Encyclopedia Britannica wrote:
Continued--attenuated. This paradox may have encouraged Parmenides, possibly one of Xenophanes' disciples (according to Aristotle), to accept the changeless Absolute, eliminating change and motion from the world. Reality thus became for him a unitary, indivisible, everlasting, motionless whole. This position is basically that of absolutistic monistic pantheism in that it views the world as real but changeless. Insofar as the change and variety of the world are only apparent, Parmenides also approaches acosmic pantheism.
A third fundamental position is that of the Ephesian critic Heracleitus, among whose cryptic sayings were many that stressed the role of change as the basic reality. Heracleitus continued the hylozoistic tendencies of the Ionian philosophers. Fire, his basic element, is also the universal logos, or reason, controlling all things; and since fire not only has a life of its own but exercises control to the boundaries of the universe as well, the system is more complex than hylozoistic pantheism. In view of the circumstance that everything is either on the way from, or to, fire, this basic element is actually or incipiently everywhere. Since the divine works here from within the universe, indeed from within a single, but basic, aspect of it, the system is an instance of immanentistic pantheism.
The philosopher Anaxagoras, one of the great dignitaries at Athens in the golden age of Pericles, approached the problem somewhat in the manner of Heracleitus. Nous (or Mind) he held to be the principle of order for all things as well as the principle of their movement. It is the finest and purest of things and is diffused throughout the universe. This, like the preceding system, is an instance of immanentistic pantheism.
From the standpoint of the typology here employed, Plato may be regarded as the first Western philosopher to treat the problem of the absoluteness and the relativity in God with any degree of adequacy. In the Timaeus an absolute and eternal God was recognized, existing in changeless perfection in relation to the world of forms, along with a World-Soul, which contained and animated the world and was as divine as a changing thing could be. Although the material can be variously interpreted, panentheists hold that Plato has adopted a dual principle of the divine, uniting both being and becoming, absoluteness and relativity, permanence and change in a single context. To be sure, he envisioned the categories of absoluteness as situated in one deity, and those of relativity in another; but the separation seems not to have pleased him, and in the tenth book of the Laws, by invoking the analogy of a circular motion, which combines change with the retention of a fixed centre, he explained how deity could exemplify both absoluteness and change. Plato thus may be viewed as a quasi-panentheist.
Aristotle, on the other hand, with his exclusivistic, transcendent God, exemplifying only the categories of absoluteness, anticipated the absolute God of Classical Theism, existing above and beyond the world.
Stoicism, one of the foremost of the post-Aristotelian schools of thought, represents an immanentistic pantheism of the Heracleitean variety. First of all, the Stoics accepted the decision of Heracleitus that an indwelling fire is the principal element entering into all transformations and is also the principle of reason, the logos, ordering as well as animating all things, but that, second, there is a World-Soul, which is diffused throughout the world and penetrates it in every part. Rather than approximating Plato's spiritual World-Soul, the Stoic World-Soul is more like the Nous of Anaxagoras. The Stoics were Materialists, and their diffuse World-Soul is, thus, an extended form of subtle matter. That everything is determined by the universal reason is an unvarying theme in Stoicism; and this fact suggests that Stoic pantheism, despite its immanentism, stresses the categories of absoluteness rather than those of relativity in the relations holding between God and the world.
The life of reason brings man into harmony with God and with nature and helps him to understand his fate, which is his place in the universal system. Although the view is an amalgam of several types of pantheism, this particular mixture has retained its identity. It is therefore useful to call this position, or any similar combination of themes, by the name Stoic pantheism.
