Elements of Pantheism

Element Books, 1999

(c) Paul Harrison 1999


Contents
1. What is pantheism?
2. History of Pantheism I: Oriental and Classical
3. History of Pantheism II: Monotheist and Modern
4. Core beliefs: The Divine Universe
5. Core beliefs: Sacred Nature
6. Pantheist ethics: responsibilities, rights and liberties.
7. Pantheist ceremony, meditation and mysticism.
8. Pantheist controversies: souls, bodies and death.
9. A fifth world religion?
Appendix: The Pantheist Credo
Further Reading

1. What is Pantheism and is it for you?
Are you a pantheist? 
Do you feel a deep sense of peace and belonging and wonder in the midst of nature, in a forest, by the ocean, or on a mountain top? 
Are you speechless with awe when you look up at the sky on a clear moonless night and see the Milky Way strewn with stars as thick as sand on a beach?
When you see breakers crashing on a rocky shore, or hear wind rustling in a poplar's leaves, are you uplifted by the energy and creativity of existence?
Finally, do you find it difficult to imagine a God who is different from and separate from the beauty of nature or the power of the universe?
If you answered yes to these questions, then you are almost certainly a pantheist.

What is Pantheism?
The word Pantheism derives from the Greek words pan (="all") and theos (="God"). Thus, Pantheism means: All is God. In essence, Pantheism holds that the Universe as a whole is divine, and that there is no divinity other than the Universe and Nature.
Pantheism is a religion that reveres and cares for nature. A religion that joyously accepts this life as our only life, and this earth as our only paradise, if we look after it. Pantheism revels in the beauty of nature and the night sky, and is full of wonder at their mystery and power.
Pantheism believes that all things are linked in a profound unity. All things have a common origin and a common destiny. All things are interconnected and interdependent. In life and in death we humans are an inseparable part of this unity, and in realizing this we can find our joy and our peace.
Pantheism is among the oldest of religious beliefs. It can be dated back to at least the sixth or seventh centuries BC, when the Hindu Upanishads were written, and the Greek philosopher Heraclitus flourished. Pantheism, of one kind or another, came to dominate the ancient world East and West.
The spread of Christianity and Islam forced Pantheism underground for some 1200 years, but by the nineteenth century it was beginning to regain some of its old prominence. It was the dominant belief of many philosophers and poets from Wordsworth and Goethe to Hegel and Walt Whitman.
The bleak first half of the twentieth century pushed Pantheism into the background again, but today it is enjoying a new renaissance in Scientific Pantheism, nature-oriented paganism, deep ecology, philosophical Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and religious forms of humanism and atheism.
What does it mean to say the Universe is divine?
Not all pantheists mean quite the same thing when they talk about the divinity of the Universe. Some, like the authors of the Pantheist Credo (page xx), take the Universe and nature as their start and finish, and when they say "the Universe is divine," they don't mean that it has any supernatural powers or personality. They mean simply that we feel a profound reverence and awe for it, similar to the reverence and awe that believers in a more conventional God feel towards their deity.
This view is very close to that of the Irish writer John Toland, who first used the word pantheist in 1705, and defined it as a person who believes "in no other eternal being but the universe."
Other pantheists, like the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, start with an idea of God or of a supreme being, and identify that with the Universe and nature. Others again imagine the universe itself as possessing a cosmic soul and godlike power.
By and large the modern definition of Pantheism is still close to Toland's. Here are a few authoritative modern versions:
The religious belief or philosophical theory that God and the Universe are identical (implying a denial of the personality and transcendence of God); the doctrine that God is everything and everything is God. 
[Oxford English Dictionary
A doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe.
[Merriam Webster Collegiate]
The doctrine that the universe conceived of as a whole is God and, 
conversely, that there is no God but the combined substance, forces, and 
laws that are manifested in the existing universe. 
[Encyclopaedia Britannica]

Why do people become pantheists?
Most pantheists in Western countries today were not reared as pantheists, but as Christians, Jews, even Muslims. So what made them become pantheists? 
Usually they had grown unhappy with the religions they were brought up in. In the case of Christianity, for example, they could no longer accept the claims of impossible miracles, or logical conundrums such as a God who is both three and one, or a Saviour who is both human and divine.
Many pantheists also feel that the traditional religions are too oriented towards invisible beings and realms, and not enough towards the real world we inhabit, towards this present life, and towards the body.
Dissatisfaction with established religions drove people on long spiritual journeys, often through many alternative beliefs, in search of alternatives, testing out the many forms of Buddhism, paganism, humanism or simple atheism.
But in all of them there was still an unsatisfied yearning for religion: the need for a system of beliefs and practices that relate us emotionally to nature and the universe, that tell us of our place as a member of them.
When people join the World Pantheist Movement they are asked to say why they became pantheists. Here's just a small selection of their comments:
As early as I can remember, the trees, the wind, and the rivers spoke with greater reverberation than my parents or the elders of the church. The sense I have always known that I am not separate from the beetles, the irises, the rocks, the deer has given me hope and inner peace and strength in times of need. HC.
After trying every religion I could find, I still never feel closer to anything truly divine than when I am, without ideas, being in nature. All these other schools of thought - they only add unnecessary flourishes to what is already enough. TO.
My understanding of these things has gone beyond the normal `atheistic' mode. There is a spiritual/emotional side to life - that is part of what it means to be human. I feel awe and reverence when I watch a sunset or catch a glimpse of a kingfisher. AM
I can't picture God as a being floating around on a cloud, controlling the earth, but I can picture a supreme being as nature and everything around me. LG.
I ended up with the philosophical connectiveness to the universe without the supernaturalism. Guess what that is? Pantheism. EM. 
I can not trust a god that needs to be reminded of his/her superiority all the time. I and my friends have always stood apart in our belief that the Earth is our Mother and that Nature itself was our beginning and end. RP.
I cannot accept the idea of an anthropomorphic God, but at the same time, I cannot agree with the desolate landscape of true atheism. BW
I have a strong belief in the overwhelming power of Nature, and that the Power of Nature is the only power that collectively is bigger than me or my species. HD.

A religion for our modern age
The world's major religions originated in times very different from today: superstitious times when science was rudimentary and education limited to a small elite. They were also times of high mortality from wars and epidemics, when life was cheap and dreams of a paradise after death seemed tempting.
Science and education have made life more difficult for the gods of traditional religions. Once the idea of God provided a handy catch-all explanation for deep questions such as how the universe began, how life and mind arose. But today science is providing convincing answers for all of these, forcing the idea of a creator God to retreat to an area outside of space and time.
Education has taught people to think independently and critically. It's difficult for most educated people today to believe in dogma or miracles merely because a parent, a priest or an ancient book proclaims it. People seek for sounder foundations, and ask for hard evidence of what religions claim. If that evidence does not satisfy reason, more and more people chose to reject religion.
These trends have favoured the spread of scepticism, agnosticism and atheism. Yet none of these positions are fully satisfying. The first two admit that they have no answers, while atheism provides only negative answers.
Yet there is still a deep human need for the experience of religion. Most people have a sense that there is something greater than the self or than the human race, a need for belonging. They feel a need for answers to the deepest questions that science cannot answer: questions about the central values of our lives, the anchoring points for our being, and the ethical guidelines for our actions.
Pantheism is in a unique position to satisfy these religious needs, without sacrificing any of the critical spirit that education fosters. It is well suited to the scientific age, the space age and the environmental age we are living in.
* Pantheism accepts and affirms life joyously. It does not regard this life as a waiting room or a staging post on the way to a better existence after death.
* Pantheism has a healthy and positive attitude to sex and life in the body.
* Pantheism teaches reverence and love for nature. Nature was not created for us to use or abuse - nature created us, we are an inseparable part of her, and we have a duty of care towards her.
* Pantheism is uniquely adapted to the space age. The Hubble telescope has revealed the vastness, power, creativity and violence of the universe. We need an idea of divinity in keeping with this new knowledge. 
* Pantheism does not simply co-exist uncomfortably with science: it fully embraces science as part of the human exploration of the divine universe.

A Gallery of "isms"
Theism: Belief in one personal creator God who transcends the world, and who may or may not be immanent in it.
Panentheism: Belief in a personal creator God who transcends the world, but is also intimately present and active in the world and in each of us.
Pantheism: Belief that the Universe is divine and that there is no divinity other than the Universe.
Atheism: Disbelief in any supernatural deity.
Humanism: An atheistic philosophy stressing human responsibility for our ethical choices.
Polytheism: Belief in and worship of many gods.
Paganism (modern): Nature-oriented form of polytheism, usually revering Goddess and God, and sometimes other deities.
What Pantheism is not.
It's easy to confuse Pantheism with several other religious beliefs. Let's take a look first at what Pantheism is not. As we do we will encounter some basic concepts which will be useful in later chapters.
Pantheism is not theism. Theism (from Greek theos = God) is the belief in an all-powerful, omniscient, thinking God who created the universe and watches personally over each one of us. He may be present to the universe in carrying out his actions or sustaining things in existence, but essentially he is thought of as infinite and eternal, beyond space and time. This is the God of the central traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Pantheism does have its own "God" (though many pantheists choose not to use the word), but this God is the Universe itself. Some pantheists such as the Stoics have believed that the Universe has a collective soul or a purpose in its evolution. But many simply revere the physical universe that science and our senses reveal to us, just as it is.
Critics of Pantheism often point out that in this case God is simply an extra and unnecessary name for the Universe. But when pantheists refer to the Universe as their god, all they really mean is that they feel the same profound sense of awe and reverence that other believers feel towards their gods. To call the Universe "god" or "divine" is not at all meaningless. Although it does not tell us anything extra about the Universe itself, it expresses the powerful emotions that pantheists feel towards the Universe.
Pantheism is not panentheism. The word panentheism was first used in 1874 from the Greek words pan-en-theos, meaning "All in God." This is a more worldly form of traditional belief in God. God is still seen as supreme all-powerful creator and personal judge. Part of him transcends space and time, so he is greater than the universe. But at the same time he is present throughout the Universe, in every atom and every living thing. Many Jews, Christians and Muslims are panentheists - indeed none of these religions believe in a totally distant and wholly separate God.
Pantheism, by contrast, does not believe in a God who even partly transcends time and space. The divinity is right here, right now in this present time, all around us and in us. We are each part of the divine whole and it is part of us.
The American humorist Ambrose Beirce cleverly caught the difference with panentheism in The Devil's Dictionary. He defined Pantheism as "the belief that everything is God, as opposed to the belief that God is everything."
Pantheism is not polytheism. Many people confuse Pantheism with polytheism. Polytheism (from Greek poly = "many" and theos = "god") means belief in many gods, as in ancient Greece and Rome, the Celtic and Nordic worlds, and in popular Indian and Chinese religion.
The confusion arises from the word "pantheon" which means the collection of all the gods of a nation, or the temple in Rome dedicated to the gods of all the nations. 
But part of the problem lies with dictionaries. They often list a second meaning for Pantheism as the acceptance or worship of all the gods or all the nations. This meaning started life as an error which crept into the mother of all modern English dictionaries, the massive Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED had literally hundreds of volunteers searching for and reading material from every period in the history of English. Some of the examples they found showed a different usage of the word pantheism, to mean the indiscriminate acceptance of all the gods of all the nations, such as existed in the later Roman Empire, when Rome absorbed the religions of many of its conquered nations. 
The first recorded example of the word pantheism with this meaning dates from 1837 - well over a century later than Toland's first use of pantheist. But once it got into the great OED, it filtered from there into many other modern dictionaries.
This second meaning is rare in print today. Most modern encyclopaedias and all books on religion and philosophy deal only with the first meaning, equating the Universe with God.
The second meaning is in direct contradiction to the first. Indeed the second meaning is not even normal polytheism. Polytheism usually worships the gods of a particular culture, but pantheism in this meaning worships or accept all the gods of all cultures on earth.
Neither polytheism nor pantheism in this second meaning are compatible with Pantheism as normally understood. It is not logically possible to believe in literally in many gods, and at the same time to believe that the Universe is the only true divinity.

