Pantheism can refer to a number of Philosophy and Religion beliefs, such as the belief that the universe is God, or panentheism, the belief in a non-corporeal divine intelligence or God out of which the universe arises,Ann Thomson; Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment, 2008, page 54. as opposed to the corporeal gods of religions, such as Yahweh. The former idea came from Christian theologians who, in attacking the latter form of pantheism, described pantheism as the belief that God is the material universe itself.Worman, J. H., "Pantheism", in Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, Volume 1, John McClintock, James Strong (Eds), Harper & Brothers, 1896, pp. 616–624.Worman cites Wegscheider, Institutiones theologicae dogmaticae, p. 250. In some conceptions of pantheism, the universe is thought to be an immanent deity, still expanding and creating, which has existed since the beginning of time.
Another definition of pantheism is the worship of all gods of every religion, but this is more precisely termed omnism. Pantheist belief does not recognize a distinct personal god, anthropomorphic or otherwise, but instead characterizes a broad range of doctrines differing in forms of relationships between reality and divinity. Pantheistic concepts date back thousands of years, and pantheistic elements have been identified in diverse religious traditions. The term pantheism was coined by mathematician Joseph Raphson in 1697, and has since been used to describe the beliefs of a variety of people and organizations.
Pantheism was popularized in Western culture as a theology and philosophy based on the work of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza—in particular, his book Ethics.
A pantheistic stance was also taken in the 16th century by philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno.In the East, Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy is thought to be similar to pantheism in Western philosophy. The early Taoism of Laozi and Zhuang Zhou is also sometimes considered pantheistic, although it could be more similar to panentheism. Cheondoism, which arose in the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, and Won Buddhism are also considered pantheistic.
Pantheistic tendencies existed in a number of Gnosticism groups, with pantheistic thought appearing throughout the Middle Ages. These included the beliefs of mystics such as Ortlieb of Strasbourg, David of Dinant, Amalric of Bena, and Meister Eckhart.
The Catholic Church has long regarded pantheistic ideas as heresy.Collinge, William, Historical Dictionary of Catholicism, Scarecrow Press, 2012, p 188, . Sebastian Franck was considered an early Pantheist.
Giordano Bruno, an Italian friar who evangelized about a transcendent and infinite God, was burned at the stake in 1600 by the Roman Inquisition. He has since become known as a celebrated pantheist and martyr of science.McIntyre, James Lewis, Giordano Bruno, Macmillan, 1903, p 316.The Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta is thought to be similar to pantheism. The term Advaita (literally "non-secondness", but usually rendered as "nondualism", and often equated with monism) refers to the idea that Brahman alone is ultimately Satya, while the transient phenomenal world is an illusory appearance ( maya) of Brahman. In this view, Jiva, the experiencing self, is ultimately non-different ("na aparah") from Ātman-Brahman, the highest Self or ultimate Reality. The jivatman or individual self is a mere reflection or limitation of singular Ātman in a multitude of apparent individual bodies.
In the posthumously published Ethics, he opposed René Descartes' famous mind–body dualism, the theory that the body and spirit are separate. Spinoza held the Monism view that the two are the same, and monism is a fundamental part of his philosophy. He was described as a "God-intoxicated man" and used the word "God" to describe the unity of all substances.
This view influenced philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who said, "You are either a Spinozism or not a philosopher at all." Spinoza earned praise as one of the great rationalism of 17th-century philosophyScruton 1986 (2002 ed.), ch. 2, p.26 and one of Western philosophy's most important thinkers. Referred to as "the prince" of the philosophers. Although the term "pantheism" was not coined until after his death, he is regarded as the most celebrated advocate of the concept. His book, Ethics, was the major source from which Western pantheism spread.
The term was first used in English in a translation of Raphson's work in 1702. It was later used and popularized by Irish people writer John Toland in his work of 1705 Socinianism Truly Stated, by a Pantheist.
