Pandeism
Pandeism, or pan-deism, is a theological doctrine that combines aspects of pantheism with aspects of deism. Unlike classical deism, which holds that the creator deity does not interfere with the universe after its creation, pandeism holds that such an entity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate entity. Pandeism purports to explain why God would create a universe and then appear to abandon it, and pandeism seeks to explain the origin and purpose of the universe.
Various theories suggest the coining of pandeism as early as the 1780s. One of the earliest unequivocal uses of the word with its present meaning was in 1859 with Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.
Definition
Pandeism is a hybrid blend of the root words pantheism and deism. The earliest use of pandeism appears to have been 1787, with another usage found in 1838, a first appearance in a dictionary in 1849, and an 1859 usage of pandeism expressly in contrast to both pantheism and deism by philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.In his 1910 work Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis, physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein presented the broadest and most far-reaching examination of pandeism written up to that point. Weinstein noted the distinction between pantheism and pandeism, stating "even if only by a letter, we fundamentally differ Pandeism from Pantheism", indicating that the words, even if spelled similarly, have very different implications.
Some pantheists identify themselves as pandeists as well, to underscore that "they share with the deists the idea that God is not a personal God who desires to be worshipped". It has also been suggested that "many religions may classify themselves as pantheistic" but "fit more essentially under the description of panentheistic or pandeistic", or that "pandeism is seen as a middle path between pantheism and deism". Here it is noted as well that "some authors also distinguish 'panendeism', whereby only part of God becomes the universe".
Pandeism falls within the traditional hierarchy of monistic and nontheistic philosophies which address the nature of God. It is one of several subsets of deism: "Over time there have been other schools of thought formed under the umbrella of deism including Christian deism, belief in deistic principles coupled with the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and Pandeism, a belief that God became the entire universe and no longer exists as a separate being".
Bruner, Davenport and Norwine, alluding to Victorian scholar George Levine's suggestion that secularism can bring the "fullness" always promised by religion, observe that "for others, this 'fullness' is present in more religious-oriented pantheistic or pandeistic belief systems with, in the latter case, the inclusion of God as the ever unfolding expression of a complex universe with an identifiable beginning but no teleological direction necessarily present". They suggest that pandeism, within a general tendency of postmodernity, has the capacity to "fundamentally alter future geographies of mind and being by shifting the locus of causality from an exalted Godhead to the domain of Nature".
In the 2013 edition of their philosophy textbook, Doing Philosophy: An Introduction Through Thought Experiments, Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn define "pandeism" as "he view that the universe is not only God but also a person". Travis Dumsday, in his 2024 Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual, writes that the emergence of consciousness in panspiritism is what "distinguishes panspiritism from pandeism, since, according to the latter, the physical cosmos emerges out of an ontologically prior divine conscious subject". He goes on to describe that in pandeism, "God became the universe at the big bang, and the resultant cosmos may inherit some or all of His divine characteristics".
Progression
Ancient world
The earliest seeds of pandeism coincide with notions of monotheism, which generally can be traced back to the Atenism of Akhenaten, and the Babylonian-era Marduk. Weinstein thought the ancient Egyptian idea of primary matter derived from an original spirit was a form of pandeism. He also found varieties of pandeism in spiritual traditions from ancient China, India, and among various Greek and Roman philosophers.The 6th century BC Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon has been described by some scholars as a pandeistic thinker. Weinstein wrote that Xenophanes spoke as a pandeist in stating that there was one god which "abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all" and yet "sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over". Weinstein also found elements of pandeism in the ideas of Heraclitus, the Stoics, and especially in the later students of the 'Platonic Pythagoreans' and the 'Pythagorean Platonists. He specifically identified 3rd century BC philosopher Chrysippus, who affirmed that "the universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul", as a pandeist.
Religious studies professor, F. E. Peters found that "hat appeared... at the center of the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism that is the legacy of the Milesians". Historian of philosophy Andrew Gregory thought that, of the Milesians, "some construction using pan-, whether it be pantheism, pandeism or pankubernism, describes Anaximander reasonably well", although he questions whether Anaximander's view of the distinction between apeiron and cosmos makes these labels technically relevant at all. Gottfried Große in his 1787 interpretation of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, describes Pliny, a first-century figure, as "if not a Spinozist, then perhaps a Pandeist".
Middle Ages to Enlightenment
The philosophy of 9th century theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who proposed that "God has created the world out of his own being", has been identified as a form of pandeism. Weinstein notes that Eriugena's vision of God was one which does not know what it is, and learns this through the process of existing as its creation. In his great work, De divisione naturae, Eriugena proposed that the nature of the universe is divisible into four distinct classes:The first stage is God as the ground or origin of all things; the second is the world of Platonic ideals or forms; the third is the wholly physical manifestation of our Universe, which "does not create"; the last is God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of created things ultimately returns to completeness with the additional knowledge of having experienced this world. A contemporary statement of this idea is that: "Since God is not a being, he is therefore not intelligible... This means not only that we cannot understand him, but also that he cannot understand himself. Creation is a kind of divine effort by God to understand himself, to see himself in a mirror". French journalist Jean-Jacques Gabut agreed, writing that "a certain pantheism, or rather pandeism, emerges from his work where Neo-Platonic inspiration perfectly complements the strict Christian orthodoxy". Eriugena himself denied that he was a pantheist.
Weinstein thought that 13th-century Catholic thinker Bonaventure—who championed the Platonic doctrine that ideas do not exist in rerum natura, but as ideals exemplified by the Divine Being, according to which actual things were formed—showed strong pandeistic inclinations. Bonaventure was of the Franciscan school created by Alexander of Hales and in speaking of the possibility of creation from eternity, declared that reason can demonstrate that the world was not created ab aeterno. Of another Catholic, Nicholas of Cusa, who wrote of the enfolding of creation in God and the unfolding of the divine human mind in creation, Weinstein wrote that he was, to a certain extent, a pandeist. He held a similar view of Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, who had written A Cabbalistical Dialogue placing matter and spirit on a continuum, and describing matter as a "coalition" of monads.
Several historians and theologians, including Weinstein, found that pandeism was strongly expressed in the teachings of Giordano Bruno, who envisioned a deity which had no particular relation to one part of the infinite universe more than any other, and was immanent, as present on Earth as in the Heavens, subsuming in itself the multiplicity of existence. This assessment of Bruno's theology was reiterated by others, including Discover editor Corey S. Powell, who wrote that Bruno's cosmology was "a tool for advancing an animist or Pandeist theology". The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger notes that Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope, was in particular "critical of... pandeism". Lutheran theologian Otto Kirn criticized as overbroad Weinstein's assertions that such historical philosophers as John Scotus Eriugena, Anselm of Canterbury, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Moses Mendelssohn, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing all were pandeists or leaned towards pandeism.
In Italy, Pandeism was among the beliefs condemned by Padre Filippo Nannetti di Bibulano in volumes of his sermons published posthumously in the 1830s. Nannetti specifically criticized pandeism, declaring, "To you, fatal Pandeist! the laws that create nature are contingent and mutable, not another being in substance with forces driven by motions and developments". In 1838, an anonymous treatise, Il legato di un vecchio ai giovani della sua patria, was published, in which the author, discussing the theory of religion presented by Giambattista Vico a century earlier, speculated that when man first saw meteor showers, "his robust imagination recognized the effects as a cause, then deifying natural phenomena, he became a Pandeist, an instructor of Mythology, a priest, an Augur". In the same year, phrenologist Luigi Ferrarese in Memorie Riguardanti la Dottrina Frenologica critically described Victor Cousin's philosophy as a doctrine which "locates reason outside the human person, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual pandeism, absurd for us, and injurious to the Supreme Being".
Literary critic Hayden Carruth said of 18th-century figure Alexander Pope that it was "Pope's rationalism and pandeism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature" According to American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, "later Unitarian Christians, transcendentalists, writers and some pragmatists took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world". Walt Whitman has elsewhere been deemed "a skeptic and a pandeist". Schick and Vaughn similarly associate the views of William James with pandeism. The Belgian poet Robert Vivier wrote of the pandeism to be found in the works of Nineteenth Century novelist and poet Victor Hugo. In the 19th century, poet Alfred Tennyson revealed that his "religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism". Literature professor Harold Bloom wrote of Tennyson, that towards the end of his life Tennyson "declared himself agnostic and pan-deist and at one with the great heretics Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinoza". Charles Darwin has been described as having views that were "a good match for deism, or possibly for pandeism". Friedrich Engels has also been described by historian Tristram Hunt as having pandeistic views.