Plotinus, the creator of one of the most thoroughgoing philosophical systems of ancient times, may be taken to represent Neoplatonism, an influential modification of Plato's attempt to deal with absoluteness and relativity in the divine. Plotinus' system consists of the Oneai��"the absolute God who is the supreme power of the systemai��"the intermediate Nous, and the World-Soul (with the world as its internal content). His World-Soul follows the Platonic model. The system really blends pantheism with Classical Theism, since the categories of absoluteness apply to the One, and the relativistic categories apply to the World-Soul. The doctrine of emanation, whereby the power of the One comes into the world, is a clear attempt to bridge the gap between absoluteness and relativity. For Plotinus, as for Classical Theism, there is immanent in man an image of the divine, which serves as well to relate man to God as does the divine spark in Stoic pantheism. Even Classical Theism may thus contain a touch of immanentistic pantheism. This view, or any similar combination of themes, is an instance of emanationistic or Neoplatonic pantheism.
Though Scholasticism, with its doctrine of a separate and absolute God, was the crowning achievement of medieval thought, the period was, nonetheless, not without its pantheistic witness. Largely through Jewish and Christian mysticism, an essentially Neoplatonic Pantheism ran throughout the age.
The only important Latin philosopher for six centuries after St. Augustine was John Scotus Erigena. Inasmuch as, in his system, Christ's redemptive sacrific helps to effect a Neoplatonic return of all beings to God, Erigena can be said to have turned Neoplatonism into a Christian drama of fall into sin and redemption from its power. When Erigena said that, even in the stage of separation from God, God in his superessentiality is identical with all things, he advanced beyond a strictly Neoplatonic pantheism to some stronger form of immanentistic or monistic pantheism.
In the two principal writings of the esoteric Jewish movement called the Kabbala, known for its theosophical interpretations of the Scriptures, a mystically oriented system of 10 emanations is presented. A Spaniard, AvicebrAi��n, a Jewish poet and philosopher, similarly presented a Neoplatonic scheme of emanations. And in Spain, AverroAi��s, the most prominent Arabic philosopher of the period, represented an Aristotelian tradition that is heavily overladen with Neoplatonism. For AverroAi��s, the active intellect in man is really an impersonal divine reason, which alone lives on when man dies.
The German Meister Eckehart, probably the most significant of philosophical mystics, developed a markedly original theology. From his Stoic pantheism there arose his most controversial thesisai��"that there resides in every man a divine, uncreated spark of the Godhead, making possible both a union with God and a genuine knowledge of his nature. But Eckehart also distinguished between the unmanifest and barren Godhead and the three Persons who constitute a manifest and personal God. Thus, the system has similarities to both Stoic and Neoplatonic pantheism.
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, whose broad scholarship and scientific approach anticipated the coming Renaissance, continued the tradition into the 15th century. The ai��i��learned ignorance,ai�� in which a man separates himself from every affirmation, can have positive results, in Nicholas' view, because man is a microcosm within the macrocosm (or universe), and the God of the macrocosm is thus mirrored in all of his creatures. He also held that, in reference to God, contradictions are compatibleai��"his ai��i��coincidence of oppositesai�� doctrine, in which God is at once all extremes. Clearly, Nicholas wished to ascribe to God both the categories of transcendence and those of immanence without distinction. But in fact he displayed some preference for the categories of the absolute, insisting, for example, that the creatures of the world can add nothing to God since they are merely his partial appearances. Despite this bias toward absolutism, and even to acosmism, Nicholas can be appropriately viewed as espousing an identity of opposites pantheism.
The humanism of the Renaissance included an enlarged interest in Platonism and in its historical carrier, Neoplatonism, as well as influences from Aristotle and from Kabbalistic sources. The view of man as a microcosm of the universe was widespread. Marsilio Ficino, one of the first leaders of the Florentine Academy, found the image and reflection of God in all men and anticipated the divinization of man and the entire cosmos. The humanist and syncretistic philosopher Pico della Mirandola, also a leading figure in the Academy, substituted for creation a Neoplatonic emanation from the divine.
