675 C) to distinguish, within God Himself, two realities of God: one that transcends every essence and another that coincides with the essence of all things; but neither this nor other distinctions save him from pantheism, despite the opinions of authoritative Catholic scholars to the contrary (M. Cappuyns, E. Gilson). At most one can subscribe to the judgment of De Wulf (Storia della filo. mediev., trad. it., I, Firenze 1944, p. 135 ff.): in the De divisione there are texts (numerous) that have a markedly monistic flavour and others that no less clearly establish a distinction between God and creation.
Other manifestations of pantheism, besides those in the Muslim and Jewish worlds, are found throughout the Western Middle Ages, from David of Dinant and Amaury of Bène to Eckhart (v.), whose 17 propositions were condemned as heretical and 11 as suspect by John XXII in 1329. It seems, however, that despite some rash statements, CAUSA (v.) cannot be accused of pantheism, for he maintains the duality between God and creatures, rejects the emanationist principle, and accepts creation in the Christian sense.
Pantheism flourished in Renaissance thought: traces of it are found in Pico della Mirandola (v.), CESALPINO, ANDREA (v.), Patrizi, and an unequivocal expression in G. BRUGNATO (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 the divine unity, the necessary relation between the world (natura naturata) and God (natura naturans), and expressions such as “all things are one being” leave no doubt as to his Neoplatonizing pantheism. Significant is the following passage from Lo 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 in so far as He communicates Himself to the effects of nature, He is more intimate to them than nature itself is; 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 not the soul itself.”
Pantheism, which in Bruno is more lyrical effusion than speculative elaboration, finds its highest and most intensely religious philosophical expression in Spinozism (v.), whose pantheistic system is typical and, as such, has universal significance in the history of human thought. Into it converge Jewish influences (Avicebron, the Cabala, Chasdai Crescas), Renaissance philosophy (Cusanus, Bruno), German Protestant mysticism, as well as ancient Neoplatonism and Cartesianism. Yet to understand Spinozist pantheism one must also take into account what may be called the “mathematism” of modern thought. It is not merely a matter of method (as is well known, the Ethics bears the subtitle more geometrico demonstrata) but of substance: for Spinoza, the relation between God and the world is one of logical inherence, analogous to that between a triangle and its properties; and, in analogy with mathematics, where the quantitative criterion entails no judgment of cause or end, Spinoza excludes efficient and final causes from 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 I, De Deo, ed. G. Gentile, Bari 1915, p. 3). Spinoza identifies God and Substance, which he holds to consist of infinite attributes, each of which expresses His eternal and infinite essence and is therefore itself infinite. But just as Substance exists only in its attributes, so the attributes (thought and extension are the two we know) exist only in their infinite modes; hence God exists only in things as their universal essence, and things are in Him as modes of His essence. God is “natura naturans” as the universal essence of the world, “natura naturata” as the totality of things in which His essence is realized. God is thus not distinct from His effects and exists only in His effects. This is the point of his most typical and perfect form: not the creation of the world, but its necessary derivation from the essence of God. The dependence of the world on God is not that of an effect from an efficient cause, but of a sequence or consequence, in the same way that from the definition of a triangle it follows that the sum of its angles equals two right angles. In short, Spinoza conceives the causal relation as a logical-mathematical relation of principle and consequence. Nothing can be other than it is: there is no room for chance or freedom. To know this universal necessity is the supreme beatitude of the soul (amor Dei intellectualis).
The same logical-mathematical intellectualism does not spare even LEIBNIZ (v.), who so insistently polemicizes against SPINOZA and distinguishes himself from the latter’s pantheistic tendencies. The accusation is by no means groundless: the determinism of the best (God cannot but create the best of all possible worlds) and the exclusively logical character of the created world are significant. Even his idea of creation is highly questionable: “Created substances depend on God, who preserves and continuously produces them through a mode of emanation, just as we produce our thoughts” (Discourse on Metaphors, § 14). The Enlightenment thought of the 18th century is steeped in what blends into deism (SHAFTESBURY, TOLAND, DIDEROT, HERDER, ROUSSEAU; v.). LESSING (v.), the world is the consubstantial offspring of God. Similarly, German preromantic and romantic literature is almost entirely pantheistic, as is transcendental idealism in the forms of FICHTE and SCHELLING (v.); yet it is only with HEGEL (v.) that the intellectualism of SPINOZA is transformed into dialectical pantheism.
