pantheism

195:4.1The church, be­ing an ad­junct to so­ci­ety and the ally of pol­i­tics, was doomed to share in the in­tel­lec­tual and spir­i­tual de­cline of the so-called Eu­ro­pean “dark ages.” Dur­ing this time, re­li­gion be­came more and more monas­ti­cized, as­ceti­cized, and le­gal­ized. In a spir­i­tual sense, Chris­tian­ity was hi­ber­nat­ing. Through­out this pe­riod there ex­isted, along­side this slum­ber­ing and sec­u­lar­ized re­li­gion, a con­tin­u­ous stream of mys­ti­cism, a fan­tas­tic spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence bor­der­ing on un­re­al­ity and phil­o­soph­i­cally akin to pan­the­ism.

1:5.11Prim­i­tive re­li­gion had many per­sonal gods, and they were fash­ioned in the im­age of man. Rev­e­la­tion af­firms the va­lid­ity of the per­son­al­ity con­cept of God which is merely pos­si­ble in the sci­en­tific pos­tu­late of a First Cause and is only pro­vi­sion­ally sug­gested in the philo­sophic idea of Uni­ver­sal Unity. Only by per­son­al­ity ap­proach can any per­son be­gin to com­pre­hend the unity of God. To deny the per­son­al­ity of the First Source and Cen­ter leaves one only the choice of two philo­sophic dilem­mas: ma­te­ri­al­ism or pan­the­ism.

1:5.12In the con­tem­pla­tion of De­ity, the con­cept of per­son­al­ity must be di­vested of the idea of cor­po­re­al­ity. A ma­te­rial body is not in­dis­pens­able to per­son­al­ity in ei­ther man or God. The cor­po­re­al­ity er­ror is shown in both ex­tremes of hu­man phi­los­o­phy. In ma­te­ri­al­ism, since man loses his body at death, he ceases to ex­ist as a per­son­al­ity; in pan­the­ism, since God has no body, he is not, there­fore, a per­son. The super­hu­man type of pro­gress­ing per­son­al­ity func­tions in a union of mind and spirit.

118:6.8To rec­og­nize De­ity om­nipo­tence is to en­joy se­cu­rity in your ex­pe­ri­ence of cos­mic cit­i­zen­ship, to pos­sess as­sur­ance of safety in the long jour­ney to Par­a­dise. But to ac­cept the fal­lacy of om­nif­i­cence is to em­brace the colos­sal er­ror of pan­the­ism.

91:2.5When re­li­gion is di­vested of a per­sonal God, its prayers trans­late to the lev­els of the­ol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy. When the high­est God con­cept of a re­li­gion is that of an im­per­sonal De­ity, such as in pan­the­is­tic ide­al­ism, al­though af­ford­ing the ba­sis for cer­tain forms of mys­tic com­mu­nion, it proves fa­tal to the po­tency of true prayer, which al­ways stands for man’s com­mu­nion with a per­sonal and su­pe­rior be­ing.