## 1. Pantheism in religion, literature, and philosophy



There are several different ways to think about pantheism. (1) Many of
the world's religious traditions and spiritual writings are
marked by pantheistic ideas and feelings. This is particularly so for
example, in Hinduism of the Advaita Vedanta school, in some varieties
of Kabbalistic Judaism, in Celtic spirituality, and in Sufi mysticism.
(2) Another vital source of pantheistic ideas is to be found in
literature, for example, in such writers as Goethe, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Emerson, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, and Robinson
Jeffers. Although it should be added that, far from being limited to
high culture, pantheistic themes are familiar, too, in popular media,
for example in such films as *Star Wars, Avatar*, and *The
Lion King*. (3) Thirdly, as it is in this article, pantheism may
be considered *philosophically*; that is, a critical
examination may be made of its central ideas with respect to their
meaning, their coherence, and the case to be made for or against their
acceptance.


## 2. Arguments for / drives towards pantheism



A good way to understand any view is to appreciate the kind of drives
that may push someone towards it. What arguments may be given for
pantheism? Although there are a great many different individual lines
of reasoning that might be offered, generally they may be placed under
two heads; arguments 'from below', which start from *a
posteriori* religious experience, and arguments 'from
above', which start from *a priori* philosophical
abstraction.



Following the first type of argument, pantheistic belief arises when
the things of this world excite a particular sort of religious
reaction in us. We feel, perhaps, a deep *reverence for* and
*sense of identity* *with* the world in which we find
ourselves. Epistemically it seems to us that God is not distant but
can be encountered directly in what we experience around us. We see
God in everything. The initial focus of attention here may be either
our physical environment (the land on which we live, our natural
environment) or else our social environment (our community, our tribe,
our nation or, generally, the people we meet with) but further
reflection may lead to its more universal expansion.



In the second kind of argument, reasoning starts from a relatively
abstract concept whose application is taken as assured, but further
reflection leads to the conclusion that its scope must be extended to
include the whole of reality. Most typically, the concept in question
is that of 'God', or 'perfect being', in which
case pantheism appears as the logical terminus or completion of
theism. The following paragraphs illustrate four examples of such
reasoning.



(1) Traditional theism asserts the *omnipresence* of God and,
while it strongly wishes to maintain that this is not equivalent to
pantheism, the difference between saying that God is *present
everywhere in* *everything* and saying that God *is*
everything is far from easy to explain. If omnipresence means, not
simply that God is cognisant of or active in all places, but literally
that he exists everywhere, then it is hard to see how any finite being
can be said to have existence external to God. Indeed, for Isaac
Newton and Samuel Clarke divine omnipresence was one and the same
thing as space, which they understood as 'the sensorium of
God' (Oakes 2006). One recent variant of this position is
*Logical Pantheism* according to which God is identified with
*logical space*, with the totality of all possible worlds.
(Aranyosi 2022)



(2) The traditional theistic position that God's creation of the
universe is continuous can easily be developed in pantheistic
directions. The view that the world could not exist--even for a
second--without God, makes it wholly dependent on God and, hence,
not really an autonomous entity (Oakes 1983). Moreover, to further
develop this argument, if God creates every temporal stage of every
object in the universe, this undermines the causal power of individual
things and leads to occasionalism, which in turn encourages pantheism;
for in so far as independent agency is a clear mark of independent
being, the occasionalist doctrine that all genuine agency is
divine--that it all comes from a single place--tends to
undermine the distinction of things from God. Both Malebranche and
Jonathan Edwards have found themselves charged with pantheism on these
grounds, and it was for this reason that Leibniz, in attempting to
refute the pantheistic monism of Spinoza, felt it most important to
assert the autonomous agency of finite beings (Crisp 2019).



(3) Alternatively it might be argued that God's
*omniscience* is indistinguishable from reality itself. For if
there obtains a complete mapping between God's knowledge and the
world that God knows, what basis can be found for distinguishing
between them, there being not even the possibility of a mismatch?
Moreover, were we to separate the two, since knowledge tracks
reality--we know something because it is the case and not
*vice versa*--then God would become problematically
dependent upon the world (Mander 2000).



(4) Arguments of this general type may also proceed from starting
points more philosophical than theological. For example, Spinoza, the
most famous of all modern pantheists starts from the necessary
existence of something he calls 'substance.' By this he
means that which exists wholly in its own right, that whose existence
does not depend upon anything else. The notion of 'the
Absolute', or wholly unconditioned reality, as it figures in the
philosophies of Schelling, Hegel, and the British Idealists may be
considered a related development of the same philosophical starting
point (see Thomas 2019). In both cases the reasoning runs that this
necessary being must be all-inclusive and, hence, divine.