The most famous scholar of the Italian Renaissance was Giordano Bruno. Combining Copernican astronomy with Neoplatonism, Bruno thought of the universe as an infinite organism with monads as its ultimate constituents and world-systems as its parts. The universe, he held, is in a continual process of development and is infused with the divine life. Accepting Nicholas of Cusa's doctrine of the identity of opposites, he taught that contradictory ascriptions apply equally to God in particular and that claims concerning his immanence and transcendence are equally valid. More open to the categories of relativity than Nicholas, Bruno, however, exemplified a neatly balanced instance of identity of opposites pantheism.
The next great innovator of mystical religious thought was Jakob BAi��hme, who, in developing the concept of the divine life, took a decisive step beyond mere absoluteness. God goes through stages of self-development, he taught, and the world is merely the reflection of this process. BAi��hme anticipated Hegel in claiming that the divine self-development occurs by means of a continuing dialectic, or tension of opposites, and that it is the negative qualities of the dialectic that men experience as the evil of the world. Even though BAi��hme, for the most part, stressed absoluteness and relativity equally, his view that the world is a mere reflection of the divineai��"apparently denying self-development on the part of creaturesai��"tends toward acosmic pantheism.
In the 17th century the foremost pantheist was a Jewish rationalist, Benedict Spinoza, whose training in the history of philosophy included both medieval Jewish philosophy and the Kabbala. He championed a rational rather than a mystical pantheism, so much so that all that remained of mysticism, in fact, was his concept of the intellectual love of God. The rationality of the system is suggested by Spinoza's argument that, since God is the infinite being, he must be identical with the world; for otherwise, God-and-world would be a greater totality than God alone. Also, since God is a necessary being and is identical with the world, the world must also be necessary in all its parts. It follows from this that human freedom is an impossible idea; and the sense that man has of such freedom is based on his ignorance of the causes that have determined him. Spinoza distinguished between God and the world in three ways: first, by stressing God's activity in the active sense of natura naturans (ai��i��the nature that [creates] natureai�� ; i.e., God) compared to the passive sense of natura naturata (ai��i��the nature that [is created as] natureai�� ; i.e., the world); second, he related God to eternity and the world to time; and third, he distinguished God as self-existing substance, the whole, from the world, which he conceived as the attributes and modes of that substance. In terms of the present classification, Spinoza represents a monistic pantheism tending toward absolutism.
Goethe, the incomparable German litterateur, claimed that he was a follower of Spinoza. In fact, however, his beliefs were rather different inasmuch as Goethe championed man's individuality; opposed mechanical necessity; and held a hylozoistic, or vitalistic, position in which nature was organic, a living unity. His personalistic pantheism mixes hylozoistic and Stoic types with a touch of relativism added to the mixture.
During the 19th century, pantheism and panentheism were sustained by various kinds of Idealism that developed during the period. In these systems the categories of relativity gained in prominence; God was conceived as entering history and as being more intimately related to processes of change and development.
Although the philosophy of the German patriot J.G. Fichte, an immediate follower of Kant, began in the inner subjective experience of the individual, with the ai��i��Iai�� positing the ai��i��not-Iai�� ai��"i.e., feeling compelled to construct a perceived world over against itselfai��"it turns out eventually that, at a more fundamental level, God, as the universal ai��i��I,ai�� posits the world at large. The world, or nature, is described in organic terms; God is considered not alone as the Universal Ego but also as the Moral World Order, or Ground of ethical principles; and since every man has a destiny as a part of this order, man is in this sense somehow one with God. In the moral world order, then, man has a partial identity with God; and in the physical order he has membership in the organic whole of nature. It is not clear, however, whether in Fichte's view God as Universal Ego includes all human egos, and the organic whole of nature. Should he do so, then Fichte would be a representative of dipolar Panentheism, since in his final doctrine the Universal Ego imitates an Absolute deity who is simply the divine end of all activity, serving equally as model and as goal. In this interpretation God is conceived both as absolute mobility and absolute fixity. It is not entirely clear whether the doctrine is to be understood as referring to two aspects of a single God, the panentheistic alternative, or to two separate gods, the alternative imbedded in Plato's quasipanentheism. In either case, Fichte has enunciated most of the themes of panentheism and deserves consideration either as a representative or precursor of that school.
