Pandeism

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Pandeism is occasionally used as a synonym for pantheism; this article discusses other uses of the term.

Pandeism is a term that has been used at various times to describe religious beliefs. This use has been inconsistent over time - some 19th century figures (particularly Godfrey Higgins, later echoed by John Ballou Newbrough) used the term to describe the beliefs that they attributed to a particular cult or sect, the worshipers of a group of gods called Pans. More modern usage has described (or contrasted) the nature of God as described by broader philosophical systems, particularly those incorporating or mixing elements of pantheism and deism. The term has occasionally been used to refer dismissively to simultaneous belief in all religions, or some elements thereof.

Contents

Use of the term by Godfrey Higgins

Pandeism (or a Pand�an religion) was originally used by Godfrey Higgins, a historian of religions, [1] to describe a religious society that he purported had existed from ancient times, and at one time had been known throughout the entire world. Higgins believed this practice continued in secret until the time of his writing, in the 1830s in an area stretching from Greece to India. The term was used in this context in the posthumous release of Higgens' 1833 treatise titled Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis: Or an Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations and Religions. [2]:

I think Pandeism was system; � and that when I say the country or kingdom of Pand�a, I express myself in a manner similar to what I should do, if I said the Popish kingdom or the kingdoms of Popery; or again, the Greeks have many idle ceremonies in their church, meaning the Greeks of all nations: or, the countries of the Pope are superstitions, &c. At the same time, I beg to be understood as not denying that there was such a kingdom as that of Pandae, the daughter of Cristna, any more than I would deny that there was a kingdom of France ruled by the eldest son of the church, or the eldest son of the Pope.[3]

Higgins' choice of the term

Higgins' usage is related to pantheism, yet distinctly different. While pantheism normally refers to one universal god, pandeism, as described by Higgins, refers to the worship of a family, a union, or a pantheon of gods which are collectively universal.

Higgins was a follower of Irish writer John Toland who coined "pantheist" in his 1705 work, Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist; although Toland lived in an era when "deism" and "theism" were interchangeable, Higgins wrote during the 1820s and 1830s, a period several generations later when Deism was popular and became distinct from theism. When coining "pandeism", Higgins was aware of the similarity between pandeism and pantheism, and of the similarity between pandeism and deism - indeed, he directly contrasts his pandeism with Toland's pantheism:

Many persons have thought that this Pan related to what has been called Pantheism, or the adoration of universal nature, and that Pantheism was the first system of man. For this opinion I cannot see a shadow of foundation. As I have formerly said, it seems to me contrary to common sense to believe that the ignorant half savage would first worship the ground he treads upon,--that he would raise his mind to so abstruse and so improbable a doctrine as, that the earth he treads upon created him and created itself: for Pantheism instantly comes to this.[4]

Higgins also mentions deism or deists at several points later in the same work, noting for example that "the Rev. R. Taylor, A.M., the Deist, now in gaol, infamously persecuted by the Whigs for his religious opinions, in his learned defense of Deism called the Diegesis, has clearly proved all the heirarchical institutions of the Christians to be a close copy of those of the Essenians of Egypt." [5]

While pandeism evokes both pantheism and deism and suggests their combination, Higgins' usage is removed from both. Whereas Toland's construction of pantheism was based on the Greek root words pan, meaning all and Theos, meaning God, Higgins flips the construction around, stating:

When I consider all the circumstances detailed above respecting the Pans, I cannot help believing that, under the mythos, a doctrine or history of a sect is concealed. Cunti, the wife of Pandu (du or God, Pan), wife of the generative power, mother of the Pandavas or devas, daughter of Sura or Syra the Sun?Pand�a only daughter of Cristna or the Sun?Pandion,[6] who had by Medea a son called Medus, the king of the Medes, who had a cousin, the famous Perseus � surely all this is very mythological � an historical parable![7]
...
We have seen that though Cristna was said to have left many sons, he left his immense empire, which extended from the sources of the Indus to Cape Comorin, (for we find a Regio Pandionis near this point,) to his daughter Pand�a; but, from finding the icon of Buddha so constantly shaded with the nine Cobras, &c., I am induced to think that this Pandeism was a doctrine, which had been received both by Buddhists and Brahmins.[8]

