Introduction to Panentheism

The notion of panentheism stands at the interface between science and religion; it provides a vision of the universe and science that allows for constructive dialogue between scientific agnosticism and religious belief.¹ Panentheism is a philosophical and theological position that asserts simultaneously that God is in the world and that the world is in God. Panentheism is situated between classical theism, its Enlightenment form deism, and pantheism. Christianity, like most world religions, is theistic, affirming the existence of an absolute Being, God. In Christianity, God is both transcendent and immanent in relation to the world (or universe or cosmos): transcendent as beyond the world, both material and noetic; God is the creator of the world, but is infinitely more than the world; and immanent, since God sustains the world at every moment and is thus present in the world as its principle of existence. Theism typically emphasizes divine attributes that distinguish God from the world, such as unicity, simplicity, immutability, impassibility, and eternity, and affirms that God is ontologically different and separate from the world.

Deism admits the existence of divine Being but emphasizes God’s otherness from the world and does not recognize any divine action in the world other than the initial act of creation. The classic eighteenth-century image attributed to deism presents God as a cosmic clockmaker who, having made the clock, winds it up and walks away, letting it tick along independently. Pantheism confounds God and creation; it identifies God and creation, denying God’s transcendence and retaining only a depersonalized divine immanence. In the absence of a notion of creation ex nihilo, the world is seen as an eternal existent.

Panentheism is a modern neologism coined in the early nineteenth century.² It is composed of the Greek words pan (all), en (in), and theos (God). Panentheism understands God and the world to be intimately interrelated, with the world being in God in some fashion and, similarly, God being in the world in some fashion. The fundamental problem of panentheism is the middle term, “en/in”: How is creation “in” God? Or God “in” creation? Panentheism seeks to avoid both separating God from the world—as traditional theism, especially in its radical form, deism, tends to do, notably by its emphasis on a fundamental ontological difference between God and the world—and identifying or fusing God with the world as in pantheism. Traditional theistic systems emphasize the difference between God and the world, notably by highlighting the ontological gulf between Creator and created, between infinite and finite, between eternal and temporal, while panentheism stresses a dynamic interrelationship or interpenetration of God and the world. Whereas pantheism identifies or comingles God and the world, panentheism maintains the identity and significance of both the divine and the non-divine, the distinction between the world as created and God as transcendent, uncreated and the Creator. In modern readings of ancient literature, anticipations of panentheist understandings of God-and-creation occur in philosophical and theological writings throughout history, although overly enthusiastic panentheist readings of ancient Christian authors and in non-Christian religions may be more anachronistic than sound historical theology or interreligious comparative theology.

A rich diversity of panentheist models of God–world relations has developed in the past century, often in response to scientific theories, especially modern cosmology and brain science (see Atmanspacher and von Sass 2017, 1031; Clayton 2004; Clayton 2017; Cooper 2006; and Culp 2017). Panentheism is frequently seen as a philosophy that facilitates the search for compatibility and dialogue between religious and scientific views of the world, including human existence. But for some philosophers, panentheism is not a clearly demarcated philosophical position, since advocates of panentheism cannot adequately distinguish it from “well-established and clearly articulated rival models of God such as classical theism, neo-classical theism, open theism, and pantheism” (Mullins 2019, 204).³ Willem B. Drees (2017) questions whether panentheism has inherent advantages over theism and pantheism in relation with science.

Panentheism is an unsettling and controversial notion in modern Orthodox Christianity. Some Orthodox theologians explicitly place their theologies under the panentheist umbrella, while others reject panentheism as incompatible with Orthodox tradition. This article explores panentheism in modern Orthodox thought. It discusses Orthodox supporters and critics of panentheism, beginning with the Russian religious renaissance, especially Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944) and his predecessors, and Orthodox critics of panentheism, notably Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) and Nicolas Lossky (1870–1965),⁴ and more recent Orthodox theologians attracted to panentheism, such as Kallistos Ware (1934–2022), Andrew Louth (b. 1944), Christopher C. Knight (b. 1952), and Alexei Nesteruk (b. 1957). The conclusion focuses on how Orthodox theologians envisage panentheism as compatible with the Orthodox tradition and whether the Orthodox critics of panentheism have been answered, and it sketches the contours of an Orthodox panentheism.

Panentheism in Sergius Bulgakov

Sergius Bulgakov’s philosophical–theological thinking revolves around his much-criticized theology of Divine Wisdom (sophiology), with which he also assimilates the patristic notion of the divine energies in a complex (and not entirely coherent) system that seeks to maintain an antinomic balance between God as utterly transcendent and yet radically immanent. He explicitly defines his theology as panentheist, defending it against the accusation of pantheism levied against his philosophical mentor Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900).⁵ To distance himself from Solovyov’s subtly pantheistic system, Bulgakov emphasizes God’s transcendence to creation and God as Creator, while at the same time maintaining the prime panentheist affirmation that God is in creation and creation in God—nothing can exist outside God:

