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Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters
Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical--that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and--with striking regularity--monstrosity.
In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism "monstrous"--at once repellent and seductive--is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources--medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms--Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.
In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism "monstrous"--at once repellent and seductive--is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources--medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms--Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 5, 2024
I am in awe. I read this book as someone with a strong background in philosophy and as someone who describes their religious/spiritual worldview as pantheist and I've been given so much to think about. I will be returning to this book and the copious notes I've taken, and I've come away with a little list of texts from the endnotes that I'll also be picking up. I've spent much time thinking about what beliefs do in the world - how particular spiritual orientations might lend support to political change-making and imagining - and this book has left me inspired.
[Re-read leaves me just as inspired, and has connected with several other explorations. Highly recommend.]
[Re-read leaves me just as inspired, and has connected with several other explorations. Highly recommend.]
February 12, 2023
A wonderfully astute and provocative contribution to theology! I loved her coverage of the ideologically charged criticisms of pantheism throughout the centuries. I also really appreciated her readings of supposed secular scientists engaging explicitly theological ideas. She examines the theologies of modern physicists, justifiably abandoning the distinction between theology and theory. Such analysis is rare, yet it is crucial for mapping the history of ideas, for theologians who take modern science seriously, and for encouraging theorists to own their theologies and examine them more deeply.
I do wish the Theos chapter would have been more constructive. She quotes so many people throughout the book, I was hoping she would lay down some of the secondary literature in the end and speak more from her own voice--even as her bibliography covers a wide range of interests and is exceptionally diverse. (I have a lot more reading to do!)
When Rubenstein does use her own words, she tends to deploy a habit of postmodern theologians I find unhelpful--using long, jumbled, newfangled words, with liberal use of prefixes, slashes, dashes, parentheses, etc. Not that it isn't justified, since the point is precisely to complicate received language, but it makes the text and theology esoteric, sounding abstract and inaccessible. Only specialized academics write like that, so it makes me wonder who they're writing for, and what impact they expect their work to have.
Nonetheless, this is a fantastic contribution to the 21st century theological conversation, one that breaks new ground and encourages expanding horizons and challenging conventional assumptions.
I do wish the Theos chapter would have been more constructive. She quotes so many people throughout the book, I was hoping she would lay down some of the secondary literature in the end and speak more from her own voice--even as her bibliography covers a wide range of interests and is exceptionally diverse. (I have a lot more reading to do!)
When Rubenstein does use her own words, she tends to deploy a habit of postmodern theologians I find unhelpful--using long, jumbled, newfangled words, with liberal use of prefixes, slashes, dashes, parentheses, etc. Not that it isn't justified, since the point is precisely to complicate received language, but it makes the text and theology esoteric, sounding abstract and inaccessible. Only specialized academics write like that, so it makes me wonder who they're writing for, and what impact they expect their work to have.
Nonetheless, this is a fantastic contribution to the 21st century theological conversation, one that breaks new ground and encourages expanding horizons and challenging conventional assumptions.
February 11, 2021
As the end crept closer, I felt my despair rising. Not because of the content of this book, which is wonderfully monstrous, full of brilliant analysis and wit. No, I wept because there are no more Rubenstein books to conquer. I've now read all of the major works in her oeuvre, and each is an incredible achievement. Rubenstein's subjects are the biggest, deepest, most existentially and ontologically gripping stuff: philosophical wonder, infinite metaverses, gods, worlds, and our care and relations of others in the broadest sense. She holds a mirror to the concepts behind our everyday assumptions, demonstrating the metaphysical, physical and moral commitments our culture has made both wittingly and unwittingly. And across her works, she has sketched out a different path that is pluralist, joyfully agnostic, pragmatic, feminist, and creative.
This book lays her cards on the table more than the others. Rubenstein here explores the possibility of a pluralistic pantheist theology that celebrates the diversity of "pancarnation" without inverting or collapsing back into the old binaries of Western philosophical tradition. Rubenstein presents a cogent analysis of the intellectual history of pantheism in the West in order to answer the question: what were we so afraid of?