In contrast to Toland, Higgins uses the word "Pans" to collect variations of named gods or godlike heroes - such as Pandu, Pand�a, the Pandavas, and Pandion - into a single system of worship called Pandeism as a sort of family name for a goup of godlike individuals. Thus where Toland's term referred to pan- (all) and -theism (god), Higgins refers to Pande- (a root indicating this family of gods) and -ism (indicating allegiance to an ideology). The term as a whole, related by Higgins, appears to refer to a secret sect of worshipers of these "Pans", which was left in the wake of the collapse of an ancient empire that stretched from Greece (the home of Medea and Perseus) to India (where the Buddhists and the Brahmins coexist). Higgins concludes that his observations:

...confirm the very close connexion which there must have been in some former time, between Siam, Afghanistan, Western Syria, and Ireland. Indeed I cannot doubt that there has been really one grand empire, or one Universal, one Pand�an, or one Catholic religion, with one language, which has extended over the whole of the world; uniting or governing at the same time... [9]

Higgins leaves clues, however, that there may be additional layers of meaning in his word choice, stating in the preface to Vol. I of 'Anacalypsis':

I think it right to warn my reader, that there are more passages than one in the book, which are of that nature, which will be perfectly understood by my Masonic friends, but which my engagements prevent me explaining to the world at large.[10]

Decades later, John Ballou Newbrough cited extensively to Higgins' use in the notes to his 1882 Oahspe Bible.[11]

Comparative usage

William Harbutt Dawson, in his 1904 biographical work, Matthew Arnold and His Relation to the Thought of Our Time, used the term purely as a comparative reference point, writing:

... whatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary. And one may with even greater truth say that the man who is able to receive and live by the religion which Arnold offers him is no longer in need of its help and stimulus. To be able to appreciate an ethical idealism a man must himself be already an ethical idealist.[12]

Later, F. E. Peters uses the term in his 1967 Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, also suggesting its meaning by contrasting it with another concept:

What appeared here, at the center ot the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism (see theion) that is the legacy of the Milesians. [13]

Usage as a restatement of another concept

Some of these uses to which the term has been put are etymologically disjunctive, as they ascribe a meaning to the term that does not reflect the roots of what is an obvious portmanteau within a well defined family of similar terms. The term most closely resembles a splicing together of the Latin root 'pan' (meaning 'all'), as it is used in pantheism fused to the word deism, itself originally derived from the Latin deus, meaning God, but which was later adopted by the Deist movement, and came to have the meaning ascribed by its members. Such a term may describe a pantheistic deism � a system in which a Creator God designed the universe and initiated its creation, but is now one with the universe, and therefore nonresponsive.

Conversely, the term may describe a deistic pantheism, in which a God that has always been pantheistic has ceased a previously active interection with the universe. The term has been used in some instances as a restatement of pantheism (the concept that God and the universe are one) or panendeism (the concept that God both is the universe, and transcends the universe). Others have specified that it is a concept distinct from pantheism, and have used it instead to describe a universe which combines elements of pantheism (for example, that God and the universe are one) and deism (for example, that a creator God created a self-regulating universe, but subsequently ceased to actively intervene in its operations).

Examples

In 1997, Pastor Bob Burridge[14] of the Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies[15] wrote an essay titled God Is Not the Author of Sin, identifying pandeism as either a deistic refinement or subset of pantheism:

All the actions of created intelligences are not merely the actions of God. He has created a universe of beings which are said to act freely and responsibly as the proximate causes of their own moral actions. When individuals do evil things it is not God the Creator and Preserver acting. If God was the proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be "God in motion". That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism. The Creator is distinct from his creation. The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism.[16]

Burridge concludes by challenging his reader to determine why "calling God the author of sin demand[s] a pandeistic understanding of the universe effectively removing the reality of sin and moral law."

Similarly, a 1995 news article quotes Jim Garvin a Vietnam vet who became a Trappist monk in the Holy Cross Abbey[17] of Berryville, Virginia who describes his current spiritual position as "'pandeism' or 'pan-en-deism,' something very close to the Native American concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit..."[18]

Natalia Kita,[19] an "ordained minister through several free-thinking churches"[20] classifies her beliefs as "transcendental pandeism," a phrase to which she assigns the following meaning:

God not only is, always was, and always will be the universe, but that the Universe is contained within God, and God transcends that which we know as the Universe. I also believe that all living beings contain the knowledge/wisdom of God/the Universe within them, if only they open their minds to it. I view God not so much as a being, but as a force of pure spirit and energy, containing all the knowledge/wisdom there is, and sharing it with all.

This use of the term appears to be consonant with panentheism, but with some minor variations with respect to the relationship between God and the individual.