As the object of the providence of God, the world is not only a thing or an object in the hands of God; it possesses its own proper being, given by God at its creation, its own nature, its own life. And at the same time this created nature does not remain outside God, because ontologically there can be no extra-divine existence. The world abides in God, although it is not God, and the relationship of God to the world in [divine] Providence is not defined as a unilateral action of God towards a world existing outside of him and alien to him, but rather as an interaction of Creator with creation . . . Because of the divinity of its foundation, the world maintains its own existence in the eyes of God, even though it is created ex nihilo. As a result of its created nature, it also maintains its own independent existence in the eyes of God. God gave to the world at its creation a genuine reality, which he also posits eternally for the Creator himself. It is by the power of this divine reality and as by this unbridgeable difference that the world exists both for itself and for God, and the relationship between them can only be on the basis of interaction, however profound, intimate and multifaceted it may be, even to the extent of the union of the two natures, divine and human, and the deification of humanity in Christ and the church. (Bulgakov 1931b, 102–4)

Bulgakov maintains the traditional Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo but nuances the understanding of this doctrine by affirming that creation exists within God as potential, in effect as an eternal divine “idea,” realized only at the moment of creation:

God creates the world, as it were, out of himself, out of the abundance of his own resources. Nothing new is introduced for God by the life of the world of creatures. That world only receives, according to the mode proper to it, the divine principle of life. Its being is only a reflection and a mirror of the world of God . . . The world, having been created from “nothing,” in this “nothing” finds its “place.” God confers on a principle which originates in himself an existence distinct from his own. This is not pantheism, but panentheism. (Bulgakov 1937, 63–64, 72)

It is statements such as “God creates the world, as it were, out of himself” that, taken out of context, lend themselves to interpretations of Bulgakov’s cosmology as pantheist. Such statements must be seen in relation to Bulgakov’s cosmology as a whole, which includes the unequivocal affirmation of divine transcendence, for example when he writes: “God in the Holy Trinity has all fullness and all-bliss; he is self-existent, unchanging, eternal, and therefore absolute (God in himself)” (Bulgakov 1931a, 35).

Following his discussion of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the world, Bulgakov (1936, 199–200) writes: “But is this not a pantheism, an impious deification of the world, leading to a kind of religious materialism? Yes, it is a pantheism, but an entirely pious one; or more precisely, as I prefer to call it to avoid ambiguity, it is a panentheism.” Bulgakov variously summarizes his panentheism as ‘‘the truth that all is in God or of God (panentheism)” (Bulgakov 1925, 27) and “the world is the not-God existent in God; God is the not-world existent in the world. God posits the world outside of himself, but the world possesses its being in God” (Bulgakov 1931a).⁶

For Bulgakov, panentheism is based on the key premise that nothing can exist autonomously apart from God, that God must at every moment create or sustain everything that is not-God: “Nothing can exist outside God, as alien or exterior to him . . . In reality there is but one true existence, the divine. There is only the one God in his divine Wisdom, and outside him nothing whatever. What is not God is nothing” (Bulgakov 1937, 72, 148). The last sentence must be understood in the sense that nothing can exist independently of God as Creator; otherwise, God would not be absolute or one, since something else would exist in addition to God. This is the basis of dualistic philosophical systems, which see God and the world as independent eternal existents.

It is on this conception of panentheism that Bulgakov founds his distinction between eternal Divine Sophia (God in himself) and Created Sophia (all that is not-God, which God creates and sustains in time).

Bulgakov’s Philosophical and Spiritual Predecessors

Bulgakov was the last great Russian religious philosopher–theologian. But what about his predecessors in the Russian religious renaissance from the 1880s to the Bolshevik Revolution?

Other leading representatives of the Russian religious renaissance did not refer explicitly to “panentheism,” but they advanced certain ideas that can be assimilated to panentheism. This does, of course, run the risk of an anachronistic interpretation of their thinking. To give two examples, the term “panentheism” does not occur in two major representative works of the religious renaissance, the Lectures on Godmanhood (1877–84) by Vladimir Solovyov and The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914) by Pavel Florensky, nor for that matter in the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The search for intimations of panentheism in Bulgakov’s predecessors must instead focus on the notion of all-unity or total-unity (vseedinstvo) and the interest of the religious thinkers in spiritual (or mystical) experiences inspired by nature. The idea of a principle of unification of all that exists has its roots in ancient philosophies; it features prominently, for example, in Plato (“the One”) and in Plotinus (“the First”). All-unity was readily assimilated in the Russian religious renaissance from German idealists, especially Fredrich Schelling (1775–1854), whose philosophy has a decidedly pantheist flavor, and from Schelling’s predecessors, especially the mystic Jakob Boehme (1575–1624). In early Christian thought, God as Creator is the de facto principle of unity in creation, but for many thinkers of the Russian religious renaissance, a strict theism that emphasizes a radical distinctiveness between God and the world, reflected in a theistic exposition of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, posits an untenable dualism, an unbridgeable chasm between God and creation. The challenge was to identify a basis of all-unity that encompasses both the Creator and the created, the spiritual and the material, and empirical, intuitive, and abstract knowledge, in a single all-inclusive vision of existence and knowledge without slipping into unwanted dualism or pantheism. The idea of the totality of all beings forming an absolute unity, yet without this being pantheism, occurs as early as Peter Chaadaev (1794–1856): “There is absolute unity in the total aggregation of beings . . . This objective unity . . . has nothing in common with the pantheism professed by a majority of contemporary philosophers” (cited in Zenkovsky 1953, 162). Vladimir Solovyov draws on German idealism to make all-unity and its correlate divine-humanity or Godmanhood (bogochelovechestvo), the centerpieces of his thinking. To express the unity of all beings, Solovyov adopts the term vseedinstvo (all-unity).

