God, or Nature (Deus sive Natura)

Last lesson we reached the theorem: there is exactly one infinite substance. Spinoza now gives that substance its name. The one substance is God (Ethics I, Prop. 11 proves God necessarily exists). And because there is nothing else — nothing outside or alongside it — this God is also identical with the whole of Nature. Spinoza’s signature phrase for the identity is Deus sive Natura: “God, or Nature.”

God, being infinite, has infinitely many attributes — infinitely many fundamental ways of being. But the human intellect grasps only two of them: Thought (cogitatio) and Extension (extensio). So the one substance can be understood as a thinking thing and, equally, as an extended (spatial, physical) thing. These are not two substances but two attributes of the same substance.

Where does everything else fit — this rock, your body, your mind, a particular thought? All finite, particular things are modes: modifications of the one substance under one of its attributes. Your body is a mode of God under the attribute of Extension; your mind is a mode of God under the attribute of Thought. Nothing finite is a substance in its own right; each is a passing determination of the single infinite being.

Spinoza marks a crucial distinction with two Latin phrases (Ethics I, Prop. 29, Scholium). Natura naturans — “Nature naturing” — is Nature considered as active: God, the substance and its attributes, the free and immanent cause of all things. Natura naturata — “Nature natured” — is Nature considered as product: the whole system of modes that follow from the divine nature. One reality, viewed as source and as consequence.

The single most important word for Spinoza’s God is immanent. “God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things” (Ethics I, Prop. 18). A transitive cause produces an effect outside itself — a carpenter builds a table separate from the carpenter. An immanent cause produces its effects within itself. God does not make a world and then stand apart from it. Nothing is outside God, because God is everything there is.

This overturns the ordinary religious picture. The God of Genesis is transcendent: a person who exists prior to and outside the world, deliberates, and chooses to create it. Spinoza’s God is nothing like that. There is no standpoint outside Nature from which to create it; the world is not chosen but follows from God’s nature with the same necessity by which a triangle’s nature yields its angles.

It follows that God acts for no purposes. Spinoza flatly rejects final causes — the idea that things happen for the sake of goals. To think God designed the eye “in order that” we might see, or sent rain “so that” crops grow, is to project human wants onto Nature. In the Appendix to Ethics I he calls this anthropomorphism the great prejudice: people “consider all natural things as means to their own advantage” and so invent a God shaped like themselves. Nature simply follows from its own necessity.