## 3. The logic of identity



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



(1) *Dialectical identity*. It is important to note that many
pantheists will not accept the classical logic of identity in which
pairs are straightforwardly either identical or different. They may
adopt rather the logic of relative identity, or
identity-in-difference, by which it is possible to maintain that God
and the cosmos are simultaneously both identical and different, or to
put the matter in more theological language, that God is
simultaneously both transcendent and immanent. For example, Eriugena
holds that the universe may be subdivided into four categories: things
which create but are not created, things which create and are created,
things which are created but do not create, and things which neither
create nor are created. He argues that all four reduce to God, and
hence "that God is in all things, i.e. that he subsists as their
essence. For He alone by Himself truly has being, and He alone is
everything which is truly said to be in things endowed with
being" (*Periphyseon*, 97). But nonetheless, for
Eriugena, the uncreated retains its distinct status separate from the
created, not least in that the former may be understood while the
later transcends all understanding. In consequence, he insists that
God is not the genus of which creatures are the species. Similarly,
the Sufi philosopher, ibn 'Arabi identifies God and the
universe, suggesting in a striking metaphor that the universe is the
food of God and God the food of the universe; as deity swallows up the
cosmos so the cosmos swallows up deity (*Bezels of Wisdom*,
237; Husaini 1970, 180). But Ibn 'Arabi in no sense regards such
claims as preventing him from insisting also on the fundamental gulf
between the unknowable essence of God and his manifest being. We must
distinguish between the nature of God and the nature of things,
between that which exists by itself (God) and that which exist by
another (the universe), but since the nature of God just is Being
itself, no parallel distinction may be drawn between the being of God
and the being of things. Nothing real exists besides God who discloses
himself in and through the universe (Chittick 1989, ch.5). Again,
Nicholas of Cusa's celebrated doctrine of the 'coincidence
of opposites'--which he memorably illustrated by pointing
to way in which, upon infinite expansion, a circle must coincide with
a straight line--allows him to say *both* that God and the
creation are the same thing *and* that there exists a
fundamental distinction between the realm of absolute being and the
realm of limited or contracted being (Moran 1990). Even Spinoza goes
to great lengths to show that the two attributes of *thought*
and *extension* by which we pick out the one substance as
'God' or 'nature' are nonetheless at the same
time irreducibly different. They may be co-referring but they are not
synonymous; indeed, they are utterly incommensurable. Such a
dialectical conception of unity, in which there can be no identity
without difference, is a strong element in Hegel's thought, and
also one aspect of what Hartshorne meant by *dipolar theism;*
the opposites of immanence and transcendence are included among those
which he thinks God brings together in his being.



(2) *Partial Identity.* Even accepting a classical conception
of identity and difference, there remain issues to settle. If we think
of pantheism negatively as a rejection of the view that God is
distinct from the cosmos, we would face four possible schemes by which
we might represent their mereological relation: we might understand
God as proper part of nature, we might take nature as a proper part of
God, we might regard the two domains as partially overlapping, or else
we might hold that they are strictly identical.



Reflecting upon the ambiguities of the previous two paragraphs, it
might be argued that only where we find strict classical identity do
we have pantheism. For if the universe is not wholly divine we have
mere *immanentism*, while if God includes but is not exhausted
by the universe then we have rather *panentheism*. Now,
certainly it may be allowed there are metaphysical schemes for which
the range of overlap between divinity and the cosmos is so small that
they fail to capture the spirit of pantheism. (For example, a
world-view in which God were understood as the vital spark which
animates an otherwise dead and motionless cosmos, or a world-view in
which the cosmos were merely one small fraction of the being of God
would indeed seem far from the spirit of pantheism.) However, to limit
the term's application to just those schemes advancing strict
classical identity would be far too restrictive.



Such 'strict identity' is virtually impossible to define
due to the extreme difficulty of stipulating what would count as an
acceptable and what as an unacceptable sense, part, aspect, or element
of difference. For example, Aquinas distinguishes between the doctrine
that God is the form of all things ('formal pantheism')
and the doctrine that God is the matter of all things ('material
pantheism') (Moran 1989, 86). Does either of these count as
pantheism 'proper', or must both obtain at the same time?
Again, while some pantheists conceive of deity in mereological terms
as the collection of things which make up the universe, many others
have found this approach inadequate, maintaining that in some
important sense 'the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts.' The finite things that we encounter around us and are
happy enough to describe as parts *of nature* we feel less
happy to think of as parts *of God.* Such theorists may also
reject the charge that their way of thinking is
*panentheistic*, maintaining that the proper lesson to draw is
not one of the transcendence of the holistic view but rather one
concerning the degree of unreality or abstraction involved in any
distributed view. In short, does *any* admission of difference
between the world as common-sense experiences it and the divine cosmos
as pantheism understands it amount to a concession either that there
are aspects of experience which fall outside deity or aspects of deity
which fall outside experience? If so, then the class of 'true
pantheists' threatens to become null. In the end, rather than
attempt to draw sharp but artificial and contentious lines it seems
more fruitful to maintain that the boundaries of demarcation between
immanence, pantheism, and panentheism are vague and porous.



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


## 4. Nature of the identity relation itself



To say that God is *identical with* the world as a whole is not
self-explanatory and, although often the matter is left
disconcertingly vague, examination of the literature reveals a variety
of different understandings of the identity relation being asserted
here.



