Pantheismusstreit or the pantheism controversy, came to the attention of the public in 1785 when Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, his correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn concerning Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's late Spinozist phase. Other prominent writers, including Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Kaspar Lavater, and Johann Georg Hamann, became involved in this dispute, which led to an objective reappraisal of Spinozism. The first important reaction to Benedict de Spinoza's influence in Germany had been Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Theodicy (1710). At the time of the pantheism controversy, the distorted image of Spinoza, the "satanic atheist," was definitely destroyed. This image had been created by Pierre Bayle and cultivated in Germany by Theophil Gottlieb Spitzel (1639–1691), Johann Christophorus Sturm (1635–1703), Johann Konrad Dippel (c. 1672–1734), and Christian K. Kortholt (1633–1694), whose De Tribus Impostoribus Liber (1680) had attacked Herbert of Cherbury, Thomas Hobbes, and Spinoza as "impostors."

Inception of the Controversy