Toland was influenced by both Spinoza and Bruno and had read Joseph Raphson's De Spatio Reali, referring to it as "the ingenious Mr. Ralphson's (sic) Book of Real Space".Daniel, Stephen H. "Toland's Semantic Pantheism," in John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious, Text, Associated Works and Critical Essays. Edited by Philip McGuinness, Alan Harrison, and Richard Kearney. Dublin, Ireland: The Lilliput Press, 1997. Like Raphson, he used the terms "pantheist" and "Spinozist" interchangeably.R.E. Sullivan, "John Toland and the Deist controversy: A Study in Adaptations", Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 193. In 1720 he wrote the Pantheisticon: or The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society in Latin, envisioning a pantheist society that believed, "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."Toland, John, Pantheisticon, 1720; reprint of the 1751 edition, New York and London: Garland, 1976, p. 54. He clarified his idea of pantheism in a letter to Gottfried Leibniz in 1710 when he referred to "the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe".Paul Harrison, Elements of Pantheism, 1999.Honderich, Ted, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 641: "First used by John Toland in 1705, the term 'pantheist' designates one who holds both that everything there is constitutes a unity and that this unity is divine."Thompson, Ann, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 133, .In the mid-eighteenth century, the English theologian Daniel Waterland defined pantheism this way: "It supposes God and nature, or God and the whole universe, to be one and the same substance—one universal being; insomuch that men's are only modifications of the divine substance."Worman, J. H., "Pantheism", in Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, Volume 1, John McClintock, James Strong (Eds), Harper & Brothers, 1896, pp. 616–624.Worman cites Waterland, Works, viii, p. 81. In the early nineteenth century, the German theologian Julius Wegscheider defined pantheism as the belief that God and the world established by God are one and the same.Worman cites Wegscheider, Institutiones theologicae dogmaticae, p. 250.
Between 1785–89, a controversy about Spinoza's philosophy arose between the German philosophers Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (a critic) and Moses Mendelssohn (a defender). Known in German as the Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy), it helped spread pantheism to many German thinkers.
A letter written in 1886 by William Herndon, Abraham Lincoln's law partner, was sold at auction for US$30,000 in 2011. In it, Herndon writes of the U.S. President's evolving religious views, which included pantheism.
The subject is understandably controversial, but the letter's content is consistent with Lincoln's fairly lukewarm approach to organized religion.
19th-century European theologians also considered Ancient Egyptian religion to contain pantheistic elements and pointed to Egyptian philosophy as a source of Greek Pantheism. The latter included some of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus and Anaximander. The Stoics were pantheists, beginning with Zeno of Citium and culminating in the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, Stoicism was one of the three dominant schools of philosophy, along with Epicureanism and Neoplatonism.
The early Daoism of Laozi and Zhuang Zhou is also sometimes considered pantheistic, although it could be more similar to panentheism.Cheondoism, which arose in the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, and Won Buddhism are also considered pantheistic. The Realist Society of Canada believes that the consciousness of the self-aware universe is reality, which is an alternative view of Pantheism.
In 2009, pantheism was mentioned in a Papal encyclicalCaritas In Veritate, 7 July 2009. and in a statement on New Year's Day, 2010, criticizing pantheism for denying the superiority of humans over nature and seeing the source of man salvation in nature.
In 2015, The Paradise Project, an organization "dedicated to celebrating and spreading awareness about pantheism," commissioned Los Angeles muralist Levi Ponce to paint the 75-foot mural in Venice, California, near the organization's offices. The mural depicts Albert Einstein, Alan Watts, Baruch Spinoza, Terence McKenna, Carl Jung, 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.
"Hegel and Marx are usually cited as the greatest proponents of historical determinism." [6]
However, some have argued against treating every meaning of "unity" as an aspect of pantheism, and there exist versions of pantheism that regard determinism as an inaccurate or incomplete view of nature. Examples include the beliefs of John Scotus Eriugena, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and William James.* Theories of the will in the history of philosophy by Archibald Alexander p. 307 Schelling holds "...that the will is not determined but self-determined." [7]
For the Aztecs teotl was the metaphysical omnipresence creating the cosmos and all its contents from within itself as well as out of itself. This is conceptualized in a kind of monistic pantheism as manifest in the supreme god Ometeotl, as well as a large pantheon of lesser gods and idealizations of natural phenomena.