Pantheism and its near neighbours: atheism and paganism
There are some religious orientations that Pantheism is close to, but not identical to. These include atheism, humanism, and paganism. It is perfectly possible to combine pantheism with any of these views, and many people do.

Pantheism and atheism
Atheism is disbelief in God, more specifically disbelief in any sort of personal, thinking being with supernatural powers, as found in theism, panentheism or polytheism. The word stems from the Greek a-theos, meaning "without God."
The nineteenth century German philosopher Schopenhauer once remarked that Pantheism was simply a polite form of atheism. In one sense he was right. Pantheism is atheistic towards the gods of all traditional religions. It does not believe in any separate creator, or in a personal judging God. Many pantheists of a materialist bent agree with atheists that all phenomena are a part of nature. They do not believe there are any supernatural beings or spirit realms.
But there are differences. Atheism does not claim to be a coherent philosophy, religion or way of life. It has only one unifying belief: that there is no personal creator God. 
Atheism does not make any positive statements. It does not involve any particular way of viewing the universe. It is quite possible for an atheist to regard the universe as pointless and hostile and human life as meaningless. Clearly, this approach is emotionally very distant from Pantheism.
But many atheists have been uncomfortable with the purely negative. Many have had a profound religious awe and humility towards nature and the universe. As Sagan wrote in Pale Blue Dot: 
A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
This sort of approach is sometimes known as positive atheism or religious atheism. It is identical with naturalistic and scientific forms of Pantheism.
A good way of summing up the difference between atheism and Pantheism is that atheism defines what a person does not believe, while Pantheism defines what they do believe.

Pantheism and Humanism
Like pantheists, humanists have felt the need to go beyond atheism, to develop a set of more positive beliefs about humans and their place in the universe.
The main stress in humanism has been on human responsibility to choose our own destiny, and to create our own ethical systems without supernatural backing. In recent decades there has been an increasing focus on human responsibility for nature.
Some humanists have recognized the need for a more religious approach, marked by the founding of the Friends of Religious Humanism in 1962. Many humanists recognize the need for religious ceremonies to mark births, weddings and deaths and have developed non-theist forms of these.
As Peter Samson has written in Can Humanism be Religious?:
The most meaningful and liveable kind of humanism is itself a religious way of understanding and living life. It offers a view of [people] and [their] place in the universe that is a religious philosophy...overarching and undergirding it all, there can be a haunting sense of wonder which never leaves one for whom life itself is a mystery and miracle. To be caught up in this sense of wider relatedness, to sense our being connected in live ways with all the world and everyone in it, is the heart dimension of religion, whatever its name.
This view of religious humanism is more or less identical with religious atheism and with Scientific Pantheism. 

Pantheism and Paganism
The word pagan comes from the Latin paganus, which originally meant rustic or rural. In religious terms, it came to be used of those people - often country-dwellers - who stuck to traditional polytheism when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD. Today the word is loosely used of any non-Christian who practices a polytheistic or nature-based religion. The most common forms are Celtic and Nordic.
Many modern pagans proclaim themselves to be pantheists. As Margot Adler wrote in her account of paganism in the United States, Drawing Down the Moon, "Divinity is immanent is all Nature. It is as much within you as without." 
Doreen Valiente's Wiccan poem Charge of the Goddess expresses this Pantheism beautifully:
I who am the beauty of the green earth,
and the white moon among the stars, 
and the mystery of the waters, 
call unto thy soul: 
Arise, and come unto me.
For I am the soul of nature, 
who gives life to the universe.
From Me all things proceed, 
and unto Me all things must return; 
and before My face, beloved of gods and of men, 
let thine innermost divine self be
enfolded in the rapture of the infinite.
Most pagan cults such as Wicca, however, proclaim at least two gods - Goddess and God - and often more. If these gods are taken as real beings with supernatural powers, then this is a form of polytheism. It is not strictly compatible with Pantheism.
But many modern pagans don't take these deities literally. They see them rather as symbols of different aspects of the power and beauty of nature and the Universe. It is quite possible to be this kind of "symbolic" pagan and to be a pantheist at the same time.
A closely related belief is animism. Animism holds that every living thing, every animal, plant, tree, rock and stream, has its own spirit or divinity within itself that must be respected and revered. 
All pantheists would agree that each individual thing in nature has its own presence - a presence that, if we truly open our senses and hearts - is mysterious, awesome and commanding of deepest respect. However, where animists might see each divine spirit as in some way independent, the pantheist would see them as members of a larger unity.
Is Pantheism a philosophy or a religion?
Some people claim that Pantheism cannot be regarded as a religion. This is mainly because Pantheism in the West has been most clearly expressed by individual philosophers such as Giordano Bruno or Spinoza. And until recently it has never been an organized religion under its own name. The most numerous school of pantheists in the classical world, the Stoics, were a school of philosophers and did not have any religious ritual.
But like Buddhism, Pantheism is both a philosophy and a religion. It does deal with many of the issues that philosophy deals with. But it also deals with religious issues that reach far beyond typical philosophical discussion. It covers the emotional relationship between humans, nature and the universe. It entails a distinctive approach to ethics, stressing human rights and environmental concern. It has inspired religious ceremony and approaches to meditation and mysticism. And in recent years it has begin to organize as a religion. 
In the rest of this book we shall examine these elements of Pantheism as a religion.



2. The History of Pantheism 1: Oriental and Classical
Pantheism is a perennial heresy that has cropped up in every world religion. Less frequently, it has appeared as a philosophy or religion in its own right. But because the word pantheism was not invented until the early eighteenth century, it rarely appeared under its own name before modern times.
Pantheism has shown up in a number of different varieties, ranging from the simple reverence of the physical universe and nature just as they are, through beliefs in vast cosmic souls, to versions that believe that everything we see is only an illusion concealing a perfect mental unity.
In this chapter and the next we will trace the history of Pantheism in the major religious and philosophical traditions East and West.

Hinduism
Hinduism is not so much a single religion as a vast and diverse collection of related deities, practices and philosophies. Hindus have wide options to choose their own personal gods, or to choose a highly intellectual and philosophical approach. Pantheism runs like a golden thread through the philosophical strand of Hinduism.
The Upanishads, written around 600 BC, were the first philosophical explorations of Hinduism. They describe a cosmic unity linking ourselves and everything around us at mental and physical levels. That unity is called Brahman. In most of the individual Upanishads, Brahman is identical with the world soul, or Atman, and this in turn is identical with the soul of each individual.
As the Chandogya Upanishad expresses it: 
"Verily this whole world is Brahman. Tranquil, let one worship it as that from which he came forth, as that into which he will be dissolved, as that in which he breathes . . . One should reverence the thought 'I am the World All.'"
The Svetasvatara Upanishad puts it more poetically: 
Thou art the dark-blue bird and the green parrot with red eyes, 
Thou hast the lightning as thy child. Thou art the seasons and the seas."
And the Mundaka Upanishad:
Fire is His head; His eyes, the moon and sun; the regions of space, His ears; His voice, the revealed Vedas; Wind, His breath; His heart, the whole world. Out of His feet, the earth. Truly He is the Inner Soul of all.
Perhaps the favourite scripture of educated Hindus is the Bhagavad Gita, written probably in the first or second century AD. A chapter of the immense Indian epic the Mahabharata, it consists of the advice given by the god Vishnu to the hero Arjuna, who is about to fight an army containing his own relatives on the field of Kuruksetra. Vishnu, incarnated as the charioteer Krishna, explains that Arjuna should do his duty in battle. The human soul, which is part of the universal soul, is immortal - therefore no-one is truly slain. If people perform the duties appropriate to their station, without attachment to success or failure, then they cannot be stained by action. The rest of the poem provides the full philosophy underlying this insight.
Himself as in all beings
and all beings as in himself
sees he . . . who sees the same in all . . .
Whoso reveres me as abiding in all things,
adopting the belief in oneness,
though abiding in any possible condition,
that disciplined man abides in Me.
I am taste in water, son of Kunti,
I am light in the moon and sun.

Indian Buddhism
Buddhism began in Northern India in the sixth century BC. In origin it was not at all pantheistic. In the oldest scriptures, in the Pali language, Buddha teaches that life is essentially suffering. His doctrine is above all a method for avoiding suffering and rebirth into a world of suffering. To do so we must abandon desire and attachment to worldly things, and give up the illusion of having a self. If we achieve this, we can attain nirvana. Nirvana is seen not as some separate divine realm, but simply the permanent cessation of all craving and suffering.
But even in it original form Buddhism contained a germ that could later blossom into pantheistic forms. At the core of nirvana, Buddha saw an "unborn, unoriginated, unmade and unconditioned" ultimate reality. This is not called a god, but it is viewed with the deepest religious reverence and desire for unity, in the same way as pantheists view the Universe and nature. However, Buddha himself still saw the realm of nirvana as being reached by turning one's back on the world of the senses.
Buddha did not create a unified church like that of Catholic Christianity and Islam, and divisions soon began to emerge. Between 100 BC and 200 AD new schools grew up which were much less negative about life in this world. These schools became known collectively as the Mahayana or Great Vehicle.
The Mahayana developed the idea of the bodhisattva - the person capable of attaining nirvana in one lifetime, but who voluntarily holds back from this in order to help all others beings towards enlightenment.
Central to the Mahayana approach is the idea of emptiness or sunyatta. Buddha himself had taught how all things and all human minds were fleeting and impermanent, totally dependent on other things, having no separate or enduring reality. 
The Mahayana thinkers took this idea one step further. If nothing was permanent or separate, then in a sense all things had no persistent reality: everything was unreal, or empty. So we were, right here and now, in the midst of nirvana.
"There is no specifiable difference whatever between nirvana and the everyday world," wrote the great 2nd century Indian philosopher Nagarjuna.
"All things are the perfection of being, infinite perfection, unobscured, unconditioned, " says the Siksammuccaya. "All things are enlightenment . . . Buddha, you have reached the other shore without leaving this one." 

Chinese Buddhism
This shift in thinking paved the way for the more life-affirming, world-affirming and pantheistic versions of Buddhism that are found in China and Japan. There are so many different schools, teachers and scriptures that it is impossible here to highlight more than a few.
One of the most pantheistic is the Flower Garland school, known in China as Hua-Yen and in Japan as Kegon. This is based on a vast and extraordinary document known as the Avatamsaka Sutra, parts of which are known in Indian, but most only in Chinese versions. It dates from the first or second centuries AD. The sutra paints an infinite cosmos of untold oceans of worlds, and is filled with almost psychedelic imagery of light and jewels and flowers.
The Hua Yen school is fully pantheist. It views the Buddha as a cosmic deity, infinite, eternal, present everywhere, manifesting itself in myriads of forms: 
The Buddha's body fills the cosmos, appearing before all beings everywhere . . . Buddha has Reality for his body, pure as space itself. All the physical forms that appear he includes in this reality.
The school taught that ultimate reality and concrete things are identical. All things arise together simultaneously through mutual causation. All things depend on each other and penetrate each other, reflecting each other like jewels. "Every single pore contains everything," wrote the school's Chinese founder, Fa Tsang. Or, as the Avatamsaka Sutra puts it, "Even on the tip of a grain of sand, Buddhas as numerous as particles of dust exist."
Zen Buddhism
Probably the best known form of Buddhism on the West today is Zen. It shares Hua-Yen's pantheistic view of reality. "Everything the world contains, grass and trees, bricks and tiles, all creatures, all actions and activities, are nothing but manifestations of the law," said Japanese abbot Muso Kukoshi in 1345.
The following dialogue is reported of Liang Chai, founder of the Tsao Tung (Soto Zen) sect.
Monk: What is the mind of an ancient Buddha?
Liang Chai: Just a wall and broken tiles.
Monk: Do they know how to expound the Dharma [law or teaching]?
Liang Chai: They are always expounding the Dharma vigorously without interruption.
Because the Buddha nature is inherent in everything around us, no laborious rites, no arduous study or poring over the scriptures are needed to realize it. It can be understood in an instant, in a sudden enlightenment known in Japanese as satori. This insight can be brought about by any breaking of the boundaries of ordinary conceptual thinking - hence the apparently absurd mind-puzzles of the Zen koan, or the tales of teachers' physical assaults on pupils to try and shake them up.
Once satori has been achieved, Zen teaches a complete absorption in the ordinary tasks of everyday life by doing them with heightened awareness. "The Buddha Dharma has no room for practice and striving, " said I Hsuan, Chinese founder of the Lin Chi (Rinzai) sect. "You have only to be ordinary and unconcerned, wearing robes, taking food, stooling, passing water, and resting when you feel tired."