A second early follower of Kant was F.W.J. von Schelling, who, in contrast to Fichte, stressed the self-existence of the objective world. Schelling's thought developed through several stages. Of particular interest to the problem of God are the final three stages in which his philosophy passed through monistic and Neoplatonic pantheism followed by a final stage that was panentheistic.
In the first of these stages, he posits the Absolute as an absolute identity, which nonetheless includes, as in Spinoza, both nature and mind, reality and ideality. The natural series culminates in the living organism; and the spiritual series culminates in the work of art. The universe is, thus, both the most perfect organism and the most perfect work of art.
In his second, Neoplatonic, stage he conceived the Absolute as separated from the world, with a realm of Platonic ideas interposed between them. In this arrangement, the world was clearly an emanation or effect of the divine.
In the final stage of his thought, Schelling presented a theophany, or manifestation of deity, involving the separation of the world from God, and its return. In appearance this was quite like the views of Erigena or like the unmanifest and manifest Brahman of Indian thought. But, since the power of God continues to infuse the world and there can be no real separation, the entire theophany is clearly the development of the divine life. The Absolute is retained as the pure Godhead, a unity presiding over the world; and the worldai��"having in measure its own spontaneityai��"is both his antithesis and part of his being, the contradiction accounting for progress. The positing within God of eternity and temporality, of being-in-itself and of self-giving, of yes and no, of participation in joy and in suffering, is the very duality of Panentheism.
It was a disciple of Schelling, Karl Christian Krause, who coined the term panentheism to refer to the particular kind of relation between God and the world that is organic in character.
The third, and most illustrious, early post-Kantian Idealist was G.W.F. Hegel, who held that the Absolute Spirit fulfills itself, or realizes itself, in the history of the world. And in Hegel's deduction of the categories it is clear that man realizes himself through the attainment of unity with the Absolute in philosophy, art, and religion. It would appear, then, that God is in the world, or the world is in God, and that, since man is a part of history and thus a part of the divine realization in the world, he shares in the divine life; it would seem, too, that God is to be characterized by contingency as well as necessity, by potentiality as well as actuality, by change as well as permanence. In short, it would seem at first that the panentheistic dipolarity of terms would apply to the Hegelian Absolute. But this is not quite so; for Hegel's emphasis was on the deduction of the categories of logic, nature, and spirit, a deduction that provided the lineaments of Spirit-in-Itself (the categories of the intrinsic logic that the world, as Spirit, follows in its development), Spirit-for-Itself (nature as existing oblivious of its own context), and Spirit-in-and-for-Itself (conscious spiritual life, natural, and yet aware of its role in the developing world). This deduction, moving from the most abstract categories to the most concrete, is partly logical and partly temporal; it cannot be read either as a sheerly logical sequence or as a sheerly temporal sequence. As a logical sequence, it has the appearance of a Neoplatonic scheme turned on its head, since the Absolute Spirit that emerges from the deduction includes all of the steps of the preceding rich and multifarious deduction. As a temporal sequence, the system would seem to be a species of Stoic (i.e., Heracleitean) pantheism, qualified by a clear Parmenidean motif (see above Greco-Roman doctrines), which appears in its stress on an absoluteness that, from the eternal standpoint, cancels out time. This Parmenidean quality is to be found not only in Hegel but in most of the Idealists who were influenced by him. Time is real, on this view, and yet not quite real, having already eternally happened. And when Hegel spoke of the Absolute Spirit, this phrase held the internal tension of a near contradiction, for spirit, however absolute, must surely be relative to what is around it, sensitive to and dependent on other spirits. The fact that Hegel wished to give something like equal emphasis, however, both to absoluteness and to relativity in the divine being or process suggests that his goal is identical with that of the panentheists, even though he is perhaps more fairly regarded as a Pantheist of an ambiguous type.