In 1984, Paul D. Feinberg, professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, also identified seven: Hylozoistic; Immanentistic; Absolutistic monistic; Relativistic monistic; Acosmic; Identity of opposites; and Neoplatonic or emanationistic. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, edited by Walter A. Elwell, p. 887.
+ !Country !Subdivision(s) !Number !Year !Ref | ||||
1,394 (0.006%) | 2011 | 2011 Australia Census | ||
1,855 (0.005%) | 2021 | |||
75 (0.001%) | 2011 | |||
295 (0.002%) | 2011 | |||
30 (0.003%) | 2011 | |||
45 (0.006%) | 2011 | |||
40 (0.003%) | 2011 | |||
395 (0.008%) | 2011 | |||
0 (0%) | 2011 | |||
25 (0.002%) | 2011 | |||
125 (0.004%) | 2011 | |||
0 (0%) | 2011 | |||
0 (0%) | 2011 | |||
0 (0%) | 2011 | |||
0 (0%) | 2011 | |||
1,940 (0.04%) | 2011 | |||
Border Region | 179 (0.04%) | 2006 | ||
County Dublin | 524 | 2006 | ||
Mid-East Region | 177 | 2006 | ||
Midland Region | 118 | 2006 | ||
South-East Region | 173 | 2006 | ||
South-West Region | 270 | 2006 | ||
West Region | 181 | 2006 | ||
366 (0.009%) | 2006 | |||
60 (0.001%) | 2001 | 2001 Scotland Census | ||
and | 2,216 (0.004%) | 2011 | ||
Northern Ireland | 29 (0.002%) | 2011 | ||
790 (0.02%) | 2006 | 2006 Uruguay Census |
The 2021 Canadian census also showed that pantheists were less likely to be part of a recognized minority group compared to the general population, with 90.3% of pantheists not being part of any minority group (compared to 73.5% of the general population). The census did not register any pantheists who were Arabs, Southeast Asian, West Asian, Koreans, or Japanese people.
In Canada (2011), there was no gender difference in regards to pantheism. However, in Ireland (2011), pantheists were slightly more likely to be female (1074 pantheists, 0.046% of women) than male (866 pantheists, 0.038% of men). In contrast, Canada (2021) showed pantheists to be slightly more likely to be male, with men representing 51.5% of pantheists.
Nontheism is an umbrella term which has been used to refer to a variety of religions not fitting traditional theism, and under which pantheism has been included.
Panentheism (from Greek πᾶν (pân) "all"; ἐν (en) "in"; and θεός (theós) "God"; "all-in-God") was formally coined in Germany in the 19th century in an attempt to offer a philosophical synthesis between traditional theism and pantheism, stating that God is substantially omnipresent in the physical universe but also exists "apart from" or "beyond" it as its Creator and Sustainer. Thus panentheism separates itself from pantheism, positing the extra claim that God exists above and beyond the world as we know it. The line between pantheism and panentheism can be blurred depending on varying definitions of God, so there have been disagreements when assigning particular notable figures to pantheism or panentheism.
Pandeism is another word derived from pantheism, and is characterized as a combination of reconcilable elements of pantheism and deism.
It assumes a Creator-deity that is at some point distinct from the universe and then transforms into it, resulting in a universe similar to the pantheistic one in present essence, but differing in origin.Panpsychism is the philosophical view that consciousness, mind, or soul is a universal feature of all things. Some pantheists also subscribe to the distinct philosophical views hylozoism (or panvitalism), the view that everything is alive, and its close neighbor animism, the view that everything has a soul or spirit.
Ideas resembling pantheism existed in Eastern religions before the 18th century (notably Hinduism, Confucianism, and Taoism). Although there is no evidence that these influenced Spinoza's work, there is evidence regarding other contemporary philosophers, such as Leibniz, and later Voltaire.Lan, Feng (2005). Ezra Pound and Confucianism: remaking humanism in the face of modernity. University of Toronto Press. p. 190. . In the case of Hinduism, pantheistic views exist alongside panentheistic, polytheistic, monotheistic, and atheistic ones.
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