Taoism
Taoism was a major influence in making Chinese and later Japanese Buddhisms so much more positive about real life. 
Taoism is a strongly pantheistic religion. Its classic scripture, the Tao te Ching, was composed some time between the sixth and third centuries BC, traditionally by Li Erh, a retired custodian of imperial archives, also known as Lao Tan or Lao Tzu.
The Tao te Ching never speaks of a transcendent God or God. Its central focus is the Tao or Way, conceived of as a mysterious and numinous unity, infinite and eternal, underlying all things and sustaining them. But there is a profound religious reverence and respect for the Tao, and an acceptance of the need for human submission to the Tao. In this sense the Tao is discussed much in the same spirit as pantheism discusses the divinity of the Universe.
The Great Tao flows everywhere . . . 
All things depend on it for life, 
and it does not turn away from them.
One may think of it as the mother of all beneath Heaven.
We do not know its name, but we call it Tao . . . 
Deep and still, it seems to have existed forever.
The ideal of Taoism was to live in harmony with the Tao and to cultivate a simple and frugal life, avoiding unnecessary action: "Being one with nature, he [the sage] is in accord with the Tao."
Lao Tzu's most famous successor, Chuang Tzu, emphasized the pantheistic content of Taoism even more strongly. "Heaven and I were created together, and all things and I are one," he said.
When Tung Kuo Tzu asked Chuang Tzu where the Tao was, he replied that it was in the ant, the grass, the clay tile, even in excrement: "There is nowhere where it is not . . . There is not a single thing without Tao."
Chuang Tzu envisaged a kind of mystical union with the Tao, and a stoic acceptance of life and death: "He would follow anything, he would receive anything. To him everything was in destruction, everything was in construction. This is called tranquility in disturbance."

Ancient Greece and Rome
There was time when it seemed that pantheism could have achieved a similar prominence in the West as in the East. Between the third century BC and the fourth century AD three great philosophical systems vied for first rank among the educated elite. Of these, Stoicism was thoroughly pantheistic. Neo-Platonism was inclined to pantheism, but of a more idealistic and world-rejecting type. And pantheism was present even among the materialist Epicureans.
Probably the first identifiable pantheists in the West were the earliest of all Greek philosophers, from the Western, Ionian shore of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Thales of Miletus, one of the seven sages of antiquity, taught that the universe had a soul and was full of divinities. His Miletan contemporary, Anaximander, believed that all things were made from the apeiron or infinite substance:
"The infinite has no beginning, . . . but seems to be the beginning of other things, and to surround all things and guide all . . . And this is the divine, for it is immortal and indestructible."
But the clearest expression of this early pantheism came from Heraclitus, of Ephesus, not far up the coast from Miletus. Heraclitus was a notorious misanthrope and haughtily refused to take part in the politics or religious ceremonies of his native city. The story has it said that he eventually withdrew into the mountains to live off grass and herbs.
Heraclitus' writings have survived only in fragments which are often dense and obscure. He is perhaps best known for his doctrines that fire is the basic substance of all things, and that everything is in a process of ceaseless change: 
Eternity is a child at play, playing draughts . . . No-one can step twice into the same river, nor touch mortal substance twice in the same condition. By the speed of its change, it scatters and gathers again.
Heraclitus mocked conventional religious belief, and held that the cosmos was its own maker and creator:
The Cosmos was not made by gods nor men, but always was, and is, and ever shall be, ever living fire, igniting in measures and extinguishing in measures.
The first major movement of pantheism in the West, Stoicism, was profoundly influenced by Heraclitus. The school was founded in the early third century BC by Zeno of Citium in Cyprus. Zeno was probably an old man when he began teaching to small groups in the Athenian market place, in a painted colonnade known as the Stoa Poikile which gave the group its name.
Today Stoicism is best known for the uncomplaining acceptance of fate and suffering which it encouraged - but it had a fully developed philosophy covering logic, ethics and physics. Stoic science was wise before its time: it taught that the sun was a huge sphere of fire, bigger than the earth, and that the moon shone with reflected light.
The Stoics believed that the Universe itself was a divine being, a living thing endowed with soul and reason. All conventional gods were merely names for different powers of the cosmic God. Everything in the earth and heavens was the actual substance of God. 
The Stoics were materialists, and yet they saw this God as a being with intelligence and purpose, a "designing fire" pervading every part of the universe. "God is the common nature of things, also the force of fate and the necessity of future events," wrote Zeno's follower Chrysippus. "In addition he is fire, and the aether . . Also things in a natural state of flux and mobility, like water, earth, air, sun, moon and stars; and he is the all-embracing whole."
In time Stoicism became one of the leading schools of thought in the classical world. It viewed itself as a philosophy, not as a religion, and so never had organized rites or churches. 
Its most famous follower was Marcus Aurelius, who ruled the Roman empire from 161 to 180 AD. Marcus seems to have led an unhappy life, much of it spent on military campaigns in Eastern Europe. His wife Faustina was notoriously unfaithful, and his wastrel son Commodus became the worst Roman emperor since Nero and Caligula. Marcus' Meditations were written from day to day, often in response to the stress of supreme power or the fear of death in battle.
Marcus saw the Universe as "one living being, having one substance and soul." All things were interconnected with a sacred bond. Nature was in a process of constant change, using the universal substance to mould now a horse, then when the horse dies a tree, then a man.
It was crucial, Marcus believed, for us to realize that we were part of the universe and to be in harmony with it:
Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee . . . From thee are all things, to thee all things return . . . Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature and end your journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature which produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.
Another leading classical strand of thought was founded by Epicurus (341-270 BC). Epicureanism was a materialist philosophy. It taught that nothing existed except atoms and the void in which they moved. It did pay lip service to the existence of the classical gods, but described them as perfect beings living in a distant realm, with no interest in the earth and no impact on human affairs.
The Roman poet Lucretius gave the most thorough expression to Epicureanism in his poem On the Nature of Things, written in the first century BC. For Lucretius, as for the Stoics, even the spirit was made of a refined type of matter. But despite his scepticism about traditional religions, he had a deep pantheistic respect for the universe. He believed it was infinite in all directions and full of many inhabited worlds like our own.
He also had a religious love for nature, which he addresses as Venus:
You alone govern all things, and without you nothing emerges into the regions of light or becomes joyous and loveable . . . A divine pleasure and awe seizes me, that nature stands so clearly unveiled in every part.
The final flower of pantheism in the classical world was the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus (205-270) who lived and taught in Rome. He made an unlikely pantheist. He shunned public baths with their promiscuous nudity. "Plotinus seemed ashamed of being in a body," Porphyry, his favourite pupil, wrote in the biography of his master. Porphyry also wrote down all of his master's lectures and published them as The Enneads.
The time when Plotinus lived was chaotic, marked by famines, plague, wars and civil wars, and the near-collapse of the Roman empire. So perhaps it is not surprising that Plotinus was a world-rejecting type of pantheist who hoped that death would bring him into complete union with God.
He envisaged God as an impersonal Unity - infinite, eternal, with no spatial location, and even without thought, knowledge or movement. This idea is strikingly close to that of Taoism.
Plotinus imagined that the universe was made by God (or the One, as Plotinus called him) out of his own substance, by progressive emanation, somewhat like a balloon being blown up. "The One, perfect in seeking nothing, possessing nothing and needing nothing, overflows and creates a new reality by its superabundance," Plotinus taught.
The One emanated first into Intellect, a purely spiritual form, then into Soul, which in turn animated the physical world. Soul is present even in the lowest forms of existence, but these are so far removed from divinity that Plotinus sometimes calls matter evil.
This universe is a single living being, embracing all living beings within it, and possessing a single Soul that permeates all its parts . . . A sympathy pervades this single universe, and . . in a living and unified being there is no part so remote as not to be near, through the very nature that binds the living unity in sympathy.
Soul enlivens all things with its whole self and all Soul is present everywhere. . . And vast and diversified though this universe is, it is one by the power of soul and a god because of soul. The sun is also a god, because ensouled, and the other stars, and if we ourselves partake of the Divine, this is the cause.
Plotinus had a powerful influence on later Christian thought, and on Christian mysticism. Indeed he told Porphyry that his chief goal was to strive for mystical union with the One: "Often I have woken to myself out of the body, become detached from all else and entered into myself; and I have seen beauty of surpassing greatness, and have felt assured that then especially I belonged to the higher reality, engaged in the noblest life and identified with the Divine."
It is tempting to wonder what might have happened if Marcus Aurelius had encouraged Stoicism as the official religion of Rome. The cultural history of the following 1500 years might have turned out very differently. But the Roman emperors from Constantine on chose to favour and enforce Christianity as the state religion, and Pantheism was forced underground. For some 1200 years, from the fourth century until the end of the sixteenth, pantheism in the West appeared only as occasional sparks amid the great theistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.



3: The History of Pantheism 2: Monotheistic and modern.

The three major Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all believe in a similar kind of God. He is a God who existed from all eternity, who then created and now rules the universe. A god who has planned a vast cosmic drama that will end in the final judgement of all human souls and the winding up of the history of the earth as we know it. A God who extends far beyond space and time and is far greater than the universe.
Yet none of these religions believe in a totally distant and separate God. Even their central doctrines tend to be panentheistic (see page xx) - that is, they believe that God is active and present in some way in the universe, as well as extending beyond it.
But they also have statements that can be read in a more clearly pantheistic way. Again and again pantheists have arisen from within all three religions, sometimes disguising their views carefully enough to avoid persecution - sometimes being condemned as heretics.

Judaism: Old Testament, Talmud and Kabbalah
Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, is often described as being totally distant and unapproachable. Yet from the time of Moses' first encounter with the burning bush on Mount Sinai, God showed himself on earth. When he proclaimed his name as "I am who I am," he was asserting Himself to be Being itself. Isaiah (6:3), Jeremiah (23:24) all proclaim that God fills the whole earth with his presence.
Perhaps the most beautiful expression of this feeling is Psalm 139:
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? 
Or whither shall I fell from thy presence? 
If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! 
If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there! 
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. 

The Talmud, the body of Jewish commentaries and legal literature, was composed between the fourth and seventh centuries AD. It took these Old Testament hints much further. The rabbis of the Talmud developed the idea of God's presence on this earth, the Shechinah. God was seen as filling the world like the human soul fills the body. "There is no place where the Shechinah is not, not even a thorn bush," one rabbi declared. "He is as near to his creatures as the ear to the mouth," said another.
The Kabbalah, a system of esoteric Jewish thought developed between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, went even further. The Kabbalistic writers did not see God and creation as two separate and distinct things. Unifying everything was Ein Sof, the endless or infinite. This was seen as an impersonal, unnameable Being without qualities, thoughts or feelings, somewhat similar to the Tao. Ein Sof emanated, like the One of Plotinus, into successive layers, culminating in angels and finally all material things. But ultimately everything remained one, and nothing existed but the divine being.
"The divine essence is below as well as above, in heaven and earth. There is nothing else," wrote the author of the Zohar, Moses de Leon. "Do not say `This is a stone and not God.' God forbid!" wrote the sixteenth century Palestinian Kabbalist Moses Cordovero. "Rather, all existence is God, and the stone is a thing pervaded by divinity."

