QuestionsDoes God exist?All is one: divinity within the world
Does God exist?PantheismWhat God is

All is one: divinity within the world

Giordano Bruno 1548 · 1600The universe is infinite, filled with countless worlds.
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What it claims

The universe is one, infinite, immobile, and divinity is to be sought in the infinite world and in things, not outside them.

Why

Matter draws its forms from within itself, and one world-soul is wholly in every thing: the divine is in the world.

In short

"All is one: divinity within the world" is an argument by Giordano Bruno (Cause, Principle and Unity, dial. II-V (1584)) on the question "Does God exist?" (answer: pantheism). Its claim: The universe is one, infinite, immobile, and divinity is to be sought in the infinite world and in things, not outside them. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Cause, Principle and Unity, dial. II-V (1584)
Valid with an implicit premise

For Aristotle and his heirs, matter is a passive dough that receives forms from elsewhere, and God is outside the world. Bruno overturns both ideas. Matter carries all forms within itself and brings them out of its own bosom; one world-soul is wholly present everywhere; matter and form are in the end one substance, and all the differences between things are only the changing faces of this single substance. So divinity is not to be sought outside the world, but within it. Note: Bruno declares that he leaves aside the "supreme principle", which he reserves for faith, and before his judges he would say that God is "in all and above all". Whether this is true pantheism or "panentheism" is debated; we file it here because the argument concludes to a divinity within the world.

P1Matter is not an emptiness waiting for its forms from outside: it brings them out of its own bosom, so it already contains them.
P2A world-soul, whose first faculty is the universal intellect, forms and animates everything. It is wholly present everywhere, not as a body is, but like a voice heard entire in every corner of a room.
P3If matter contains all forms and one soul is everywhere, then potency and act, matter and form, coincide: as to substance, the whole is one.
P4Then everything that distinguishes things (species, numbers, figures) is mere accident: there is only one substance, of which particular beings are changing faces.
P5 · implicit premiseWhat is the single substance of all things, infinite, living, "the greatest and the best", is divine: there is no need to look for divinity elsewhere.
Therefore the universe is one, infinite, immobile, and divinity is to be sought in the infinite world and in things, not outside them.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where everything is a single substance, but that substance is not divine: a single nature, without God. The conclusion about divinity no longer follows.
Valid with P5. Without it, one can accept that everything is a single living substance (a single nature) without concluding that it is divine: that would be monism without God, the view Bruno attributes to Democritus and the Epicureans. Bruno does not write it as a premise, since he spontaneously calls this substance "the greatest and the best", "Jupiter who fills all things". The theological debate is mostly about P1 (a divine matter) and the step from P3 to P4 (if everything is one, what becomes of individuals?).
Analogy. The dialogue uses the image of the carpenter's wood (Dicsono, summarising Teofilo's view): a bed, a bench, a beam, a statue are not wood, but made of wood, in the wood. The forms change, the wood remains. For Bruno, all things in the world are likewise forms of a single substance, and that substance is living and divine.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Thomas Aquinas 1266 · attacks premise 5

Three errors about God: making him the world-soul, making him the formal principle of all things, or, like David of Dinant, "most foolishly", prime matter. It is impossible for God to enter in any way into the composition of a thing, either as form or as matter: he is the first cause, and a cause is not confused with what it produces.

Bruno replies
Giordano Bruno 1584 · Teofilo, Bruno's spokesman
Teofilo specifies that he is not speaking of the supreme and perfect principle, excluded from his consideration, but of the world-soul; he leaves within its limits the contemplation that rises above nature, impossible and null for one who does not believe.
Giordano Bruno 1584 · Teofilo, on David of Dinant
Matter, which preserves forms rather than receiving them, is rightly contemplated as a divine being in things: perhaps what David of Dinant meant, misunderstood by those who report his opinion.
The debate goes on (our summary) The two replies pull in opposite directions: the first sets God apart from the inquiry, the second keeps a "divine" matter that Thomas classes precisely among the errors. Before his Venetian judges, Bruno would say he understood the Holy Spirit "as the soul of the universe" (he adds "or assistant to the universe", and cites the Book of Wisdom): very close to the first of the three errors Thomas denounces.
A
A common objection attacks the conclusion

If everything is one divine substance, then evil, suffering and crime are divine too. How can one worship or love a God who is also the executioner?

Bruno replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Bruno
In the dedicatory letter of The Infinite, Bruno writes that everything comes from good and goes toward good, and that the contrary appears only to one who sees only the present moment, as the beauty of a building escapes one who sees only a stone or a piece of wall.
The debate goes on (our summary) This is the "view of the whole" reply, later taken up by Leibniz and Pope ("whatever is, is right"), and attacked by Voltaire after the Lisbon earthquake (1755): the whole does not console the suffering part.
Spinoza 1677 · attacks the conclusion

From Spinoza's standpoint, Bruno stops halfway. For him, "whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived". There is only one substance, God or Nature: no "supreme principle" above it, reserved for faith, nor any separate world-soul. To keep a God hidden beyond nature is to keep the transcendence one claims to overcome.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1677, after the author's death (1600).
The debate goes on (our summary) Spinoza never names Bruno, and we do not know whether he read him: the parallel dates from the late 18th century (Jacobi) and remains debated. We state here the criticism his doctrine implies against Bruno's, not one he actually wrote.
In the same family · What God is
An infinite cause, an infinite universeGiordano Bruno
Does God exist?Pantheism 5
God, or NatureBenedictus de Spinoza
Does God exist?Pantheism 6
One logos governs all: the divine is the unity of the world's oppositesHeraclitus of Ephesus · 500 BC
Does God exist?Pantheism 3
Spinoza's God: the harmony of the laws, not a God who concerns himself with mankindAlbert Einstein · 1929
Does God exist?Pantheism 3