Pantheism

• 1. Introduction

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  Pantheism names the conviction that reality and divinity are one and the same thing. Not that God watches over the universe from a distance, not that God inhabits the universe like a tenant, but that God simply is the universe, under another name. Nature, cosmos, the totality of being: all of it sacred, all of it divine, none of it requiring a separate creator to explain its existence.

  The word itself only arrived in 1697, coined in Latin by an English mathematician named Joseph Raphson. But the ideas it names stretch back to the oldest recorded religious thought, and its influence has touched figures as different as Abraham Lincoln, Baruch Spinoza, and the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius. When Pope Pius IX condemned pantheism in 1864, he was not chasing a fringe curiosity. He was pushing back against a current running through the heart of Western philosophy.

  What does it mean to say God and nature are identical? How did a controversial Dutch philosopher of the 17th century become the central figure in this tradition? And who exactly are the pantheists of the modern world? The answers reach from ancient Greece to a 75-foot mural painted on a wall in Venice, California, in 2015.

• 2. Spinoza and the Founding Text

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  Baruch Spinoza was born into the Sephardi Jewish community in Amsterdam, a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese descent who developed ideas so controversial that the local synagogue issued a formal exclusion order against him when he was 23. The specific charge was his questioning of the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine.

  His major philosophical work, Ethics, was published after his death, and it immediately drew the attention of the Catholic Church, which placed it in the Index of Forbidden Books. In Ethics, Spinoza took direct aim at Rene Descartes' famous argument that the mind and body are separate substances. Spinoza held that they are one. He extended this monism further: God and the world are not two things but one. He used the word "God" to describe the unity of all substances, and for this he was described by admirers as a "God-intoxicated man".

  The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, himself one of the major figures of German idealism, stated bluntly that "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." Spinoza earned recognition as one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy, and although the term "pantheism" was not coined until after his death, he became its most celebrated advocate. His Ethics was the principal channel through which pantheistic ideas spread across Western thought.

• 3. Naming a Philosophy

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  Joseph Raphson's 1697 work, De Spatio Reali seu Ente Infinito, introduced the Latin word "pantheismus" into print for the first time. Raphson drew a sharp distinction between what he called atheistic "panhylists" who held that everything is matter, and Spinozan "pantheists" who believed in a universal substance, both material and intelligent, from which all things arise. He referred to the pantheism of the Ancient Egyptians, Persians, Syrians, Assyrians, Greeks, Indians, and Jewish Kabbalists as precedents. Raphson also believed that the universe was immeasurable to human understanding, that humans would never fully comprehend it.

  The term made its first appearance in English in a 1702 translation of Raphson's work. Irish writer John Toland then carried it further, using and popularizing it in his 1705 publication Socinianism Truly Stated, by a Pantheist. Toland had read Raphson, referred to Spinoza and Bruno as the same current of thought, and in 1720 wrote the Pantheisticon in Latin, envisioning an entire pantheist society whose creed was: "All things in the world are one, and one is all in all things... what is all in all things is God, eternal and immense, neither born nor ever to perish." He clarified his thinking directly to the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in a 1710 letter, describing "the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe".

  Between 1785 and 1789, a public controversy in Germany over Spinoza's philosophy drew in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi as critic and Moses Mendelssohn as defender. This dispute, known in German as the Pantheismusstreit, spread pantheistic ideas to a much wider circle of German thinkers.

• 4. Martyrs and Mystics

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  Giordano Bruno was an Italian friar who evangelized about a transcendent and infinite God. In 1600, the Roman Inquisition burned him at the stake for it. He has since been claimed as a celebrated pantheist and as a martyr of science, a figure whose execution by the Catholic Church made vivid what was at stake in arguing that divinity is not separate from the natural world.

  The Catholic Church's hostility to these ideas had deep roots. The Church had long regarded pantheistic ideas as heresy, and the medieval period produced repeated condemnations of thinkers who edged toward them. Mystics in this tradition included Ortlieb of Strasbourg, David of Dinant, Amalric of Bena, and Eckhart, all of whom were associated with beliefs that the Church treated as dangerous. Sebastian Franck was considered an early pantheist. Pantheistic tendencies also appeared within a number of Gnostic groups throughout the Middle Ages.

  The formal ecclesiastical condemnation came in 1864, when Pope Pius IX included pantheism in the Syllabus of Errors. By that point, pantheism had become the position of prominent writers and philosophers across Europe and North America: William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge in Great Britain, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in Germany, Knut Hamsun in Norway, and Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau in the United States. The Vatican was not wrong to see it as a growing current.

• 5. Lincoln and the Letter

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  A letter written by William Herndon, Abraham Lincoln's law partner, was sold at auction for US $30,000 in 2011. Herndon wrote the letter in 1886, and in it he described the evolution of Lincoln's private religious views in unusually direct terms.