Islam and Sufism
In Islam pantheism and strong panentheism have been expressed most frequently in Sufism, the current of thought that stresses the possibility of mystical union with Allah.
Even in the Koran it is possible to find texts that support a form of pantheism or strong panentheism:
To Allah belongs the East and the West, and wheresoever you turn there is the face of Allah (Sura 2:115)
We created man, We know the very whisperings within him and we are closer to him than his jugular vein. (Sura 50:16
In Islam, it is a sin to claim that any other divinity existed beside Allah. Moreover, Allah is totally self-sufficient and needs nothing to complete him. This rigorous monotheism led some of the Sufis to the logical conclusion that nothing at all exists except Allah. Since Allah is within each one of us, it is possible to attain mystical union with Allah.
One Sufi who paid with his life for these beliefs was Al Hallaj (858-922 AD). He wrote of Allah:
You are the Only One in the loneliness of Eternity, You are the Only One to witness You . . . Your being far away is damnation, without You actually stepping aside; Your presence is Your knowledge, without Your moving at all . . . Nothing is above You that casts a shadow on You, nothing below that supports You, nothing before that limits You, and nothing behind that overtakes You.
But Al Hallaj overreached himself when he said "I am the truth" - ie "I am God." By this he meant, no doubt, that in his mystical states he became one with God: "You have manifested yourself so much that it seems to me that there is only You in me!" But the orthodox viewed statements like these as the deepest heresy. Al Hallaj was put on trial in Baghdad, and executed after horrific public tortures.
A different fate attended another near-pantheist, the Spanish-born theologian Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), who became feted as one of Islam's most eminent and beloved philosophers. Ibn Arabi spent decades travelling the Muslim world before settling in Damascus. 
The cosmos is his form [Ibn Arabi wrote]. The eye perceives naught but Him . . . Allah is essentially all things. He permeates through all beings created and originated . . . He who knows himself understands that his existence is not his own existence, but his existence is the existence of Allah . . . For He will not have anything to be other than He. Indeed, the other is He, and there is no otherness.
Moreover, Ibn Arabi said, every one of us was a facet of God's existence:
The knower and that which he knows are both one, and he who unites and that with which he unites are one, and seer and seen are one . . . Thou art not thou: thou art He. Thou never wast nor wilt be, Thou art neither ceasing to be nor still existing. Thou art He.

Christianity
The roots of Christian pantheism reach back to the New Testament itself. Of course, we can never be sure what Jesus himself believed, because he never wrote anything down, and what was eventually written contains a great deal of enigmatic and paradoxical material. But there are remarks in the New Testament that can be given a pantheistic interpretation.
When the Pharisees asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come, he replied: "The Kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say `Here it is' or `There it is', because the Kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:20).
The early apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, has Jesus saying: "The Kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you . . . Cleave a piece of wood, I am there. Raise up a stone, and you will find me there."
St Paul often claimed that the spirit of God dwelt in each one of us, and expressed a clearly pantheistic emotion when he addressed the Athenians. God made us, he said, so that we should seek him; "though he is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being," (Acts 17:27-28).
These few sayings have provided inspiration and biblical justification for pantheists and near pantheists in the Christian tradition throughout the ages, and they are especially influential today.
Most Christian mystics were panentheists rather than true pantheists: they believed not that the Universe was God, but that God was the Universe, and also greater than the Universe. He was part immanent in real things, part transcendent, above and beyond them.
True pantheism has rarely been recorded in Christianity, for the very good reason that until the seventeenth century it would have been punished as profound heresy. The few pantheists who did stick their necks out often paid for it with the burning of their books and often with excommunication and death. These included two thirteenth century theologians at the University of Paris, David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena. "It is manifest," wrote David, "that there is only one substance, not only of all bodies, but also of all souls, and that this substance is nothing else but God Himself. It is clear, then, that God and Matter and Mind are the same substance." The works of David and of Amalric were destroyed as heretical, and in 1210 nine of Amalric's followers were burned at the stake.
The Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) was perhaps the most pantheistic of Christian mystics. Eckhart taught that all things were contained in God, who was the being of every being, in the innermost part of each and every thing. By transcending our selves we could become one with God in mystic union. It took a while for his contemporaries to challenge the heresy of his position. He was highly regarded for most of his life, but at the age of 66 he was formally charged with heresy, and his "errors" were condemned in a papal bull of 1329.
God is infinite in his simplicity and simple in his infinity [Eckhart wrote]. Therefore he is everywhere and is everywhere complete . . . Only God flows into all things, their very essences. Nothing else flows into something else. God is in the innermost part of each and every thing, only in its innermost part.
All things are contained in the One, by virtue of the fact that it is one. for all multiplicity is one, and is one thing, and is in and through the One. . . The One is not distinct from all things. Therefore all things in the fullness of being are in the One by virtue of its indistinction and unity.

Post-Christian pantheism: from Bruno to Toland.
By the end of the sixteenth century science was beginning to emerge, still nervously, from the Church's fetters. Classical Greek and Roman authors were translated and printed, and made accessible to a wider public. Copernicus' theory that the earth moved around the sun had demoted the earth from its status as centre of the universe. 
But it was not until well after the Reformation that pantheists, atheists and other non-Christians dared to express their philosophy more openly in Europe. And in Catholic countries subject to the Inquisition it was still fraught with danger.
The first truly post-Christian pantheist in Europe, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) paid with his life for his intellectual courage. The young Bruno became a Dominican monk, but fled Italy under suspicion the heresy and murder. He spent most of his life roaming restlessly between England, France and Germany. 
He was, beyond all doubt, a heretic in the church's terms. Like Lucretius, Bruno believed that the universe was infinite, containing an infinity of worlds just like our own. For him the Universe was God, and God was the Universe. 
Every individual thing had something of the whole within itself. "There is one simple Divinity found in all things, once fecund nature, preserving mother of the universe in so far as she diversely communicates herself, casts her light into diverse subjects, and assumes various names. . . This Nature is none other than God in things . . . Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; Whence all of God is in all things . . . Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion. . . . To the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature."
In 1591 Bruno fatefully accepted a tutorial post in Venice to a young nobleman, Zuane Mocenigo. After a dispute, Mocenigo denounced Bruno to the Inquisition. Transferred to Rome, Bruno spent his last years in the Holy Office prison. On February 17, 1600, he was burned alive at the Campo dei Fiori.
The most influential of all early modern pantheists was the Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). Born into a family of refugees from Portugal, Spinoza was trained in Talmudic scholarship but soon developed an unconventional theology of his own. When this became known, he was summoned before a rabbinical court and even offered money to recant. When he refused, he was excommunicated. He earned a humble living as a lens-grinder, and died of consumption in 1674.
Spinoza's chief work, the Ethics, is a difficult and abstract book. Although Spinoza uses the word God very often in the phrase deus sive nature - God or nature - there is no mention of nature's beauty. But there is a totally uncompromising pantheism. All individual things were only different ways in which God's character was expressed: 
"Nothing exists but God" says Spinoza. "God is one, that is, only one substance can be granted to exist in the universe . . . Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived."
True to its title, the Ethics offers a moral code in which the chief goal of human life is knowledge of God. For Spinoza this knowledge brought a kind of Buddhist or Stoical conquest of pain and suffering: knowing that everything that happens is a necessary part of God would help us to accept our lives joyously.
Throughout its long history up till the end of the seventeenth century, pantheism never had its own characteristic name. It was known as Stoicism, or the Brunian philosophy, or Spinozism. It was not until the early eighteenth century that the words pantheist and pantheism came into use.
The man credited with coining the word pantheist was the Irish writer John Toland (1670-1721). Toland is best known for his 1696 book Christianity not Mysterious, which argues that theology is perfectly understandable to reason, without the need for scriptural revelation. The book seems mild today: but it was condemned by the Grand Jury of Middlesex and burned by the public hangman in Dublin.
Toland had blighted his career for life, and never lived this episode down. From then on he led an insecure life mainly as a hack writer of political tracts. The fall-out also taught him to keep as a careful secret the pantheistic beliefs he had probably nurtured since the early 1690s. In fact it was not until 1720, when he was living in obscure poverty with nothing more to lose, that he stated his beliefs openly in the Pantheistikon.
Toland was the first modern pantheist to combine a religious reverence for the Universe, with respect for science, and a belief that everything is made of matter. A pantheist, he wrote to the German philosopher Leibniz, was one of those persons "who believe in no other eternal being but the universe." When asked for a brief statement of his credo, Toland replied, "The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country and all men are my family."
Toland's Pantheistikon broke new ground in another way. It was the first call for any kind of organization for celebrating Pantheism. Toland dreamed of a network of Pantheist gentleman's clubs, whose members would meet for dinner, games and philosophical debate. Each meeting would begin with a short liturgy, including recital of a pantheist credo:
All things in the world are One, and One in all things. What is all in all things is God, and God is eternal, has not been created, and will never die.
Living in an age of continued intolerance, Toland suggested that Pantheists would be wise to remain secret. The Pantheistikon was published secretively, written in Latin, and distributed only to a few close friends. Probably Toland never actually set up the kind of pantheist club he dreamed of, though an undocumented tradition has him as the founder of a Druid order, the Universal Bond. He died in Putney in 1721.

The pantheistic nineteenth century
The works of Bruno, Spinoza and Toland were slow in spreading at first. Spinoza's work was criticized by European philosophers of the enlightenment, and dismissed as atheism by Christians. 
But Spinoza began to gain a wider following in the later eighteenth century, beginning in Germany, spreading to England and from there to America. 
Pantheism was the religious heart of the Romantic poets.
Germany's greatest poet, Goethe (1749-1832) was strongly influenced by Bruno and Spinoza. Even as a boy of seven he worshipped nature, and built a secret altar in his room, made of minerals and other natural objects and candles. "Everything which exists," he wrote as a student, "necessarily pertains to the existence of God, because God is the one Being whose existence includes all things."
What kind of God would thrust only from outside,
letting the cosmos circle round his finger?
He likes to drive the world from inside,
harbours the world in Himself, Himself in the world,
so all that lives and weaves and is in Him
never wants for his power or his spirit.
The German idealist philosophers Schelling and Hegel (1770-1831) were pantheists. Hegel's concept of God has been very influential on later theology: he saw God not as a distant creator figure or judging father. Rather God was the World Spirit, clothing himself in matter and energy. The whole of history was God's self development, embodied in heroic individuals like Napoleon and in nations like Germany. "What God creates he himself is . . . God is manifestation of his own self."
In England the greatest Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century were pantheists, at least for a time in their lives.
"God only acts and is," wrote William Blake (1757-1827) "through existing beings and men." Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is better known as an atheist, but even in his Essay on Atheism, he attacks only the idea of a creator God, not the pantheistic idea of a world spirit: "There is no God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-extensive with the Universe remains unshaken."
For much of his later life, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1770-1850) accepted Trinitarian Christianity, he but dallied with pantheism in poems like The Aeolian Harp and Frost at Midnight. In the latter he hopes that his child will wander through lakes and mountains, seeing in them:
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
The best known of the English pantheistic poets was Wordsworth (1770-1850) and in his youth this tendency was strong. In the first version of the Prelude, written in 1799 when he was as 29, he writes of "that spirit of religious love in which I walked with Nature," a love so intense that it leaves little room for a separate God:
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of Nature, that connect him with the world.
Emphatically such a being lives
An inmate of this active universe . . . 
I felt the sentiment of being spread
O'er all that moves, and all that seemeth still . . . 
for in all things
I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.
Pantheism's fascination for poets persisted throughout the nineteenth century. "Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet," wrote Alfred Tennyson in The Higher Pantheism. "All is Thou and in Thee." Oscar Wilde's poem, Panthea, is strongly pantheistic.
Across the Atlantic Walt Whitman (1819-1892) America's best loved poet, and her favourite essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1822) were both pantheists. Whitman wrote:
I hear and behold God in every object. . . 
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty four,
and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass.
Emerson's 1836 Essay on Nature breathes a powerful pantheism of nature:
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life - no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing! I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. [Nature, 1836].
In Germany pantheism was still going strong right up to the first World War. It surfaced in Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (1865), which ends with Isolde's love-death merging into the divine unity:
In the cosmic spirit's
wafting unity
to drown -
to sink down -
unconscious -
highest ecstasy.
And in Gustav Mahler's Song of the Earth (1908):
Oh beauty, oh earth, drunk with eternal love and life.
All over everywhere
the blessed earth blossoms in spring
and greens again.
Everywhere and forever, 
the distances shine with blue haze
Forever, forever.
The early years of the twentieth century saw the foundation of the first pantheist movement in the modern world, by the great German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Haeckel's pantheism was close to that of Toland and Lucretius. He saw God as identical with the physical universe, and believed we should relate to it through science, art and religion. His own feelings for the aesthetics of natural form was powerfully expressed in beautiful drawings of sea creatures, corals and plankton, published in his book Art Forms in Nature.
In 1906 Haeckel launched the Monist League to embody and spread these ideas. At its peak the League had some 6,000 members in German speaking countries. Unfortunately Haeckel added his own brutal political ideas on race and eugenics to the Monist League agenda.
His love for nature and his profound respect for evolution led him to monstrous ethical conclusions, very distant from any other form of pantheism before or since. He believed that humans should actually help evolution along in the work of natural selection, by killing unfit children and even sickly adults, to prevent them spreading their genes. He also recommended the execution of all serious criminals. There is little doubt that Haeckel's views, and the appearance of scientific backing he gave them, influenced German racism and eugenics, and found realization in the Nazi policy of "euthanasia" for the mentally unfit.
However, after they won power the Nazis did not show any favour to the Monist League. They were more interested in Nordic paganism than in pantheism, and the League was disbanded in 1933.