Her catalog of the visceral horror such thinking has engendered in many, many (mostly male) thinkers is both amusing, frustrating, and terrifying. Rubenstein primarily uses a critical reading of Spinoza to open out the idea of a multimodal and irreducible pantheism, before tying that vision into both Amerindian animism and modern cosmology and quantum physics. The end result is not the homogeneous "pudding" that some critics of pantheism fear, but a gloriously lumpy and fruitful perspectival relationality.
Rubenstein advocates for a broad view of "personhood" that may rescue us from the instrumentalist depredations of modern capitalist neoliberalism, while avoiding the mushiness of moral relativism. In her view, the messy multiplicity of reality is cause for celebration, and the dethroning of a patriarchal sky daddy now leaves room for the hard but fulfilling work of an interagential ethics of care that recognizes each of us as multiplicities in ourselves, a shifting chimerical conglomeration that can be parsed or combined differently depending on one's perspective. I freaking love that.
That said, I did feel like Rubenstein, in her efforts to out-maneuver the Western binaries, put her finger on the scale for the Many over the One. In "Strange Wonder" and "Worlds Without End", I thought she did a stronger job indicating how both the monistic and the pluralistic views are endlessly implicated in an infinite deconstructive dance of interpretation. I understand her sympathies are with the Many, but I think she was too quick to discard the One here rather than sublating it to a higher (and non-synthesizing) dialectic. She's already laid out the conceptual case for it, noting that one's view of reality is irreducibly perspectival ("is it many or one" is about as answerable as "is it a duck or a rabbit?"). This is merely a minor quibble though, as overall I am overawed by her keen mind and beautiful vision of the Good. I will wait in hope for any further output from this amazing author. With my highest possible recommendation, you should read this.
This book lays her cards on the table more than the others. Rubenstein here explores the possibility of a pluralistic pantheist theology that celebrates the diversity of "pancarnation" without inverting or collapsing back into the old binaries of Western philosophical tradition. Rubenstein presents a cogent analysis of the intellectual history of pantheism in the West in order to answer the question: what were we so afraid of?
Her catalog of the visceral horror such thinking has engendered in many, many (mostly male) thinkers is both amusing, frustrating, and terrifying. Rubenstein primarily uses a critical reading of Spinoza to open out the idea of a multimodal and irreducible pantheism, before tying that vision into both Amerindian animism and modern cosmology and quantum physics. The end result is not the homogeneous "pudding" that some critics of pantheism fear, but a gloriously lumpy and fruitful perspectival relationality.
Rubenstein advocates for a broad view of "personhood" that may rescue us from the instrumentalist depredations of modern capitalist neoliberalism, while avoiding the mushiness of moral relativism. In her view, the messy multiplicity of reality is cause for celebration, and the dethroning of a patriarchal sky daddy now leaves room for the hard but fulfilling work of an interagential ethics of care that recognizes each of us as multiplicities in ourselves, a shifting chimerical conglomeration that can be parsed or combined differently depending on one's perspective. I freaking love that.
That said, I did feel like Rubenstein, in her efforts to out-maneuver the Western binaries, put her finger on the scale for the Many over the One. In "Strange Wonder" and "Worlds Without End", I thought she did a stronger job indicating how both the monistic and the pluralistic views are endlessly implicated in an infinite deconstructive dance of interpretation. I understand her sympathies are with the Many, but I think she was too quick to discard the One here rather than sublating it to a higher (and non-synthesizing) dialectic. She's already laid out the conceptual case for it, noting that one's view of reality is irreducibly perspectival ("is it many or one" is about as answerable as "is it a duck or a rabbit?"). This is merely a minor quibble though, as overall I am overawed by her keen mind and beautiful vision of the Good. I will wait in hope for any further output from this amazing author. With my highest possible recommendation, you should read this.
