Page 38 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Reality 11

into his doctrine an element which for all that it is intended
to be purely “intellectual,” is necessarily based on the expe-
rience that by its very nature draws man out of the domain
of abstract thinking and puts him in actual relation with the
real, namely, love. In this, although his exposition here is as
strictly conceptual as everywhere else, Spinoza actually starts
not from a concept but from a concrete fact, without which
the conceptual formulation would have been impossible—
and that fact is that there are men who love God (regardless
of whether they are many or few, Spinoza himself obviously
knew this fact from his own experience). He conceived of their
love of God as God’s love of Himself, actualized by His cre-
ation, and encompassing man’s love of God as well as God’s
love of man. Thus God— the very God among the infinity of
whose attributes nature and spirit are only two— loves, and
since His love becomes manifest in our love of Him the divine
love must be of the same essence as human love. In this way
the most extreme anti- anthropomorphism evolves into a sub-
lime anthropomorphism. Here too we end up by recognizing
that we have encountered the reality of God; it is truly an en-
counter, for it takes place here in the realization of the identity
(unum et idem) of His love and ours, although we, finite natural
and spiritual beings, are in no wise identical with Him, who is
infinite.

3
Spinoza began with propositions stating that God is, that He ex-
ists not as a spiritual principle which has no being except in the
mind of him who thinks it, but as a reality, a self- subsisting re-
ality absolutely independent of our existence; this he expresses
in the concept of substance. But he concluded with proposi-
tions implying that this God stands in a living relationship to