Theological Notes: A Promising Time for Pantheism

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IN THE 19th century, it really seemed that pantheism - the belief that there is no God other than the universe and nature - might sweep all before it.

Many of the greatest 19th- century writers and thinkers in the English- and German-speaking worlds were pantheists, at least for part of their lives. Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley were indisputably so; Coleridge flirted with pantheism for a time; Tennyson and Wilde wrote pantheist poems. Hegel and Schelling espoused pantheism; Goethe had a life-long love affair. Over the Atlantic Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman were all pantheists.

It is easy to see why. Pantheism required (and still requires) no belief in improbable …