Pantheism

Pantheism, or the incarnation of the Spirit in matter, n of the idea in the form, is the first step of paganism toward the law of love, which was revealed and preached by Jesus. Antiquity, avid for pleasures, enamored of exterior beauty, scarcely looked beyond what it saw; sensual, ardent, it was ignorant of the melancholies that are born of restless doubt and of repressed tendernesses; it feared the gods, whose softened image it placed in the hearths of its residences; slavery and war gnawed at it within and exhausted it without; in vain did sonorous and magnificent Nature invite men to comprehend its splendor; they feared it or adored it, as they did the gods. The sacred groves participated in the terror of the oracles, and no mortal separated the benefits of their solitude from the religious ideas that made the tree palpitate and the stone tremble. Pantheism has two faces, under which it is fitting to study it. First, the infinite separation of the divine nature, fragmented into all the parts of the Creation and finding itself in the most minute details, as well as in its magnificence, that is, a flagrant confusion between the work and the workman. In the second place, the assimilation of Humanity or, rather, its absorption into matter. Ancient pantheism incarnated the divinities; modern pantheism assimilates man to the animal kingdom and makes the creating molecules arise from the burning furnace where vegetation is elaborated, thus confusing the results with the principle. God is order, which human confusion could not disturb. Everything comes to its purpose: the sap to the trees and the thought to the brains; no idea, daughter of time, is abandoned to chance; it has its rank, a close kinship that gives it the reason for being, links it to the past and exhorts it to the future. The history of religious beliefs is the proof of this absolute truth; no idolatry, no system, no fanaticism that has not had its powerful and imperious reason for existing; all advanced toward the light, all converged toward the same objective and all will come to merge, like the waters of distant rivers, in the vast and deep sea of Spiritist unity. Thus pantheism, precursor of Catholicism, carried within itself the germ of the universality of God; it inspired in men fraternity toward Nature, that fraternity which Jesus was to teach them to practice toward one another; sacred fraternity, consolidated today by Spiritism, which victoriously establishes communication between terrestrial beings and the spiritual world.

In truth I say to you: the law of love sets forth slowly, and in a continuous manner, its infinite spirals; it is it that, in the mysterious rites of the Indian religions, divinizes the animal, consecrating it for its weakness and for its humble services; it is it that peopled with familiar gods the purified hearths; it is it that, in each of the diverse beliefs, makes the generations spell out a word of the divine alphabet. But it was reserved to Jesus alone to proclaim the universal idea that sums them all up. The savior announced love and made it stronger than death. He said to men: “Love one another; love one another in pain, in joy, in opprobrium; love Nature, your first initiator; love the animals, your humble companions; love what begins, love what ends.” The Word of the Eternal is called love and embraces, in an inextinguishable tenderness, the Earth where you pass and the heavens where you will enter, purified and triumphant.

Lazarus.

[1] [The emphasis is ours to indicate a figurative sense in the expression, not confusing it with the principle of reincarnation.]