Nicolas Lossky (1870–1965) (father of the theologian Vladimir Lossky) describes the characteristic feature of Russian philosophical thought as “the search for an exhaustive knowledge of reality as a whole and the concreteness of metaphysical conceptions . . . the whole being understood not as a chaotic multiplicity but as a systematic pan-unity” (Lossky 1952, 95). This all-unity is discovered first in contemplation and in prayer. “In dialoguing with God,” summarizes the Catholic theologian Tomáš Špidlík (1919–2010), “we discover the profound sense of the universe and its unity: the Russians call this vseedinstvo, ‘all-unity,’ for them a key expression in gnoseology” (Špidlík 1994, 86). From Solovyov onwards, all-unity was a powerful, even hypnotic notion in Russian thought, “bewitching and subjugating men’s minds,” writes Vasily Zenkovsky (1881–1962), becoming an idée fixe (Zenkovsky 1953, II:874).

Solovyov (2003, 29–66) set out to unify the three forms of knowledge (empirical, metaphysical, and mystical) and integrate them with beauty. Beauty in this sense is less an aesthetic quality isolated from ethics and truth as it is a manifestation of goodness and truth—a modern revisitation of the classic Platonic triad of higher forms, truth-beauty-goodness. At first, Solovyov referred to the principle of unity in creation as the “world-soul” (anima mundi), inherited from Stoic and Neo-Platonist philosophy and the idealist Friedrich Schelling. Through the notion of the world-soul, Solovyov sought to reconcile divine unity and the multiplicity of creation: “The soul of the world is both one and all; it occupies a mediating position between the plurality of living entities and the unconditional unity of the Deity . . . The soul of the world is a dual entity: it includes both the divine principle and created being; but, since it is determined by neither of them, it remains free” (cited in Zenkovsky 1953, II:505–6).

For Solovyov, divine fullness or actuality includes multiplicity, the unity of a multiplicity of ideas and potencies, “the primordial unity of the divine Logos,” writes Solovyov (1877–83, 131) in his Lectures on Godmanhood. Solovyov’s (1877–83, 130) justification for this “primordial unity” is based on the notion of divine as absolute: “If the divine essence were not all-one, did not contain all, then something existent could, consequently, be outside of God; but in such a case God would be limited by this being, external to himself; God would not be Absolute, i.e. he would not be God.” Bulgakov later expresses this notion—hardly new in Western thought, since Greek philosophers came to the same realization before Christianity—in his somewhat ambiguous statement “What is not God is nothing” (Bulgakov 1937, 72, 148).

The cosmic “fall” is thus a fall from divine unity-in-multiplicity to creaturely disunity-in-multiplicity: “Having fallen away from the divine unity, the natural world appears as a chaos of discordant elements” (Solovyov 1877–83, 135). Solovyov (1877–83, 103–4) conceived the principle of all-unity manifested in the world-soul as a mirror of the divine world, which unites the Platonic triad of beauty, truth, and goodness:

The absolute actualizes goodness in beauty, through truth. Since they are only different aspects or positings of a single subject, these three ideas, or universal unities, form, in their interpenetration, a new concrete unity. This unity constitutes the complete actualization of the divine content, the integral totality of the absolute essence, the realization of God as the all-One, in whom “dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” [Colossians 2:9].

For Solovyov, love is the over-arching principle of unity of the truth-beauty-goodness triad that brings together the different orders of existence:

Goodness is the unity of the all or of all individuals; it is love as what is willed, or desired; it is the beloved. Consequently, here we have love in a special and preeminent sense as the idea of ideas; its unity is essential. Truth is also love; that is, it is the unity of the all, but as objectively represented; its unity is ideal. Finally, beauty is also love (that is, the unity of all individuals). But it is love as manifested or made available to the senses; its unity is real. (Solovyov 1877–83, 103)

Solovyov saw the world as all-unity in the state of becoming, whereas the Absolute is the All-Unity, as Nicolas Lossky (1953, 104) explains:

The world contains the divine element, all-oneness, as a potentiality, an idea; but it also contains the non-divine, natural, material element, the dispersed, the multiplex of the particular which is not all-oneness. However, every particular being tends to become all-oneness and gradually moves toward that goal, uniting oneself with God. The process of establishing all-oneness in the world is the development of the world.

Other figures of the Russian religious renaissance who pursued the quest for all-unity, or the closely related concept of integral knowledge, at some stage in their intellectual development include Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948), Simeon Frank (1877–1950), Lev Karsavin (1882–1952), Alexei Losev (1893–1988), Sergius Troubetskoy (1862–1905), and Eugene Troubetskoy (1863–1920), as well as Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1891) and the leading poets of the Silver Age of Russian letters prior to World War I, such as Alexander Blok (1880–1921) and Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949).

