The word pantheism was coined by a mathematician twenty years after Spinoza died
Spinoza is the thinker most tied to the idea that God and the universe are one, yet he never used the word. An English mathematician, Joseph Raphson, coined it in Latin in 1697. Within a century and a half it had drawn Wordsworth, Emerson and Whitman, and a formal papal condemnation.
Pantheism covers a family of views that treat reality itself as divine: the whole of nature is a self-organising unity with no separate creator, yet worthy of reverence. It rejects a personal god and differs from panentheism, which places the divine above and beyond the universe. Because the label began as a weapon in arguments, few people in ancient times would have described themselves this way, although scholars see traces in animist traditions, Orphic religion and the Stoics from Zeno of Citium to Marcus Aurelius.
Raphson introduced the term in De Spatio Reali, contrasting atheist panhylists, for whom everything is mere matter, with followers of Spinoza, who believed in a single universal substance that is both material and intelligent. An English translation in 1702 brought the word into English, and the Irish writer John Toland popularised it from 1705, later imagining a pantheist society in his Pantheisticon of 1720. Toland had read Raphson and drew on Spinoza and on Giordano Bruno, the Italian friar executed by the Roman Inquisition in 1600 and later hailed as a martyr of science.
Spinoza himself grew up in Amsterdam's Sephardi Jewish community and was expelled by a herem at 23 over his views on scripture and God. His Ethics, published after his death, rejected Descartes' split between mind and body in favour of a single substance he called God. Hegel said that one is either a Spinozist or no philosopher at all. A German dispute of 1785 to 1789 between Friedrich Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn, the pantheism controversy, spread these ideas widely.
By the early 19th century pantheism appealed to Wordsworth and Coleridge, Fichte and Schelling, and Thoreau as well as Emerson and Whitman, and Pope Pius IX condemned it in the Syllabus of Errors in 1864. In the East, Advaita Vedanta, early Taoism and Korea's Cheondoism are often compared with it. An 1886 letter by Abraham Lincoln's law partner William Herndon, which sold for 30,000 US dollars in 2011, claims Lincoln was for a time a pantheist.
Source: Pantheism
