This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Theology gathers nine positions on the nature of God and how God relates to the created world, ranging from strict identity between God and universe to full separation, with several attempts at a middle course.
Pantheism holds God and the universe are strictly identical, a claim Baruch Spinoza gave its clearest statement identifying God with Nature, and Giordano Bruno reached from within a Hermetic framework. Acosmism takes the opposite emphasis inside that same identity, holding only God is ultimately real and the finite world has no independent existence, a reading G.W.F. Hegel applied to Spinoza's own system. Theistic Personalism stands furthest from both, holding God a genuine person distinct from the world, the working theology of most popular monotheism.
Panentheism and Process Theology each try to hold a middle course. Panentheism, developed by Charles Hartshorne, holds the world exists within God without God's own being exhausted by it. Process Theology, building on Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics of events, holds God experiences and grows alongside the world's becoming.
Emanationism and Tzimtzum both address how a finite world could come from an infinite source. Emanationism, given its classical form by Plotinus and echoed in Kabbalah's ten sefirot, holds the world proceeds by a necessary overflow of divine fullness. Tzimtzum, Isaac Luria's Kabbalistic doctrine, holds instead God first withdrew, opening a conceptual space for a finite world.
Hermetic Mentalism and the Doctrine Of Correspondence share a root in the Corpus Hermeticum. Mentalism holds the universe is fundamentally a thought within a universal Mind; Correspondence holds the higher and lower orders of reality share one pattern, so what is below mirrors what is above.