Another aspect of the Russian religious renaissance that contains intimations of panentheism are spiritual experiences inspired by nature. Cosmism, a sense of unity between humanity and the rest of creation, is reflected in descriptions of nature in writings of major personalities of the Russian religious renaissance. In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), starets (elder) Zosima recounts an event from his youth, when he suddenly calls out to his companions, “speaking straight from [his] heart”:

Gentlemen . . . look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish, and we don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep. (Dostoyevsky 1880, II, VI, 2)

Similarly, after the death of Zosima, Alyosha (Alexei), the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, rushes out into the still night, gazes upwards at the starry night and all around him:

[T]he silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars . . . Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to love it, to love it for ever and ever. (Dostoyevsky 1880, III, VII, 4)

In his Autobiographical Notes, Bulgakov describes several experiences stimulated by nature and by art that nudged him towards his return to Christianity after years of intellectual wandering in the byways of Marxism and idealism. The first experience, in the spirit of nineteenth century romanticism (as indeed the extracts from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov), took place in 1895:

I was twenty-four years old. For a decade I had lived without faith and, after early stormy doubts, a religious emptiness reigned in my soul. One evening we were driving across the southern steppes of Russia, and the strong-scented spring grass was gilded by the rays of a glorious sunset. Far in the distance I saw the blue outlines of the Caucasus. This was my first sight of the mountains. I looked with ecstatic delight at their rising slopes. I drank in the light and the air of the steppes. I listened to the revelation of nature. My soul was accustomed to the dull pain of seeing nature as a lifeless desert and of treating its surface beauty as a deceptive mask. Yet, contrary to my intellectual convictions, I could not be reconciled to nature without God. Suddenly, in that evening hour, my soul was joyfully stirred. I started to wonder what would happen if the cosmos were not a desert and its beauty not a mask or deception—if nature were not death, but life. If he existed, the merciful and loving Father, if nature was the vesture of his love and glory, and if the pious feelings of my childhood, when I used to live in his presence, when I loved him and trembled because I was weak, were true, then the tears and inspiration of my adolescence, the sweetness of my prayers, my innocence and all those emotions which I had rejected and trodden down would be vindicated, and my present outlook with its emptiness and deadness would appear nothing more than blindness and lies, and what a transformation it would bring to me! (Bulgakov 1946, 10–11)

But Bulgakov was slow to respond to this invitation to recognize a transcendental reality, the existence of a world beyond the sensory; another thirteen years would pass before his definitive return to the faith and the church.

Bulgakov’s mentor Pavel Florensky intersperses descriptions of experiences in nature with philosophical and theological reflections in his classic The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914). Many chapters of the book (in the form of letters to an unnamed friend) begin with an evocation of a natural experience with which he associates a theological reflection developed in the rest of the chapter, as in this introduction to Letter Five, on the Comforter:

Do you remember, my gentle one, our long walks in the forest, the forest of dying August? The silvery trunks of the birches stood like stately palms, and their gold-green tops, as though exuding blood, pressed against the crimson and purple aspens. And above the surface of the earth, the branches of a hazel grove spread like green gauze. There was a holy hush of solemnity beneath the vaults of this temple. My far and yet eternally near Friend, do you remember our intimate conversations? The Holy Spirit and religious antinomies—that, it appears, is what interested us most. And finding ourselves in this solemn grove, we walked at sunset through the cornfield, became drunk with the flaming west, and rejoiced that the question was becoming clear, that we had come independently to the same answer. Then our thoughts flowed out in streams flaming like the vault of heaven, and we grasped each other’s thoughts almost before they were spoken. (Florensky 1914, 80)

Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948), Bulgakov’s friend and collaborator, also advances a philosophical–theological position assimilated to panentheism. Berdyaev’s Trinitarianism and aspects of his cosmology may have been influenced by Bulgakov, even though Berdyaev did not adhere to sophiology, from which he explicitly distances himself (see Berdyaev 1935; 1948, 241). In his history of panentheism, John W. Cooper (2006, 218–20) refers to both Bulgakov and Berdyaev as “trinitarian panentheists.”

In summary, for the Russian religious thinkers, God creates the world in beauty as a manifestation of his love towards creation. The created beauty of the world is not merely aesthetic; more importantly, it is a visible manifestation and seal of divine love and God’s intimate connection with the world, which has a correlate in the ideal of beauty as the goal of the human creative process. Humanity is a part of the cosmos, rather than the cosmos being something separate “out there” and humanity as irreconcilably different from the rest of creation. This cosmic, mystical outlook sees the world as a divine creation reflecting divine glory: one has only to open one’s eyes to perceive the glory of God. All-unity is thus an unspoken complicity between Creator and created. The sense of wonder experienced in the contemplation of nature becomes prayer; humanity joins and verbalizes the wordless worship of both inanimate and animate creation for its Creator. If God is indeed love, as John the Evangelist unequivocally affirms (1 John 4:8, 16), then this love must and does manifest itself throughout creation as a unifying principle between God and creation, between God and humanity.

Both these aspects of the Russian religious renaissance, the search for all-unity and spiritual–mystical experiences of God, can be interpreted as manifesting an underlying panentheistic view of how God relates to the world or creation, God’s presence in the world, and the world’s presence in God.