Dan Schneider, in his Review of Stranger In A Strange Land (The Uncut Version), by Robert A. Heinlein[21] uses the term to describe a character who appears to other characters as identifying humanity as God:

Jubal... is a devout and fierce individualist in a world filled with cults and bureaucracies, and by novel's end it is he, not Jill nor Mike, that is still a stranger, still tilting against the windmills. He honestly believes in his own free will, which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pandeistic urge, 'Thou art God!' Mike, by contrast, readily abandons his Martian beliefs for human ones, even as he claims to merely find a congress between them.

As a distinct concept

The closest notable ideology to the latter usage was authored by Baruch Spinoza, who envisioned a universe that was one with God, and in which the course of the universe had nevertheless been predetermined by God. A point of critique in 2004 essay by Roncelin de Fos discussing the Christian Origins of U.S. states:

The labeling of Spinoza's philosophy as "pantheism" by the Church was meant more as an invective and indictment than a true analysis of his writings. It was really a variant of Deism -- a "pandeism," if I may. Theism, however, posits something very different. Theism believes that nature was not God, but created BY God. That God is a completely independent sentient and cognitive Being, and that God interacts with his "children" on a personal level (e.g., The Bible).

This assertion is echoed by "Cristorly" (the pseudonym of Orlando Alc�ntara, a Dominican poet and theologian), who characterizes the pantheistic God as transcendent, while the pandeistic God is merely continuous with Creation:

God is inmanent, trascendent and holistic. That is Pantheism, not Pandeism. Pantheism is right, because we are speaking about a personal, individual, trascendent God. Pandeism (like Spinoza's) is not right, due to the fact that is not a trascendent God, a God beyond Creation. [22]

Cristorly has developed a "Theognosis" of Omnientheism, which integrates six concepts - Theism, Deism, Panentheism, Panendeism, Pandeism, and Pantheism - into a coherent corpus or canon. Cristorly describes his definitions as "discretional," meaning that each can only be understood in the context of all the rest. Cristorly asserts:

The terms Theism, Pantheism, and Panentheism have their root in Greek, which is a Biblical language, and therefore it is correct. In a discretionary way we assume that these terms present the idea of a personal, individual God. However, the terms Deism, Pandeism, and Panendeism have their root in Latin, which is not a Biblical language, and therefore it is not correct. These terms present the idea of God like synonymous of Energy or Cosmic Force, because God is not personal here, He is not individual.

Within this grouping, the meanings of the terms hinge on their categorization of the "transcendence, immanence, and holism of God". With respect to Pandeism, he notes, "we see that Energy or Cosmic Force in Pandeism is immanent and holistic, but it is not transcendent."[23]

The following excerpt from a discussion of a painting by Spanish artist Orlando Cordero offers the same conceptual distinction between pantheism and pandeism. The author used the words "pande�sta" and "pande�smo" in the Spanish version, which were translated by the author into "pandeist" and "pandeism", respectively. The comparison suggests that pandeism is a system with a cold, impersonal God, while pantheism presents a warm and experiential God:

His vision is pandeist, and it had to be pantheist. In order to get a pantheist painting, it is necessary to have Christ as pennant, footpath, and lighthouse. Pandeism is impersonal like in the present canvas, in which man, nature and word integrate themselves; whereas pantheism is a personal Christ-like experience of every day. Here there is signal-like materiality for the making of other paintings. [24]

A final form can be found in the usage ascribed by J. Sidlow Baxter, who wrote in his 1991 master work, The Most Critical Issue:

If the Bible is only human lore, and not divine truth, then we have no real answer to those who say, "Let's pick the best out of all religions and blend it all into Pan-Deism - one world religion with one god made out of many".[25]

Notes

  1. ^  Anacalypsis, pg. 439.
  2. ^  The person Higgins refers to as "Pandion" here is more commonly known as Aegeas - the husband of Medea and father of Medus; Aegeas was himself the son of Pandion II, and Higgins reference clearly equated Aegeas with the lineage of his father.
  3. ^  Anacalypsis, pg. 439.
  4. ^  Anacalypsis, pg. 443.
  5. ^  Anacalypsis, pg. 439.
  6. ^  Anacalypsis, pg. 787.
  7. ^  Anacalypsis, xx.
  8. ^  Oahspe Bible, pg. 874.
  9. ^  William Harbutt Dawson, Matthew Arnold and His Relation to the Thought of Our Time, (1904, republished 1977), p. 256.
  10. ^  Francis E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, p. 169 (NYU Press 1967).
  11. ^  Albuquerque Journal, Saturday, November 11, 1995, B-10.

See also


References

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