List of pantheists

Pantheism is the belief that the universe (or nature as the totality of everything) is identical with divinity, or that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God. Pantheists do not believe in a distinct personal or anthropomorphic god.

Adi Shankara
Giordano Bruno
Baruch Spinoza
John Toland
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Margaret Fuller
Claude Debussy
Carl Gustav Jung
Albert Einstein
Michio Kaku
Elon Musk

List
  • Nammalvar, one of the twelve Alvars.[1]
  • Vyasa, writer of Mahabharata.[2]
  • Laozi, name traditionally given to the writer of the Tao Te Ching, and considered the founder of philosophical Taoism.[3]
  • Heraclitus (c. 535 BCE–c. 475 BCE), pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. From the lonely life he led, and still more from the riddling nature of his philosophy and his contempt for humankind in general, he was called "The Obscure" and the "Weeping Philosopher".[4]
  • The Stoics (founded early 3rd century BCE) are often considered pantheists for their belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature and for arguing that physical conceptions are adequate to explain the entire cosmos.[5]
  • Adi Shankara (788–820 CE), known for consolidating the doctrine of Advaita Vedānta.[6]
  • Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c. 815–c. 877), Irish theologian, Neoplatonist philosopher, and poet.[7]
  • Amalric of Bena (died c. 1204–1207), French theologian, father of medieval pantheism, after whom the Amalricians are named.
  • Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. He was burned at the stake for his pantheist views.[3]
  • Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), German philosopher, Christian mystic, and Lutheran Protestant theologian.[8]
  • Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), Jewish-Dutch philosopher, has been called the "prophet"[9] and "prince"[10] of pantheism.
  • John Toland (1670–1722), an Irish rationalist philosopher and freethinker, and occasional satirist, who wrote numerous books including the Pantheisticon.

Late modern period
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German writer, artist, and politician. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, and over 10,000 letters written by him are extant, as are nearly 3,000 drawings.[11]
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism.[3]
  • Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include 9 symphonies, 5 concertos for piano, 32 piano sonatas, and 16 string quartets. He also composed other chamber music, choral works (including the celebrated Missa Solemnis), and songs.[12][13][14] He has been labeled a deist as well.[15]
  • Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), German Romantic landscape painter.[16]
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), German philosopher.[3]
  • Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851), Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields.[17]
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.[3]
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), English poet. Tennyson praised Bruno and Spinoza on his deathbed, saying of Bruno, "His view of God is in some ways mine".[18]
  • Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalist movement.[19]
  • Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), German statesman and diplomat, first Chancellor of the German Empire.[20]
  • Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), American author, poet, philosopher, freemason, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist.[21][22]
  • Walt Whitman (1819–1892), American poet, essayist and journalist.[3]
  • John Shertzer Hittell (1825–1901), American historian.[23]
  • Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Russian writer, philosophical essayist and pacifist.[24]
  • Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899), lawyer, Civil War veteran, political leader, orator, and notable agnostic.[25]
  • Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), German zoologist, natural historian, and philosopher.[26]
  • Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher. While sometimes interpreted as a proponent of atheistic existentialism by his statements about God, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger says about Nietzsche's conception of divine: "Is Nietzsche here teaching a pan-theism", asks Heidegger. "If it were pantheism, we would first of all still have to ask what pan — the universe, the whole — and what theos — God — here mean. At all events, here we have a question! So, then, God is not dead? Yes and no! Yes, he is dead. But which God? The God of "morality," the Christian God is dead — the "Father" in whom we seek sanctuary, the "Personality" with whom we negotiate and bare our hearts, the "Judge" with whom we adjudicate, the "Paymaster" from whom we receive our virtues' reward, that God with whom we do business. Yet where is the mother who will take pay for loving her child? The God who is viewed in terms of morality, this God alone is meant when Nietzsche says "God is dead." He died because human beings murdered him. They murdered him when they reckoned his divine grandeur in terms of their petty needs for recompense, when they cut him down to their own size. That God fell from power because he was a "blunder" of human beings who negate themselves and negate life (Nietzsche by Martin Heidegger, VIII, 62).[27][28] Von Douglas Burham notes, in light of Nietzsche, that "God exists entirely immanently to nature or the cosmos"[29] and that Nietzsche opposed popular forms of atheism as mired by morality: "That is, a "religion of pity" captures the way in which an atheist, for example, surreptitiously retains a direct connection to Christianity through the continuing commitment to morality.".[30] Nietzsche in the posthumously-published "The Will to Power" translated by Walter Kaufmann (philosopher) states