It is impossible for one to leave the 19th century without mention of the pioneering experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner (1801ai��"87), founder of psychophysics, who developed an interest in philosophy. Fechner pursued the themes of panentheism beyond the positions of his predecessors. A panpsychist with an organic view of the world, he held that every entity is to some extent sentient and acts as a component in the life of some more inclusive entity in a hierarchy that reaches to the divine Being, whose constituents include all of reality. God is the soul of the world, which is, in turn, his body. Fechner contends that every man's volitions provide impulses within the divine experience, and that God gains and suffers from the experiences of men. Precisely because God is the supreme being, he is in process of development. He can never be surpassed by any other, but he surpasses himself continually through time. He, thus, argues that God can be viewed in two ways: either as the Absolute ruling over the world, or as the totality of the world; but both are aspects of the same Being. Fechner's affirmations comprise a complete statement of panentheism, including the dipolar deity with respect to whom the categories of absoluteness and relativity can be affirmed without contradiction.
The 20th century marks a decisive break with absolutism. In the first half of the century, panentheism gained in authority. The position of the Russian ex-Marxist Nikolay Berdyayev, a religious metaphysician, with his emphasis on divine and human freedom, is a manifesto of panentheism. Even more impressive was the work of the eminent British-American philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. As in the case of Fechner, Whitehead came to philosophy from science and held an organismic view of the structure of the world. In Whitehead's view God has two natures: his primordial nature is abstract; his consequent nature is concrete and includes within itself the total history of the world. Whitehead was also a panpsychist and believed that feeling is present in some degree at every level of the world process. Whether or not he was, then, also a panentheist is in dispute. He held that the possible future and the total past are in Godai��"in his primordial and consequent natures; but for Whitehead the present moment is relative, and contemporaries exclude each other. In the present moment of any entity, since it is the present of that entity, it is appropriate to say that God is in that entity, part of the data on which it acts; thus the Stoic spark of divinity has here a modern application. From the standpoint of God, on the other hand, all entities are part of God; they come from him and return to him in the passage of time, but they are not in God in the sense that their independence in the present moment is prejudiced.
It was left to Charles Hartshorne, one of Whitehead's followers, to provide the definitive analysis of panentheism. It is Hartshorne's suggestion that the organismic analogy, present in Whitehead as well as in many earlier thinkers, be taken seriously. For Hartshorne, God includes the world even as an organism includes its cells, thus including the present moment of each event. The total organism gains from its constituents, even though the cells function with an appropriate degree of autonomy within the larger organism.
Panentheism is then a middle way between the denial of individual freedom and creativity characterizing many of the varieties of pantheism and the remoteness of the divine characterizing Classical Theism. Its support for the ideal of human freedom provides grounds for a positive appreciation of temporal process, while removing some of the ethical paradoxes confronting deterministic views. It supports the sacramental value of reverence for life. At the same time the theme of participation with the divine leads naturally to self-fulfillment as the goal of life.
Many pantheistic and Theistic alternatives claim the same advantages, but their natural tendency toward absoluteness may make justification of these claims in some cases difficult and, in others, some argue, quite impossible. It is for this reason that a significant number of contemporary philosophers of religion have turned to panentheism as a corrective to the partiality of the other competing views.
Charles Hartshorne and W.L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (1953), offers an extensive historical exploration of pantheism, panentheism, and classical theism. The fundamental basis of panentheism is discussed not only in the epilogue of the above volume, but in many other works by Charles Hartshorne, including The Divine Relativity (1948) and The Logic of Perfection (1962). For the relation of mysticism to pantheism, see W.T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (1960). For information concerning any of the philosophers mentioned, reference may be made to their individual entries in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vol., ed. by Paul Edwards (1967); the Enciclopedia filosofica, 6 vol., 2nd ed., ed. by G.C. Sansoni (1967); or the Diccionario de filosofAi��a, 2 vol., ed. by Jose Ferrater Mora (1965).