Pantheism

 Pantheism is the theory that nothing exists outside of God or--in a logical if not intuitive equivalent--that no God exists outside the world. This includes a vast range of ideas, from (1) seeing the universe as thought in the mind of God to (2) seeing it as a mechanistic system of matter and energy that evokes reverence. The first is theistic idealism, the second science overlaid with awe--what Richard Dawkins mocks as "sexed up Atheism" (The God Delusion, 2007, p. 40). Between these extremes, a cafeteria of flavors is outlined by Michael Levine in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ("Pantheism"). I recommend that article but will only consider a few flavors.

 George Berkeley, an Irish bishop (1685-1753), uses his scientific theory of vision to argue that what we experience as the phenomenological world is merely a set of mental constructs, ideas existing solely in our minds. We construct a world of three-dimensional things from an amorphous field of light on two-dimensional retinas. Where do our ideas of the "real" world come from? Other thinkers, such as Kant, would say that we form these ideas by interpreting sensory input in terms of human categories absent from the things themselves. This sets the material world at a remove but doesn't deny it. Berkeley, however, assumes a total disconnect between matter and spirit and argues that our idea-world (being spirit) cannot be caused by matter but only by some form of spirit. Since his writing table persists when he leaves the room, an enduring matrix must support its existence outside of his mind, and that can only be God. Thus, he reasons, all the world--at least as we experience it--is nothing but ideas in the divine mind wholly dependent on God's ongoing thought. This is close to an orthodox view of God's sustaining the world after creating it ex nihilo, but the unreality of matter turns it into pantheism. If everything is idea in God's mind, then he contains the world. God and the universe are one.

 By denying the independent reality of the sensory world, Berkeley comes close to a kind of pantheism common in non-Abrahamic traditions. Typically, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism hold that the phenomenological world is an essentially unreal (because impermanent) theater of suffering, change, and conflict that we are called to escape into peace, permanence, and unity. Only nonduality is real, everything else a cycle of deaths and births like a bad dream we need to wake up from. Levine calls this acosmic pantheism because it denies the real existence of the world of things, the cosmos. The only reality is a Godhead we are called to merge with. Unlike in Abrahamic traditions, gods in this tradition are artifacts of the dualistic world, not in competition with the Godhead, who says through Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: "Those who worship other gods, and adore them with faith, are really adoring me" (9.23).

 Medieval Christian mystics influenced by the Eastern theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500) approach the acosmic position, especially the great Meister Eckhart (c. 1260- c.1328), who was denied sainthood because of his extreme world denial. For him, the created world is disposable. His goal is to disappear utterly into the Godhead. "No barrel can hold two different drinks. If it is to contain wine, then the water must be poured out so that the barrel is quite empty. Therefore, if you wish to be filled with God and divine joy, then you must pour the creatures [the created world] out of yourself." 

     Dualistic life experience vanishes for Eckhart's saved Christian. God is all. "The blessed in heaven know creatures without the images of creatures, which they perceive rather in a single image, which is God" (The Book of Divine Consolation, Part 2). This seems to preclude any separate personal immortality. The 9th century theologian, John Scotus Eriugena, also a student of Pseudo-Dionysus, was condemned by papal councils for his pantheism, and Eckhart's protege Henry Suso (1295-1366) ends a sensuous description of heaven with souls disappearing into "the vast wilderness and unfathomable abyss of the unknown Godhead, wherein they are immersed, overflowed, and blended up" (A Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, Part 12). 

 A milder form of pantheistic Christianity is represented by the Celtic Ionia Community, a tradition promoted by John Philip Newell, whom I recently heard speak on the spirituality of naturalist John Muir. In the tradition of Johns Scotus Eriugena, Newell regards nature as a second "book" of revelation, and part of his religious practice is to visit natural wonders or to meditate on simple processes such as bowl of water or the rising sun. The Celtic tradition celebrates thin places in the world where eternity is just over the threshold. Here is a conviction that, behind a veil of ignorance, God, nature, and humankind are united in holiness. Newell respects all religions, quotes gnostic scripture, and praises Pelagius (354-418) for opposing the doctrine of Original Sin. The world is good, and so is human nature, at least at its sensitive core. His school of Christianity devalues written authority, emphasizes living intuition (Christian and non-Christian), and finds holiness in nature in that term's high Romantic sense:

One impulse from a vernal wood 

May teach you more of man, 

Of moral evil and of good, 

Than all the sages can.

