Pantheism
is the doctrine that all (pan) is God (theism). This belief has been accepted
by millions both as a religion and as a philosophy. The term pantheist was
supposedly coined by John Toland in 1705, although, as the Encyclopedia Britannica
points out in an article on the subject, pantheism is very old and is international.
It traces the belief back to 1000 B.C. in India in connection with Brahmanism,
to ancient Egypt in the successive identifications of Ra, Isis, and Osiris
with the universe, to Greek philosophers from the 6th century B.C. onwards,
including Xenophanes, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Cleanthes the Stoic, to
strains of Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages, to representatives of Christianity
in Scotus Erigena (9th century) and David of Dinant (12th century), to representatives
of Judaism in its Kabbalists, to Giordano Bruno who perished at the stake in
1600 in the Inquisition, to Spinoza and John Toland, to the better known
pantheistic poets, Lessing and Goethe, and to philosophers Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel, and theologians Schleiermacher and Strauss. It is not to be supposed
that all of these proponents of pantheism advocated exactly the same views, but
all in some way expressed the basic principle of identifying the world with
God.
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