(1) *Substance identity.* For Spinoza the claim that God is the
same as the cosmos is spelled out as the thesis that there exists one
and only one particular substance which he refers to as 'God or
nature'; 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 the
finite things of the world are thought of as something like
*parts* of the one great substance, although the terminology of
parts is somewhat problematic. Parts are relatively autonomous from
the whole and from each other, and Spinoza's preferred
terminology of *modes*, which are to be understood as more like
properties, is chosen to rectify this. A further problem with the
terminology of parts is that many pantheists have wanted to claim that
God or nature is not just the whole or totality of things, but is
somehow the inner essence or heart of *each* individual thing.
This may be expressed in the idea that somehow the whole is present in
each of its parts, a suggestion whose meaning has often been left
metaphorical or obscure. Giordano Bruno, for example employs the two
illustrations of a voice heard in its entirety from all sides of the
room, and that of a large mirror which reflects one image of one thing
but which, if it is broken into a thousand pieces, each of the pieces
still reflects the whole image (Bruno 1584, 50, 129). A thesis of the
complete interpenetration or interrelation of everything, the claim
being made here is related to that defended by Leibniz (who was not a
pantheist) that each monad is a mirror to the entire universe.



In Western philosophy Spinoza's formulation of the pantheistic
position has become so influential as to almost completely define the
position, but while practically all pantheists are monists (of some
sort), not all are *substance* monists, and there do exist
alternative ways of expressing identity besides a head-count of the
number of particular entities.



(2) *Being itself*. There is a long theological tradition in
which God is regarded as *being itself*, rather than as one
being among others, and insofar as it treats God as something to be
found inseparable from and at the very root of all that is, such a
conception may be used to express pantheism. While a conceptual
distinction may be drawn between 'the totality of beings'
and 'being itself,' it is clear that neither of these
could have any reality except in and through the other. The
identification of God with being itself is a common Christian view,
from Augustine to Tillich, but it is not exclusive to Christian
thought. For example, Ibn 'Arabi, in developing the Koranic
notion of *tawhid* (God's unity), asserts that there
can be no real being other than God; that God permeates through all
beings and *is* essentially all things. Especially among his
followers this was developed into a monistic ontology of *wahdat
al-wujud* (the unity of being).



(3) *Identity of origin*. A third way to express the identity
of God and nature is by reference to the thought that all things come
from God, rendering them both identical with each other and with the
one source from which they came. It is important in this connection to
discuss the difference between such notions as emanation, expression,
or instantiation and the more specifically theistic conception of
creation *ex nihilo*, for given the plausibility of supposing
that what 'flows forth' or 'radiates out' from
a source is only latent within that stem, traditional theists have
often insisted on creation *ex nihilo* precisely to drive a
wedge between creator and created and thereby rule out pantheism. But
although it would be tempting to contrast creation *ex nihio*
as theistic and emanation as pantheistic, such thoughts are probably
too simple. Plotinus' universe comprises in a hierarchy of
emanations from what he terms, the 'One'; but as neither
anything in the cosmos nor the sum of all things in the cosmos, as an
ideal construction from which all expressions fall short,
Plotinus' God is really too transcendent for his doctrine to
count as pantheism proper (see Steinhart 2019). Eriugena, by contrast,
has an emanation-theory that is more genuinely pantheist but, given
his apophatic conception of God as marked by both being and non-being,
he regards this position as wholly compatible with the doctrine of
creation *ex nihilo.* To Eriugena, God is precisely the nothing
from which all things were made. Spinoza approaches the question of
origin from a rather different angle. Arguing that God is the immanent
cause of all things, he draws an important distinction between
*natura naturans* and *natura naturata*; between the
universe considered in active mode as cause and the very same universe
considered in passive mode as effect (*Ethics* 1p29s). This is
an important doctrine not least for the way in which it links with
necessity. Modelled more on the way in which the theorems of geometry
derive from its axioms than on the sense in which a work of art
results from the free or spontaneous activity of its artist,
pantheistic creation of this second type courts a determinism that
threatens to rule out free will. And that has been a very common
objection to pantheism.



(4) *Teleological Identity*. Religious world views in which it
is the ultimate destiny or purpose of the cosmos to achieve oneness
with or to fully express deity provide a fourth model for
understanding pantheistic claims of identity. The true identity of the
universe is that which is revealed at the end of all things. For
example, on the Absolute Idealist scheme, history culminates in the
complete realization of God or Absolute spirit in the world and so, as
Schelling put it, in the last days "God will indeed be *all
in all*, and pantheism will be true" (Schelling 1810, 484).
A rather different example of this type of thinking is that of Samuel
Alexander who thinks that the universe evolves in a steadily
progressive manner and will finally 'attain deity', where
deity 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 complex
organisations of organic matter. By way of objection to such
teleological conception of identity it might be challenged that
something can only become merged with God, or become God, if it is
*no*w different from God. But against this it could be replied
that, if the notion of teleology be taken seriously, a thing more
truly is what it is *destined to become* than what it
*currently seems to be*, for everything about it is to be
explained in terms of its *telos* or goal. It may also be
responded that anything which can be *converted* into God
cannot be finally *different from* God. Hence Alexander, for
example, is clear that since all potentiality must be grounded in some
actuality there is also a sense in which the universe is already
implicitly God: "God as actually possessing deity does not exist
but is an ideal, is always becoming; but God as the whole universe
tending 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 are
identified, it follows that one or both words are being used in a
different way than usual; that nature is more like God than commonly
thought and/or that God is more like nature than commonly thought.
With respect to the cosmos this may be seen in the stress pantheists
typically put on the unity of the cosmos.



