Spinoza conceives of “God or Nature” and its relations to the “finite modes” (that is, the ordinary finite things of everyday life, such as rocks, tables, trees, animals and human beings.) The first is the standard interpretation, according to which God-or-Nature is nothing less than the whole of reality, on which ordinary finite things (“finite modes”) depend as states of qualities that it produces in itself. . . Spinoza defined “religion” as “whatever we desire and do of which are he cause insofar as we have the idea of God, or insofar as we know God.” While not a person, not purposive, and not transcendent, his God is nevertheless the omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, blessed and necessarily existing cause of all things. There is indeed an appropriate attitude to hold towards God, in his view: not worshipful awe, but rather the pure “intellectual love of God” of which many theologians have written as the soul’s highest good. In Spinoza’s revisionary understanding of it, however, all knowledge is ultimately knowledge “of God”, and so intellectual love of God is the final affective result of any fully adequate rational understanding (of anything) whatsoever.
-from “All Necessarily So: Spinoza’s Ethics” Don Garret (TLS review)
"Wolf Among Wolves," Bonnie Prince Billy
