Word Finder - pantheism

definition

The belief that the Universe is in some sense divine and should be revered. Pantheism identifies the universe with God but denies any personality or transcendence of such a God.

definition

The belief in all gods; omnitheism.

Some uncertainty may be felt whether pantheism should rank as a theism.

In the first place, it may be doubted whether to a Greek of the 6th century pantheism was nearer than monotheism.

That suggests pantheism, the usual form of such esoteric wisdom.

Persian literature after that date, and especially Persian poetry, is full of an ardent natural pantheism, in which a mystic apprehension of the unity and divinity of all things heightens the delight in natural and in human beauty.

When the existence of God is denied (atheism), or His nature is declared unknowable (agnosticism), or He is identified with nature itself (pantheism), or He is so distinguished from the world that His free action is excluded from the course of nature (deism), miracle is necessarily denied.

Accordingly his assertion of the unity of God was at the same time a declaration of the unity of Being, and in virtue of this declaration he is entitled to rank as the founder of Eleaticism, inasmuch as the philosophy of Parmenides was his forerunner's pantheism divested of its theistic element.

Determinism had other forms besides that of a crude materialism, and the direction that Malebranche succeeded in giving to speculation led only to the more complete denial of freedom and individuality in the all-devouring pantheism of Spinoza.

His pantheism had an antinomian drift; for himself and his officials he claimed impeccability; but, whatever truth there may be in the charge that among his followers were those who interpreted "love" as licence, no such charge can be sustained against the morals of Niclaes and the other leaders of the sect.

Lotze's metaphysics is thus distinguished from the theism of Newton and Leibnitz by its pantheism, and from the pantheism of Spinoza by its idealism.

The pantheism of Spinoza, combining as it did the religious and the scientific points of view, had a wide influence upon thought and culture.

This yields a characteristic type of pantheism, in the theory of the Unknowable which - rather paradoxically - is offered us.

The Greek gods being the powers of nature personified, pantheism lay nearer to hand than monotheism.

In the pantheism that thus takes the place of the old dualism there seems no place left for the individual.

Dr Smith contributed articles on Calvin, Kant, Pantheism, Miracles, Reformed Churches, Schelling and Hegel to the American Cyclopaedia, and contributed to McClintock and Strong's Cyclopaedia; and was editor of the American Theological Review (1859 sqq.), both in its original form and after it became the American Presbyterian and Theological Review and, later, the Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review.

Thereupon Spinoza advanced a pantheism which supposed that bodies and souls are not, as Descartes thought, different substances, but merely attributes - the one the extension and the other the thought of one substance, Nature or God.

It remained, however, for Schelling to convert this parallelism into identity by identifying motion with the intelligence of God, and so to transform the pantheism of Spinoza into pantheistic idealism.

No realists, they came nearer to Spinozistic pantheism and to Leibnitzian monadism, but only on their idealistic side; for they would not allow that extension and body are different from thinking and mind.

On Schelling's idealistic pantheism, or the hypothesis that there is nothing but one absolute reason identifying the opposites of subjectivity and objectivity, Hegel based his panlogism.

Though the spirit and the language of Plotinus is closely allied to that of pantheism, the result of his thinking is not pantheism but mysticism.

Such a view is not pantheism but mysticism (q.v.), and should be compared with the theology of Oriental races.

Yet these two schools of Sufis were never quite similar; on Sunnite soil Sufiism could not openly impugn orthodox views, while in Persia it was saturated with Shiite heresy and the pantheism of the extreme devotees of 'Ali.

Hence, while the accusation of pantheism is frequently brought against these thinkers, the term theosophical is never used in their regard.

They excluded the Deity from all direct action upon the world, and substituted for a cosmic principle the active intellect, - thus holding a form of Pantheism.

Objections to the belief in immortality have been advanced from the standpoints of materialism, naturalism, pessimism and pantheism.