Retreat in the twentieth century
Pantheist ideas were so dominant in the nineteenth century that some writers of the time saw it as the culmination of all religious development until then, and predicted the triumph of pantheism in the following century. 
But the optimism was premature. Pantheism was too positive and too optimistic a faith for the first half of the disastrous twentieth century. 
Nevertheless some very eminent pantheists maintained their views throughout these difficult times. 
The United States' greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), was a strong pantheist. He claimed that Nature was the source of his inspiration, and in his building he followed the principles of nature. "I believe in God," he wrote, "only I spell it Nature":
God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.
One of the greatest US poets of the twentieth century, Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) held very similar pantheist beliefs. Jeffers' poems are steeped in nature, seen just as she is, elemental, beautiful yet often brutal. His pantheism was very close indeed to that of John Toland, and identical with that of today's World Pantheist Movement:
I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole . . . This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions - the world of spirits.
The greatest English novelist of this century, D. H. Lawrence, was a pantheist. He penned, on the fly-leaf of a book about Fra Angelico, this concise statement of his beliefs, which was privately published in 1935 as one of the shortest books of all time - a single paragraph:
This is how I "save my soul" by accomplishing a pure relationship between me and another person, me and other people . . . me and the animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me and the skies and sun and stars, me and the moon; an infinity of pure relationships . . . that makes our eternity for each one of us . . . This, if we knew it, is our life and our eternity; the subtle, perfected relation between me and my whole circumbient [sic] universe.
Finally, the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a pantheist. Of course Einstein is best known for his theory of relativity, but he frequently pronounced on political and ethical questions.
Einstein made it plain that he did not believe in any kind of personal human-like God who would work miracles and answer paryers in defiance of the laws of nature, and reward and punish us in the afterlife.
For Einstein God was the order and harmony and law of the universe itself, and science was in that sense a religious quest.
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
But people like Einstein, Lloyd Wright and Lawrence, eminent though they were, were isolated sparks in the dark years from 1914 to the 1950s. They did not make up a self aware movement. It was not till the last half of the twentieth century that pantheism began to regain some of its nineteenth century promise, as we shall explore in the concluding chapter.



4. Core beliefs I: The Divine Universe.
Two core beliefs lie at the heart of pantheism. All pantheists believe that the Universe is divine, or that there is no distinction or separation between the Universe and God. And they believe that the Universe is in the deepest sense a unified whole of which all individual things are interdependent parts.
For pantheists there is no part of God or the divinity held in reserve, somewhere beyond the edge of time and space. God did not precede the Universe. God does not extend outside the Universe. God is not greater than the Universe. Some scientists speculate that there may be other universes beyond the one we can see with our telescopes - but if so these would still be part of the bigger Universe or Omniverse, the totality of everything that exists.

Why pantheists describe the universe as divine.
Some pantheists have tried to prove that God and the Universe are identical through logical argument. Spinoza used complicated scholastic definitions to try to prove that nothing except God could possibly exist. But Spinoza believed that God possessed infinite attributes beyond mind and space and time, and so strictly he did not believe that God and the Universe were identical.
There are simpler proofs of the central pantheist belief. According to theists, before the Creation nothing existed except God. Therefore the only thing out of which he could make creation was his own substance. By this argument the Universe would be, or would at least part of, God's substance. 
Another proof starts with the theological definition, provided by St Anselm of Canterbury, that God is "that being than whom no greater can be conceived." Now if we define the Universe as the totality of everything that exists, then it is impossible to conceive of anything greater than the Universe. So the Universe itself must be Anselm's greatest being, and therefore the Universe is God or the true "supreme being."
Another approach to grounding the central pantheist belief in the divinity of the Universe is by comparing its real powers with the powers that people think God possesses.
Throughout the ages, sceptics have suggested that the supposed powers of the gods were myths, based on the real powers of nature. So Zeus or Thor embodied the power of storms. Apollo symbolized the power of the sun, Neptune that of the sea, and so on.
Pantheists take this argument further and suggest that the main characteristics of the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are based on nature and the Universe. 
God is said to be the creator: overwhelmingly powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent, infinite and eternal. Pantheists would argue that the Universe itself possesses most of these qualities usually attributed to God. It is indeed the only thing we know to possess these qualities, and our only source of experience of these qualities.
The Universe is our creator. We are made of star stuff: our hydrogen and helium emerged in the first few minutes after the big bang, the rest of our elements were forged by fusion inside stars, and strewn across space in novae and supernovae. Finally they were regathered in the solar system allowing life to evolve.
The Universe can also destroy us. In past mass extinctions, it has wiped out most life on earth through large meteor collisions or nearby supernovae, and it could do so again in the future. The power of nature can destroy us through earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storms and floods, epidemics.
So in a very real sense the Universe and Nature are, as far as we are concerned, overwhelmingly powerful.
The Universe is omnipresent because it is filled with energy spreading from every part to every other part. Radiation of various types, mostly in the form of photons, reaches us from every corner of the universe and from the deepest reaches of time past - we are constantly bathed in microwave radiation from the earliest moments of the universe's existence.
In the human sense, the Universe is not all-knowing. Yet every part of it is, in a sense, "aware" of every other through the exchange of photons conveying messages about the state of even the most distant regions. 
The universe our telescopes can detect does not appear to be infinite. What we can see today covers a diameter of no more than 20-30 billion light years. Nor is the universe as far as we know eternal - cosmologists estimate it to be between 10 and 15 billion years old. But from our tiny human perspective, these times and distances are virtually eternal and infinite. 
The most prevalent modern hypothesis of cosmic origins, the inflation theory of Allan Guth and Andrei Linde, predicts that our local universe is just one of a foam of universes bubbling into existence from a dense energy field. The totality of all these universes, the greater Universe, or Multiverse, or Omniverse, would in fact be truly infinite and eternal.

The Universe as eternal, or as its own creator
Humans are naturally impelled to seek for the causes of everything. That urge explains a large part of our success as a species, and has driven us to investigate links and to develop new technologies. 
This same urge has led people to seek for the cause of the whole Universe. Theists like Thomas Aquinas have argued that we see from experience that nothing exists without a cause. Since it is unacceptable for a chain of causes to be infinite, the Universe itself must have a first cause. This has been one of the main arguments for the existence of a creator God.
Sceptics have always challenged this argument. Since we have no problems imagining an infinite future, it is hard to see any good reason why the chain of causes in the past should not be infinite.
The argument for a creator God has a serious logical flaw. It assumes that everything requires a cause, and yet theists accept that one thing does exist without a cause: God Himself. As sceptics have pointed out, this tends to undermine the basic premise of the argument. If one thing can be self-existing, why can this one thing not be the Universe itself?
When we say something has a cause, we mean that something preceded it which brought it about - cause precedes effect. But by definition the Universe includes all time and space, and no time could have preceded it. It seems unreasonable to ask for the cause of a totality that includes all space and all time.
Moreover, the idea of a creator God does not really answer the question of cause, but simply pushes it back one level. The question of the cause of God's own existence remains unanswered, yet theists draw a boundary here to our urge to question causes.
As the Scottish philosopher David Hume remarked:
If I am still to remain in utter ignorance of causes . . . I shall never esteem it any advantage to shove off for a moment a difficulty which . . must immediately, in its full force, recur upon me. . . . It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that divinity, the better.
But if the Universe had no external creator, then where did it come from?
One possibility is that the universe "created" itself, or rather emerged spontaneously, out of virtually nothing. Several modern theories of cosmology assume that the universe began as a fluctuation in a quantum vacuum, or arose from an energy field empty of matter. 
Another possibility is that it existed eternally and had no beginning. This does not appear to be true of our own local universe, but it could be true of the Multiverse, the bubbling foam of universes that several theories of cosmology believe to exist.
British cosmologist Stephen Hawking has suggested that space-time might be curved back on itself like the surface of a sphere, and like a sphere it may have no beginning or end. "The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside it," he writes in A Brief History of Time. "It would just BE . . . What place, then, for a creator?"

Evolution as the great designer
One of the most powerful arguments for the existence of God has been the argument from design: if nature has the appearance of careful design, then there must have been a designer. But pantheists do not accept the idea of a designer separate from the universe. They believe that the universe designed itself through evolution.
The design argument was classically put by English clergyman William Paley in 1802. Suppose, said Paley, that we found a watch lying on the ground, in perfect working order, with all its parts moulded and assembled to tell the time of day. We would immediately assume that the watch had a designer. Since nature shows evidence of very complex and beautiful design, it follows, Paley argued, that the Universe must have a maker and designer.
This mechanism being observed, the inference . . . is inevitable that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.
The Scottish sceptic philosopher David Hume had already provided a telling answer to the design argument in his Dialogues on Natural Religion, published in 1776. Hume showed how apparent design could arise purely by chance in a universe of countless particles in motion. Given an infinite length of time, the particles would eventually hit on every possible combination. And some of those combinations would be forms of order which, once hit upon, would perpetuate themselves for a very long time.
Two centuries later we have more knowledge and better theories to flesh out what Hume claimed. We know how gravity gathers matter together into galaxies and then into stars that begin burning. We know how solar systems can form from rotating clouds of dust. We do not know exactly how life originated, but we do have a number of plausible theories. We know that organic molecules exist even in space. We know the physics and chemistry of how DNA reproduces itself and makes the vast diversity of organisms on this planet.
The science of self-organization is showing how inanimate matter can form quite spontaneously into regular patterns. No-one imagines that a quartz crystal requires a designer: it is the inevitable result of the way in which the atoms that make it up behave. Sand piles arrange themselves into mounds with very specific angles of slope, not because there is an invisible sandpile designer at work, but simply because of gravity and the shape and weight of the grains.
Above all, in the theory of evolution, we have a brilliantly successful scientific explanation of how design emerges in the most complex things: living creatures. 
Evolution is a wonderful mechanism for perfecting design, and like any good designer, it has both creativity and rigorous discipline. Its main sources of creativity for new variations are random mutations and sexual recombinations of genes. Its disciplined weeding out of poor design is done by the environment. Organisms that are best adapted to the environment thrive better and produce more offspring. Those that are less well adapted die out.
For pantheists evolution is a universal force that works even on non-living things. From the very first instant of our universe, every individual thing has existed in the midst of other things, and has had to adapt to them. Evolution is at work even in the realms of mind and of society. Ideas, scientific theories, technologies and products are tested against each other and the most effective survive.