William Wordsworth's poem, "The Tables Turned," encapsulates pantheistic Christian piety. The natural world, if it is not God himself, is an authentic revelation of God to humanity.

Isaac Newton, the creator of classical physics and an inventor of calculus, was expert at both divine "books." Reputed as a foremost Biblical scholar, he wrote far more about of theology and religious history than about science. Little of this was published until recently because Newton denied the Trinity and championed a conspiracy theory of religious history. He wrote that primal truth--the prisca sapienta taught by Noah after the flood--involved veneration of the heliocentric solar system as a manifestation of God. Newton saw experimental physics as a way to uncover the bedrock of religion, the primal verities of Adam and Noah that had been obscured by misreadings of the Bible and buried by corrupt priests. God could be revealed, he thought, by careful study of original scripture and ancient histories in the light of experimental science. 

Far from the secular program it seems today, science was for Newton "a religious enterprise through which one could come to an understanding of the way God had created the universe," says Robert Iliff in Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (2017, p. 16). Newton's mathematic universe was, for him, not a mechanism, but a manifestation of the living mathematical mind that "vivifies the entire world" so that "the immediate cause of gravity is God" (p. 207). Of course, this isn't precisely pantheism because it situates God's mind outside the nature that it animates, but from the human perspective, it suggests that nature is the body of God and is all that we can reliably experience of him so that, subjectively, it may amount to the same thing--a God known purely rationally in keeping with Newton's dislike for "enthusiasm."

Believers in physics today are more likely to model nature on machine than on mind--maybe not on a preprogrammed machine because of the vagaries of quantum mechanics, still far from the body of an invisible spirit. The world of science is not, in Carl Sagan's words, "demon-haunted." Today, Newtonian predictability seems not so much to reveal God as to render him redundant, to evict him from nature. Theistic religions have to rent another room, even if sometimes signals penetrate the wall between them. There are several ways this can blend toward pantheism. It's common, I think, for scientists, even amateur fans, to understand scientific knowledge to be an absolute good--to make an idol of it in old-fashioned religious terms.

A more radical idea, advanced by philosopher Philip Goff among others, is that the material universe itself is conscious. The science of Newton and his successors, Goff asserts, tells only what matter does, not what it is, and consciousness can be explained if matter is conscious. He doesn't mean self-conscious, but a lower threshold of awareness he calls experience. Goff proposes that a consciously acting universe would account for all the critical parameters that enable human consciousness: "Agentive cosmopsychism explains the fine-tuning without making false predictions; and it does so with a simplicity and elegance unmatched by its rivals. It is a view we should take seriously" ("Is the Universe a Conscious Mind?" Psyche, online). Obviously, a world-soul, if it existed, would be God elegantly fitting the definition of pantheism, but I can't see how it provides any of the perks we humans look for in our religions.

Maybe that misses the point. Albert Einstein called himself a pantheist and seemed to mean--among other things--that he saw the universe as ordered and tried to transcend his self-interest without believing in a personal God. There was also a sense of wonder. This chimes with my friend Robert Stacy who calls himself a pantheist. In the absence of belief in God, he describes what he calls a spiritual imperative: "that which is felt and sensed and transcendent; more than the sum of its parts, as it were, and exists outside and apart from that which is pragmatic, practical, and grasped easily day-to-day; unexplainable and undefinable." Pantheism he describes as "a harmonious presence that lies somewhere mysteriously beyond the imposition of rationality and reason." 

        I have difficulty distinguishing this from mysticism, except that the latter usually is tied to a tradition (even if that tradition is ultimately discarded). Maybe it's about approach, not kind. Maybe roads inevitably converge as well as diverge in a yellow wood.