Pantheism - History

History

The first known use of the term pantheism was by English mathematician Joseph Raphson in his work De spatio reali, written in Latin and published in 1697. In De spatio reali, Raphson begins with a distinction between atheistic ‘panhylists’ (from the Greek roots pan, "all", and hyle, "matter"), who believe everything is matter, and ‘pantheists’ who believe in “a certain universal substance, material as well as intelligent, that fashions all things that exist out of its own essence.” Raphson found the universe to be immeasurable in respect to a human's capacity of understanding, and believed that humans would never be able to comprehend it. The term was borrowed and first used in English by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work "Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist". He clarified his idea of pantheism in a 1710 letter to Gottfried Leibniz when he referred to "the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe".

Although the term "Pantheism" did not exist before the 17th century, various pre-Christian religions and philosophies can be regarded as pantheistic. They include 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. Johannes Scotus Eriugena was, as much as possible, a christian pantheist.

The early Taoism of Lao Zi and Zhuangzi is also sometimes considered pantheistic.

The Catholic church regarded pantheism as heresy. Italian monk Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600 for heresy, is considered by some to be a pantheist. Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, finished in 1675, was the major source from which pantheism spread. John Toland was influenced by both Spinoza and Bruno, and sometimes used the terms 'pantheist' and 'Spinozist' interchangeably. In 1720 he wrote the Pantheisticon: or The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society in Latin.

In 1785, a major controversy about Spinoza's philosophy known in German as the Pantheismus-Streit (Pantheism controversy) between critic Friedrich Jacobi and defender Moses Mendelssohn helped to spread pantheism to many German thinkers in the late 18th and in the 19th century.

For a time during the 19th century pantheism was the theological viewpoint of many leading writers and philosophers, attracting figures such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge in Britain; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Germany; Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the USA. Seen as a growing threat by the Vatican, it came under attack 1862 in the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX.

In the mid-eighteenth century, English theologian Daniel Waterland defined pantheism as: "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, German theologian Julius Wegscheider defined pantheism as the belief that God and the world established by God are one and the same.

In the late 20th century, pantheism was often declared to be the underlying "theology" of Neopaganism, and Pantheists began forming organizations devoted specifically to Pantheism and treating it as a separate religion.