Pantheism (from Greek pân, “all,” and theós, “god”) — The doctrine that God and the universe are identical, or that everything that exists is a manifestation of the divine, there being no personal God separate from and transcendent to the world. The term is modern: the form “pantheist” is associated with the Irish writer John Toland (1705), possibly its first use, although the ideas it names are much older. Affinities are pointed out in the Stoics, for whom the divine logos pervades the cosmos, in Plotinus, and in Giordano Bruno, who conceives the infinite universe as an expression of divinity. The most influential formulation is Spinoza’s in the Ethics (1677), which identifies God with the one infinite substance, expressed in the formula “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura, IV, preface); interpreters disagree, however, on whether the label “pantheist” fits him, since he denies a transcendent personal God yet holds that nature is the mode of expression of substance. In the late eighteenth century the “pantheism controversy” (Pantheismusstreit) pitted Jacobi against Mendelssohn over Lessing and Spinoza, making pantheism a central theme of German thought, with echoes in Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher. It is distinguished from panentheism, a term of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1828), according to which the world is in God but God exceeds it. It stands opposed to theism, which affirms a personal, transcendent God, and to deism, while critics have sometimes equated it with atheism. See Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, Schleiermacher, monism, and immanence and transcendence.
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