Panteoil is the Spanish term for a crj-pt (q. v.) be- hind the altar, serving as the burial-place of the bishop.
Pantheism (from irac, all, and Srtoc, God), a gen- eral name for a belief in the identity of God and nature.
I. Dejinltion. — This philosophical dogma has been very variously conceived, and is therefore liable to many deti- nitions. According to Waterland, " it supposes God and nature, or God and the whole imiverse, to be one and the same substance — one universal being; insomuch that men's souls are only modifications of the divine sub- stance" (ITorAv*, viii, 81). According to Wegscheider, pantheism is "ea sententia, qua naturam divinam mun- do supponunt et Deum ac mundum unum idemque esse statuunt" (p. 250). Lacoudre says, "Pantheistaj qui contendunt unicam esse substantiam, cujus partes sunt omnia entia qua; existunt." Weissenborn defines pan- theism as '• the system which identifies God and the all of things or the unity of things.'''' To the critical student of the history of philosophy pantheism presents itself in six different forms. These are, (1) mechanical or mate- rialistic— God the mechanical unity of existence; (2) ontological (abstract unity) pantheism — the one sub- stance in all (Spinoza) ; (3) dynamic pantheism ; (4) psychical pantheism — God is the soul of the world ; (5) ethical pantheism — God is the universal moral order (Fichte) ; ((3) logical pantheism (Hegel). But, though pantheism has exhibited these varieties, the generall)' prevailing pantheistic notions may be subdivided until there remains only one phase that is generally understood to be referred to as pantheistic. That doctrine which is uncritically called the purely pantheistic, and which teaches that pantheism means absorption of God in nat- ure, is atheistic in fact, and should be treated under atheism (q. v.). That form of pantheism which teaches the absorption of nature in God — of the finite in the infinite — amounts to an exaggeration of theism (q. v.). Those forms above spoken of as ethical and logical pantheism, and now seen in their culmination in Strauss's writings, the most antichristian of them all, denying a personal God and a historical Christ, are properly ration- alism (q. v.), because they are not strictly philosophic but semi-religious, seeking to supplant Christianity as a religion, and not as a philosophical system. Pantheism, then, strictly speaking, is the doctrine of the necessary and eternal co-existence of the finite and the infinite — of the absolute consubstantialitj' of God and nature — considered as two different but inseparable aspects of universal existence. True, this doctrine conducts to the same result as atheism, yet theoretically it is widely different, and starts from exactly the opposite premise. The Atheist begins with nature, perceives and recog- nises the material universe, but denies that there is any God; the I'antheist starts with the assumption of the existence of a Divine P)eing as a truth which the soul cannot deny, and maintains that he is identical with nature — in other words, denies that there is any nature except God. t^uite differently, the Christian maintains the existence of both God and nature. He accepts the doctrine of Scripture, which is that God existed before the universe, and is ever apart from it and above it; for he made it by a spontaneous act, and in infinite wisdom and power still upholds it. It is a revelation of him. but no part of him; not God, but the voluntary mani- festation of God. It is not what he is. liiit what he has willed to be. In other words, God is the Being present everj'where in and controlling nature, as the soul the bodv, but distinct from it.
II. Scriptural Doctrine. — Some attempts have been made to maintain that the germs of pantheism are to be found in the Bible, as in such declarations as that of 1 Cor. XV, 28, ''Tliat (Jod may be all in all;" but it is evi- dent that belief in an omnipresent God regnant in nat- ure and belief in an impersonal God identical with nat- ure are widely different. Not to press the language of Scripture unfairly into questions which it only touches incidentally, we think the following clearly bears against the pantheistic theory of the relation of God to the universe: ''AH things were made by him, and without him was not anything made which was made" (John i, 3). Tliis surely is deism, not pantheism. The first clause states that all things came out of nothing into being 'by the will of the Logos; the second clause con- firms this by denying the contrary proposition that any- thing ever came into being either of itself or by any other will than that of the Word, The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same way speaks of cre- ation having both a beginning and an end : " They shall perish, but thou endurest: and they all shall wax old as a garment, and as a vesture thou shalt fold them up, and they shall be changed; but thou art the same, and thy years shall not change." Here the contrast is em- phatically marked between a perishing universe and its unchanging and unchangeable Author. It rests on the deistical axiom that the things which had a beginning must also have an end. If the Son of God had a begin- ning in time, he too should subside before the change of time. His is the only existence outside of God which does not follow the fixed conditions of the creation, and therefore he is one with God, and is God. The argu- ment is identical with that of the evangelist John, and both alike rest on a deistical conception of the universe. Take one more passage in James, where it is said of God that "with him is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." The reference is to that Light of lights, the Father of lights, which, unlike the sun, has neither annual orbit nor daily decline. The material sun rises and sets daily, and yearly climbs the sky to the solstice, and then declines to the tropic, but the uncreated Sun shines on, fixed and immovable. He is the same yes- terday, to-day, and forever.