Was the whole universe designed so that we should evolve?
The modern form of the design argument is much more sophisticated and challenging than Paley's. It is based on the idea that, if we are here to observe it, the whole universe must be structured in such a way that conscious intelligent beings would evolve. This argument is known as the Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
In its weak form the argument simply states the obvious: if the universe were not structured in that way, then there would be no-one around to observe it. But in its strong form the Anthropic Cosmological Principle suggests a lot more. It claims that the universe shows sign of having been deliberately designed with the goal of creating conscious observers like us.
The principle has some arresting evidence to back it. For example, if the mass of the neutrino had been just 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of one per cent heavier, gravity would have made the universe recollapse before life had time to evolve. There are many other constants which seem to be incredibly finely-tuned to make life possible.
But even the strong form of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle can't prove that conscious beings are the purpose for which the universe was designed. If this was so, it's not clear why humans have been planned to evolve on a planet that is periodically hit by meteorites big enough to wipe out a large proportion of all species on earth.
And if the universe is tuned so that consciousness can emerge and evolve, this implies that intelligent life has probably emerged on countless billions of other planets - so humans would have no special status in the design.
Those who believe the universe designed itself have several possible answers to the strong Anthropic Cosmological Principle. One is that the basic physical constants had to turn out one way or another, and our particular arrangement is no less likely than any of the others. It only seems miraculous from our human-centred viewpoint, just as a lucky spin on the roulette table might seem to the winner like the hand of destiny.
The inflation theory assumes that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes - each one of which may have slightly different initial conditions and laws of physics. Given so many, all permutations are possible, and our own universe is just one of them. There would be many others where life was not possible.
Cosmologist Lee Smolin suggests that black holes spew matter into new dimensions, creating new universes with slightly different laws to ours. Over time a kind of evolution would operate and favour the kind of universe that produces black holes. This just happens to be the same kind of universe that allows stars to exist for long periods of time. In other words, our kind of universe is likely to be the most common.

The Universe has the emotional impact of a God or divinity.
Another approach to showing how the Universe can be considered divine is to look at the emotions it awakes in us, and compare these with the feelings that believers have towards a personal God.
In 1917 the German theologian Rudolf Otto wrote his classic work The Idea of the Holy. Based on comparative study of religions East and West, Otto tried to establish exactly what qualities people felt were possessed by things seen as divine - whether these were the personal creator Gods of Western religions, or impersonal things like the Tao, Brahman or nirvana in the East.
Otto decided that above all divinity was a mysterium tremendum et fascinans - an awesome yet fascinating mystery. The three key elements were mystery, awesome power, and capacity to fascinate. Pantheists believe that the Universe itself is the only entity we know of that possesses these qualities, and therefore has the highest claim to be considered as divine.
Mystery is the feeling that the divinity is something wholly other, something extraordinary and incomprehensible, producing blank wonder and astonishment in us. The universe has the capacity to do this like nothing else in our experience. Earlier generations, as they gazed at the starry heavens on a clear night, could have had some sense of this, though the universe was thought of as actually very small, not much bigger than the solar system.
But the twentieth century is the first to have the privilege of knowing the vast scope of the universe, from the smallest sub-atomic particles to the furthest quasars and clusters of infant galaxies. Today we have the priceless asset of the Hubble Space Telescope which reveals exploding stars, colliding galaxies, and luminous gas clouds birthing solar systems like our own.
Although science is continually discovering more about the inner workings of all this, what it can never do is take away our astonishment that all this stupendous immensity exists. It is all so very distant from our everyday experience that it will never cease to leave people breathless with wonder and excitement. The mystery of the ultimate origins of our universe, before the Big Bang, before the first tiny fraction of a nanosecond, may well remain forever unsolved. And the most basic mystery of all: why does anything exist? is inherently unanswerable.
Newton thought that matter was made up of hard little particles moving around predictably as they bumped into each other. Modern science has discovered that matter is far stranger and more mysterious. Its picture of reality is one that common sense cannot grasp at all however hard it tries.
The theory of relativity teaches that as we approach the speed of light, time lengthens, length shortens, and mass increases. Quantum mechanics tells us that the ultimate particles of light, photons, are not distinct particles in one place but are fuzzy waves of probability smeared out in space. And yet whenever we put up apparatus to detect them they only ever show up as particles, pin-point dots on a detector screen. They can behave both as waves and as particles, yet humans cannot imagine anything that could be both.
All this goes so much against everyday experience and everyday human ways of understanding things, that quantum mechanics is a profound mystery even to physicists working in the field. As Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman remarked to his students: "Do not keep saying to yourself `But how can it be like that?' because you will get into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."
Otto's second aspect of divinity is the dread it inspires: the sense of an overwhelming and uncontrollable power that can transfix anyone who comes near it. A power that instills a sense of its absolute superiority, and makes us feel our personal submission to it and submergence in it.
No-one has ever seen the power of the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and whenever this power is written or spoken about it is described in terms of the power of nature: when God smites people, he does so with thunderbolts, earthquakes, plagues and other natural means.
In fact pantheists believe that claims about God's awesome power are simply symbolic expressions of the real power of nature and the universe. No-one who has witnessed or seen films of lightning, volcanic eruptions or arching solar flares can be other than awestruck at the terrifying levels of power involved. The sun alone is so powerful that we cannot gaze at it directly even for more than a few seconds without being blinded. 
Jews, Christians and Muslims see all these things as expressions of the power of God. Pantheists see them as expressions of the power of Nature herself, and recognizing that power, acknowledge that Nature should be regarded as divine.
The final quality of divinity that Otto identified is its beauty and power to fascinate and inspire love. "The believer," Otto wrote, "feels a something which captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often to the pitch of dizzying intoxication."
Here too pantheists would claim - and most non-pantheists would acknowledge - that these same feelings can be inspired by the beauty of nature. A forest or a pounding ocean, scudding clouds, still pools or leaves falling on an autumn day can inspire the deepest feelings of love, peace and belonging.
Wordsworth expresses these feelings intensely in his 1799 Prelude:
among the hills I sate,
Alone upon some jutting eminence
At the first hour of morning, when the vale
Lay quiet in utter solitude . . . 
Oft in those moments such a holy calm
Did overspread my soul that I forgot
The agency of sight.
Again, images from the Hubble Space Telescope have shown us the indescribable beauty of the universe, from the radiance of whirlpool galaxies, to the diaphanous veils of glowing dust clouds, to the exotic blossoms of planetary nebulae.

What kind of a God is the pantheist God?
The pantheist God is quite different from the God of Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Indeed many pantheists prefer to avoid using the word God at all, because it brings up in most listeners' minds ideas of the particular God they have read about in the Bible or Koran or were taught about as children. Other pantheists, however, see the word God as simply a name for the highest object of reverence, and believe they have as much right to use it as others.
The pantheist divinity is the existing Universe. It is not a personal God. It is not a loving father, conscious of and caring for each one of us. It is simply the Reality of Being, just as it is. It is beyond personality, in any human sense. It cannot really love us, but it cannot hate us either. As Spinoza wrote in his Ethics, 
"God is without passions, neither is he affected by any emotion of pleasure or pain . . . Strictly speaking, God does not love anyone . . . He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return."
To some people this may seem like a cold unwelcoming sort of God, a hard God to love. The best way to answer this is to think of some part of nature that you love - a particular forest, say. Do you expect the forest to love you back? Does it worry you that the forest cannot love you back? Does it make you love the forest any the less?
People who do like to think in terms of love, can think about love assessed by deeds rather than by possession of emotions, and reflect that the universe has provided us all with an indescribably beautiful home and a consciousness with which to appreciate it. True, it could wipe us out tomorrow in a hurricane or a meteor strike - but then so could the "loving" God of theist religion. Natural disasters are easier to accept if you do not imagine there is a personal God sending them to destroy the innocent and the guilty alike, or creating a world in which such things can happen.
The pantheist divinity is not a good God. It is neither good nor evil. The human categories of good and evil do not apply. It simply is. Again, this conception is easier to square with reality than the idea of an omnipotent and perfectly good God, who allows or even causes events that in human terms would be seen as evil, such as devastating hurricanes, floods, epidemics claiming millions of lives. 
The question why God would allow pain and evil to exist is one of the most difficult of all for theists to answer. Pantheists do not have to answer it: the Universe is what it is.
The pantheist divinity is not a judging God. It will not assess each one of us at the end of our lives, and assign each of us to everlasting bliss or agony. It is not listening to our every breath and thought, marking them down in our account to be held for or against us after our death. For many pantheists, even conscientious pantheists who strive to do good in their lives, the freedom from a judging God inside your brain is a liberating experience. There is no need to be self-conscious all the time, aware of how your every thought might be assessed by a vigilant listener who has the power to punish you for all eternity.
The divinity of pantheism is not, in the normal human sense of the word, conscious. Some pantheists, such as the Stoics or Hegel and many modern pagans, have believed that the universe does have some kind of collective mind or soul and sense of purpose.
Naturalistic or scientific pantheism, however, does not believe there is anything resembling a soul or spirit to the universe. There are no galactic neurones, no stellar databanks thinking collective thoughts. But we humans are part of the universe. We are conscious and aware of the universe. So in this sense the universe has consciousness within it.
The pantheist divinity has a number of character traits that are quite different from the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is in a state of permanent change and motion, at every level from the restless flitting of electronsand the lightspeed motion of photons, to the slow rotation of galaxies over aeons. 
Everything is in a state of flux, a flux that can at times be creative, and at times destructive. The destruction is an essential part of the creation. The elements for life were made available only by stars blowing off part of their substance as supernovae. The rise of the mammals was made possible only by the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The divine unity.
So far I have been referring to the pantheist divinity as an "It". But in fact all individual things are part of it. We are not set over against it in distinction from it. We have a share in the divinity. This is what modern pagans mean when they say: "Thou art God." Not that each one of us is a separate little god in our own right, with supernatural powers and demanding to be worshipped, but that we are all part of the same universal divinity.
Each one of us is just as much part of the divinity as a venerable old tree or a bright star. The pantheist God is the community of all beings. It is not a He, or a She, or an It. It is a "We."
The major Western religions are all monotheistic. They all insist on the unity of God (though in the Christian case this unity has also to accommodate the Trinity).
Pantheists too are in a sense monotheistic. Their one divinity is the universe, and they have a profound belief in the unity of all things in nature and the universe. Indeed the pantheist belief in unity is in a sense stronger that the theistic one. Theists believe that God and the Universe are separate things. For pantheists there is only one all-embracing Reality: the Universe.
Some pantheists have simply asserted this unity. Others like Spinoza have tried to prove it logically. But the unity of the universe and nature is not just a feeling or an abstract belief: it has a solid basis in science.
Everything in our universe shares a common origin. The standard big bang cosmology holds that the whole universe originated as a microscopic bubble no more than one hundredth of a millimetre across. Thus everything that makes up the universe of today was once in the most intimate contact. As Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote in his comic short story All at One Point: "Every point of each of us coincided with every point of each of the others."
But unity is not just based on a shared history. It continues throughout the present. Every single particle, every star, every being in the universe is linked by the force of gravity. A quasar on the edge of the observable universe has some effect, however small, on each of our bodies.
The whole universe is a tightly woven mesh of electromagnetic radiation. Everything emits photons of energy which race in all directions. Everything is made of the same sub-atomic constituents, held together by the same forces. And everything transmutes into everything else. The day before yesterday we were atoms in the heart of a burning star, yesterday we were dust in a collapsing proto-star, today we are living humans, tomorrow we may be soil, beetles, grass, trees, birds.
Some idealist pantheists, like Parmenides from Elea in Southern Italy, or the authors of the Upanishads, have taken the idea of unity to extremes, and suggest that nothing really exists except the divine unity. All the everyday things we see around us, they suggest, are really just illusions.
But most modern pantheists are realists. They accept the reality that individual things exist independently of our minds: tables, cats, moons and so on. Although nothing is exactly the same even from one moment to the next, individual things do have a temporary existence, which can be very long in human terms.
Such is the creativity of matter that every single thing is different from every other. No two people are alike, no two clouds are alike, no two pebbles on the beach are identical. Without individuality, the divine unity would be utterly drab and could have no more beauty that an empty room.
Yet all these individual things are part of the same universe. Just as, on the ocean, every wave is different and partly separate, yet every wave remains part of the same ocean.