  Herndon wrote: "Mr. Lincoln's religion is too well known to me to allow of even a shadow of a doubt; he is or was a Theist and a Rationalist, denying all extraordinary supernatural inspiration or revelation. At one time in his life, to say the least, he was an elevated Pantheist, doubting the immortality of the soul as the Christian world understands that term. He believed that the soul lost its identity and was immortal as a force. Subsequent to this he rose to the belief of a God, and this is all the change he ever underwent."

  The subject is understandably controversial. But Herndon's account sits consistently with what observers noted about Lincoln's generally lukewarm approach to organized religion throughout his public life. The letter places pantheism, however briefly, at the center of how one of the most studied figures in American history privately understood the divine.

• 6. Eastern Parallels

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  Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy, has long been identified as broadly parallel to Western pantheism. The term Advaita means "non-secondness," usually rendered as nondualism, and it holds that Brahman alone is ultimately real. The phenomenal world is an illusory appearance of Brahman, described by the Sanskrit term maya. In this view, the individual experiencing self, called jivatman, is ultimately non-different from Atman-Brahman, the highest Self or Reality. The individual self is understood as a reflection or limitation of the singular Atman across many apparent individual bodies.

  The early Taoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi is also sometimes considered pantheistic, though some interpreters think it aligns more closely with panentheism. Cheondoism, which arose during the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, and Won Buddhism are both counted among traditions with pantheistic character.

  Hellenistic theology also recorded early pantheist-adjacent ideas. Within the ancient Greek religion of Orphism, pan, meaning "the all," was linked to the creator god Phanes, who symbolized the universe, and also to Zeus, after the swallowing of Phanes. The Stoics, beginning with Zeno of Citium and extending to the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius, held explicitly pantheistic views. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, Stoicism was one of the three dominant schools of philosophy alongside Epicureanism and Neoplatonism.

• 7. Modern Pantheism

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  In the late 20th century, some declared pantheism to be an underlying theology of Neopaganism, and dedicated pantheist organizations began to take shape. The Universal Pantheist Society, open to all varieties of pantheists and supportive of environmental causes, was founded in 1975. The World Pantheist Movement was incorporated in 1999, focused exclusively on promoting naturalistic pantheism, a strictly metaphysical naturalistic version of the belief. It has been described as an example of "dark green religion" with an emphasis on environmental ethics. The World Pantheist Movement is headed by Paul Harrison, an environmentalist and writer who had previously served as a vice president of the Universal Pantheist Society before resigning in 1996.

  In 2007, Dorion Sagan, son of scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan, published Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature, co-written with his mother Lynn Margulis. In a chapter called "Truth of My Father," Sagan wrote that his "father believed in the God of Spinoza and Einstein, God not behind nature, but as nature, equivalent to it."

  In 2009, pantheism appeared in a Papal encyclical, and in a statement on New Year's Day, 2010, the Vatican criticized pantheism for denying the superiority of humans over nature and for seeing nature itself as the source of human salvation. In 2015, The Paradise Project commissioned Los Angeles muralist Levi Ponce to paint a 75-foot mural in Venice, California, depicting Albert Einstein, Baruch Spinoza, Carl Sagan, Emily Dickinson, Nikola Tesla, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Rumi, Adi Shankara, and Laozi among others, all figures associated with the pantheist tradition.

• 8. Who Calls Themselves Pantheist

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  Census data from the early 21st century offers a rare numerical window into who formally identifies as pantheist. According to the 2011 censuses, the United Kingdom had the most self-identified pantheists of any country counted. In Ireland, the number rose from 202 in 1991 to 1,106 in 2002 to 1,940 by 2011. In New Zealand, there was exactly one self-described pantheist recorded in 1901. By 1906, that number had grown sevenfold to 7, and by 2006 it had reached 366.

  The 2021 Canadian census counted 1,855 pantheists, or 0.005% of the population, up from roughly 1,000 in 2011. The data showed that Canadian pantheists were somewhat more likely to be in their 20s and 30s than the general population, and about four times less likely to be under 15. Pantheists were also more likely to fall outside recognized minority groups: 90.3% of Canadian pantheists did not belong to any designated minority, compared to 73.5% of the general population. In Canada in 2021, men represented 51.5% of pantheists. In Ireland in 2011, the pattern was reversed, with women slightly more likely to identify as pantheist: 1,074 female pantheists at 0.046% of women, against 866 male pantheists at 0.038% of men.

  These numbers are small by any measure, but they document a tradition with a paper trail running from a single New Zealander in 1901 to a Venice mural spanning 75 feet depicting the full sweep of the pantheist intellectual lineage.