page_title: Pandeism
section_title: Middle Ages to Enlightenment
hierarchical_section_title: Pandeism / Progression / Middle Ages to Enlightenment
caption_attribution_description: English: Bronze statue of Giordano Bruno by Ettore Ferrari (1845-1929), Campo de' Fiori, Rome. Français&#160;: Statue de Giordano Bruno en bronze par Ettore Ferrari (1845-1929), Campo de' Fiori, Rome. Español: Estatua de Giordano Bruno en bronce por Ettore Ferrari (1845-1929), Campo de' Fiori, Roma.
context_page_description: Pandeism, a theological doctrine first delineated in the 18th century, combines aspects of pantheism with aspects of deism. It holds that a creator deity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate and conscious entity. Pandeism is proposed to explain why God would create a universe and then appear to abandon it, and an origin and purpose of the universe.
  Various theories suggest the coining of the word "pandeism" as early as the 1780s, but one of the earliest unequivocal uses of the word with its present meaning came in 1859 with Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.
context_section_description: Weinstein examines the philosophy of 9th century theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who proposed that "God has created the world out of his own being", and identifies this as a form of pandeism, noting in particular that Eriugena's vision of God was one which does not know what it is, and learns this through the process of existing as its creation. In his great work, De divisione naturae (also called Periphyseon, probably completed around 867 AD), Eriugena proposed that the nature of the universe is divisible into four distinct classes:
  1 – that which creates and is not created;
  2 – that which is created and creates;
  3 – that which is created and does not create;
  4 – that which neither is created nor creates.
  The first stage is God as the ground or origin of all things; the second is the world of Platonic ideals or forms; the third is the wholly physical manifestation of our Universe, which "does not create"; the last is God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of created things ultimately returns to completeness with the additional knowledge of having experienced this world. A contemporary statement of this idea is that: "Since God is not a being, he is therefore not intelligible... This means not only that we cannot understand him, but also that he cannot understand himself. Creation is a kind of divine effort by God to understand himself, to see himself in a mirror." French journalist Jean-Jacques Gabut agreed, writing that "a certain pantheism, or rather pandeism, emerges from his work where Neo-Platonic inspiration perfectly complements the strict Christian orthodoxy." Eriugena himself denied that he was a pantheist.
  Weinstein also thought that thirteenth century Catholic thinker Bonaventure—who championed the Platonic doctrine that ideas do not exist in rerum natura, but as ideals exemplified by the Divine Being, according to which actual things were formed—showed strong pandeistic inclinations. Bonaventure was of the Franciscan school created by Alexander of Hales and in speaking of the possibility of creation from eternity, declared that reason can demonstrate that the world was not created ab aeterno.
  Of Nicholas of Cusa, who wrote of the enfolding of creation in God and the unfolding of the divine human mind in creation, Weinstein wrote that he was, to a certain extent, a pandeist. And, as to Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, who had written A Cabbalistical Dialogue (Latin version first, 1677, in English 1682) placing matter and spirit on a continuum, and describing matter as a "coalition" of monads, Weinstein also found this to be a kind of pandeism. Weinstein found that pandeism was strongly expressed in the teachings of Giordano Bruno, who envisioned a deity which had no particular relation to one part of the infinite universe more than any other, and was immanent, as present on Earth as in the Heavens, subsuming in itself the multiplicity of existence. This was reiterated by others including Discover editor Corey S. Powell, who wrote that Bruno's cosmology was "a tool for advancing an animist or Pandeist theology."
  Lutheran theologian Otto Kirn criticized as overbroad Weinstein's assertions that such historical philosophers as John Scotus Eriugena, Anselm of Canterbury, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Mendelssohn, and Lessing all were pandeists or leaned towards pandeism.
  In the 1820s to 1830s, pandeism received some mention in Italy. In 1832 and 1834, publishers Angelo Ajani and Giovanni Silvestri, respectively, each posthumously published volumes of sermons of Italian Padre Filippo Nannetti di Bibulano (aka il Filippo Nani, Padre da Lojano; 1759–1829), who named pandeism as being among beliefs he condemned, railing against "Jews, Muslims, Gentiles, Schismatics, Heretics, Pandeists, Deists, and troubled, restless spirits." Nannetti further specifically criticized pandeism, declaring, "To you, fatal Pandeist! the laws that create nature are contingent and mutable, not another being in substance with forces driven by motions and developments." Within a few years thereafter ca
caption: Giordano Bruno, identified by several sources as a pandeistic thinker
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