The European form of Buddhism: the energy of knowledge and strength compels this belief...So one understands that an antithesis to pantheism is attempted here: for "everything perfect, divine, eternal" also compels a faith in the "eternal recurrence." Question: does morality make impossible this pantheistic affirmation of all things, too? At bottom, it is only the moral god that has been overcome. Does it make sense to conceive a god "beyond good and evil"? Would a pantheism in this sense be possible?"[31]

See also: Faith in the Earth and World riddle
  • Felix Klein (1849–1925), German mathematician.[32]
  • Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), the Serbian American inventor believed in aether (opposite essentially of gravity) being the source of all existence and energy, sometimes referred to as prana. or Qi in Chinese.[33]
  • Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation.[34]
  • Vazha-Pshavela (1861–1915) Georgian poet and writer Luka Razikashvili, noted Georgian patriot and author of the highest calibre in the field of Georgian literature.
  • Claude Debussy (1862–1918), French composer.[35]
  • Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concept of the collective unconscious from a pantheistic worldview.[36][37][38]
See also: Cosmic Man

Groups

Africa

Asia

Europe

Middle East

North America


See also

References
  1. "Journal: Humanities, Volumes 40–44", publisher = University of Madras, p. 76 – 90
  2. Alexander Duff. India and India missions. p. 68.
  3. Levine, Michael P.; 1994; Pantheism: A Non-theistic Concept of Deity; Routledge, 1994; ISBN 0-203-01477-4, ISBN 978-0-203-01477-6
  4. Vijay Tankha (2006). "Heraclitus of Ephesus". Ancient Greek Philosophy: Thales to Gorgias. Pearson Education India. p. 71. ISBN 978-81-7758-939-9. By equating god with nature, Heraclitus could be regarded as a pantheist — everything is god.
  5. Mander, William (1 January 2013). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Pantheism (Summer 2013 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
  6. "Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy Comprising the Nyaya, the Sankhya, the Vedant ... by K. M. Banerjea", p. 434
  7. Alexander Campbell Fraser "Philosophy of Theism", a collection of lectures from 1896 pg 80–82
  8. Mayer, Paola (1999). Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy – Hapiography – Literature. Montreal / Kingston / London / Ithaca: McGill Queen's University Press. pp. 135 f. ISBN 0-7735-1852-5. The idealistic element in Böhme lies in a particular understanding of the relationship between the infinite and the finite, the divinity and the world, that is the very opposite of what Schlegel proposed in the Jena period. Paradoxically, this relationship is also the point at which Böhme tends towards pantheism. […] It seems reasonable to assume that Schlegel recognized a similarity between the model that explains the world as emanation from the divine perfection and Böhme's account of a creation driven by desire for self-manifestation and made out of God's very substance.
  9. Picton, J. Allanson, "Pantheism: Its Story and Significance", 1905
  10. Fraser, Alexander Campbell "Philosophy of Theism", William Blackwood and Sons, 1895, p 163
  11. Robert C. Holub (1986). Jost Hermand (ed.). The Romantic School and Other Essays: Heinrich Heine. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 223. ISBN 978-0-8264-0291-2. Goethe was as little a deist as Fichte; for he was a pantheist.
  12. Jane Stuart Smith; Betty Carlson (1995). The Gift of Music: Great Composers and Their Influence (3 ed.). Crossway. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-89107-869-2. Beethoven loved the natural world, but as a pantheist who worships nature rather than the Creator. "Beethoven was not the man to bow to anyone — even God!" said David Ewen.
  13. Oscar Thompson (2005). How to Understand Music. Kessinger Publishing. p. 136. ISBN 978-1-4179-9202-7. To begin with, Beethoven was strongly individualistic and, in a sense, harshly antisocial. He realized the stature of his own genius. In Nature only did he recognize his equal and for that reason he was a pantheist of the most ardent order.
  14. T. C. W. Blanning (2008). The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art. Harvard University Press. p. 99. ISBN 978-0-674-03104-3.