As is well known, HEGEL reproaches SPINOZA for making the world disappear and accuses him of “acosmism”; only the unity of God-world is real, in which God is the substance and the world the accident. SPINOZA’s error is not that he is a pantheist, but that he failed to grasp the positive character of negation, dissolving the finite into the infinite and affirming unity at the expense of multiplicity. Instead, dialectics 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). The creation of the world and the eternal expression of the Word express one and the same movement. “God is the truth, the substance of the universe and not merely an abstract ‘other.’ It is therefore the same content; it is the divine intellectual world, the divine life in itself that unfolds. Now, this circle—the activity of its life—is the very same thing as the life of the world, yet this is apparent, that 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 unfolds in the world (Father); b) the idea that has attained consciousness (Son: between the world and the Son or Word, identical to 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 is realized as the general spirit of the community. This, for HEGEL, is absolute religion, a speculative transformation of Christianity. HEGEL himself vainly defended himself against the charge of pantheism, and even authoritative interpreters (e.g., TH. HAERING, A. LASSON, J. H. STIRLING, etc.) have unjustifiably maintained that his philosophy is not pantheistic at all. Such an interpretation can be justified only in this sense: given the essential dialectic by which dialectical antinomy, the essence of thought and the real, replaces the concepts of being and substance, one cannot speak of pantheism, since the ontological identity of beings is lost, which is thinkable only as the dialectical (and in which it is denied) term of multiplicity. In this case, HEGEL’s system may 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 dwell 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. KRAUSE (v.) would not be cited here were it not for the fact that his modest thought exerted influence in Belgium and especially in Spain, and that he coined the term “pantheism,” which then says nothing new: it is not God, of whom we have intuition, that is in the world, but the world in God: “all in God.” Consequently, philosophy is the science of God or of Essence.
For pantheism, the world is identified with God, from whom it emanates or proceeds; hence the being of the world is the same as the being of 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, or again that it is not of the same spiritual nature as God. The consequence is: if one maintains the principle of the identity of the world with God, one must affirm the identity of contraries, 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 duality also within Substance? If so, there is not a single original reality (Substance or God), but two realities irreducible to the unity of Substance. If Substance is one, then matter and spirit are identified in God and the identity of contraries is affirmed, that is, the reality of each is denied. In pantheism, it is never clear where spirit begins and matter ends, or vice versa. The distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata is of no avail, since it merely restates the same difficulty. Moreover, pantheism maintains that God cannot be conceived without the world, since without the world He would be unconscious: consciousness, in fact, implies another life, that is, the distinguishing of something that is and stands opposed to it; hence the world is necessary to God, who makes Himself, becomes, reveals Himself through the world, and attains self-consciousness. This thesis, typical also of Greek and medieval pantheism and of German transcendental idealism, makes pantheism outright atheism. A God who becomes (the Gott im Werden of HEGEL), who is potentiality passing into act (v.), is not God, not an infinite Spirit that is Pure Act. Evidently, here God is denied and something else is called by His name. Indeed, when the pantheist argues that God without the world would be unconscious because consciousness, to grasp itself, needs the other, he is not speaking of Absolute Consciousness or of God, but of finite human consciousness, which is not pure spirit like God—who, precisely because He is pure spirit, is always consciousness in act and therefore does not necessarily need the other to be such. Similarly, He is perfect spirit without needing to become such, to make Himself: if He had to make Himself, He would always be spirit in fieri and thus 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 tantamount to saying: God is not. Finally: one does not speak of God but of something else when it is argued that, if God is infinite, He cannot be but impersonal: whoever speaks of person speaks of limit and finitude, but God is infinite and without limits; hence God is impersonal. It is observed: a) the argument does not conclude that God is impersonal; it concludes that God does not exist, since an impersonal God is not God but an abstraction (or nature or humanity, etc.); b) the premise is correct if one understands finite human person, but the concept of human person is not the only possible concept of person: God is person in a different way from how man is person, yet He is so analogously (v. ANALOGIA). In other words, in no case can it be maintained that