Intellectual Love of God or the Ultimate Freedom

Introduction

What does it mean to be truly free? Throughout this series we have established that nothing in the universe is contingent: everything follows from the necessity of the divine nature with infinite accuracy. There is no free will in the vulgar sense. The laws of nature cannot be broken.

Given all of this, freedom sounds impossible. But Spinoza's answer is the most radical claim in the entire Ethics: freedom is not the opposite of necessity. Freedom comes through necessity.

Freedom Through Necessity

The common understanding of freedom is the ability to choose otherwise. We believe we are free when we feel that we could have done something different. But as we discussed in the previous posts, this feeling is an illusion. The mind is determined by causes, which are themselves determined by prior causes, extending back infinitely.

So what kind of freedom remains?

[E5p6] The mind has greater power over the emotions and is less subject thereto, in so far as it understands all things as necessary.

This is the key: understanding. The more you understand the causes behind your emotions, your thoughts, and the events around you, the less power those emotions have over you. Not because you escape them, but because you see them for what they are: necessary effects of necessary causes.

The Third Kind of Knowledge

Spinoza describes three kinds of knowledge. The first kind (imagination, opinion, memory) is the source of all falsity. The second kind (reason) connects things logically through common notions. But the third kind is the highest: intuitive knowledge.

[E5p25] The highest endeavour of the mind, and the highest virtue is to understand things by the third kind of knowledge.

This third kind of knowledge is direct understanding of the essence of things through their connection to God or Nature. Not abstract reasoning about causes, but a lived comprehension of how everything follows from the divine nature.

Let's say you understand, truly understand, that the person who wronged you acted from necessity, just as a triangle necessarily has angles summing to 180 degrees. This is not a thought exercise. It is a shift in perception. The anger does not vanish because you suppress it. It transforms because the inadequate idea that caused it has been replaced by an adequate one.

[E5p3] An emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion, as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea thereof.

Amor Dei Intellectualis

From this third kind of knowledge arises something Spinoza calls amor Dei intellectualis: the intellectual love of God.

[E5p32 corollary] From the third kind of knowledge arises pleasure accompanied by the idea of God as cause, that is, the love of God; not in so far as we imagine him as present, but in so far as we understand him to be eternal; this is what I call the intellectual love of God.

This love is not devotion to a personal deity. It is the mind's joy in understanding the eternal necessity of all things. When you see how everything (including your own thoughts and emotions) follows from the nature of God or Nature, the result is not resignation. It is love.

We can see how this love differs from ordinary love. Ordinary love attaches to particular things and is subject to jealousy, fear, and loss. The intellectual love of God attaches to nothing particular: it attaches to the whole of reality as it necessarily is.

[E5p20] This love towards God cannot be stained by the emotion of envy or jealousy: contrariwise, it is the more fostered, in proportion as we conceive a greater number of men to be joined to God by the same bond of love.

The Mind-Reality Gap

Throughout this series we have discussed the mind-reality gap: the distance between what the mind imagines and what actually is. First-kind knowledge (bias, opinion, neurosis) widens this gap. The wider the gap, the more we suffer. We fight against reality because we believe it should be different from what it is.

The intellectual love of God closes this gap entirely. Not by changing reality, but by understanding it. When you understand that everything is as it must be (not because someone chose it, but because the laws of nature made it necessary), the gap between thought and reality disappears.

This is the state Spinoza calls blessedness.

[E5p42] Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein, because we control our lusts, but, contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts.

The Ultimate Freedom

The ultimate freedom is not freedom from the laws of nature. It is the full understanding and acceptance of them. Not passive acceptance: active understanding. The kind of understanding that transforms every emotion from a passion into an action, every confusion into clarity, every fight against reality into harmony with it.

The wise person is not someone who escapes necessity. The wise person is someone who understands necessity so completely that nothing disturbs the acquiescence of their spirit. They are conscious of themselves, of God, and of things, and in this consciousness, they possess the only freedom that is real.

[E5p42 note] The wise man, in so far as he is regarded as such, is scarcely at all disturbed in spirit, but, being conscious of himself, and of God, and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit.

The path is hard. But the freedom it leads to is the freedom that comes from understanding the necessity of all things, including yourself.