Pantheism

 

Pantheism is a doctrine of religious philosophy widely used by a group of poets and literary figures who think that God is everywhere in natural. Pantheism is the view that the Universe (Nature) and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Ancient Greek: pan meaning ‘all’ and theos meaning ‘God’.

 

 As such, pantheism denotes the idea that ‘God’ is best seen as a process of relating to the Universe. Although there are divergences within pantheism, the central ideas found in almost all versions are the Cosmos as an all-encompassing unity and the sacredness of Nature (Mander 2012).

 

From the classical to modern periods, it has been used in powerful literature by many literary scholars. Eagle (1970) defines it as ‘the doctrine that God and the universe are identical’ and so according to him ‘God is everything, and everything is God’ (implying a denial of the personality and transcendence of God) (p. 435).

 

The concept began to spread more widely in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, in Germany with Goethe and Hegel, and in Britain with the romantic poets - Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, and the transcendentalists in the USA - above all Emerson and Thoreau.

 

During the 19th century it became the dominant literary art in glorifying nature. The concept of pantheism appears in different languages and expressions by scholars and poets of different ages and phases. Some of them are summed up below. Virgil (70-19BC) visualizes ‘Heaven and earth, the watered plains, the moon's shining globe, the sun and stars are all strengthened by some Spirit working within them [Aeneid vi. 724-727 (30-19BC)].

 

Likewise, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) thinks ‘a motion and a spirit drive all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things’ [Tintern Abbey, 102-104 (1798)]. John Keats (1795-1821) also maintains ‘God does make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence’. Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894) thinks the soul has different forms like bird, flower, living water, light and dives into the joyful beauty of this graceful world, and takes on our robe, primal purity, and rests, silently, in God [Le Bernica (1862)].

 

 

Similarly, Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) assumes ‘the sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains’ are all ‘the Vision of Him who reigns’ [The Higher Pantheism]. William Blake (1757-1827) maintains ‘God only Acts and Is, in existing beings or Men’ [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)]. Correspondingly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) conceptualizes the ‘Soul of each’ as ‘God of all’ [The Eoliean Harp (1795-1817)].

 

 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) thinks if God did not inspire the bird with the powerful instinct towards its young in feeding it, and if the same did not pervade every living thing in nature, the world would not be able to exist! But divine power is spread everywhere and eternal love is active everywhere [Conversations with Eckermann, 29 May 1831].

 

 

Oscar Wilde (1854- 1900) says that we are made one with what we touch and see and we are resolved into the supreme air, with our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair, with our young lives each springimpassioned tree flames into green, -all life is one [Panthea]. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) hears and beholds God in every object [I hear and behold God in every object] (Adapted from Romantics: Nature-Worship and Pantheism by Harrison). So, from the above texts and references we have got the ideas of pantheism as: God pervades every living thing; Natural objects are the Vision of God, and: Soul of every natural object is God of all.

 

 

But the holy Quran declares: “Whatever is in the heavens and on earth, declares the Praises and Glory of Allah: for He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise” (61:1). From the verse it can be understood that natural elements declare the praises and Glory of God, they themselves do not represent God. Though Goethe’s remark that God pervades every living thing in nature is objectionable from Islamic perspective, his very statement: “divine power is spread everywhere and eternal love is active everywhere” supports the above verse.

 

 

 Pantheism in Wordsworth

 The greatest contribution of Wordsworth to the poetry on nature is his use of unqualified Pantheism—‘making nature itself divine’. “If to follow the traditional poetic habit of imaginatively giving life to all experience, and of imaginatively unifying all experience, is to be a pantheist, then Wordsworth was a pantheist” (Durrant 1979: 16). He believes God shines through all the objects of nature, investing them with a celestial light. He finds Him in the shining of the stars; he marks Him in the flowering of the fields. This immanence of God in nature gives him mystic visions.

 

Nature is no longer a mere vegetation; subject to the law of growth and decay; not a collection of objects to be described but a manifestation of God. Wordsworth came to believe that beneath the matter of universe there was a soul, a living principle, acting, even thinking. It may be living, at least, speaking to him, communicating itself to him: And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things [Tintern Abbey, 95-102 (1798)].

 

The chief faith of Wordsworth, namely, his pantheism, is lyrically expressed in this poem. Here the poet ‘most directly expresses the sense of a unifying spirit within all things’ (Durrant 1979: 6). Thus Wordsworth identified ‘God and Nature as one’ (Coles 1991: 45). In The White Doe the idea is called ‘natural lord’: Gone are they, bravely, though misled, /With a dear Father at their head!/ The sons obey a natural lord (Danby 1979: 133). In lines 6-8 of “It is a beauteous evening”, the speaker begins to address someone who turns out to be a young girl. He tells her to listen that ‘the mighty Being is awake’ and making a ‘sound like thunder’ that lasts forever.

 

The speaker then tells the child (actually his daughter, Caroline) who is walking besidehim that even though she isn't affected by the solemn ideas he has when he comes face to face with nature, she is not any less divine. In fact, she ‘liest in Abraham's bosom all year’, because God is with her even when she is not aware of Him: Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;/ And worship’st at the Temple’s inner shrine/ God being with thee when we know it not (Lines 9-14). Wordsworth foreshadows Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power when he states that ‘there is an active principle alive in all things’ which seeks to move beyond itself: All beings have their properties which spread/ Beyond themselves, a power by which they make/ Some other being conscious of their life (O’ Dwyer 2008). In the woodcock episode of Book I, for example, the boy has stolen someone else's bird. In the context of solitude, darkness, and guilt, the effect is chastening, for the boy senses that, in breaching his own ethics, he has also offended that life beyond himself: "and when the deed was done/I heard among the solitary hills/Low breathings coming after me, and sounds/ Of undistinguishable motion" (Prelude 321-24).

 

 So, from the above discussion we find that Wordsworth thinks of the unifying force of Nature as God and God in nature appears in different names like spirit, life beyond physical world, a mighty/powerful Being, a living principle, an undistinguishable motion, and natural lord and so on.

 

To conclude, one can say that

Pantheism is a belief system/concept that reflects the awareness of and belief in the life force in all objects in nature, including trees, rocks, water, etc. It is somewhat related to the concept of animism, which suggests that there is consciousness in nature and natural objects. Both of these ideas relate to the pagan or polytheistic views of religion, in which nature is venerated as sacred, and multiple gods (as opposed to one god) are seen as representing the cosmos and the earth. In Wordsworth's poetry, nature is a frequent topic and the sacred nature of landscape is a central theme. "Tintern Abbey" (whose fuil title is actually "LINES. COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. JULY 13, 1798") is one such poem that isinspired by the beauty of a particular landscape that Wordsworth saw as a sacred place. Wordsworth himself seems to acknowledge the unorthodox nature of his spiritual leanings here:

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear, — both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

These lines hint at a larger picture than merely a meditation upon the beauty of a place, but instead suggest a form of morality and philosophy found in nature: ideas that infuse Wordsworth's work deeply.