Orthodox Critics of Panentheism

Orthodox thought after the Russian religious philosophers had difficulty comprehending and accepting the notion of all-unity, tinged with Platonism and romantic cosmism, and, it was felt, teetering towards pantheism. Orthodox thought sought to bridge the gap between God and creation by other avenues. One weakness of all-unity, typically elaborated in isolation from Christ and the Incarnation, is that it becomes a philosophical notion that is not specifically Christian and is not dependent on Revelation, even though it is not inimical to Revelation. For some critics, all-unity is too close to pantheism for comfort. Vasily Zenkovsky (1881–1962) refers to pantheism as the “fatal companion of the metaphysics of total-unity.” He describes Solovyov’s metaphysics of all-unity as “a modernized pantheism, in the tradition of Spinoza and Schelling,” with the world as Absolute Being, even if “an Absolute in process of becoming,” while recognizing Solovyov’s sincere wish “to place Christian principles at the foundation of all of his theoretical constructions” (Zenkovsky 1953, II:847, 530). Nicolas Lossky (1952, 128) also refers to the “pantheistic flavor” of Solovyov’s conception of all-unity as the Absolute. Both Zenkovsky and Lossky link what they perceive as implicit pantheism in Solovyov’s cosmology to his failure to consider God explicitly as the Absolute, the Creator (Zenkovsky 1953, II:530; Lossky 1952, 127–28). Yet Solovyov does not emerge as a pantheist in the light of the totality of his writings and of his life. It is true that, unlike his successors Florensky and Bulgakov, Solovyov did not forcefully emphasize the idea of God as Creator and creation ex nihilo—the thrust of Solovyov’s intellectual project was to express a unity between God and the world, not to seek out what differentiates them.

After Bulgakov’s death in 1944, the mode of religious thought he incarnated lost its appeal among younger Orthodox theologians, who followed a more scriptural and patristic approach to theology. Georges Florovsky was the strongest Orthodox critic of panentheism. Florovsky considered Bulgakov’s panentheism as little more than Solovyov’s pantheist wolf disguised in a theistic sheepskin. Florovsky affirmed the patristic doctrine of creation as the true Christian theology of relations between God and the world, with a great ontological gulf between God as the Uncreated Creator and creation as contingent.

Florovsky thus advanced a classic and strong theistic position, indirectly attacking Solovyov and Bulgakov. In his foundational essay “Creation and Createdness,” Florovsky (1928, 33–63) argues that creation is an act of the divine will, hence contingent—the world might not have been—not a feature of the divine essence, which would be pantheism: “The world exists, but it also began to exist, which means that it might not have existed, and so its existence is not a matter of any necessity. Created existence is neither self-sufficient nor self-sustaining” (Florovsky 1928, 36).

But Florovsky (1928, 44) is hard put to explain how the idea of creation originates in God and admits, reluctantly, that creation has some form of pre-existence (“before” creation) in the divine will: “God’s unchanging will first freely produces the idea of creation and then creation itself.” This alone could be considered a legitimate formulation of panentheism. Florovsky tries to get around this problem by explaining that the idea of creation existed in God’s mind from all eternity but its realization occurs in time—a position not dissimilar to that of Bulgakov. Florovsky (1928, 43) postulates that there are two types of eternity, one relating to the divine essence, and hence ontological, the other to the divine will, and hence contingent, with creation falling into the second category:

God’s idea of the world, his plan and intention are without any doubt eternal, but in some sense they are not coeternal or co-existent with him, as they are “separated” from his “essence” by the exercise of his will. To put it differently, the eternity of God’s idea of the world is of a different type to the eternity of God’s being and consciousness . . . The idea of the world originates in God’s will, not his being.

Florovsky’s solution is ingenious but not entirely satisfactory, and it seems to run counter to his own categorical assertion that “[n]othing created can ever be part of God” (Florovsky 1928, 45). It also involves introducing time into eternity—but does God suddenly “have” the “idea of the world,” as happens in human thought?

Florovsky (1928, 45–46) tries to buttress his argument that there are two types of eternity with citations from Gregory of Nazianzus, Athanasius, Augustine, John of Damascus, and Maximus the Confessor to the effect that there was some form of divine eternal pre-contemplation of creation before its actual realization. Unlike Bulgakov and later Orthodox theologians, Florovsky is unwilling to call a spade a spade—to recognize intimations of panentheism in the ancient fathers—but in the end, his solution could be assimilated to panentheism.

Nicolas Lossky, like Florovsky, finds that Bulgakov was unable to prevent his sophiology from slipping into pantheism: “The non-divine aspect of the world proves to be so characterless that his theory must be regarded as a peculiar variety of pantheism” (Lossky 1952, 229, also 230). For Lossky (1952, 228), the basic flaw in Bulgakov’s system is that Bulgakov blurs, if not eradicates, the ontological gulf between God and creation:

His contention that in the Divine and in the created world all is “one and identical in content (though not in being),” and all his theories connected therewith contain too great an ontological approximation of the world, and especially of man, to God . . . that is logically incompatible with the teaching about God expounded by the negative theology.