  15. Swafford, Jan (2014). Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-618-05474-9. He believed his talent came from nature—God's nature, to be sure.
  16. Spivey, Nigel (2001). Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude. University of California Press. p. 229.
  17. Joseph McCabe (1945). A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Freethinkers. Haldeman-Julius Publications. Retrieved 1 July 2012. His name is still a classic in the literature of his science and he was in his time a man of high international repute. In regard to religion he was, like Goeth, a pantheist, as he shows particularly in his Aanden i Naturen (2 vols. 1849).
  18. Freethought of the Day, 6 August 2006, Alfred Tennyson Archived 3 December 2012 at archive.today
  19. Chevigny, Bell Gale (1994) [1976]. The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings (Revised and expanded ed.). Boston: Northeastern University Press. p. 169. ISBN 1-55553-182-2. But pantheism and repudiation of dogma had two adverse effects: it made some of her writing diffuse to the point of unintelligibility and some spiritually unacceptable to her editors.
  20. Bismarck, Otto von (1968). Hamerow, Theodore S. (ed.). Reflections and Reminiscences. New York: Harper Torchbooks. p. 15. I left school at Easter, 1832, a normal product of our state system of education; a Pantheist, and if not a Republican, at least with the persuasion that the Republic was the most rational form of government….
  21. Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. ISBN 978-0-19-507894-7, p. 623.
  22. Harding and Bode, eds., The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 294. "I was born to be a pantheist."
  23. Hittell, John (1857). A Plea For Pantheism. C. Blanchard.
  24. Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel (2007). Tolstoy's Quest for God. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. p. 177.
  25. "I am a pantheist" Interviews, Robert G. Ingersoll, p. 246.
  26. Allison, Lincoln (1991). Ecology and Utility: The Philosophical Dilemmas of Planetary Management. Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. p. 28. ISBN 0-8386-3490-7. Haeckel's revival of Pantheism is a neat and attractive trick which portrays man as ascending from the swamp, rather than descending from the heavens. But God was already in the swamp, as he is in us.
  27. Friedrich Nietzsche.
  28. https://ia802902.us.archive.org/22/items/nietzschevol.1thewilltopowerasartvol.2theeternalrecurranceofthesamebymartinheide/Nietzsche%2C%20Vol.%201%20The%20Will%20to%20Power%20as%20Art%2C%20Vol.%202%20The%20Eternal%20Recurrance%20of%20the%20Same%20by%20Martin%20Heidegger%2C%20David%20Farrrell%20Krell%20%28z-lib.org%29%20-%20Copy.pdf https://archive.org/details/Nietzsche_20150206 https://archive.org/details/Nietzsche.Heidegger
  29. Burnham, Douglas (5 December 2014). Reading Nietzsche: An Analysis of "Beyond Good and Evil". Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-49361-7.
  30. Burnham, Douglas (5 December 2014). Reading Nietzsche: An Analysis of "Beyond Good and Evil". Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-49361-7.
  31. The Will to Power
  32. Silvan S. Schweber (2000). "3". In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist. Princeton University Press. p. 86. ISBN 978-0-691-04989-2. There is another thread that tied Felix Klein to Wilhelm von Humboldt: his belief in a preestablished harmony. With Klein and his fellow mathematicians, the Leibnizian preestablished harmony became more specific. It became a preestablished harmony between physics and mathematics and the foundation of their pantheistic faith.
  33. "Nikola Tesla Physics: WSM Explains Nikola Tesla Inventions. Pictures Nikola Tesla Inventions". spaceandmotion.com. Retrieved 25 May 2016.
  34. Henry-Louis de La Grange (1995). "May–August 1906". Gustav Mahler: Volume 3. Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904–1907). Oxford University Press. p. 455. ISBN 978-0-19-315160-4. His pantheistic beliefs made him see the manifestations of God's will everywhere, and sensed its 'miracles and secrets ... and contemplated them with the deep respect and touching astonishment of a child'.
