Pantheism & Panentheism

In Greek pan means "all," theos means "god," and en means "in." Pantheism means that all is God; panentheism, that all is in God. The two doctrines can be definitely distinguished. When considered together they may be called the pan-doctrines.

Although theism is often contrasted with pantheism and panentheism, the idea of all, or totality, is prominent in every form of theism as a doctrine of the high religions. Thus it occurs in the terms all-knowing, all-powerful, creator of all, and still others. Nevertheless, the most usual form of Western theology, sometimes called classical theism, holds or implies that the world of creatures is outside God. Yet it is also said by those in this tradition that in God is knowledge of all things. Can anything be outside knowledge-of-all-things? To many great minds this has seemed an unendurable paradox. To escape this apparent absurdity of a knowing that does not include the known and yet also to avoid including the world in the divine life, Aristotle denied knowledge of particular things to God, who, he held, was aware only of universal forms or ideas. Divine thought then knows only itself: it is pure thinking of thinking. Therewith Aristotle fell into other paradoxes, including that of exalting as divine a being ignorant of us and our world and hence, it seems, inferior to us. Yet classical theists accepted Aristotle's formula "unmoved mover" (meaning unchanged changer) as descriptive of God. This conception implies that there can be nothing changing in God. Was then Paul, who said, referring to God, "For in him we live and move, and have our being" (Acts 12:28), a pan-theologian?

When we human beings know things other than our own minds and bodies, the known things seem to be outside us. However, our knowledge of these outside things is extremely incomplete and uncertain. God must know everything at least as well and as certainly as we know our own pains and pleasures. Nothing can be so external to an all-knowing God as most things are to us. Accordingly, Plato, the first great philosophical theologian, believing in a divine Soul of the World (who knows us and whose body is the universe), made it clear that nothing was simply outside this deity: the universe as divine body is "in" the divine soul rather than the reverse. Plato was certainly a pan-theologian.

The essential difference between the two forms of pantheology is manifest in their answers to the question "Do the creatures have genuine freedom of decision making, or does God determine everything?" Classical pantheism was a form of theological determinism: God decides or determines everything, including our supposed decisions. Both the ancient Greek Stoics and Spinoza (1632–1677) held this view. Panentheists object that, if one power determines all, there is, causally speaking, only one agent in all action. The Stoic-Spinozistic doctrine is an extreme monism rather than a genuine pluralism. Or, at best, its pluralism is unclear or ambiguous, for reality is active agency or nothing. As Plato said, "being is power"; for him every soul is "self-moved." This agrees with panentheism, which admits a plurality of active agents within the reality of the supreme agent.