A distinction may be drawn between *distributive* pantheism,
the view that each thing in the cosmos is divine, and *collective
pantheism*, the view that the cosmos as a whole is divine (Oppy
1997). And if polytheism in general is coherent there is no reason in
principle why we should exclude the possibility of a distributive
pantheism. But as in pursuit of explanatory unity and coherence belief
in many Gods tends historically to give way to belief in single deity,
while it would be technically possible to identify the universe with a
collection of deities, in practice monism tends to win out, and it has
been characteristic of pantheists to stress heavily the unity of
nature. Thus pantheism typically asserts a *two-fold* identity:
as well as the unity of God and nature, it urges the unity of all
things with each other.



It may be asked whether a statement of the world's unity is a
*precondition* for asserting its identity with God, or a
*consequence* of asserting it? Is the intuition that the cosmos
constitutes a single integrated whole a contributory factor in
thinking it divine, or (reflecting the traditional idea that God is
unique and simple or without parts) is the intuition that it is divine
the reason for regarding it as such a unity?



The kind of unity which the pantheist thinks to find in nature can
vary from a very strong metaphysical oneness, like that of Parmenides,
which excludes all diversity or difference, to a much looser
systematic complex of distinct but inter-related elements, but the
four species of unity most commonly defended are: (1) the unity of all
that falls within the spatio-temporal continuum under a common set of
physical laws, (2) the reductive unity of a single material out of
which all objects are made and within which no non-arbitrary divisions
can be made, (3) the unity of a living organism, or (4) the more
psychological 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 the
*nature* of that cosmos. There are three main traditions.



(1) *Physicalism*. Many pantheists argue that physical
conceptions are adequate to explain the entire cosmos. This is an
ancient form of pantheism, found for example in the Stoics, for whom
only bodies can be said to exist. Soul they understood as nothing more
than a specific form of *pneuma*, or breath, the active power
to be found throughout nature. This is also a form of pantheism
popular today--often termed, scientific or naturalistic
pantheism. Such worldviews make no ontological commitments beyond
those sanctioned by empirical science (Buckareff 2016,
Lancaster-Thomas 2020).



(2) *Idealism*. During the nineteenth century, when pantheism
was at its most popular, the dominant form was idealist. According to
Absolute Idealism, as defended by such figures as Fichte, Schelling,
Hegel, and many of the British Idealists, all that exists is a single
spiritual entity, of which the physical world must be understood as a
partial manifestation. The search for that which may be asserted
without condition or qualification leads to the conclusion that all
variety is the expression of an underlying unity, and that nothing can
be real in the absence of mind or spirit. On some versions of this
sort of doctrine the physical world starts to look more like an
*appearance* of the ultimate spiritual (or possibly unknown)
reality beneath. Hegel himself rejects this sort of doctrine
--which he terms *acosmism*--and while it certainly
amounts to a view that there exists nothing besides God, in view of
its basic denial of the reality of the world we all experience it
hardly seems like a kind of pantheism.



(3) *Dual-aspect theory*. The pantheism of Spinoza is of
neither these types. For Spinoza, there is one thing which expresses
itself, or which may be understood, in two different ways, either as
thinking substance or as extended substance. The principle difficulty
of any such position is to further specify that ambiguous
relationship, whilst simultaneously avoiding the twin but opposed
pitfalls of reductionism and dualism.



Pantheists holds that whatever exists falls within God. This places
them in disagreement with any theory of the *supernatural*. But
such opposition must not be misunderstood, for to say that there is no
supernatural realm is not in itself to delineate the range of what is
natural. This is important, for while many contemporary pantheists
have been epistemologically conservative, there is no reason *in
principle* why the pantheist should oppose the idea of that which
is epistemically transcendent to us, no reason (that is) why he should
seek to limit the compass of the universe to the *known*
universe. For example, Spinoza held, not only that the realms of
thought and extension must stretch indefinitely beyond our finite
grasp, but that, as well as in the two known realms of thought and
extension, the one substance must exist also in an infinity of other
dimensions completely beyond our power to conceive.


## 7. The divinity of the cosmos



One of the strongest and most commonly raised objections to pantheism
is that it is simply inappropriate to call the universe
'God'. Thus Schopenhauer complains that "Pantheism
is only a euphemism for atheism," for "to call the world
God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a
superfluous 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 in *The God Delusion*
complains that "Pantheism is sexed-up Atheism" (Dawkins
2007, 40). It is clear that the more naturalistically the cosmos is
conceived the stronger that objection must seem, but to estimate more
carefully its validity the following six sections take in turn a
number of characteristics which the cosmos possesses or might possess
and which could be thought to make it divine. We may proceed from the
least to the most contested, noting that not all pantheists will agree
on all marks.


