Pre-modern times Pantheism "is primarily a polemical term", so there are not many pantheists in Ancient history. and with
Zeus, after the swallowing of Phanes. Pantheistic tendencies existed in a number of
Gnostic 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
Eckhart. According to others, Acts 17:28 is not pantheist, but panentheist. According to Jacqueline Lagrée, Acts 17:28 could be pantheistic, but panentheism is more accurate for what has been called pantheism. The
Catholic Church has long regarded pantheistic ideas as heresy.
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. 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
real, while the transient
phenomenal world is an illusory appearance (
maya) of Brahman. In this view,
jivatman, the experiencing self, is ultimately non-different ("na aparah") from
Ātman-Brahman, the highest Self or
Reality. The
jivatman or individual self is a mere reflection or limitation of singular
Ātman in a multitude of apparent individual bodies.
Baruch Spinoza In the West, pantheism was formalized as a separate theology and philosophy based on the work of the 17th-century philosopher
Baruch Spinoza. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine, and was effectively excluded from Jewish society at age 23, when the
local synagogue issued a
herem against him. A number of his books were published posthumously, and shortly thereafter included in the Catholic Church's
Index of Forbidden Books. In the posthumously published
Ethics, he opposed
René Descartes' famous
mind–body dualism, the theory that the body and spirit are separate. This view influenced philosophers such as
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who said, "You are either a
Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." Spinoza earned praise as one of the great
rationalists of
17th-century philosophy and one of
Western philosophy's most important thinkers. 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. He referred to the pantheism of the
Ancient Egyptians,
Persians,
Syrians,
Assyrians,
Greek,
Indians, and Jewish
Kabbalists, specifically referring to Spinoza. The term was first used in English in a translation of Raphson's work in 1702. It was later used and popularized by
Irish writer
John Toland in his work of 1705
Socinianism Truly Stated, by a Pantheist. Like Raphson, he used the terms "pantheist" and "Spinozist" interchangeably. 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." 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". 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
souls are only modifications of the divine substance." 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. 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.
19th century Growing influence During the beginning of the 19th century, pantheism was the viewpoint of many leading writers and philosophers, attracting figures such as:
William Wordsworth and
Samuel Coleridge in Great Britain;
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in Germany;
Knut Hamsun in Norway; and
Walt Whitman,
Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau in the United States. Seen as a growing threat by the Vatican, in 1864, it was formally condemned by
Pope Pius IX in the
Syllabus of Errors. 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
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
Taoism of
Laozi and
Zhuangzi is also sometimes considered pantheistic, although it could be more similar to
panentheism.
20th century In the late 20th century, some declared that pantheism was an underlying theology of
Neopaganism, and pantheists began forming organizations devoted specifically to pantheism and treating it as a separate religion. In 2009, pantheism was mentioned in a
Papal encyclical 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. 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. ==Categorizations==