Lossky’s specific objections to Bulgakov’s panentheism, which overlap with his critique of sophiology, are that the idea that God creates from within himself minimizes divine creativity; that Bulgakov’s argument suggests, untenably, that humanity is consubstantial with God; and that panentheism is unable to give a reasonable explanation for evil, the freedom of created agents, and their capacity for independent creativity (Lossky 1952, 230).

Florovsky’s main target in “Creation and Createdness” was sophiology, but panentheism suffers collateral damage for being too closely interwoven with sophiology in Bulgakov and for being ultimately reducible, according to Florovsky, to pantheism. Whereas Florovsky sees panentheism as a subspecies of pantheism (hence, unacceptable), Bulgakov and other modern Orthodox theologians who welcome panentheism regard it as a subspecies of theism (hence, acceptable). Considering the totality of Bulgakov’s theology, with the overwhelming evidence that he was a Christian theist, it is not possible to sustain a claim that he was in reality a pantheist, even if his own theological system grounded in sophiology breaks down under close analysis.

Modern Orthodox Endorsements of Panentheism

Four Orthodox theologians, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Fr. Andrew Louth, Alexei Nesteruk, and Fr. Christopher Knight, participated in a symposium on panentheism held in 2001 (Ware 2004; Louth 2004; Nesteruk 2004; Knight 2004). Ware’s paper focuses on the doctrine of the divine energies of Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) and Louth’s on the logoi of Maximus the Confessor (580–662). Both papers relate the doctrines of Maximus and Palamas to panentheism. The core of Palamite theology is the distinction between the divine essence, what God is, unknowable to created beings, and the divine energies, by which God acts and makes himself known in creation; the divine energies are not attributes or external features of God but rather God himself. Humans can know and experience God by the divine energies, thus opening the door to a panentheistic interpretation of the divine energies. For Ware (2004, 159), Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are “all fundamentally ‘panentheist,’ if by ‘panentheist’ is meant the belief that God, while above the world, is at the same time within the world, everywhere present as the heart of its heart, the core of its core.” This explanation can be taken as a simple affirmation of divine transcendence and immanence and does not include the notion that the world is somehow in God. Nevertheless, Ware (2004, 166) accepts that panentheism “is a label that may legitimately be applied to Palamism,” in the sense of “weak panentheism,” since Palamas “believes that the being of God embraces and penetrates the universe, he also believes that the divine being is in no way exhausted by the universe, for God remains utterly transcendent in his imparticipable essence.”

As Louth (2004, 188) summarizes, the logoi of Maximus the Confessor are the inner principles or reasons of creation that derive from their Creator, the Logos of God—Christ—entailing a participation in God, compatible with panentheism: “To say that the universe is created by the Logos entails that the universe has a meaning . . . That ‘meaning’ is logos: everything that exists has its own logos, and that logos is derived from God the Logos. To have meaning, logos, is to participate in the Logos of God.”

Nesteruk (2004, 175), proceeding from the ancient Greek and patristic notion of humanity as a microcosm of creation and from logoi of things of Maximus, affirms that the universe “is seen as inherent in the person of the Logos of God.” But since the universe is not a personal hypostasis, it cannot relate to God as such, and thus humans, as personal beings capable of participating in the Logos, bring nonhuman creation to its fulfillment in God: “It is only through human apprehension that these objects [non-human creation] are brought to a realization of their function in the divine plan, when the objects receive their meaning in terms of purposes and ends” (Nesteruk 2004, 180). In this sense, humans offer nonhuman creation to God, acting as “priests of creation” (Nesteruk 2004, 182), a notion developed by other Orthodox theologians, such as Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1921–83) in a liturgical context (Schmemann 1973) and Metropolitan John Zizioulas (1931–2023) as a grounding for human responsibility for creation (Zizioulas 2013).

In his essay, Knight discusses Philip Sherrard (1922–95), a British Orthodox writer and translator of Greek literature into English. Sherrard (1998, 239), who identifies with panentheism, discussing the concept of creation ex nihilo, argues that for some Eastern Christian writers, the term “nothing” “does not denote an absolute black, the privation of every quality,” but beyond its negative connotation, has positive content:

It refers to that in God which is free from all form, material or non-material . . . Insofar as we can envisage it at all, it may be envisaged as the fathomless, incomprehensible ground or depths of God’s uncreated energies and possibilities, the pre-ontological nihil from which all things proceed. In this way it refers not to something that is outside or privative of God, or that is void of his presence. It refers to what is within God.

Even though Ware, Louth, Nesteruk, and Knight participated in the 2001 symposium on panentheism, none explicitly identifies himself as “panentheist,” as do Bulgakov and Sherrard. Adherence to panentheism is an inference, not directly proclaimed. Although few Orthodox theologians explicitly identify themselves as panentheist, many, like Ware, Louth, and Nesteruk, draw on the Palamite theology of the divine energies and Maximus’s logoi of creation—or both—in their own theologies, thereby adopting theologies seen as fundamentally panentheist.

Have the Critics Been Answered?

Orthodox approaches to a theology of God and the world advanced since the late nineteenth century overlap to some extent. Among the early Russian religious thinkers, the quest for all-unity flowed into sophiology, which, even in its refined Bulgakovian form, turned out to be highly problematic. It was hotly contested during Bulgakov’s lifetime and received little attention after his death, except as an exotic episode in historical theology. Alternatively, the Palamite theology of the divine energies and Maximus’s logoi, derived from and consistent with Orthodox tradition, were more favorably received in the second half of the twentieth century, even though Bulgakov considered that his sophiology was compatible with Palamism and constituted a further development of it.

The theologies of the logoi of things and the divine energies waxed into the spirituality of the contemplation of God in creation, human responsibility for the natural world, and support for environmental measures. Despite the defense of panentheism by appeals to the theologies of the divine energies and the logoi, panentheism remains on the margins of Orthodox thought, perhaps because it is considered primarily an overly philosophical approach to essentially theological questions, too closely associated with sophiology and hence under a suspicion of covert pantheism, as critics such as Florovsky and Nicolas Lossky maintained.

Despite Orthodox reticence to adopt the term panentheism, have the philosophical and theological objections to panentheism, especially in Bulgakov, raised by Florovsky and Lossky, been adequately answered? Perhaps they have. First, it is impossible to sustain the contention that Bulgakov was a pantheist, however ambiguous some of his formulations may be, especially taken in isolation from the totality of his theology and personal faith, and however much certain interpretations of his theology of creation and his sophiology may argue in this direction. Bulgakov explicitly rejected the accusation of pantheism, affirming divine transcendence to creation and creation ex nihilo (defined as the actualization in time of eternal divine ideas) and proclaiming his theology was panentheistic—creation is in some fashion in God, but God is more, infinitely more, than creation.

Second, the interpretation of panentheism by contemporary Orthodox theologians in the light of the logoi of creation in Maximus the Confessor and the divine energies of Palamas shows that intimations of panentheism occur among esteemed fathers of the Church, especially Maximus and Palamas, whose theologies are widely received in contemporary Orthodox thought.

Third, the affirmation of divine presence in creation both in the Russian religious renaissance and in modern Orthodox thinkers such as Ware (“through creation to the Creator”) (Ware 1996), Dumitru Stăniloae (“the contemplation of God in creation”) (Stăniloae 2002, 203–33), and Alexander Schmemann (“the world as sacrament”) (Schmemann 1979, 217–27) manifests a theological–spiritual vision in the Orthodox mystical–sacramental tradition that could be placed under the panentheist umbrella. Stăniloae, an early exponent of the revival of Palamite theology, develops the notion of “the Contemplation of God in Creation” as an essential aspect of “illumination” in Christian spiritual life, while Schmemann places the contemplation of God in creation in a pastoral and liturgical context and develops the idea of humans as priests of creation.

Fourth, Florovsky’s solution to the problem of reconciling divine transcendence and divine immanence, the basis of his critique of panentheism—two types of eternity in God, with creation subsisting in the divine will prior to its actualization in time—can be read as panentheistic in all but name and runs counter to his own emphasis on the ontological gulf separating God and creation.

Conclusion: Towards an Orthodox Panentheism

Orthodox thinking on panentheism focuses almost exclusively on its ontological implications for relations between God and creation—Orthodox theologians have metaphysics in their DNA—leaving aside other aspects of panentheist reflection, such as the relations among God, mind, and body (see Atmanspacher and von Sass 2017, 1034–36). Orthodox mindful of the science–theology dialogue have to some extent appealed specifically to panentheism to buttress their theological positions (see Ware 2004; Louth 2004; Nesteruk 2004; Knight 2004).

The transition in contemporary Orthodox thought from an earlier polemical stance regarding panentheism to an irenic one is promising, despite continued reticence in some Orthodox quarters to accept such a modern philosophical notion as panentheism as compatible with Orthodox tradition. Major issues that require further exploration include overcoming Orthodox hesitations concerning panentheism because of its apparent origin in secular philosophy rather than Christian theology, and the relationship and compatibility between panentheism and Maximus’s theology of the logoi and the neo-Palamite theology of the divine energies, widely (but not universally) accepted in contemporary Orthodox theology.

Although several modern Orthodox theologians have explicitly or implicitly accepted the notion of panentheism, Orthodox have not engaged in the ongoing dialogues over the nature and varieties of panentheism. By and large, Orthodox have been content to ground their cosmologies in patristic theologies, especially those of Maximus the Confessor and Palamas, with further refinements—even Sergius Bulgakov saw his sophiology as a development of Palamism, for example, in a positive elaboration of the four negative characteristics of Chalcedonian Christology (see Bulgakov 1937, 83–88). Even those Orthodox who seek to place their theologies under the panentheist umbrella—with Bulgakov the most prominent—do not explicitly elaborate how they understand panentheism.

Even though some Orthodox theologians accept panentheism as a legitimate philosophical–theological position in the Orthodox tradition, they have not truly spelled out with much precision how they understand panentheism or where they situate themselves in the panoply of contemporary panentheisms. Nonetheless, several key elements recur in the reconciliation of panentheism and Orthodox tradition:

• God is the uncreated Creator of all that exists (the cosmos, world, or universe, “heaven and earth” in the Nicene Creed).

• God is both transcendent to and immanent in creation.

• As transcendent to creation, God is entirely self-sufficient to creation and under no necessity to create (Bulgakov is an exception to this principle, since he argues that God’s nature as love inclines or even compels God to create an external object to fulfill his nature as love (Bulgakov 1945, 130). See the discussion of this in “Divine Freedom and the Need of God for Creation” in Gallaher 2016, 95–114).

• As immanent to creation, God sustains the world in a continuous act of creation; this God is in the world, not as exhausting divinity, and the world is in God, not as a “part” of God but as encompassed in God’s love and providence.

• Creation had some form of eternal divine existence —a “divine idea”—before being actualized in the act of creation by the divine will.

• Both the theology of the divine energies of Palamas and the theology of the divine logoi of things of Maximus the Confessor are compatible with panentheism.

• Neither panentheism nor the theologies of the divine energies or the logoi exhaust the divine mystery, the fullness of which is beyond the comprehension of creatures.

• The ultimate fulfillment of panentheism is eschatological, in the Kingdom of God, when God will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28) (one of Bulgakov’s preferred biblical references); for humanity, the notion that God will be “all in all” is encapsulated in the Orthodox doctrine of theosis (deification).

It is in this context that Orthodox believe it is possible to accommodate panentheism within the Orthodox tradition. Of the broad approaches to panentheism surveyed in Philip Clayton’s (2017) article in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, several do not appear on the Orthodox radar: “conservative panentheism” (basically an extension of classical theism, which affirms but minimizes divine immanence, with implications suggesting the rejection of some scientific theories such as evolution) and “naturalistic panentheism” (too close to, if not affirming, materialism, atheism, and pantheism). Orthodox would be drawn to apophatic panentheism (consistent with the powerful role of apophatic theology in the Orthodox tradition) and metaphysical panentheism (2017, 1057) (which can accommodate the divine energies and the logoi of things). Clayton also mentions “mystical panentheism,” which would appeal to Orthodox as an extension of apophatism: the encounter with God in the natural world (see the citations from Dostoyevsky 1880 given earlier).

The schema incorporates an apophatic element, typically one of the strongest aspects of modern Orthodox thought, into the theologies of Florensky, Bulgakov, and Vladimir Lossky (see Ladouceur 2019, 98–105). The insertion of an apophatic component into panentheism suggests there is a limit to our comprehension of the divine–creation relationship; at some point, human rationality, understanding, and language cease to be meaningful, and we must retreat to a humble attitude of awe, worship, and prayer before the divine mystery of creation.

This schema nonetheless leaves important issues dangling, including crucial ones such as how is creation “in” God: How can the idea of creation be eternal in God, since eternity is an ineffable divine quality? And the question of whether and how God is affected by events in his own creation—by human actions. This is a variation of the old philosophical issue of divine unchangeability and impassibility in new clothes (change [including compassion, suffering] involves imperfection; God is perfect, therefore cannot be subject to change etc.). There is a line of thought in Orthodoxy, admittedly not strong, that recognizes divine passibility beyond that of Christ on the Cross: God suffers because of humanity and with humanity (for an overview of the theology of divine suffering in modern Orthodox thought, see Ladouceur 2019, 236–39). Divine passibility or impassibility has downstream implications in spirituality, for example, belief in the efficacity of prayer, especially intercessory prayer for both the living and the deceased. But this mystery has not yet been integrated into Orthodox reflection on panentheism.

On another front, does panentheism resolve the dilemma of what to do about the sophiology of the Russian religious renaissance? Is it an acceptable philosophical–theological position to account for relations between God and the world without having to appeal to the external construct of Divine Wisdom, with all the inherent risks of the personalization of wisdom as some form of divine being? In his masterly study Wisdom in the Christian Tradition, Marcus Plested (2022) considers the charge of pantheism levied against the sophiologies of Solovyov, Florensky, and Bulgakov, but he does not refer directly to panentheism, even though Bulgakov himself repeatedly places his theology under the panentheist umbrella.⁷ Plested (2022) offers a “re-oriented sophiology,” a “sophiology without Sophia.” He jettisons the troublesome notion of an intermediary, somewhere between God and creation, “shifting, imprecise, indefinable, ungraspable, elusive” (Plested 2022), somehow associated with femininity, and which more than any other aspect of sophiology has been the source of unending debates and accusations of heresy. Plested’s (2022) framework for a re-oriented sophiology, is, as he states, “based in the first instance on Palamas”; it is neo-Palamism 2.0, which makes explicit tacit implications in Palamism itself. The framework is inherently panentheistic: “The creation as whole is a manifestation of the divine wisdom, the eternal ideas for the creation corresponding to the uncreated energies sustaining and underpinning the creation . . . God thus creates, indwells, and draws all creation back to himself as wisdom according to energy or operation.” Through the Incarnation, God opens “to all human beings the promise of participation in the deifying energies of God” (Plested 2022, 239–42).

Paraphrasing Vladimir Lossky and Florovsky, the sophiologists asked the right questions about God and the world but offered the wrong answers.⁸ Perhaps panentheism is the right answer—but Orthodox need to do more homework.

Acknowledgments

This is a revised and expanded version of papers given at the American Academy of Religion (Video conference, November 20, 2021) and the Orthodox Theological Society in America (Volos, Greece, January 10, 2023).