## 8. Evoking religious emotion



Most straightforwardly it has been maintained that the One is holy
because 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 our
non-rational, non-sensory experience of it rather than its own
objective features and, taking its departure from Otto's work,
one approach has been to argue that the feelings of awe which people
feel towards God can be, and often are, applied to the universe
itself (Byerly 2019). Whether it is really possible, or appropriate,
to entertain such feelings towards the cosmos as a whole will be
discussed below, but the chief point to make here concerns the extreme
subjectivism of this response; it's coming to rest upon feelings
which, while sincere enough, indicate nothing whatsoever about the
universe itself. On this view, all that distinguishes a pantheist from
an atheist is *feeling*; a certain emotional reaction or
connection that we feel to the universe. It would become akin, say, to
the difference between one who loves art and another who is relatively
indifferent to it. *Prima facie*, however, this approach puts
the cart before the horse; rather than say that the One is divine
because we feel a set of religious emotions towards it, it seems more
appropriate to suppose that we feel those emotions towards it because
we think it is divine.


## 9. A place in the universe at large



Religion gives meaning to human lives by assigning them a certain
definite place within a grander scheme or narrative. It gives its
adherents a sense of their part in a coherent universe. It tells us
that the universe is not a random conjunction of brute facts, but a
whole in which we have our proper location. The pantheist may regard
the cosmos as divine for very similar reasons. To think of oneself as
part of a vast interconnected scheme may give one a sense of being
'at home in the universe.' Here ecological thinking may
come to the fore; like the individual creatures in a complex
ecosystem, small but vital contributors to a larger whole, we too may
be thought to have our place in the connected whole that is
Nature.


## 10. The infinity / eternity / necessity of the universe



Historically the majority of pantheists have regarded the universe as
Infinite, metaphysically perfect, necessarily existent, and eternal
(or some subset thereof) and--taking these attributes as the
characteristic marks of divinity--that has formed one very
important reason for thinking that the universe itself is in fact
God.



In more recent times, however, there have arisen naturalistic or
scientific forms of pantheism which reject or are neutral about these
characteristics and, while they remove one important set of reasons
for thinking the cosmos divine, so long as others remain, the
amputation in itself seems insufficient reason to refuse the label
'pantheist' to such views. Any methodology which limits
itself to empirical science will presumably find it hard to attribute
anything like infinitude or necessary existence to the cosmos, while
approaches which do find a role for such features will need to be
careful that they understand them in an appropriate fashion. (For
example, it is doubtful that mere infinite extent, or infinite
divisibility, in space and time would be sufficient to merit that the
universe be called divine.) But with these caveats aside the pantheist
is not without arguments for believing that the universe as a whole
displays marks of metaphysical perfection.



The earliest arguments for such a view are to be found in the
pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander who held that the universe
emerges from what he termed '*to apeiron*,' a
complex notion which may be rendered as the infinite, the boundless or
the indefinite. Anaximander's thought seems to have been that
the ground by which all qualitative characteristics are explained must
itself lack any determination. Insofar as we can construct his
reasons, he argued that some such boundless potentiality was need to
ensure the continual coming to be and passing away in the world that
characterises the passing of time. As something thus immortal and
indestructible, Anaximander concluded that the infinite was also
divine (Aristotle, *Physics*, 203b).



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



But perhaps the most commonly used argument among pantheists has been
the ontological argument. As employed by classical theism this line of
argument has been much criticised, but the forms in which it has been
put forward by pantheists (such as Spinoza and Hegel) are
interestingly different. On their way of thinking, the more perfect an
idea becomes the less room there remains for any gap between it and
its instantiation, but no idea becomes perfect simply by defining
itself to be so. This can be shown only by a full development of its
content 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 his
ineffability. If he is so much greater than anything else, anything we
say of him would limit or falsify him, so we can speak at best in
negatives, or simply conclude that he is an ineffable mystery. It
would be hard to think of a line of reasoning less congenial to the
rationalist spirit that has characterised many pantheists, for example
scientific pantheism.



At the same time it must be allowed that there is a strong apophatic
streak in much pantheism. In contrast to his teacher, Thales, who
thought it possible to specify the ground of all things as water, for
Anaximander the one source from which cosmos comes forth (*to
apeiron*) is construed precisely in terms of its resistance to any
determinate characterisation, while both Eriugena and Ibn 'Arabi
stress that although the God of which we can speak is identical with
the cosmos, there remains another sense in which we cannot speak of
God at all. The essence of God considered in himself, the universal
ground of being cannot itself be captured by any of the limited
categories which flow out from it. Even Spinoza suggests that the
highest stages of knowledge consist in a form of intuitive insight,
which transcends mere reasoning or conceptual knowledge in that it
enables us to grasp the essence of individual things. Part of what he
calls 'the intellectual love of God', such *scientia
intuitiva* is itself assigned a salvific role in Spinoza's
thought; 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 rejection
of a personal deity is the definitive mark or most important element
of their position (Levine 1994; Harrison 2013). However, the matter
calls for more considered attention.



It is important to distinguish between the specific question of
whether God is literally a 'person' and the more general
question whether God is 'person-like'; the issue of
whether notions such as intellect, thought, consciousness, intent,
etc. have any application to the divine, even if analogical or
metaphorical. It should also be recognised both that the notion of
personhood is itself deeply problematic, and that a not inconsiderable
number of traditional *theists* would only with considerable
qualification be prepared to allow that God is personal.