March 8, 2026
“Despite the decades of scholarship illuminating the historical identity, persistent entanglement, and productive crossings of the regimes we now call “science” and “religion,” the default assumption among scientists, theists, and their audiences remains that these categories are self-identical and starkly opposed”
“the “conversation” between religion and science amounts to an either/or, metonymically encapsulated in the figures of God”
“what sort of gods and monsters such scientific theories are producing, and what sorts of ethical values and social formations they reflect and reinforce”
“accounts of creation, sustenance, and transformation—processes that are wholly immanent to the universe itself”
“pantheism not only unsettles, and not only entangles, but demolishes the raced and gendered ontic distinctions that Western metaphysics (with some crucial exceptions) insists on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, and animacy and inanimacy—distinctions that are rooted theologically in the Greco-Roman-Abrahamic distinction between creator and created, or God and world”
“locating in anti-pantheist literature some recurring themes—most notably, those of monstrosity, undifferentiation, (specifically maternal) femininity, dark primitivity, and dreamlike Orientalism”
“if these monstrosities are said to threaten the carefully erected structures of Western metaphysics, then—at least for those of us who seek a creative destruction of such structures— the question becomes how pantheism, in its most transformative sense, might actually take shape.”
“The monster is essentially a mixture. It is a mixture of two realms, the animal and the human … of two species … of two individuals … of two sexes … of life and death.… Finally, it is a mixture of forms.… the transgression of natural limits, the transgression of classifications, of the table, and of the law as table: this is actually what is involved in monstrosity.”
“associated with the world, or creation, or nature. God is said to be anthropomorphic, unchanging, rational, and masculine while the world is coded as animal-vegetal, changeable, irrational, and feminine. When Spinoza tells us that God is the world, then, he is mixing up traits that any sane philosophy would keep separate, transgressing the law of the table”
“if the power of Nature is the divine power and the divine power is the essence of God, then by the transitive principle, “the power of Nature” is “the very essence of God.” The universe we are in—and which, in turn, is in us—is what we mean when we say the word “God”; conversely, “God” is nothing other than the creative work of creation itself.”
“according to Spinoza, God and Nature are equivalent terms. As he phrases it (hastily, as if hoping no one will notice): “the power of Nature is the divine power and virtue, and the divine power is the very essence of God.””
“By “the table, and the law as table,” Foucault has in mind the whole chart of oppositions that Aristotle ascribes to Pythagoras, and that Western philosophy keeps extending and expanding; namely, the “table” that opposes mind to body, human to animal, male to female, the unchanging to the changing, the rational to the irrational, the spiritual to the material, perfection to imperfection, light to darkness, activity to passivity, etc”
“the first of each of these terms maintains its historical privilege by denigrating and repudiating the second, which turns out to be its condition of possibility”
“What Benjamin Lazier calls pantheism’s “referential promiscuity” is moreover a function of its being initially and more commonly used as a polemical term than as one of positive identification”
“panentheism according to which, as Philip Clayton explains, “the world is in God, but God is also more than the world.””
“panentheists might hold an a priori commitment to the ontological distinction between God and the world, or they might worry that pantheism’s identity forecloses difference, or both of these at once. As such, panentheists call upon the “en” to ensure the separation between God and world that enables their relation”
“the theistic world is thought to be object, not subject; passive, not active; created, not creator—and the pantheistic God-world collapses, or at least entangles, these distinctions”
“the “conversation” between religion and science amounts to an either/or, metonymically encapsulated in the figures of God”
“what sort of gods and monsters such scientific theories are producing, and what sorts of ethical values and social formations they reflect and reinforce”
“accounts of creation, sustenance, and transformation—processes that are wholly immanent to the universe itself”
“pantheism not only unsettles, and not only entangles, but demolishes the raced and gendered ontic distinctions that Western metaphysics (with some crucial exceptions) insists on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, and animacy and inanimacy—distinctions that are rooted theologically in the Greco-Roman-Abrahamic distinction between creator and created, or God and world”
“locating in anti-pantheist literature some recurring themes—most notably, those of monstrosity, undifferentiation, (specifically maternal) femininity, dark primitivity, and dreamlike Orientalism”
“if these monstrosities are said to threaten the carefully erected structures of Western metaphysics, then—at least for those of us who seek a creative destruction of such structures— the question becomes how pantheism, in its most transformative sense, might actually take shape.”