  35. Léon Vallas (1933). Claude Debussy: His Life and Works. Oxford University Press, H. Milford. p. 225. He made a pantheistic profession of faith: I do not practise religion in accordance with the sacred rites. I have made mysterious Nature my religion. I do not believe that a man is any nearer to God for being clad in priestly garments, nor that one place in a town is better adapted to meditation than another. When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpetted earth, ... and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration. ... To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! ... that is what I call prayer.
  36. Andrew Reid Fuller, Psychology and Religion: Eight Points of View, p. 111, "Jungian pantheism"
  37. Spencer, John, "New Heavens, New Earth, 2002, p 25 "It was from this pantheistic world-view that the famous psychologist Carl Jung developed his notion of a "collective unconscious,""
  38. Kay, William K. (1997). "Jung and World Religions". Journal of Beliefs & Values. 18: 109–112. doi:10.1080/1361767970180112.
  39. Adir Cohen (1994). The Gate of Light: Janusz Korczak, the Educator and Writer Who Overcame the Holocaust. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. p. 75. ISBN 978-0-8386-3523-0. Korczak's God is a pantheistic one, embracing the entire world.
  40. Einstein, Albert "Gelegentliches", Soncino Gesellschaft, Berlin, 1929, p. 9, ""This firm belief, a belief bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as "pantheistic" (Spinoza)."
  41. Isaacson, Walter (2008). Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 388–389. Reported by The New York Times 25 April 1929 under the headline "Einstein believes in 'Spinoza's God'"
  42. G. S. Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (Macauley, New York, 1930) p. 372-373.
  43. John S. Rigden (2000). Rabi, Scientist and Citizen. Harvard University Press. p. 229. ISBN 978-0-674-00435-1. Rabi is deeply religious. Eschewing religious practices, and an anthropomorphic concept of God, Rabi has what Einstein referred to as a "cosmic religious feeling" — a religious sense that transcends dogma and institutions.
  44. Sawin, Martica (2009). Leon Kelly: An American Surrealist. New York City: Francis Naumann Fine Art. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-9800556-1-0. 'My father was a pantheist, if anything,' his daughter Paula said.
  45. "We are now sufficiently advanced to consider resources other than materialistic, but they are tenuous, intangible, and vulnerable to misapplication. They are, in fact, the symbols of spiritual life – a vast impersonal pantheism – transcending the confused myths and prescriptions that are presumed to clarify ethical and moral conduct. The clear realities of nature seen with the inner eye of the spirit reveal the ultimate echo of God. ..." – Adams, Ansel (1950). My Camera in the National Parks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 97. Archived from the original on 11 July 2012. Retrieved 30 June 2009.
  46. "As an unabashed pantheist I am naturally a full-blooded transubstantiationist, knowing full well that the ground wheat of bread and crushed grapes of wine are the body and blood of Christ, the Anointed One, or olive-oiled man who is so slippery that he has no hangups." – Watts, Alan (2007). In My Own Way: An Autobiography. New World Library. p. 72. ISBN 978-1-57731-584-1. Retrieved 30 June 2009.
  47. Wendy Schuman. "Pete Seeger's Session". Beliefnet, Inc. Retrieved 16 August 2013. I feel most spiritual when I'm out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. [I used to say] I was an atheist. Now I say, it's all according to your definition of God. According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I'm looking at God. Whenever I'm listening to something I'm listening to God.
  48. Paris, Barry (2001). Audrey Hepburn. New York City: Berkley Books. ISBN 978-1-101-12778-0.
  49. Sagan, Carl (1980) [Originally published 1979]. Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (Reprint ed.). New York: Ballantine Books. p. 330. ISBN 978-0-345-33689-7. LCCN 78021810. OCLC 428008204. Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others—for example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein—considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws.
  50. Margulis, Lynn; Sagan, Dorion (2007). Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing Company. p. 14. ISBN 978-1-933392-31-8. My father believed in the God of Spinoza and Einstein, God not behind nature but as nature, equivalent to it.
  51. Montevideo Portal (7 October 2013). Montevideo Portal "Biografía novelada". Commandant Facundo tells about the life of Jose 'Pepe' Mujica and his exceptional path: from playful and working child, to revolted and in love young, from fighter and political militant to pantheist, earth-lover farmer." (Original Spanish: "Comandante Facundo narra la vida de José Pepe Mujica y su trayectoria excepcional: de niño travieso y trabajador, a joven rebelde y enamorado; de combatiente y militante político, a panteísta cultivador amante de la tierra.) {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  52. Paul Lester (10 October 2008). "Suicide: How the godfathers of punk kept the faith". The Jewish Chronicle. Vega is similarly ambivalent. He alludes to the "miraculous" nature of his career with Suicide and fateful meeting with Rev, begging the question – does he believe in a higher power? "I distrust the name 'God' but, yes, I do believe in a higher power," he says. He adds that he shares the rationalist stance of Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher and "pantheist theologian". "God is in all of us," he says, before deciding: "There is an immense power. There has to be."
  53. Sweetman, Brendan (2003). "Infinite Minds: A Philosophical Cosmology". International Philosophical Quarterly. 42 (2): 250–252. doi:10.5840/ipq200343216.
  54. Messner, Reinhold (2014). My Life at the Limit. Translated by Carruthers, Tim. Seattle: Mountaineers Books. ISBN 978-1-59485-853-6. I didn't become a Tibetan Buddhist; I remained a pantheist.
  55. Robby Berman (15 February 2018). "Michio Kaku believes in God, if not that God". Retrieved 29 July 2020. One god is a personal god, the god that you pray to, the god that smites the Philistines, the god that walks on water. That's the first god. But there's another god, and that's the god of Spinoza. That's the god of beauty, harmony, simplicity.
  56. Terence Handley MacMath (1 September 2010). "Interview: Chris Goodall, economist and author". Retrieved 29 July 2020. I don't pray in the conventional sense any more, but try to replace my lack of prayer with a sense of awe in God and that Spirit all around us, trying to be receptive to God in everything.
  57. Appleyard, Bryan. "Mark Rylance: Height of his powers".
  58. Julie McCarthy (26 December 2017). "A Lifetime Of Planting Trees On A Remote River Island: Meet India's Forest Man". NPR. Retrieved 29 July 2020. I see God in nature. Nature is God. It gives me inspiration. It gives me power … As long as it survives, I survive.
  59. Ustaer, Feyyaz (17 January 2017). "Metallica's James Hetfield Reveals: Does He Believe In God?". Metalhead Zone. TG Media. Retrieved 16 February 2022. I believe in a higher power, yes. I don′t know … he, she, it … whatever … I see it everywhere. It is everything to me.
  60. Diekmeyer, Kadie Karen (5 November 2021). Change Your Religion If It Tells You To Be Cruel (video). YouTube. Retrieved 26 March 2022.
  61. Lee, Jennifer (4 January 2022). "'There is great wisdom in the teaching of Jesus', says Elon Musk". Christian Today. Retrieved 16 February 2022. 'As Einstein would say, "I believe in the God of Spinoza,"' he said, referencing Einstein's belief 'in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings'.
  62. Davis, Erik (11 October 2007). "The Gaahl!: A black metal moment". Techgnosis. Retrieved 16 February 2022. They drink wine, and Gaahl talks about pantheistic stuff like the God in nature and the God within.
  63. Voegtlin, Stewart (10 June 2005). "Leviathan: Demos 2000". Stylus Magazine. Retrieved 16 February 2022. Gaahl extrapolated on the importance of pantheism, and how one's love of nature is an important—and mostly overlooked—facet of the ideology that informs and empowers Black Metal.
  64. Buck, L. (2014). The Roman Monster: An Icon of the Papal Antichrist In Reformation Polemics. Early Modern Studies. Penn State University Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-271-09099-3. Retrieved 10 June 2023.
  65. Smith, V.S. (2008). Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity. Oxford University Press. p. 271. ISBN 978-0-19-953208-7. Retrieved 10 June 2023.
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