Pantheism controversy

The pantheism controversy was an event in German cultural history which had an impact throughout Europe.

A conversation between philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and dramatist Gotthold Lessing in 1780 led Jacobi to a protracted study of Baruch Spinoza's works. Lessing had avowed that he knew no philosophy, in the true sense of that word, save Spinozism.

Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinozas expressed sharply and clearly his strenuous objection to a dogmatic system in philosophy, and drew upon him the vigorous enmity of the Berlin group, led by Moses Mendelssohn. Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time, which Immanuel Kant rejected, as he thought that attempts to conceive of transcendent reality would lead to antinomies in thought.