“The monster is essentially a mixture. It is a mixture of two realms, the animal and the human … of two species … of two individuals … of two sexes … of life and death.… Finally, it is a mixture of forms.… the transgression of natural limits, the transgression of classifications, of the table, and of the law as table: this is actually what is involved in monstrosity.”
“associated with the world, or creation, or nature. God is said to be anthropomorphic, unchanging, rational, and masculine while the world is coded as animal-vegetal, changeable, irrational, and feminine. When Spinoza tells us that God is the world, then, he is mixing up traits that any sane philosophy would keep separate, transgressing the law of the table”
“if the power of Nature is the divine power and the divine power is the essence of God, then by the transitive principle, “the power of Nature” is “the very essence of God.” The universe we are in—and which, in turn, is in us—is what we mean when we say the word “God”; conversely, “God” is nothing other than the creative work of creation itself.”
“according to Spinoza, God and Nature are equivalent terms. As he phrases it (hastily, as if hoping no one will notice): “the power of Nature is the divine power and virtue, and the divine power is the very essence of God.””
“By “the table, and the law as table,” Foucault has in mind the whole chart of oppositions that Aristotle ascribes to Pythagoras, and that Western philosophy keeps extending and expanding; namely, the “table” that opposes mind to body, human to animal, male to female, the unchanging to the changing, the rational to the irrational, the spiritual to the material, perfection to imperfection, light to darkness, activity to passivity, etc”
“the first of each of these terms maintains its historical privilege by denigrating and repudiating the second, which turns out to be its condition of possibility”
“What Benjamin Lazier calls pantheism’s “referential promiscuity” is moreover a function of its being initially and more commonly used as a polemical term than as one of positive identification”
“panentheism according to which, as Philip Clayton explains, “the world is in God, but God is also more than the world.””
“panentheists might hold an a priori commitment to the ontological distinction between God and the world, or they might worry that pantheism’s identity forecloses difference, or both of these at once. As such, panentheists call upon the “en” to ensure the separation between God and world that enables their relation”
“the theistic world is thought to be object, not subject; passive, not active; created, not creator—and the pantheistic God-world collapses, or at least entangles, these distinctions”
March 26, 2025
Not an easy read at times, but sure worth it.
Why have so many theologians, philosophers, or even scientists run away from pantheism - the idea that God IS Nature?
This book is a history of that fear - for some, allure - and the ways it can be conceptualised.
There are MULTIPLE ways to be ONE, after all. Or should that even be the case?
From Spinoza to Einstein, this book gives a history of religion, science and alternative spiritualities (and their relationship) as they tackle this 'nuisance' of pantheism - and how in attempts to label it as monstrous, critics resorted to racist, sexist and Orientalist slurs (quite literally!)
Why have so many theologians, philosophers, or even scientists run away from pantheism - the idea that God IS Nature?
This book is a history of that fear - for some, allure - and the ways it can be conceptualised.
There are MULTIPLE ways to be ONE, after all. Or should that even be the case?
From Spinoza to Einstein, this book gives a history of religion, science and alternative spiritualities (and their relationship) as they tackle this 'nuisance' of pantheism - and how in attempts to label it as monstrous, critics resorted to racist, sexist and Orientalist slurs (quite literally!)
May 9, 2024
This is a book I’ll be thinking about and chewing on for a very, very long time. Unlike any other theological work I’ve ever read. I’m in awe of Mary-Jane Rubenstein and am eager to continue diving into her thought.
January 2, 2023
The first philosophy book I've ever read in my 71 years, and my most important book of at least the past year.
June 12, 2024
Thought-provoking. It opened up a whole new world for me.
November 9, 2025
A very engaging critique of the critique of Pantheism.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews