All Hail the Pantheist’s Impersonal God!
All Hail the Pantheist’s Impersonal God!
The anomalies of our counter-creations in the cosmic wilderness
Pantheism is perhaps the chief religious alternative to godly religions such as Old Norse polytheism, Christianity, and Islam. But what’s the essence of pantheism?
The essence of pantheism
In his scholarly, analytical book, Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Divinity, Michael Levine thinks “the central pantheistic claim” is that “everything that exists constitutes a divine Unity.” Unity, he says, is the “most central pantheistic concept” in his analysis of religions.
Running through some misunderstandings of what that unity amounts to, Levine concludes that
Whereas Unity explained in terms of substance, ontology etc. is too abstract a basis for religious belief, an account in terms of a unifying principle is not. There are of course varying interpretations of such principles. But often it is in terms of explicitly moral and evaluative categories such as goodness, justice, beauty or love — vague as these may be.
Eschewing the metaphysical conception of pantheism, Levine adds that
Although, like Spinoza, some pantheists may also be monists, and monism may even be essential to some versions of pantheism (like Spinoza’s), pantheists are not monists. Like most people they are pluralists. They believe, quite plausibly, that there are many things and kinds of things and many different kinds of value.
So, the unity in question isn’t supposed to be the positing of metaphysical oneness.
As to why “divine unity” should nevertheless be crucial to pantheism, this seems to follow from the word “pantheism,” which means “divinity everywhere” or “all is divine.”
But while there’s much value in Levine’s book, his analysis here seems to me to miss the forest for the trees. A historical or psychological approach to the topic would be more fitting, especially since pantheism usually emerges as an intellectual alternative to folk, theistic religions.
In short, we might define pantheism as a religious negation of those more mainstream religious conceptions of God.
Theistic religions
The key to those latter, theistic conceptions is that they’re anthropocentric. Divinity is personal for most of the world’s religious practitioners who posit a society of deities in the heavens or a lone, tyrannical, or loving sovereign in a supernatural realm. God and his holy entourage, then, are confined to that upper echelon, so that the hierarchies in human civilizations are only extended to the gods, angels, and demons.
The Neoplatonic concept of the great chain of being captures this mainstream idea. Whereas the human social order seems like only a link in this chain, the chain’s very sociality is a broadening of our link, as it were. The notion that ontological reality is social, that the most fundamental types of things are persons of some sort, and that these persons live in different tribes or kingdoms is all-too human.
Gods, angels, demons, and humans are persons like us, so the relation between the gods and nature is supposed to resemble how we relate to our societies. We build things out of raw materials, imposing our designs on them, and in doing so we only imitate the greater creators rather like how animists took themselves to be following their ancestral spirits.
The gods created the whole universe, and just as human nobles are more important than peasants and slaves, the gods are more important than all humans. Moreover, just as we view our artifacts pragmatically as tools that are meant to serve us, what we in the scientific age call “nature” is instead supposed to be a system of artifacts that the gods created to suit their lofty purposes.
The pantheistic negation
Pantheism, then, negates all of that.
Crucially, what’s negated is that pragmatic relation between a divinity and an enslaved, non-divine artifact. The mainstream religions say the divinities are elsewhere, in the heavens rather than on terrestrial grounds, and that the apparent local world, together with our societies are relatively profane, not sacred. What’s negated, therefore, is that personification of the bedrock of being, that naïve projection of human feudal hierarchies onto everything else.
Once that’s negated, what’s left to religions?
Well, what’s left mainly is nature, together with the blip of the history of our social comings and goings. And what intellectual pantheists observe is that nature itself seems to be active. Specifically, nature is doing right in front of us what the royal gods were supposed to have been doing: creating everything. The wind blows, the rain falls, the sun shines.
Nature is an evolving, self-developing fullness of elements, forces, and constructs. That natural creativity is what’s virtually everywhere, and because creativity is the chief act of the gods, as recorded in the creation myths of the world’s popular religions, nature must be divine.
Thus, pantheism reduces gods to nature, depersonalizing divinity in the process. Levine is correct, then, to distinguish pantheism from theism, despite the fact that “pantheism” includes the latter word. Pantheists keep the divinity of gods but dismiss their supposed personhood. In effect, pantheists naturalize divinity, just by recognizing the divine (supreme) creativity that nature itself evinces all around us.
Dualistic pantheism
But what about the unity that Levine thinks is so central to pantheism, based on the “pan” component?
Whatever force, principle, or plan unites nature seems disrupted by personal freedom and counter-creativity. Thus, the drama of real divinity is lost if we assimilate the anomalies of our exploits within nature to the cosmic evolution. Perhaps in hindsight, some species will understand exactly where personhood fits into a stage of natural creativity, in which case it would make sense to attribute civilized history to the doings of stars, black holes, electromagnetism, and the like. Then we might crown nature for our counter-creations, and the “pan” in “pantheism” would be vindicated.
Even so, the universality of nature’s divinity would be a matter of emphasis. Seeing where life fits into the cosmos, we could emphasize our emergence from nature or the autonomy of those emergent processes. And in emphasizing the latter, we’d implicitly be positing a rupture in the universe, a duality between nature’s wild, impersonal flow and the intelligent construction of artifacts.
Assuming this appreciation of the apparent strangeness of personal counter-creations in nature is consistent with the pantheistic reduction of mainstream gods to nature’s evolution (to the abundant physical creativity or complexification of matter and energy), Levine must be mistaken in saying that unity is at the core of pantheism. He gives too much weight to the “pan” part, and not enough to pantheism’s historical and social negation of the mainstream (exoteric) religious personifications of nature’s foundations.
What matters to pantheists is what’s been hiding in plain sight: the divinity (supremacy) of nature’s creativity. But what follows from that observation is the recognition of the divinity’s impersonality — which is precisely the existential impetus for human counter-creations. Mainstream religions operate on the comforting presumption that the gods are like us. If instead nature is God, we’re alienated from the divine just in so far as we prefer civility to wildness.
After all, nature’s creativity is quintessentially wild, as in impersonal, amoral, and undiscriminating. Nature tries out all possible configurations in countless molecules and star systems and on countless planets. Despite the abundance of our social experiments, we’re not so anarchical and freewheeling. Specifically, we reject the state of nature, preferring to live in societies governed not by the “law of the jungle,” but by rational, moral laws and customs to which nature is indifferent.
Pantheism sits well, then, with the dualism that underlies modern liberalism or secular humanism. There are two kinds of anthropocentrism, a silly one and a more respectable kind. Pretending that our concerns are integral to the universe at large is preposterous, or at least contrary to scientific objectifications. But dismissing the anomalies of personhood, or of self-consciousness, rationality, autonomy, curiosity, culture, and history and pretending that everything we do is perfectly natural (and therefore wild) is likewise wrongheaded.
Not only should we appreciate the supremacy of nature’s impersonal creativity and the unnaturalness of our creations, but we can understand how the latter are based on our alienation from the former.