But this theism is lifeless - a " pale and shallow deism, which India has often confessed with the lips, but which has never won the homage of her heart.'" The thought of India is upon the side of pantheism.

And idealism in some cases may interpret itself in favour of pantheism rather than of theism.

The theory is a conciliation of Theism and Pantheism.

The quotation shows that this gospel was the expression of complete pantheism.

The two opposing theories express at bottom, in the phraseology of their own time, the radical divergence of pantheism and individualism - the two extremes between which philosophy seems pendulum-wise to oscillate, and which may be said still to await their perfect reconciliation.

This system he called Panentheism, a combination of Theism and Pantheism.

The great objection to pantheism is that, though ostensibly it magnifies the Creator and gets rid of the difficult dualism of Creator and Creation, it tends practically to deny his existence in any practical intelligible sense.

The materialism of Hobbes, the pantheism of Spinoza, the empiricism of Locke, the determinism of Leibnitz, Collins' necessitarianism, Dodwell's denial of the natural immortality of the soul, rationalistic attacks on Christianity, and the morality of the sensationalists - all these he opposed with a thorough conviction of the truth of the principles which he advocated.

His speculation turns, as has been said, upon the necessity of reconciling the existence and the might of evil with the existence of an all-embracing and allpowerful God, without falling into Manichaeanism on the one hand, or, on the other, into a naturalistic pantheism that denies the reality of the distinction between good and evil.

Spinoza's philosophy is a thoroughgoing pantheism, which has both a naturalistic and a mystical side.

Pantheism, indeed, is the great deceit which awaits the Age to come.

His manner of thinking is clear, calm and logical, and he has certainly given the most complete exposition of what may be called Christian pantheism.

This production is not a physical process, but an emission of force; and, since the product has real existence only in virtue of the original existence working in it, Neoplatonism may be described as a species of dynamic pantheism.

In law he was a Zahirite, in theology a mystic of the extreme order, though professing orthodox Ash`arite theology and combating in many points the Indo-Persian mysticism (pantheism).

Since by the universally accepted doctrine of karman (deed) or karmavipaka (" the maturing of deeds") man himself - either in his present, or some future, existence - enjoys the fruit of, or has to atone for, his former good and bad actions, there could hardly be room in Hindu pantheism for a belief in the remission of sin by divine grace or vicarious substitution.

This is a collection of "Reimspruche" or rhymed distichs embodying a strange mystical pantheism drawn mainly from the writings of Jakob Bdhme and his followers.

He brought his pantheism and his determinism with him to the study of Descartes from the mystical theologians of his race.

But with the Indians this speculation leads to the complete abolition of all barriers between God and man, to a mystic pantheism, and to absorption in the universal Ego, in contrast with which the world becomes an unsubstantial phantasm and sinks into nothingness.

From that position he gradually moved towards pantheism, a way of thought to which he had shown remarkable leanings when, as a schoolboy, he discoursed of Neo-Platonism to Charles Lamb, or - if we may trust his recollection - translated the hymns of Synesius.

Between pantheism and Unitarianism he seems to have balanced till his thirty-fifth year, always tending towards the former in virtue of the recoil from "anthropomorphism" which originally took him to Unitarianism.

The explanation seems to be that while on Christian grounds he repeatedly denounced pantheism as being in all its forms equivalent to atheism, he was latterly much swayed by the thought of Schelling in the pantheistic direction which was natural to him.

Toland, the inventor of the name of pantheism, was notoriously, for a great part of his life, in some sort a pantheist.

Connected with these doctrines was their famous theory of the "rehabilitation of the flesh," deduced from the philosophic theory of the school, which was a species of Pantheism, though they repudiated the name.

This theodicy of Cousin laid him open obviously enough to the charge of pantheism.

Pantheism is properly the deification of the law of phenomena, the universe God.

The God I plead for is neither the deity of Pantheism, nor the absolute unity of the Eleatics, a being divorced from all possibility of creation or plurality, a mere metaphysical abstraction.