These points made, while it is true that traditional theism has
regularly opposed pantheism on the grounds that it tends to be
impersonal, and true also that many pantheists would deny that God is
personal, it is nonetheless the case that many other pantheists have
thought mind-like attribution of some form or other to the cosmos
absolutely central to their position (Bishop & Perszyk 2017; Hewitt
2019; Mander 2022, 2017).



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



For example, it has been argued (Baltzly 2003) that the Stoics
believed in a personal deity. Just as they construed human beings as
physical creatures animated by a physical soul, so too they regarded
God as the mind of the world--with the cosmos as his body. Like a
vast biological individual, to them God was a conscious rational
being, exercising providence over life and to whom we might approach
in prayer.



Spinoza's God is an "infinite intellect",
(*Ethics* 2p11c) all knowing, (2p3) and capable of loving both
himself--and us, insofar as we are part of his perfection
(5p35c). And if the mark of a personal being is that it is one towards
which we can entertain personal attitudes, then we should note too
that Spinoza recommends *amor intellectualist dei* (the
intellectual 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), and
Spinoza insists that "neither intellect nor will pertain to the
nature of God" (1p17s1). Moreover, while we may love God, we
need to remember that God is really not the kind of being who could
ever love us back. "He who loves God cannot strive that God
should love him in return," says Spinoza (5p19).



Another notable pantheist to insist that the supreme being is personal
was Gustav Fechner, who develops a form of panpsychism according to
which all organised matter must be thought of as possessing its own
inner life or soul. The more complex and developed its structure, the
more sophisticated its spiritual life; from the lowest soul-life of
plants, through our own mental life, which is just the inner side of
our bodies, through the soul-life of the planets and stars up to the
most developed spirit of all, God, the consciousness which corresponds
to the most complex organism there is, the cosmos itself. More
recently, a very similar view has been put forward by Timothy Sprigge
who maintains that that the only conceivable form of reality consists
in streams of experience, such as we know ourselves to be, all of
which must be thought of as included together within a single
all-embracing experience; which we may call God or the Absolute.
Sprigge, however, is more cautious than Fechner insofar as he declines
to identify any physical systems other than those of animals
(including human beings) that can confidently be said to possess their
own inner conscious life (Sprigge 2006, ch.9). Against the idea that
God is some type of all-embracing spirit or person it is often
complained that this would undermine the autonomous personhood of
finite individuals; for can one person be *part* of another?
Fechner suggests as a model for understanding this the way in which
our different sense modalities (sight, smell, touch, etc), each
inaccessible to each other, combine together into one unified
consciousness (Fechner 1946, 144). While to extend such a model beyond
the merely receptive to the active aspects of personhood, we might
think of the way in which the agency of an organisation is exercised
through the agency of its individual members. Here several pantheists
have been influenced by Christian ideas of the indwelling spirit of
God at work within the body of the Church.


## 13. Value



Sixthly (and perhaps most importantly of all) it is widely thought
that the most important thing about God--thing that most makes us
call him 'God'--is his perfection or goodness. God is
a being 'worthy of worship.' Can the pantheist say this of
the cosmos as a whole? A variety of positions are possible. (1) Any
pantheistic world-view arrived at by extending the reach of the
traditional theistic God will find it relatively easy to assert the
same value to the cosmos that it attributed to God, but there are
other possibilities as well. (2) Insofar as the pantheist assertion of
unity may be understood as an assertion of complete and coherent
integration, and disvalue held to lie in conflict, disharmony or
incompleteness, then it may be possible to argue that the culmination
of metaphysical unity constitutes also the culmination of value. For
example, the Absolute Idealist Bernard Bosanquet states, "We
cannot describe perfection; that is, we cannot enumerate its
components and state their form and connection in detail. But we can
define its character as the harmony of all being. And good is
perfection in its character of satisfactoriness; that which is
considered as the end of conations and the fruition of desires"
(Bosanquet 1913,194). (3) More naturalistically, it might be suggested
than pantheism tells us that nature is our proper home and, as such,
our proper good. Everything has its place in a wider system which both
supports it and to which it contributes. As natural creatures our most
fulfilling life is found in and at one with nature. (4) Lastly, it
should be noted that many scientific pantheists argue that nature has
no *intrinsic* value whatsoever. It is merely something that
*we* 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 to
pantheism is that, because of its all-encompassing nature, it seems
inhospitable to the differentiations of value that characterise life.
In what might be thought of as a pantheistic version of the problem of
evil, it is challenged that if God includes everything and God is
perfect or good, then everything which exists ought to be perfect or
good; a conclusion which seems wholly counter to our common experience
that much in the world is very far from being so. Or to put the
argument slightly differently, if whatever we do or however things
turn out must be deemed the action of God, how can our pantheistic
belief demand of us any specific duty? The only alternative
conclusion, if we wish to hold on to the difference between what is
good and what is bad, would seem to be equally unattractive claim that
a universe *containing both* values, *in itself*
possesses *neither*; the pantheistic deity in its own being
lies beyond good and evil.