The place of humans in the divine unity
People who object to pantheism are often concerned that it seems to give human an insignificant role in the cosmos.
Pantheists freely accept that we are physically tiny in the scale of the cosmos, as indeed everyone must accept. Far gone are the days when we believed the earth to be the centre of the universe. Our sun is just one of over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which in turn is just one of perhaps 30 billion galaxies in the visible universe.
However, this does not mean that we are insignificant. In size terms we are no more and no less insignificant than anything else in the universe. Every individual thing from a mouse to a mammoth or even a star is dwarfed by the immensity of the whole - but the whole is made up of its parts. 
We humans are not made insignificant by the size of the universe, any more than each of us is made insignificant by the size of the earth or the size of the world population.
We are, with our brains and our societies and technologies, the most complex beings we know of so far. We are conscious observers of the universe. Even if the universe as a whole possesses no consciousness, we do. In this sense we can be said to be a part of the consciousness of the universe, or of its self-consciousness. 
And though our lives have no external purpose, we can give them the noble purpose of observing and understanding and loving the universe and nature, and of preserving nature on our planet, and of creating societies where all humans can have dignity and the opportunity for fulfillment.
Most pantheists see such a self-chosen purpose as far preferable to the purpose humans have in the major Western religions. Even though, in Judaism and Christianity, humans are seen as central to the entire universe, the human role is not a distinguished one. Since God is seen as perfect and self-sufficient, it is not at all clear why God needed to create humans, or what purpose they serve to Him. Our role on earth seems to be to prove to God that we obey his commands and that we believe in him and worship him. If we fail in one short lifetime we will be punished for all of eternity. And the role of the earth, indeed of the whole vast cosmos, is simply to serve as the backdrop for this brief and tiny drama.

Unity means that union is possible
If all things are, in a fundamental sense, one, then we humans are not distinct from other things in the universe. We are not superior or set apart. We share a common origin, a common history, a common substance with everything else in nature and the universe. Our very atoms are recycled continually with our surroundings. Every single breath we take unites us with everything else on earth. 
Of course we often imagine that we are separate. We can feel isolated, alone, threatened or anxious in the face of nature and the universe.
But with only a small effort of thought, we can realize that our isolation is only partial. Our deepest selves can never be separated from the divine unity. We are never alone, every one of us shares in the unity. We are all part of the unity at all times. It is with us and we with it, inseparably, forever.
The realization of unity, the achievement of union, is the basis for pantheist meditation and mysticism which we shall examine in chapter seven.



5. Core Beliefs II: Sacred Nature
Deep reverence for nature is the second central strand of pantheism. If the whole universe may be seen as the highest divinity, nature is its closest, most precious and most beloved expression.
Pantheists believe that Nature is our mother, our security, our peace, our paradise, our past and our future. Nature made each one of us. As long as we live we remain part of nature and at our death each one of us will be reabsorbed into nature. 
These beliefs have an ancient pedigree within pantheism. Lao Tzu taught that we should live in harmony with nature, live frugally and avoid overconsumption. The Stoics taught the same. "The chief good is life according to Nature," wrote the school's founder, Zeno of Citium.
"Nature," wrote Giordano Bruno, "is none other than God in things." Spinoza usually referred to God as deus sive natura - God or nature. 
Ultimately the pantheist reverence for nature goes even further back, to the earliest stages of our existence as a species, and may be rooted in our very genes.

Hunter-gatherer religion: humans as part of nature
The human attitude to nature has changed radically during our history as a species, from reverence for nature, to mastery over nature, and back to reverence again.
We began our career as hunter-gatherers, living by collecting wild plants and roots, hunting and fishing. As yet we did not have the numbers, nor the technologies, to destroy or to transform nature, and so we lived as an integral part of nature, learning to make the most of what nature freely offered.
Hunter-gatherer societies have a deep religious respect for all natural things. Usually their religion is animist - they believe that every animal, every tree, sometimes every rock and stream, has its own spirit or divinity. Before killing an animal or felling a tree, they often ask its permission or forgiveness.
Native Americans are the best known animists. Most tribes regard the land as their sacred mother, and all creatures as their brothers and sisters. "Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people," said Chief Seattle of the Squamish tribe, in his lament on the passing of the Indian way of life. Chief Luther Standing Bear of the Lakota wrote that kinship with all creatures of the earth, water and sky was an active principle for every Indian.
"Every seed is awakened and so is all animal life," said Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa Teton Sioux. "It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbours, even our animal neighbours, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this land." Black Elk, of the Oglala Sioux, said: "Every dawn as it comes is a holy event, and every day is holy, for the light comes from your Father Wakan-Tanka; and also you must remember that the two-leggeds and all the other peoples who stand upon the earth are sacred and should be treated as such. All the fruits of the wingeds, the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds are sacred and should be treated as such."
The Indians were amazed and horrified by the way European settlers saw nature as a wilderness to be cleared and a resource to be ruthlessly plundered. "Forests were mown down," Luther Standing Bear complained, "the buffalo exterminated, the beaver driven to extinction . . . The white man has come to be the symbol of extinction for all things natural in this continent." Whereas Indians held the land in common and could not own or sell it, whites, said Sitting Bull, "claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own, and fence their neighbours away."
In felling, ploughing, and mining nature, the white man was simply doing what his parents and ancestors had done in Europe for countless generations. Behind their practice lay a set of religious beliefs quite different from the hunter-gatherers, which excused and justified their actions.

Agrarian religion: humans as master of nature
Gradually human populations increased, and in some places - the Near East, China, parts of the Andes and Central America - they grew too dense to be fed by hunting and gathering. At this point humans began deliberate agriculture, planting and cultivating seeds, domesticating and herding animals.
This shift changed our whole way of life, our society and our way of looking at the earth. Wild nature was no longer seen as our home, our shelter, our wardrobe and our larder - it became a dangerous wilderness, a refuge of savage beasts that preyed on livestock, a source of weeds that invaded the fields. Nature became something to be tamed and conquered.
Religious views changed too. The divinities of individual animals and trees vanished, and were replaced by more general gods of forces important to agriculture. Further changes came as agrarian societies grew and states developed. Dominant gods began to emerge - Ra, Zeus, Jupiter - resembling kings and emperors in their power.
The Israelite God Yahweh gave clear sanction to human mastery over nature: "Let us make man in our image, and let them rule over . . . the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth." (Genesis 1:26). "Be fruitful and increase in number," God told Adam and Eve. "Fill the earth and subdue it." (Genesis 1:28).
The age of empires brought changes too in our views of the afterlife. Most agrarian societies around the Mediterranean originally believed that life after death was a miserable, dusty, ghostly affair, very much to be feared and avoided. But as states clashed with neighbours, wars became endemic and ordinary life was often scarred by deep anxiety, insecurity and loss of dear ones. Gradually in Egypt, Greece, Israel and then Rome, the idea arose and spread that there was a life after death far better than life on earth.
This belief in heaven radically altered people's attitudes to their real lives in their real bodies on this real earth. The body came to be seen as a mere receptacle for the much more important soul. And this earth came to be seen as merely a temporary stage for a drama that would soon be over. Loving it and looking after it was not at all important. Looking after one's eternal soul took priority.
In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there was an added factor that tended to diminish earth's value. All three religions expected that sooner or later God himself would destroy this earth violently, only to replace it with a better one.

The age of city and industry: moving towards a new reverence for nature
These negative attitudes towards nature began to change during the industrial revolution. As cities grew, new urban classes, no longer dependent on the land for a living, came to appreciate landscape and seaside for their own sake. Geometrical gardens were ploughed under and remodelled after nature's informality. Landscape painting became popular. Poets and philosophers began to write ecstatically about nature.
Today these attitudes have strengthened and spread as nature has come under new threats. Everyone over the age of twenty can remember birds they used to see in their youth, and see no more. Rainforests are felled at the rate of 15 million hectares every year - an area three times the size of Denmark. The oceans are polluted and overfished, corals reefs are dying in every region of the globe. The earth's protective ozone layer is weakened, and global warming could bring rising seas and rapid climate change. All these human-induced changes threaten us and every other species on earth. Today we are living through the greatest mass extinction of species since the end of the dinosaurs.
Under these new circumstances, the old Biblical and agrarian attitude of human mastery over nature is no longer helpful. Even those religions that have not so far placed great value on nature are now coming to see humans not as masters but as stewards of this earth, with a responsibility to be kind to animals and to conserve nature. 
Pantheism goes further than this, and sees us as members of the natural community, with a duty to behave as responsible members, and to offer restitution for the damage we have done.

Our unity with nature
Just as pantheism sees the universe as a unity, it sees all nature on earth as a complex interacting whole. This unity is not just a belief or a warm feeling inside: it is scientific fact.
All living creatures on earth are branches of a single tree. The higher apes are our brothers and sisters in this extended family - we share over 98 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees. But even the lowest bacterium is a distant cousin, sharing some of our genes inherited from the first living cells. All life on earth shares a common origin, whether it all started in some warm little pond, as Charles Darwin imagined, in underwater volcanic vents or from building blocks brought in on cometary grains from space.
Our unity with nature is not just a matter of history, but a present reality that is continually renewed. Species do not exist in isolation. They live in communities, in ecosystems. Every species evolved in relation to every other part of its ecosystem. Each has its own special niche or way of life, at least a little different from every other to give all a better chance of survival.
Many species have evolved in relation to their prey or predators, as well as to their competitors. Many have come to depend on each other - for pollination, seed dispersal, protection and many other mutual services.
Every habitat from a pine forest to a pond is a community, with complex cycles in which different life-forms play their role. Plants create material from light, water, air and spoil. Herbivores eat plants. Carnivores eat herbivores. Finally, detritivores live by breaking down dead matter or excreta left by the others and turn it into soil or fertilizer.
All the members of one habitat make up a community. They share the same home, they depend on each other for survival.

Gaia unites all life and non-life on the planet
This interdependence of living things extends right up to the global level. Modern geology reveals our planet to be an awesome dynamic phenomenon. Huge continental plates slowly shift as convection currents in the earth's mantle carry them along. These massive movements, coupled with vast upwellings of molten magma from close to the earth's core, have shaped the course of life's evolution.
All living things on earth are linked together with the oceans, the atmosphere, and even the rocks. Plants and algae are the planet's farms and lungs, producing basic foods and oxygen. Animals breathe in oxygen, helping to prevent this flammable gas from building up to dangerous levels where fires might start, and they provide enough carbon dioxide to keep the planet warm. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and water circulate in complicated cycles through living forms, rivers and seas, atmosphere and the earth's crust.
Life and planet earth are not two separable things, like a carpet lying on a floor. They have moulded each other into a unity. Life has changed the earth's atmosphere radically. Without life this would resemble the atmosphere of Mars or Venus, some 95-96 per cent carbon dioxide, 3 per cent nitrogen, and hardly any oxygen. The present composition of our atmosphere is 78 per cent nitrogen, 21 per cent oxygen, and 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide. It is only life on earth that maintains this fragile mixture: without life all the oxygen would combine with other elements.
Life has even changed the geology of the earth's crust over the aeons. Oxygen produced by ancient cyanobacteria combined with iron dissolved in the oceans, to produce insoluble iron oxides which sank forming massive layers of ironstone. The remains of ancient plants decayed to form coal and oil. The bones and shells of countless trillions of sea-animals rained to the sea bed and were compressed to create limestone and chalk.
Life has an uncanny ability to keep earth comfortable for life. Oxygen produced by the first plants created the ozone layer, filtering out harmful solar radiation and making life on land possible. Carbon dioxide breathed out by animals and methane produced by anaerobic bacteria helped to warm the earth up.
British scientist James Lovelock has proposed that the whole system of living creatures, rocks, oceans and atmosphere, combined with the process of evolution, have been able to keep global climate and atmosphere at levels suitable for life over very long periods, even though the sun's output of heat has varied over time.
Lovelock's name for this self-regulating system is Gaia. Gaia or Ge is the Greek name for the goddess of the earth. For many pagans and pantheists the earth-life system Gaia has become almost a deity. Some think of her is a sort of super-organism with soul and awareness and purpose. But many pantheists would argue that Gaia is none other than the natural community of all life and non-life on earth - once again, a "we" rather than a "she" or and "it."
We do not need to assume that Gaia has a mind. Natural processes of evolution are enough to produce the balances that Lovelock has documented. When living things and processes produce an excess of some element, those living things that use that element multiply more rapidly and reduce its concentration.

