Gerard Manley Hopkins embraced Roman Catholic sacramental theology. Grace, which creates recipients anew in their deepest selves, may be offered within sacraments or outside of them. A valid sacrament establishes a formal relationship; this ‘thing-which-is-also-a-sign’ distinguishes sacraments from other sources of grace. The words consecrating the Eucharist, Hopkins believed, literally embody Christ upon the altar – unlike poems. Sacraments require physical, not merely intellectual elements. Poems are more like ‘sacramentals’, which do not establish a reality without intellectual recognition and willed assent. Keenly aware of the relation between nature’s physicality and the physicality of sacraments, Hopkins did not confuse natural awareness of God’s goodness with sacramental grace, and rejected pantheism. He developed his personal vision of Catholic sacraments and their relation to Nature through Tractarians like Henry Parry Liddon, as well as the aesthetics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Ruskin.

The idea that God is in all things has often been taken as implying pantheism – that God is all things. But doesn’t the Tradition say that God is in all things? It does. Then isn’t pantheism true? And if it isn’t true, then is the Tradition mistaken to say that He is in all things? In order to investigate whether He is in all things, St. Thomas must also consider what has traditionally been meant by the assertion.

Chapter 7 examines Goethe’s unconventional attitudes to religion and religious authority, and their influence on his creative work. It emphasises that, despite his opposition to institutionalised Christianity, Goethe remained interested in Christian beliefs and convinced of the value of scriptural reading. The chapter details his engagement with Spinozist Pantheism (the view of God as embodied in the world), with Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, and with Islam. It argues that we should see in Goethe’s approach not the rejection of religious narratives, but their reframing and rewriting.

One of the most significant philosophical events during the final decades of the eighteenth century was the so-called ‘pantheism controversy.’ An important event during the controversy was the initially anonymous publication of Thomas Wizenmann’s 1786 book entitled The Results of the Jacobian and Mendelssohnian Philosophy, Critically Examined by A Neutral Party. Kant responds to this book in his essay ‘What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?’. This chapter contains a complete translation of Wizenmann’s subsequent response to the ‘Orientation’ essay, written in the form of an open letter to Kant. The most important claim of the letter is Wizenmann’s example of the lover who infers the existence of their beloved’s reciprocal love, simply because the lover needs this to be the case. Kant responds to Wizenmann, and this example, primarily in the second Critique’s chapter ‘On Assent from A Need of Pure Reason’ (5:142–6)

A friend and follower of Walt Whitman’s, John Johnston loved the countryside for many reasons. In one sense he was an Adherer like Hallam and Cresswell: the landscape he loved most of all was that of his native Annan with its river, bridge and meadows. He was also an Explorer, whose careful observations of nature were prompted by a quest for spiritual more than scientific knowledge, and a Withdrawer, who repeatedly turned his back on dirty, smoky Bolton to find refuge in nature. Yet more than he was Adherer, Explorer or Withdrawer, Johnston was a Restorer. He went to the countryside to recompose something that was impaired and disordered by the constant turbulence to which his very active life exposed him. ‘Loafing’ quietly in secluded rural locations played a crucial role in sustaining the ethical and spiritual framework he drew on to endure professional difficulties and personal losses.

Several central themes of Schelling’s celebrated 1809 Freedom Essay were constructed in direct response to Jacobi. This chapter touches on two themes in which Schelling opposes Jacobi, and in doing so pushes Schelling’s thinking on human freedom into entirely fresh terrain: the first theme is Jacobi’s concept of reason, and the second is Jacobi’s understanding of pantheism as logically entailing determinism.

Tolstoy’s day-to-day engagement with nature shaped who he was and how he conceived of himself; it is reflected, abundantly, in what he wrote. But while the natural world remained an essential touchstone for Tolstoy for the whole of his life – a reservoir and measure of what was authentic and good – as he grew older this regard was tinged with ambivalence. He came to believe that not everything that was natural (war, violence, predation, sex) was necessarily good, and he appears to have doubted whether humans could live in a way that was at once fully natural and fully moral. This essay explores this central paradox of Tolstoy’s thinking, and focuses particular attention on the following aspects of his relationship with the natural world: the "green" creation myth that Tolstoy self-consciously fashioned about himself; the close link between nature and Tolstoy’s sense of the divine; Tolstoy’s presciently ecological conception of life in nature as a realm of both ceaseless "struggle" (war) and overarching harmony (peace); Tolstoy’s environmentalism.