To point out that classical theism faces its own difficulties over
evil and God's providence, while it may level the playing field,
does nothing in itself to help solve the puzzle, and pantheists
themselves have suggested a variety of explanations or theodicies. (1)
The most popular model for dealing with evil is found in the
philosophy of Spinoza who regards both error and evil as distortions
that result from the fragmentary view of finite creatures; phenomena
real enough to the finite beings who experience them but which would
disappear in the widest and final vision of God. In this he was, of
course, developing the Stoic sense that if we could see the world as
God does, as the perfectly harmonious embodiment of the
*logos*, we would recognise how its apparent defects in fact
contribute to the goodness of the whole. (2) It may be responded also
that the objection that pantheism councils moral indifference is based
on a modal confusion, comparable to that made by the proponent of
logical determinism. If pantheism amounts to a doctrine of providence,
it is true that what actually happens will be for the best, but it
certainly does not follow from that that whatever else *might
have* happened *would have* been for the best, and it
possible that part at least of the perfection of the cosmos comes
about through our own individual moral choices.


## 15. Pantheism and the distribution of value



Although not all pantheists ascribe intrinsic value to the cosmos as a
whole, insofar as they do, that might be thought give rise to
something of a puzzle. For if God is valuable and God is identical to
the universe then we might seem committed to the somewhat implausible
thought that everything in the universe is *equally* valuable;
a leveling off which gave rise to Coleridge's complaint that
'everything God' and 'no God' are in effect
identical positions (Coleridge 1839, 224). The pantheist need not be
committed to this view, however, for the fact that a certain feature
or element is present in everything by no means entails that it is
*equally* present in everything. Although the universe as a
whole may be divine, there is no need to regard each bit of it as
uniformly divine; no need (for example) to feel quite the same about
the loss of biological species as we do about the disappearance of
human cultures and languages. Historically, there have been two main
ways in which pantheists have regarded the distribution of value in
the universe.



(1) *Emphasis on nature.* Most typically pantheism is
characterized by deep love and reverence for the natural world insofar
as it exists independently of human culture or civilization. The
pantheist finds God more in the waterfall or the rainforest than in
the car park or the gasworks. From the romantic period onwards this is
a very strong drive in both literary and popular pantheism, with urban
and technological life regarded as at best a kind of self-interested
anthropocentric distortion of true value and at worst even a kind of
loss or separation from divinity.



If uncultivated nature is divine then the pantheist may legitimately
conclude that it should be treated with respect, even as sacred. Such
is the import of Aldo Leopold's 'land ethic' (1949)
or the 'deep ecology' of Arne Naess (1973), and many
modern pantheists have developed close connections with
environmentalism. But neither the import nor the justification of such
ideas are straightforward. It might be suggested that as no one person
ought to put their own interests before another, neither ought any
species to put itself ahead of another, nor the sentient ahead of the
insentient, nor the living ahead of the non-living. But with each
further step this argument becomes harder to press, due to the extreme
difficulty of identifying--and weighing--such potentially
conflicting interests. For example, unless the pantheist is some sort
of panpsychist, he will not regard natural objects such as rivers or
mountains as possessing sentience, purpose or interests of its own;
which means that treating them with respect cannot be modelled on what
it means to treat people or animals with respect (see Leidenhag
2018).



(2) *Emphasis on humanity*. A second and very different model
for understanding the relationship between divinity and value
maintains that God is most revealed in human culture and history. For
the Stoics, Reason or *logos*--the essence of the
world--though it underlies all things, is more strongly manifest
in some (such as human life) than in others, while the virtues of
stoic detachment and self-sufficiency preclude our true good being
held hostage to the state of anything external to ourselves, such as
nature. This pair of attitudes is summed up in Cicero's
notorious assertion that all things were made for either Gods or men
(Holland 1997, Baltzly 2003). But probably the best illustration of
this more anthropocentric way of thinking about value is the Hegelian
system, in which *Geist* --the spirit whose manifestation
*is* the universe--articulates itself in a developmental
sequence of increasingly adequate expressions (which may or may not
also be temporal) up from the most basic abstractions of merely
physical nature, through the organic realm, up to its apex in the
concrete details of social and cultural life. The beauties of nature
are valued as an approximation to those of art, and the development of
ethical life (*Sittlichkeit*) is literally "the march of
God in the world" (Hegel 1821, 247).


## 16. Pantheism and ethics



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



Firstly, for pantheism, there is no higher power, no external
authority to tell us what to do. Insofar as it rejects any sense of a
transcendent external lawgiver or--to put the matter more
positively--insofar as it regards deity as the distributed
possession of all, pantheism may be represented as endorsing the
Kantian doctrine of the autonomy of ethical judgement. But the
implications of this are open. It can lead to either democratic
communitarian ethics or to individualism. Paradoxically, it might
equally well result in a species of conservative conformity to
whatever is deemed to be the 'natural state' of the world
every bit as stifling to the human spirit as conformity to whatever is
deemed to be 'the will of God.'