The human place in nature.
Belief in the unity of nature and of our living earth has important religious consequences for pantheists, a partial return to the spiritual view of nature held by hunter-gatherers.
For pantheists, pagans, eco-protestors and deep ecologists, nature is more than just our hotel or our meal ticket. It is more than just something we need to look after for our own self-interest.
For pantheists, nature is sacred. Sacred does not mean supernatural or spooky: it means imbued with profound value, worthy of deep respect and reverence. When God called out to Moses from the burning bush, he said: "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." But for pantheists all natural areas are sacred ground and all natural things are sacred objects which must be treated with the highest consideration and compassion. We will be examining the ethical aspect of this in the next chapter.
The pantheist view of our place in nature is quite different from that of other Western religions. It certainly does not see humans as masters of nature. Rather for the past ten thousand years we have been the scourge of nature. All our attempts to conquer and subdue have led to the impoverishment of the nature that ultimately supports us. We have done disastrous damage to all other species, to their habitats, and to Gaia, that is now rebounding on us with a vengeance.
Nor does pantheism see us as the stewards of nature. Being a steward implies managing a property for the absent master, God, but pantheism does not believe in this absent master.
Rather pantheism sees us as members of the natural community of all life on earth, with the same rights as other members, but with greater duties because of our greater power to do harm. We must be partners and participants in nature. This means we must live off her surplus, not dig into her capital. We must work with nature and not against her. We must promote her vast diversity, not diminish it. We shall examine the ethical aspects of this in the next chapter.

Our love and affinity for nature
Our love for nature is another aspect of our unity with nature. To a large extent it is a natural and physical love. We spent over 95% of our evolutionary history in the midst of nature and as a part of nature. It is not surprising that we are instinctively attracted to the kind of environment where we evolved.
American naturalist E. O. Wilson calls this instinctive feeling "biophilia," which he defines as "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms." This love of nature, Wilson suggests, gave us an evolutionary advantage in the past, and could help to motivate us to defend nature today.
Whenever humans are separated from nature - in cities, or blocks of offices or flats, they try to recreate some part of nature close to them. They make gardens. They plant trees. They grow houseplants. And of course they keep pets, which are often loved as part of the family and mourned almost as strongly as humans when they die. The human love of and compassion for animals can be extraordinarily powerful.
The love of nature is not merely an abstract love. It is very often deeply rooted and attached to particular places and things: a special glade, a stretch of river, a favourite copse, a venerable tree.
We also have a deep fascination for natural form: the shape of leaves, the textures of rock, the pattern of waves, the symmetry of snowflakes like those reproduced on each chapterhead of this book. Again and again, at many different scales and in many different contexts, nature uses certain basic schemes - spiral, sphere, branching, honeycomb, radial - that we find inherently attractive.
The mathematics of nature and of human aesthetics are profoundly linked. Since Pythagoras we have known that pleasing musical harmonies are made up of simple number relationships between the wavelength of sounds.
Natural ratios also play a role in the visual arts. Painters and architects from the classical world to the Renaissance have been attracted by the golden section - a division of a line into two so that the smaller segment is to the larger as the larger is to the whole line. Numerically this golden ratio is 1:1.618.
The golden ratio crops up frequently in nature too. Spirals such as nautilus shells or sunflower seedheads often follow a sequence in which each section or angle is the sum of the previous two. This produces the number sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on. This is known as the Fibonacci sequence, after the thirteenth century Italian mathematician who discovered it while working out how many rabbits a single pair could grow to within a year.
Remarkably, as you reach higher numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, the ratio between a number and the one before it approaches 1.618 - the golden ratio beloved of artists.

Nature as therapy: expanding the boundaries of the self
Nature also has the power to heal us. Most medicines are derived, directly or indirectly, from plants. But nature can heal us mentally, too. Scientific studies have shown that natural scenes can reduce stress and anxiety, and have a strong calming and restoring effect. In one experiment, patients recovering from surgery were divided into two groups. One group were put in rooms that overlooked a copse of trees, the others had a view of a plain brick wall. Those with the natural view recovered faster, had fewer complications, and needed fewer painkillers.
Nature therapist Michael Cohen tells the story of a training session for community leaders which was tense, hurried and argumentative - until a wild bird flew into the meeting room. All debate halted as everyone cooperated to help it find its way out. The bird had a strong unifying and calmative effect.
Cohen has built a system of "nature therapy" to treat stress and other psychological problems. The system uses intimate contact with nature, developing our many senses to perceive nature, to reconnect with nature and find peace and balance.
The new discipline of Ecopsychology sets out to understand how our alienation from nature in modern society can lead to many psychological ills. One of ecopsychology's leading figures, Theodore Roszak, theorizes that we may have an "ecological unconscious" built into us as natural physical beings, linking us to our evolutionary roots in the natural realm.
The goal of ecopsychology therapy is to re-establish healthy links between our egos and our wider ecological unconscious. It involves extending the boundaries of what we conceive as our self, linking the individual with the ecosystem, the personal with the planetary. 
People exist in nature, but nature exists in people, too. As a 1990 gathering of psychologists at Harvard put it: "If the self is expanded to include the natural world, behaviour leading to the destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction."

Earth : the pantheist paradise
Pantheists do not believe in any separate paradise, heaven, hell or nirvana beyond this earth. They do not believe that the human soul will fly at death to some eternal realm. 
Whether they believe in natural death and rejoining nature's cycles, or in reincarnation, they know that there is only one home they will ever have. This earth is our only home. This is where we are born, live and die. This is where we belong.
This earth is the only place where we can find or make our paradise. It is not some temporary launch pad toward heaven or a temporary stop-gap until God violently destroys it and replaces it with a new heaven and a new earth. This earth we've got is indescribably beautiful, endlessly diverse, a clouded blue sapphire hanging in the deep black of space. Why should we need a new earth?
The only requirement is that we must take care of it for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren, and for the sake of all the other species for which earth is also home.



6. Pantheist ethics: responsibilities, rights and liberties.
Most religions have their own systems of ethics, and these have much in common - rules against theft or murder, for example. But they differ a lot in the fundamental basis of their ethics - the reasons they give for obeying the rules.
In the major Western religions, moral commands are thought to be based on divine commands, revealed by God by way of special messengers - Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. These commands are backed up by promises of divine rewards and threats of punishments. They focus overwhelmingly on religious and social duties, and only very marginally on environmental duties.
Eastern religions, especially in their purest philosophical forms, are very different. Their ethics are not presented as revelations by the gods, but as the conclusions of wise men like Buddha or Lao Tzu, perhaps with special wisdom, or special insights into ultimate reality.
The Eastern religions don't usually threaten supernatural rewards or punishments for obeying or disobeying their codes. Those that believe in reincarnation do promise an earned progression up the scale of beings, culminating in release from suffering or union with the divine totality. They do stress social and religious obligations, but often they place great stress on our duties towards other living creatures.
In most of these respects pantheism is far more like Eastern religions than Western. It makes no claim of revelation, but instead bases its ethics on its beliefs about nature and the Universe. Like Humanism, pantheism sees human beings in their natural and social setting as the only source of human moral thinking. It is our privilege, and our responsibility, to decide our ethics for ourselves.
Pantheism has no concept of a personal, loving or wrathful judging God, and promises no supernatural rewards or punishments for good behaviour. It has no concept of sin against God, and more generally no concept of radical evil inspired by supernatural powers of darkness. And it stresses our duties to nature no less than our duties to other humans.

Problems of pantheist ethics
Critics of pantheism suggest that without the threat of God's judgement hanging over them, people will ignore moral codes and commit as many crimes as they can get away with. But social reality doesn't back this up. Buddhist or Taoist societies are more law-abiding than many God-fearing Christian ones - rates of crime and violence in Japan or Korea are very much lower than in Christian United States or Latin America. One can also argue that the promise of God's forgiveness if we repent allows people to sin now, knowing that as long as we feel sorry later God will pardon us.
The real backing for human ethics is human society and human psychology. Most children are reared to have regard for other people, and develop a conscience that makes them keep on considering others in later life. For the minority who do not, societies have systems of criminal justice that keep reasonable order, except in rare cases where government has completely broken down.
Pantheism is often accused of not believing in free will. Critics argue that if we don't believe in free will, we may feel that we cannot control whether we act morally or not. Murderers and rapists may believe that they are driven inescapably to commit the crimes they do, and might feel no restraint or guilt about it. 
It is true that some influential pantheists, like Spinoza or Einstein, rejected the idea of free will. In Spinoza's case it was because of a belief that God is infinitely perfect. Everything that happens could not happen otherwise, because all things and all events are a part of God, and so must be absolutely necessary. Einstein did not believe in free will because he thought that causality ruled supreme, without exception.
But nothing in the core beliefs of pantheism says that pantheists must be determinists. Pantheism in general holds simply that the Universe is divine, it does not say whether it is determined in advance - or undetermined. 
Modern science points to the view that it may well be undetermined. Quantum physics suggests that even sub-atomic particles can behave in random, unpredictable ways. The study of chaos has shown that very small changes can magnify into enormous differences at large scale levels: a cricket chirping in China could cause hurricanes in Bangladesh. It is possible then for a minute and unpredictable subatomic fluctuation to lead to massive changes at global level. Modern cosmology believes that such fluctuations in the new-born universe, just after the Big Bang, led to the way galaxies are distributed in the universe today.
There is a more serious criticism. If pantheism believes that the universe as a whole is divine, would this not mean that every part of the universe must be divine, even destructive parts like nuclear weapons, chainsaws, factory smokestacks, or mass murderers? If so, then how could we condemn crime or evil?
Some extreme pantheists have taken this view, and have enacted it. In the early fourteenth century the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a popular religious movement in Western Europe in the fourteenth century, believed that each one of them had become God. They could therefore commit whatever crimes they pleased with impunity, fornication, theft and even murder. 
Such movements have been rare, and their views are not supported by basic pantheist beliefs. Pantheism believes that the Universe as a whole is divine, but this does not mean that every individual part of the universe is divine. It doesn't mean that oil slicks or bits of chewing gum stuck to the pavement are divine. Such criticisms make the simple mistake of assuming that the parts must have the same qualities as the whole - but this, of course, is not true. For example, a big oak tree may be massive and ancient, but its individual leaves are not.
Contrary to all the critics' fears, most pantheists have had noble ethical systems - even those that disbelieved in free will. The Stoics favoured a life of resignation to destiny, avoiding extreme passions. Spinoza led a model life, generous and frugal, and his chief work was called Ethics. Einstein was a pacifist dedicated to non-violence.
The humanistic basis of all ethics
Like humanism, pantheism accepts that human ethics are the creation of human beings, not of supernatural gods. Humans succeeded as a species by being capable of cooperation and altruism. Unselfishness and consideration of others are a part of our basic human nature and they are very prominent in hunter-gatherer societies, where food, for example, is always shared around generously.
As societies grew more complex, more and more rules were needed - but these were all human inventions, not divine commands. Human standards of ethics have not stood still since the ten commandments or the Koran - they have evolved continually. Once it was fair game to rape or kill people from a neighbouring tribe. Even Aristotle and St Paul defended slavery. But gradually belief that one should love and care for others has been extended to wider and wider groups of people until, today, more and more people consider the whole human race to be one family for ethical purposes.
We are currently living through another great leap forward in human ethical standards, extending rights and consideration beyond the human sphere, to animals, plants and even ecosystems.

The core of pantheist ethics: compassion for all living things.
Pantheism provides a stronger foundation for human and animal rights than most other religions.
In pantheism, the Universe as a whole is regarded as divine and all things are part of the unity. This means that every natural thing is an integral member of the divine. Every natural thing is one spark that goes to make up the whole fire. If we revere the fire, we are obliged to respect and cherish the sparks that make it up.
As far as our fundamental relation to the divine universe is concerned, humans are not supe