Building on previous chapters’ conclusions, this chapter posits various organizational levels of intentionality and speculates as to how they interconnect through powers-based processes and biological evolutionary developments. These levels of intentionality form an intentionality continuum. The Intentionality Continuum Thesis holds that intentionality is not a local phenomenon, present only in creatures with minds, but a global phenomenon present in fundamental physical phenomena, biological cells, plants, animals and humans, and human societies. So the continuum of intentionality in nature runs from the physical intentionality of fundamental powers to the complex, higher-level psychological powers of organisms as well as social groups. This might require emergent powers, a possibility that is defended and the account of which is inspired by the fusion theory of emergent properties advanced by Paul Humphreys. Given the panintentionality implied by the Intentionality Continuum Thesis, along with some other defensible assumptions, a reasonable though certainly tentative case can be made for pantheism. The chapter, and the book, conclude by identifying open questions.

By distancing creation from nature Christianity rejected freer notions of nature as pagan or pantheist, while imposing a gender hierarchy that rivaled in orthodox fixity creation-from-nothing. Despite the advance of scientific rationalism, Enlightenment culture did not overthrow Christian gender hierarchy. While the ecofeminist movement seized on the liberation of women to bring about ecological change, its agenda stagnated when its activism decreased. Applying a critical-theological reading, this article sees gender hierarchy as subtly read into the Christian exegesis of Genesis rather than flowing from biblical revelation. Acknowledging our current culture as interreligious, it points to two movements forwards, pertaining to gender and creation. First, by locating gender roles in the Trinity, we can loosen the ties with creation and link them to the issue of difference. Second, based on the medieval theological parallelism of nature and scripture one can argue that, in an era where scriptural literacy has lost much of its force, nature can assume a prophetic role. This allows us to reconceive the nature complex insofar as it calls not only for the unity of all creatures as well as of all genders, but ultimately also for the unity of creation with the Creator, what Eriugena called, the unity of all natures.

The landscape of contemporary religious ecology is presented in this article as a variety of responses to disenchantment and what Lynn White identified as the theological roots of environmental ruin (Biblical divine transcendence and human exceptionality). The various positions are mapped in terms of those who deny divine transcendence and make nature, either as actually or only potentially infinite, the highest (pantheists); those who deny divine unicity and return to a pre-Christian, “enchanted” nature (neo-pagans); and those who defend in various ways the ecology of the Biblical account of creation (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian monotheists).

In the seventeenth century, European thought about the capacities of a perfectly rational mind (i.e. that of the best pagan philosopher) underwent a major transformation. This transformation had three sources: (i) philological scholarship concerning the history of religion that rejected patristic narratives of pagan/Judaeo-Christian similarity; (ii) reconsiderations of Asian theology as reported by missionaries and travellers; (iii) new approaches to pagan philosophy, which was more and more conceived of as fundamentally incapable of achieving the ‘true’ metaphysical and cosmological worldview held by Christians, above all because of its universal adherence to the rational principle of ex nihilo nihil fit. As a result, by 1700 a consensus emerged that the rational pagan mind bereft of revelation would tend to some kind of animism, pantheism, vitalism, or even monism. The debate was whether this pagan worldview concealed a latent monotheism (a view held by John Selden, G.J. Vossius, Tobias Pfanner, Ralph Cudworth, and others) or to a monistic atheism (a position first articulated by Pierre Gassendi, and then further developed by Jakob Thomasius, Samuel Parker, François Bernier, and many others). By the end of the century, the second view had largely triumphed.

A historical investigation into Spinozism teaches us at least as much about the interpreters of Spinoza as it does about Spinoza’s thought itself. More than any other philosophy, Spinoza’s has been held up like a mirror to the great currents of thought, providing a particular perspective on them: one can see reflected and revealed in the mirror of Spinozism the inner and outer conflicts and contradictions of Calvinism, Cartesianism, freethinking and libertinism, the Enlightenment, materialism, the Pantheismusstreit, German Idealism, French spiritualism, Marxism, British Idealism, structuralism, and other movements. This chapter provides a condensed overview of the European reception of Spinoza from the seventeenth century until today, in both minor and major thinkers.

Shelley repeatedly described himself as an atheist, and yet in his poetry he frequently explored the possibility of god-like transcendent powers, divine inspiration, and prophecy. In many of his greatest poetic works (such as Mont Blanc, Ode to the West Wind, and Prometheus Unbound), Shelley frequently invokes biblical imagery to articulate essentially Christian values (hope, charity, love) while developing his own master themes of enlightened defiance, political liberty and the struggle toward self-control. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's Greek Titan is metaphorically “crucified” for his sacrifice to help humanity. His liberation follows a personal transformation that recalls aspects of St. Paul’s writing on self-mastery. It is unclear if Prometheus’ liberation is causally linked to his own imaginative renewal, or whether there are other forces (God, Necessity, inscrutable Powers) that are instrumental. The repeated inclination to invoke both classical and biblical writing while developing themes of personal autonomy and enlightenment is one of the most interesting aspects of Shelley's work, and one of the most representative qualities of Romantic writing more generally.