Secondly, it may be argued that pantheism is able to give a
particularly strong ground for an ethic of altruism or compassion. To
Schopenhauer (with whom this argument is particularly associated) only
genuinely altruistic or compassionate actions have moral worth, but
only pleasure and pain are capable of motivating the will, from which
he concludes that genuinely moral action is possible only if the
pleasure and pain of others can stir us to action as directly and
immediately as can our own pleasure and pain. It is not enough that we
sympathetically imagine ourselves in their shoes, he argues; we must
literally feel the pleasure and pain of others as our own, an attitude
that will be rationally grounded only in a monistic metaphysics in
which the distinction between ego and not ego becomes a trivial or
illusory distinction between two manifestations of the same underlying
unity (Schopenhauer 1839). Schopenhauer includes nonhuman animals in
this argument. To the charge that what is defended here remains but a
species of egoism--metaphysically enlarged, but still morally
worthless--it may be replied that self-concern is to be
deprecated only insofar as it is something that exists in contrast
with concern for others (a contrast which no longer finds any purchase
in this scheme).


## 17. Pantheism and religion



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



No doubt many pantheists self-consciously and deliberately reject
theism, while many theists strongly reject pantheism. But to conclude
from this that pantheism should be understood as *essentially*
opposed to theism would seem precipitous (like concluding mutual
incompatibility from the fact that many Christians oppose socialism
and many socialists oppose Christianity). Without being drawn into
doctrinal questions well outside the purview of this essay, two points
may be made. Many philosophers who have put forward pantheist beliefs
have thought there was no need for anyone who accepted them to abandon
traditional religion (for example, Spinoza, Hegel, or Edward
Caird--who argues that "the religious consciousness is not
the consciousness of another object than that which is present in
finite experience and science, but simply a higher way of knowing the
same object," (1892, 464) but whom nonetheless considered
himself Christian.) From the other side, many committed theologians
have 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 on
the grounds that it can make no sense to direct *at the cosmos*
the religious attitudes and emotions--worship, love,
gratitude--which are more normally directed *towards a
person* (Levine 1994, 315). (This is, of course, to assume that
the pantheistic God is *not* personal; a claim which, as we
have seen, many pantheists would reject.) Worship is commonly an
expression of dependence on a personal creator God, but, even if we
don't approve of their doing so, people worship many other
things, such as money, fashion, the State, or idols, without
necessarily assuming that these have residing within them some
conscious 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 it
possible to love his country but not his countrymen (Byron 1854, 25).
We typically thank a person, but it is possible also to feel gratitude
which transcends any feeling to particular individuals to an
institution (such as a college, community, or even State) which has
nurtured you. In each case there remains room for doubt whether these
attitudes are really equivalent to the sort of emotions more typically
associated with religion, but equally it is hard to see on what
legitimate 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 for
intercession. We can petition the theistic God, but can we petition
the universe itself? Most pantheists have thought not, but where the
cosmos is conceived as personal, or at least moral, room may exist to
develop such ideas. Construing the entire universe as a conscious
being, Fechner argues that it makes perfect sense to petition it; the
only difference being that normal requests must be expressed since the
object to which they are directed lies outside of us, but in the case
of God this is unnecessary since we exist already within him (Fechner
1946, 242-6). Even if not personal, so long as it could be said
that the universe exhibits a moral narrative structure there is no
reason to insist that that structure be independent of the moral needs
or requests of creatures within it (Mander 2007).



A common mark of religion is its soteriological character, its
recognition that the human condition is somehow unsatisfactory or
'fallen' and its offer to overcome this state through a
process of human transformation, be the result of that renovation
enduring happiness or some more elevated state of blessedness or
*nirvana*. Can pantheism respond to this? Can it offer the
believer hope for a better life?



If all that is hoped for is the well-being that comes from a more
ethical mode of existence, then pantheism is perfectly able to offer
this, supporting a value system which eschews selfishness in favour of
a wider concern. For example the American poet Robinson Jeffers
suggests that "there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of
salvation, in turnings one's affections outwards towards this
one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on
humanity" (Jeffers 2009, 365) But some other pantheists have
sought to offer something further. Pantheist systems with a
teleological 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 the
intellectual love of God (a state not dissimilar to the Beatific
Vision), Hegel outlines a developmental scheme whose climax consists
in the full and explicit self-manifestation of God.



In many traditional religions salvation has been linked to
immortality. Against this, it has been common among pantheists to
argue that what is distinctive about pantheism is precisely its
disavowal of any hope for personal immortality. However, some have
argued that a measure of endurance may be found in so far as we
recognize our real identity with, either the eternal universe (for
example, Schopenhauer 1851, 267-82) or, perhaps more
specifically with the ongoing life of our community (for example, John
Caird 1880). A small number of pantheistic thinkers have attempted to
develop more genuinely personal senses of immortality. For example,
Spinoza controversially claims that "The human mind cannot be
absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which
is eternal" (*Ethics* e5p23). Josiah Royce, in his early
Absolute Idealist phase, attempted to argue that if our finite will,
which in this life is never quite satisfied, is itself but a part of a
greater infinite will that is eternally satisfied, then that can only
mean that we must find our share of that satisfaction "in a life
that is not this present mortal life" (Royce 1906, 147).